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Q&A with Tom Henighan, author of Nightshade

Tell us about your forthcoming novel.
My first two attempts at fiction were mystery novels, one of them based on a real murder I investigated in the British colony of Aden (now Yemen), the other set in the north of England, where I lived and studied for several years. Later, as a university professor, I taught the “hard-boiled” novels of Hammet, Chandler and others. I’m a great admirer of the European mystery novel, from Simenon to Nicholas Freeling and the current Scandinavians, and as a film buff and lecturer on film I’ve always loved film noir.

Nightshade was inspired by my first visit to Quebec City in 2004. My wife noticed a sign for a detective agency on the Grand Allée, and I put this together with a scientific conference and an art exhibition that were happening then in the city. My detective, Ottawa-based Sam Montcalm, was suggested by the family history of a relative of my wife’s who worked for C.D. Howe in Ottawa in the 1950s. He and his family later moved to California, with tragic consequences.

Writing Nightshade I found myself attempting to update my hardboiled hero, to place him firmly in some real environments, and to avoid jocularity and parody in favour of a more in-depth look at a very proud man– intelligent and embarrassed by his failures– a man who is a bit of a dinosaur, but also acutely conscious of the present.

I’m already at work on a second Sam Montcalm novel and this one will be partially set in Los Angeles. That seems a good template—part of each Montcalm novel to be set in Ottawa and other parts in world cities with which I’m familiar.

What’s the best advice you’ve ever received as a writer?
I started writing before creative writing workshops became ubiquitous (although I founded the fiction workshop at Carleton University and taught it for ten years), so I took my advice where I found it. In England, I heard a wonderful interview with Graham Greene, who confessed to a love of plot and melodrama. And E.M. Forster (somewhat reluctantly) admitted that “oh, dear, yes, the novel tells a story.” I love the up-front story-telling of the mystery novel, which as Simenon and others have shown, needn’t undermine the seriousness and depth of the fiction. My children’s novels all have good stories, and I’ve been a bit disappointed that this seems to be no great virtue in the eyes of some Canadian reviewers. Of course these are often the same reviewers who miss more artful components, such as the mythical resonances of my YA novel, Demon in my View or the retelling of Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” in Doom Lake Holiday.  (Kate Jaimet of The Ottawa Citizen, on a panel, was a big exception!)

In the mystery novel, plot has a special necessity: the writer is playing a game with the reader, and it’s very important that the “guessing game” (the “whodunit” part) doesn’t distort the natural flow of the plot.

One of my biggest discoveries in writing novels is that the characters “speak because they want to speak” (as an academic analyst puts it). That means that once you have a character of any dimension in your story the character tells you, the author, what he or she will or won’t do. If you force such a character to fit into a preconceived plot the novel crashes. The writer has to listen to his characters. They’re far more important than the critics or reviewers!

What’s the most memorable response you’ve ever had from a reader?
When I was trying to market Coming of Age in Arabia, a very well-known American literary agent (president of U.S. agents association) called me and told me how good he thought the book was. Unfortunately, he didn’t think he could sell a lot of copies and didn’t take it on. After the book was published by Penumbra Press in Canada in 2004, a very distinguished Stanford fellow and senior professor at the University of the Americas in Puebla, called me from Mexico to congratulate me on the book, which he called one of the best books he’d ever read on a British colony. In a quite different but equally important realm, two young people thrilled me with their enthusiasm—a high school girl who approached me rather shyly at a reading and told me: “I have to tell you that I loved Mercury Man.” And a 12-year old reader in Indiana who wrote ( just a few months ago) a wonderfully intelligent and upbeat on-line review of Doom Lake Holiday. Nothing trumps the enthusiasm of youth! And it’s very inspiring to writers—to me at least!

What did you read as a young adult?
I read historical novels by writers like Dumas, Joseph Altsheler, and Kenneth Roberts, and in my teens I discovered the Russian novelists, including fairly obscure ones like Ivan Bunin, and the Scandinavians, including Johannes V. Jensen, Knut Hamsun, and other Nobel Prizewinners. I also read a lot of quality American literature, from Poe and Hawthorne to Mark Twain, Willa Cather, Hemingway and Faulkner. (Radio drama was also a huge influence)

What is your next project?
I am just finishing The Boy from Left Field, a novel about a group of Toronto kids who find Babe Ruth’s lost 1914 baseball, and I am well underway on the second Sam Montcalm novel, which carries Sam to Los Angeles in search an unusual woman caught in the centre of a bizarre international political and emotional tangle.

Tom Henighan’s numerous works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry include The Maclean’s Companion to Canadian Arts and Culture, The Well of Time, and the YA novel Viking Quest. He lives in Ottawa, and teaches at Carleton University.

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