David Russell took some time to sit down with us and tell us about himself, his new book Last Dance, and his upcoming projects.

Tell us about your book.

Last Dance is the sequel to Deadly Lessons, featuring Winston Patrick, a lawyer-turned teacher whose best efforts to leave behind the legal profession are again thwarted when his students present him with their own legal problem: Tim, a gay student, is being prevented by the school’s administration from bringing his same-sex partner to the graduation dance.

The class, with Winston’s help, challenges the school’s decision, inviting scorn from opponents that turns violent against Tim.  When Tim is killed in what appears to be a hate crime, Winston finds himself embroiled in the investigation into Tim’s death.  And the more Winston investigates, the more he finds out that Tim wasn’t the student he appeared to be.

How did you come up with the idea for this work?

The genesis of Last Dance was an actual news story from a number of years ago when a student in Ontario – albeit at a private Catholic school as opposed to a public one – faced the same opposition to bringing his date to the prom. It stuck in my craw as a kind of issue that could be so challenging for students who are coming in out in a high school environment.

Describe your ideal writing environment.

My ideal writing environment is quiet and rather meticulously organized.  Some writers thrive in creative clutter, amid papers, books, posters and artistic detritus.  Some write to music or with the television on.

I am not one of those.

My office has a desk with nothing on it but my laptop – an Apple.  I write early in the mornings or late at night when the house is quiet.

The exception is public writing. I have been known to occasionally find the muse in a coffee shop or hotel bar on vacation, at least reasonably quiet ones.  In a pinch, I can get by on airplanes or tour buses: about seventy pages of Last Dance were written by hand while taking students on a tour bus through Italy and France.

What was your first publication?

When I was in the 5^th grade, my teacher, Mrs. Lumby, decided an essay I had written defining Utopia was worthy of publication and submitted it to the local community newspaper where it was published under the headline: “Utopia’s a place where birds keep dry in the rain.”

What inspired you to write your first book?

I had been working with a script consultant in Los Angeles who was trying to get me pitch meetings for some spec scripts I had written.  We had a number of long distance telephone conversations about story ideas. When I told her about the story that ultimately became Deadly Lessons, originally conceived as a Law & Order episode, she told me that the story sounded deeper and more detailed and would make a good novel, encouraging me to write it in that format.  As it turned out, I very much enjoyed writing the novel, even more so than the scripts on which I had been working.

Who did you read as a young adult?

One of my favourite writers was the late Robert B. Parker, best known for his Spenser series of novels.  I loved the toughness of Spenser (I named my cat after him!), the witty, often urbane dialogue and the continuously reappearing cast of characters that gave the novels continuity.  I also loved the moral fortitude of Spenser, how committed to his ideals he remained, even and especially when it caused him to take actions that may conflict with those ideals.

What is your next project?

Currently I am immersed in the third novel with Winston Patrick as its protagonist.  There are so many interesting human stories in the microcosm that is the public school system that I feel like I still have some interesting mining there to do.

I have another novel that I began in Italy in 2003 (doesn’t everyone who goes to Italy start a novel) that is wholly separate from the Winston Patrick novels.  It is the next book I plan to complete when I have finished the third Winston Patrick novel.

I also have a couple of script ideas I’ve been doing early work and planning on.  I live in Vancouver, after all: aren’t we all screenwriters?

We sit down with H. Clark Adams, a retired deputy judge of 15 years, and a practicer of law for 35. He gives us the scoop on his book You Be the Judge, where the reader gets to judge different small claims court cases. He also lets us in on his upcoming projects.

Tell us about your book.

This book is about 54 actual court cases which I heard in Small Claims Court.  There is an opening statement for each case, setting the tone of what the case is about.  Then there is the evidence of the litigants.  At the end of the evidence there is an opportunity for the readers to discuss the case and come up with a decision.  My decision is in the second half of the book.

How did you come up with the title?

The title of the book is what the book is about.  It is a challenge to the prospective reader of what they are going to do when they read the book.

How did you research your book?

I did not have to do much research as I had notes on all the cases I used in the book.  I only had to change the names of hte parties.

