Community Voices: A Conversation with Gerry Boyle

Community Voices is a live event series featuring one-on-one interviews with journalist Amy Calder and notable members of the community, exclusively for the Morning Sentinel and Kennebec Journal.

Gerry Boyle began his writing career in newspapers. After Colby College, he worked many jobs, including as a roofer, postman, and manuscript reader at a big New York publisher. His first reporting job was with a weekly in the paper mill town of Rumford, Maine, where there was lots of small-town crime. From those experiences came his first novel, Deadline.

After a few months it was on to the Morning Sentinel, where he was a columnist writing about what he saw in police stations and courtrooms in the towns and cities of Maine. He enjoyed both hanging out with cops and sitting with inmates in prison visiting rooms, where he learned that the line between upstanding citizen and outlaw is a fine one.

Deadline came out in 1993. With an assist from Robert B. Parker, he landed a top-flight literary agent and other books came steadily after that: Once Burned, Lifeline, Potshot, Bloodline, and Borderline.

Gerry lives in a small village in central Maine, with his wife Mary, a school teacher, making regular trips for book research. He also writes for magazines, including Down East, and is the editor of the alumni magazine at Colby College. They have three children, who are scattered from Maine to Ireland.

Doors open at 6:30 p.m. Admission is free. Gerry will be available to sign books afterward.