Island author John Gould has stories, recalled and imagined.

They interject themselves into his speech at regular intervals – brief, pensive pauses – before John Gould, sorting through a stack of years, recovers the object of his search.

“It burned down in…1910,” Gould said of the house built by his grandfather, John Fay, on land that is now home to Fay Bainbridge State Park.

As the story goes, the Fay house was constructed in 1901 on the hillside overlooking Puget Sound and a “nice long piece of sandy beach” below. It was mostly trees back then, save for the family’s orchard, planted in homage to their New England roots.

Then came the flame from a kerosene lamp, situated on a chandelier, that one evening crept too close to the ceiling and set the home ablaze.

Fay, a lawyer who walked to Port Madison each morning to catch the ferry to Seattle, caught sight of his burning roof from the ferry.

“I once heard that he jumped off the boat,” Gould said, smiling. “But I don’t know if that’s true.”

A similar mixture of fiction and reality characterizes Gould’s new book, “The Last Dog in France,” about the French resistance and their secret escape line during World War II.

The characters and situations in the book are fictional, but the story is informed by research about real events that took place at the time.

Himself a World War II veteran, Gould will read from his self-published book at 7:30 p.m. Jan. 11 at Eagle Harbor Book Company.

This week, he flipped through the pages, recorded in memory, of his own family’s history, which has a decidedly Bainbridge slant.

Gould was born in Seattle in 1925 and spent a great deal of time on the island before finally retiring here, in his family’s original home, in 1990.

The Fay name originated on his mother’s side. Of John Fay’s three sons, only Temple Fay survived into adulthood. It was he who, after a successful career as a brain surgeon, ultimately offered to the state the family’s 17 acres, some of which retained the family name as a state park.

In return, the state forgave $4,500 in debt accrued during the Depression.

“He died, broke, shortly after that,” Gould said. “But we used to spend summers up there. There were no houses on the sand spit back then.”

There were, however, beachcombers – fisherman and loggers who built shacks out of driftwood along the beach and dug clams for food.

“We weren’t supposed to talk to them,” Gould recalled. “People didn’t like them because they thought they were digging too many clams. But we talked to them anyway because we thought they were interesting.”

Gould’s father, Carl Gould, first settled in Seattle, where as an architect he designed, among other structures, the University of Washington’s Suzzallo Library and the Beacon Hill Hospital.

“He had a little sailboat, and used to sail to Restoration Point and camp for the night,” Gould said of his father.

He married Dorothy Fay Gould, who herself would go on to write a history of the Northwest, and eventually bought land, for $50 an acre, on what is now Upper Farms Road off Country Club Road. They built the summer home that Gould now inhabits, a source of pride for such big a history buff.

It was his love of history that prompted him to write “The Last Dog in France.” The book outlines the little-told story of the French escape line used by many to evade Nazi soldiers, entwined with the type of twists Gould likes to encounter in his own reading.

“I’m not trying to write about some kind of deep message,” Gould said. “I wanted it to be something where you could learn something but still have fun when you’re reading it, not knowing how it will end until the last page.”

He characterized his own World War II experience as a “boring” by comparison. As an 18-year-old on a Navy destroyer in the Pacific, Gould “never got shot at.” It was his duty to clean mines out of harbors.

“We got to blow them up, which was actually pretty fun,” Gould said.

Only his scholarship to Princeton kept him “out of the foxholes,” though he was slated for the invasion of Japan before the US nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended the war.

Gould went on to be a professional engineer before retiring to the island that anchors his family’s past. At the Gould home, originally built in 1914 for $800, he recently finished his second book, “Escape to America,” which, not surprisingly, is set in history. Though he loves looking back, his own immortality as an author isn’t of much concern.

“I’m not looking for a Pulitzer,” he said. “This is just for fun.”

***********

War stories

John Gould reads from his new novel “The Last Dog in France” at 7:30 p.m. Jan. 11 at Eagle Harbor Books.