Describe the most memorable response you’ve received from a reader.

The most memorable response I had in regard to the book was repeated many times.  The idea of the book was to get people to read and discuss the cases and come up with their decision.  Many, many people have told me that they would sit down as a family and read the cases and had fun seeing if their decision was the same as mine.

What is your next project?

My next project is a book about a number of situations encountered by landlords dealing with tenants.  The theme of the book is to point out to prospective tenants the pitfalls of being a landlord.

Tell us about your book

The story deals with two chains of events. The first was the discovery of a contaminant, leaching from the pharmaceutical rubber parts of medical devices (syringes, drug ampoules and intravenous apparatus) that could cause death from severe allergic reactions, or from the contaminant’s cumulative toxicity.  In December 1987, this contamination became linked to an earlier sequence of events – an unexplained increase in deaths (1980-81) on the cardiac wards of the Toronto Hospital for Sick Children.

In the latter instance, based on the interpretation of specimens taken by a pathologist in the hospital’s autopsy rooms, a theory arose of intentional lethal overdosing with the heart drug, digoxin by someone on the nursing staff.  A young nurse, Susan Nelles, the daughter of a prominent Belleville paediatrician, became the focus of a criminal investigation, ultimately being charged with four counts of murder – charges that had to be dropped because of insufficient evidence. Evidence indicating that there were no murders was ignored. The question of multiple murders lingers to this day.

This complex subject is now a major case study in Canadian jurisprudence. At the time it resulted in the creation of the Grange Royal Commission of Inquiry lasting well over a year, with many expert witnesses – paediatricians, cardiologists, nurses, forensic scientists, and pathologists being called to testify.  Dr. Peter Macklem, the Professor of Medicine at McGill was called as an expert witness at the Inquiry. He denounced the interpretations of autopsy digoxin levels as indicating the digoxin status in a living baby, pointing out that no such digoxin testing had been done before – anywhere – and there were no standards with which to compare the results. It is reasonable to conclude that Dr. Macklem’s testimony, may have saved Susan Nelles from conviction and false imprisonment, although many Ontarians have been falsely convicted and imprisoned since that time, based on incorrect interpretations of child autopsy findings by a pathologist.

“The Nurses are Innocent – The Digoxin Poisoning Fallacy,” presents evidence, accumulated over a thirty year period, from four continents. In the words Dr. Macklem, who later consented to write the Foreword, “…… you now have conclusive evidence that there were no murders, so [Justice] Grange ….. should apologize to both Phyllis [Trayner] …… and to Susan.”

Did you have a specific readership in mind when you wrote your book?

My intent from the start was to prove to the police, the judiciary, the Ontario Chief Coroner, the Attorney General, the medical staff at the Toronto Hospital for Sick Children, the media – and to the Canadian public at large – that no digoxin poisoning occurred and that Susan Nelles was innocent. I believe that the nursing profession will concur with my explanations and will welcome this evidence which exculpates Susan Nelles – and the nursing profession she continues to represent so well.  The false idea of  multiple murders and the incorrect diagnosis of digoxin poisoning has been allowed to linger for 30 years – and is dismissed with multiple solid references.

What was your first publication?

Throughout my career as a diagnostic radiologist, I wrote in peer reviewed journals – seventeen publications in all.

The first of these publications was a December 1971 article in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, entitled, “Unilateral decrease in renal vascularity on the “excretory” urogram,.  This article described a new technique to show a dense image of the vascular pattern of kidney tissue after a rapid intravenous injection of a radio-opaque contrast agent (“an X-ray dye”).  The wealth of new diagnostic information offered by this simple new technique resulted in 1000 referrals to my office for this procedure each year.

Research into the cause of two clusters of  allergic reactions I encountered during these injections of X-ray “dyes” implicated a toxic / allergenic contaminant that was common to injections of any pharmaceuticals, intravenous fluids and blood transfusions , partly because the contaminant was read as digoxin by testing methods. This contaminant became linked to the 1980-81 Toronto Hospital for Sick Children baby deaths. The contaminant was being read as digoxin by the testing methods used at the Toronto Hospital for Sick Children – and by the test method used by the Centre for Forensic Sciences during the time of the Grange Inquiry into the deaths.

