The Maine crime saga aims to highlight its French-American characters

BIDDEFORD, Maine — Sitting at a table in a vast former textile factory that once sounded thousands of French-language voices, Ron Currie Jr. issued a challenge: Name this country's most famous French-American author.

Most people, Currie said, can't even name a single one, let alone the most famous one.

“It’s Jack Kerouac,” he said. “He was from Lowell, Massachusetts. His real name was Jean-Louis.”

The truth is, Currie acknowledges, that the centuries-old experience of French-Canadian immigrants living, working, fighting, and occasionally triumphing in New England's Anglo-dominated mill towns rarely provoked serious literary debate, unlike Irish, Italians, and Jewish-American immigrants all in English. But with his latest novel, “The Wild, Noble Death of Babs Dionne,” the proud Franco-American wants to remedy the situation.

The book is set in Currie's hometown of Waterville and draws inspiration from his own beloved grandmother. The focus is on a group of good-looking, older, French-speaking women who have all been friends since childhood. The title character and leader, Babs Dionne, is a classic Franco memere who runs her household and dotes on her grandchildren.

But Dionne is also a vicious crime matriarch and drug lord who ruthlessly rules Waterville's underworld and is able to call out unsuspecting men twice her size.

As the story progresses, one of Dionne's daughters is murdered by a mysterious Massachusetts killer. At the same time, another daughter, Lori, a dishonorably discharged Marine who uses drugs to escape her post-traumatic stress disorder, wants nothing to do with the family business.

“I'm almost 50 and sometimes I ask myself: Did I make this all up?” said the author of five previous books. “Because it's so disappeared – one of the reasons I wrote the book was to provide evidence that this world actually exists.”

Although he has a Scottish surname, Currie considers himself Quebecois to the core. His family, like thousands of others, came to Maine from Canada more than a century ago in search of work and a better life in New England's burgeoning shoe, textile, pulp and paper mills.

But Currie is a member of the “skipped” generation of Franco-Mainers who disconnected from their culture when their parents failed to pass on their birthright. At the time, it was seen as a burden rather than a proud resource. For decades, assimilation was strongly encouraged by the dominant English-speaking culture.

In the 1920s, French Catholics in Maine were persecuted by the Ku Klux Klan. French was banned in public schools. By the mid-20th century, many of New England's French names were anglicized, losing their proper accents and turning into English equivalents. Bourque became Burke, Marquis became Markee and Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac became Jack Kerouac.

Only in the last 20 years has Maine's longstanding stereotype of the “stupid Frenchman” begun to disappear in popular culture. Currie created Babs and her proud, violent, French-speaking crew to help make it die even faster.

“I wanted someone who would vigorously defend the language and the culture and hold Anglos and Protestants accountable for the way they treated the Franco people,” Currie said. “I was looking for a heroine for the Franco culture that didn’t exist – so I created her.”

In addition to French culture, the author also wants to pay attention to the less picturesque places in Maine, far from the sea, lighthouses and lobster boats.

“Where I grew up, it might as well have been Nebraska. I never saw the sea,” Currie said. “The Maine that I recognize, that I love, has no representation in popular culture.”

That will change soon.

Putnam is releasing Currie's new book in March and has already ordered 75,000 copies. Additionally, the publisher recently greenlit two sequels. Currie is now in the midst of writing his second Babs Dionne story.

Currie is careful to point out that although he is creating a new Franco-American literary genre, his main concern is to tell a good story.

“If you start with an ax to grind, you’re going to write a lousy story,” he said. “To the extent that I am willing to admit that it was the fulfillment of a wish at all, it is more of a wish for it [Babs] exist.”

The Wild, Noble Death of Babs Dionne is Now available for pre-order.