What inspired you to write your first book?

In 1957, while I was a senior intern on a neurosurgery rotation, I saw a patient’s carotid arteriogram displaying arteriographic standing waves – an unexplained phenomenon. These beautiful symmetric simple harmonic waves, outlined by an X-ray “dye,” occurred during a rapid injection of dye into an artery.  In arteriographic standing waves, I imagined standing sound waves similar to the periodic waves seen in a high school physics experiment when powder was sprinkled along the base of a glass tube in which a standing wave sound field was created (the Kundt’s tube experiment).

This phenomenon of arteriographic standing waves became the key to unraveling a longstanding enigma in fundamental fluid dynamics – why does laminar flow (streamline flow) suddenly turn into turbulent flow, with a dramatic increase in resistance to flow. This phenomenon affects airflow around automobiles, aircraft and rockets, and water resistance in the motion of ships and submarines – as well as fluid flows through pipes; it has been described by Mohamed Gad-el-Hak as “The Last Conundrum” of classical physics.

I was driven to write about this theory that suggests that simple harmonic sound energy generated by the flow, is the cause of the abrupt transition from streamline flow to turbulent flow. Sound has been considered to be an effect of turbulent flow, rather than the cause.

Research into “The Last Conundrum” led to my writing an article to the Journal of Fluid Mechanics in 1975. Although it was rejected, the editor, George Batchelor, of Cambridge said that he and the reviewers were quite interested in the phenomenon of arteriographic standing waves, which they were unaware of and couldn’t explain. The understanding of the cause of transition allows researchers and engineers to devise methods of  delaying or preventing transition with great savings in energy consumption.

I auto-published my first book on this subject in 1980, “Patterns in Fluid Flow Paradoxes– Variations on a Theme.” The auto-publishing route was deemed necessary because science editors would be unlikely to accept such a theory that – 1) was revolutionary and 2) was written by a diagnostic radiologist, not a physicist or an engineer trained in fluid dynamics.  This was the first of five monographs challenging the conventional theory that there is chaos in turbulent flow.  My fifth monograph on this subject, “Order in Chaos – The Physics of Transition to Turbulence,” was auto-published in August 2011. In its present form, I trust that the theory will gain acceptance.

Describe the most memorable response you’ve received from a reader.

In 1990, ten years after my first book on transition from laminar to turbulent flow in fluid dynamics was auto-published, I sent a copy to Dr. George Batchelor of Cambridge, the editor of the Journal of Fluid Mechanics. While not endorsing the theory, he replied as follows: “Thank you for your letter of April 2 with the kind gift of a copy of your book on “Patterns in Fluid Flow Paradoxes.” I was delighted also to see that our rejection of the paper that you submitted to JFM in 1975 acted more as a spur to action than as a disappointment.”

Tell us about your book.

Canada’s Constitutional Monarchy has been written to reintroduced Canadians to a rich institution integral to their ideals of democracy and parliamentary government. The Canadian Crown is presented as a colourful and unique institution at the very heart of our complex constitution, exploring its history from 15th century English explorations and16th-century New France. Moving into the 21st century, relationships with First Nations, Heraldry, the Military, Governor General, Heir to the Throne, and many other aspects of the day-to-day life of the country are explored.

How did you come up with the idea for this work?

I teach Canadian History and Civics in Ontario, and have noticed that there is very little mention of the monarchy in any available resources. In fact, the textbooks exploring the Crown that are available to teachers are almost uniformly incorrect – explaining the Crown as nothing more than a colonial vestige. The grade 10 Canadian history textbook used in my school makes no mention of such important events as the 1939 Royal Tour, Canadian Citizenship Act (1947) or the role of the Crown in proclaiming the national flag, national anthem or the repatriation of the Constitution.

I realized that if I was going to teach others about this rich and ancient Canadian institution I needed to educate myself. This book came out of this process.

Did you have a specific readership in mind when you wrote your book?

This book has been written to make the Canadian Crown easily accessible for the general public, and high school students in particular. As a visual learner myself, I made sure a lot of pictures, maps and diagrams were included in the book – appropriate since the Crown, among other things, is a very colourful institution.

How did you research your book?

Once I started this project I encountered some great publications (Jacque Monet’s The Canadian Crown, Dr. Michael Jackson’s The Canadian Monarchy in Saskatchewan and Kevin MacLeod’s A Crown of Maples) and talked with experts across the country. There is a wealth of information when you start digging – I have included a list of all of my sources (including new ones that I have found since publication) at www.canadiancrown.com.

I was honoured to be invited to attend the 2010 Symons Lecture on the State of Confederation. Visiting Charlottetown to hear Governor General David Johnston speak added a whole new dimension to the book – it reminded me of the foundational place that the Maritimes occupy in the formation of this country. I am very excited to see the 2014 celebrations to mark the 150^th anniversary of the Charlottetown and Quebec Conferences (both of which are being championed by the governor general).

What was the hardest part of writing your book?

I started this project to learn more about the institution of the monarchy in Canada, and once I scratched the surface it became apparent how complex and dynamic it is. I also encountered the quirky side of the Canadian Crown – traditions like Ancient and Honourable Hyack Anvil Battery Salute in Westminster, British Columbia. I wanted to include everything and was constantly contacting my editor with additional information even after my deadline. Not wanting to leave anything out I created an electronic “Did You Know?” section on the book’s website that I am still adding to today.

Charis Marsh, author of the series Ballet School Confidential, sits down with us to answer some questions about writing, her books, and what she’s been reading.

Describe your ideal writing environment

I write in coffee shops mostly. I like it when there are other people around me, preferably people that are also quietly working on something. I can’t usually write around people I know, they’re too distracting, but I also hate to be alone for very long. My ideal writing space definitely includes coffee and music, lots of both. Comfortable armchairs are the best, but they’re valuable real estate in coffee shops, you have to be pretty experienced to score one. The battle is totally worth it though … And free internet. And a place that has soy or almond milk to put in my coffee. I’m not picky about coffee shops at all, I swear!

In your own work, which character are you most attached to, and why?

Oh, this is a hard one! It actually changes depending on what mood I’m in. I find certain of my characters easier to write than others when I am in a particular mood.

I have a special fondness for is Julian, probably because he and I are both from the Gulf Islands. I like how on the surface he mostly seems to go with the flow, but he really has a very strong set of personal values and identity. He probably has the strongest sense of himself out of all of the main characters in Love You, Hate You actually.

Taylor is so much fun to write about when I am excited about stuff, she always makes me smile. She is such a unique person and I want to protect her, but then when I’m writing I put her in the most terrible situations!

Alexandra is such an odd combination of being extremely mature for her age in some ways and being very innocent, very young in other ways that she’s also very dear to me. She clearly has a lot of issues, but I still have a lot of respect for her. Alexandra is my character that reminds me of all the things I should have accomplished in my life but haven’t, and all that I still could if I worked hard enough.

Kaitlyn is a bit spoiled, but I can’t help but sympathize with her, it’s not really her fault. The adults around her have taught her that she is perfect and she’s going to go through some pretty tough learning experiences as a result, because of course she’s very far from perfect.

What’s the best advice you’ve ever received as a writer?

To write! It seems so simplistic, but really, the only way to improve your writing is by practice.  The more I write the more comfortable and confident I feel transferring the ideas in my head to a page. Writing truly is a craft. Much like when you have a beautiful image in your head but lack the necessary skill to paint it on a canvas, you can have many brilliant ideas for a story but be unable to recreate them on a page without practice.

When I was in grade 10, I had an awesome teacher who got us to write every morning for 20 minutes in a journal. 20 minutes of writing whatever poured out of my 14 year old consciousness at 8:30 am resulted in 2 journals full of embarrassing ramblings, but this exercise is actually one of the best ways to start writing just for writing’s sake, without the pressure to produce something good. Another thing that I like to do is write down what people say, or practice writing dialogue in their conversation style. I started doing this as a joke with my friends when I was younger, imitating each other and our teachers, and it turned out to actually be a pretty useful skill. Most people have a unique conversation style or voice. This can really help when you are trying to develop a character.

What are you reading right now?

Well, textbooks mostly. Seriously, it’s sort of depressing. And also my little brothers keep me fully updated on the books they read, they’re great readers. They are all completely obsessed with Rick Riordan’s work, so I’ve read his Percy Jackson and the Olympians series, The Heroes of Olympus series, and The Kane Chronicles series. My roommate just loaned me her copy of Paint It Black by Janet Fitch and that was so good! I have so much respect for both Riordan and Fitch.

I had the most wonderful dream the other day that J.K. Rowling had just announced that she’d been secretly writing a new fiction series (I know, I know she said she was fairly sure she’d never do that!) and then I woke up and it was not at all true. I was very sad – I am such a dork. I don’t have a Pottermore account yet though, so apparently I’m not obsessed enough!

What is your next project?

I am currently editing the next book in the Ballet Confidential series, You’re So Sweet. The second book in the Ballet Confidential series, this book was fun to write because there was more freedom to show other sides of the character’s personalities. You’re So Sweet shows the ups and downs of their competitions and training, but it also shows what they are dealing with outside of dance. They are at a very tough age, where training for dance has to be your whole world, and sometimes the outside world gets in the way of that commitment.

I also just finished an adventure book that I am very excited about, Gage Roberts and the Little Knife – this book is very important and special to me because it is exactly the sort of book I would have adored when I was about 8-10, and I wrote it for my brothers who are around that age right now. This book is about growing up and figuring out how to stand strong for what you know is right in the face of opposition. It’s about loyalty, hard work, and learning how to be brave. But it’s also about pirates, best friends, magicians, sea monsters, and kings!

If you like Love You, Hate You, make sure that you pre-order You’re So Sweet, another Ballet School Confidential book, releasing in the spring.

How did you come up with the title?

The title of the book is “Boy From Nowhere…A Life in Ninety-One Countries”. Because I came from nowhere, a tiny Saskatchewan town that was so small we couldn’t afford a village idiot.  Everyone had to take turns.

How did you research your book?

This is my ninth book.  This book took my entire life to research as it is my memoirs.  It was a work in progress.

Describe your ideal writing environment.

In my office, the door closed, Bennie Goodman in the background and a small glass of Sauvignon Blanc.

What was the hardest part of writing this book?

To carefully make sure that I wouldn’t hurt any members of my family.  The hardest part of writing a book is deciding what not to put in but what to leave out.

What are you reading right now?

Aside from the five newspapers every day including The New York Times, I am reading a Churchill biography.

Tell us about your book

This book, The Suite Life – The Magic and Mystery of Hotel Living, is the book I have always wanted to write, always intended to write, but never got around to writing until the perfect set of elements and circumstances converged in a kind of wonderful harmony that allowed me to not just write the book but to write it exactly as I had always envisioned it and to literally live a long held dream at the same time.

Throughout my youth I was always mesmerized by hotels and hotel livings – I was conceived in the Royal York Hotel and my grandparents both worked there. I grew up hearing the name “The Royal York” so much that it became part of my subconscious and came to mean something much more than just the name of a place. Then throughout my professional life as a writing and celebrity interviewer for television I found myself doing those interviews in the Royal York because it was a location I was more comfortable in than any other I could come up with. Throughout my career as an interviewer I would find myself in some of the finest hotels in the world speaking with actors and writers and directors who had chosen the hotel life about why they make such a choice – I would ask that because it was something I had always wondered about and dreamed of doing myself.

Finally, after eight books published in seven or eight languages around the world I finally had the opportunity of moving in to a hotel to live and write there, not just any hotel, but my beloved Royal York Hotel, and I would finally get to write my book on hotel living and hotel culture that I had always wanted to write.

How did you research your work?

That was the beauty of writing this book – I have been researching it by actually living it – I moved in to the Royal York and for almost two years I lived and breathed the place in all its epic eccentricity and grandeur. Before that I had been living the research with every trip to hang out with a celebrity in the fine hotels of New York, Los Angeles, Miami, France and many other parts near and far in the world.

Describe you ideal writing environment.

I don’t have an ideal environment to write in but I do prefer to write everything in long hand first – handwriting to me is part of the romanticism of the writer’s life that I first dreamed about as a kid when I would ditch school to go reading in the library and would get lost in biographies of Hemingway and Hecht and Chandler and Melville. To this day I have written all nine of my books in long hand first, all of the countless magazine and newspaper profiles and pieces in long hand first.

What inspired you to write your first book?

Being an author was what I had wanted to be since I can remember first wanting to be anything but before getting to actually be that I took a detour into the world of television as a host (celebrity interviewer and movie reviewer) and it was through that circuitous route that I ended up being able to realize the dream of becoming an author. I was in New York City interviewing film director James Cameron for television – Cameron enjoyed our conversation so much he kept copies of the tapes to use parts of the interview in the corporate video for his production company, Lightstorm Entertainment. When the interview aired it caught the eye of an editor at Doubleday who suggested to me that a book on Canadian James Cameron was something they would love to work with me on. This lead to the writing and publication of my first book – Dreaming Aloud – The Life and Films of James Cameron.

What are your reading right now?

Currently I am reading a new biography of a filmmaking hero of mine – the brilliant writer and filmmaker and raconteur John Huston. The book is called John Huston – Courage and Art by Jeffrey Meyers.

Tell us about your book.

The Chinese in Toronto from 1878: From Outside to Inside the Circle is about the development of the Chinese community as told through historical accounts, archival and present-day photographs, newspaper and magazine reports, and narratives from old-timers and newcomers. The arrival of the Chinese to Toronto began after the completion of the CPR railway in 1885 after which time a hostile British Columbia sent Chinese labourers eastwards in search of employment and a more welcoming place. In 1894 Toronto’s Chinese population numbered 50. Today no less than seven Chinatowns serve the second-largest visible minority, a population of half a million, although many Chinese communities have broken out of the Chinatown mould and have successfully established themselves in all areas of the Greater Toronto Area.

How did you come up with the title?

In a way, the title, and more specifically, the sub-title, is a tribute to my parents who were actively involved in the movement of the Chinese in Toronto from outside to inside the circle of Canadian life. My father came to Canada from a small village in China as a nine-year-old who spoke no English and had no education. He spent a lifetime perfecting English and adopting the Canadian way of life. My mother who was born in Nanaimo, B.C. was one of twelve children raised not only during the depression but also during the time of Canada’s most repressive and discriminatory policies against the Chinese. She lamented being sent to a segregated school where the mere act of walking past the regular school viagra she should have attended emphasized how different and outside the mainstream she was. She didn’t want to be outside looking in, her feelings reflecting those of so many other Chinese who were kept outside the circle of Canadian life. For decades to come, the Chinese struggled under extreme hardships imposed by state-sanctioned hostility, hatred, and discrimination.

The many layers of such hardships have been gradually peeled away. With achievements spanning all walks of life, the Chinese in Toronto are no longer looking in from outside the circle. Their lives are a vibrant part of the diverse mosaic that makes Toronto one of the most multicultural cities in the world. The photograph of Chinatown’s red gateway and the CN Tower on the book cover is symbolic of the welcoming and unimpeded passageway for anyone and everyone into the circle of Canadian life.

How did you research your book?

Research is the one of the most exciting and exhilarating parts of writing. Being a librarian, I was comfortable scouring the deepest recesses of libraries, archives, private family collections, and the Internet. I was also on a personal journey navigating through my childhood memories of growing up in Chinatown through the lens of adult eyes. There were incredible moments of discovery. One was about the Olympic figure-skating medalist, Elvis Stojko. His reverence for Chinese martial arts was such that he used the soundtrack from the film, Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story, for his skate program. Stojko had studied with one of Toronto’s earliest martial arts masters in a Chinese community hall on Hagerman Street in Old Chinatown. Not only was it thrilling to find this interesting tidbit that linked a Canadian Olympian with Chinatown but there was a surprising personal link. I had studied with the same master at the same hall.

What was your first publication?

I guess you could say that my first work was published in my high school yearbook. It was a short story about three generations of characters: a toddler, his mother, and an elderly stranger. My first book, The Spirit of the Dragon: the Story of Jean Lumb, a Proud Chinese Canadian, is about my mother who was the first Chinese Canadian woman to receive the Order of Canada. I fell into writing this children’s book quite by accident in the mid 1990s. Up until this time, I had neglected writing while I worked full-time and raised a family. When the opportunity to write a book about my mother was offered, I jumped at the chance of re-igniting my passion for writing. I haven’t looked back since. The Chinese in Toronto from 1878 is my fifth book.

What’s the best advice you’ve ever received as a writer?

Know when to stop researching and start writing.

Website

www.arlenechan.ca

Tell us about your book.

Picasso Blues is the continuing story of Ray Tate and Djuna Brown, two cops in a Midwestern city who dream of moving to Paris to live artistic and slightly wacky lives involving a lot of wine and food, a lot of art, and a lot of sex. At the end of their first book, Free Form Jazz, they were separated by their jobs: Ray Tate stayed in the city and Djuna Brown went to work in Indian Country. In Picasso they had to be brought back together. I’d had an idea years ago about using current and real events in a novel – in this case it was SARS and the G20 police riot. So for Picasso I used SARS as a means of bringing Djuna Brown back to the city to shore up police ranks decimated by the disease. And I used the G20 events to do some character building – or character destroying – for the cops in the book. Ideally, I’d like to do a book with Ray Tate as an insurance adjuster and Djuna Brown as an office clerk who found each other and share a dream together. That they’re cops doesn’t really matter to me. Unfortunately I don’t know much about insurance adjusting or office clerking. I know cops and cities and crime, so that’s what I go with.

Tell us a little about the overarching theme of your work, and why you felt compelled to explore it.

A constant theme is the nexus between personal loyalty and urban survival, two things that interest me in real life. And I got a lot of art and food and wine and Paris in there. Those things interest me as well, probably to an unhealthy degree. Definitely to an unhealthy degree. A non-Ray Tate novel I’m finishing – one of the non-commercial writing projects I have underway – has a lot of ballet in it, a lot of Philip Glass music; these are my current obsessions and I see no point in trying to avoid them. I don’t have much imagination, really, at the end of the day.

How did you research your book?

My books require no research at all, I just live my life. Since writing Picasso I’ve been to Paris twice and did absolutely no writing. I wandered around taking literally hundreds of photographs and doing the things Ray Tate and Djuna Brown would do. This set up book three. My real life and my characters’ lives aren’t much different.

Describe your ideal writing environment.

I only do actual writing of the book – that is, the typing and editing – at home on a computer. This is the mechanical stuff that I do when I’m ready to write. Occasionally, I write blocks of copy by hand, conversations, descriptions, everyplace. At the cottage, in Algonquin Park, while travelling overseas, occasionally in coffee shops. But I never refer back to those notes; once I’ve done the physical act of writing them down, I have them and never need to look at them again. In Palermo one evening I filled three little reporter’s notebooks while absorbing more grappa than I actually needed; when I got home I only opened one of the books once: to check the spelling of a street.

What are you reading right now?

Right now I’m reading non-fiction, exclusively. I very, very rarely read crime fiction or crime non-fiction. I read specific novelists when their books come out: Jerome Charyn, Robert Stone, Jim Harrison, Tom McGuane. Right now I’m up to date on all those guys. All of my current reading relates to art, photography, food, fishing, ballet, and Paris, mostly Paris in the 1920s and 1930s: The Art of Lee Miller, Camera Lucida, by Roland Barthes, Elements of Etiquette by Craig Claiborne, Matisse and Picasso, by Francoise Gilot, Just Kids, by Patti Smith. I just jump into and out of books as I work my way through them, often picking up whatever I had at hand, wherever I am in the apartment.