Of course, when I turned my back on the True North, I found myself facing south, and embracing American cultural exports with a near fanatical devotion. I have the baseball cards, jazz albums, and many, many detective novels to prove it.  And, of my imports, what could be more American than the detective novel? Edgar Allen Poe practically invented the modern mystery, and Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett followed (relatively) soon after and influenced an entire generation of crime writers. I was only too happy to snap up this literary legacy. I read (and re-read) everything I could get my hands on, Hammet, Chandler, and everyone else, too. So long as there was a crime being committed or a mystery being solved, I was happy. Gamblers, cheats, murders, arsonists, all were welcome in the pages of my reading material, but not one of these crooks was Canadian.  Time passed,  and my reading material remained much the same. I left the small town I was born in and arrived in Centre of the Universe (Toronto to its friends), went to school, graduated, all the while keeping myself steadfastly away from anything that reeked of Canadiana. But, as you will soon see, this was about to change.

I am a little embarrassed to admit that the whole change happened by chance. It was a dark and stormy night…well, afternoon, anyway. I needed something to do, and what better thing than a new book? Now, as I’ve said, I’ve read a lot of crime fiction, so finding something new at this point was a bit of a challenge. Some searching led me to a book called Sucker Punch. Grim, gritty, criminals acting badly, all that good stuff. I used one service to find the book (Amazon), but another to buy it (Kobo), and that caused a bit of trouble. The truth of the matter, though, is that I wasn’t really paying much attention. So little attention, in fact, that I, er, bought the wrong book by accident.

Now, to be fair, the book I looked at and the book that I bought did have the same title. But that’s not really an excuse. Attention to detail is very important, my teachers always told me. Anyway, I decided I would read this book, even if the author was Canadian. And not just because I couldn’t return it, either. I was growing up, I thought. I’d be so generous as to give this book a chance. Yes, I really did think like that, as embarrassing as it is to admit.

As gracious as I was feeling, I still expected to be indifferent at best, but I was enthused. And while Marc Strange’s  Sucker Punch wasn’t single-handedly responsible for my embracing Canadian genre fiction (Bon Cop, Bad Cop, anyone?),  it went a long way to changing my mind. Something about a book set in a Canadian city seemed more real to me, and I felt like I could get a better handle on the characters. I really don’t know much about Chicago or the people who live there, but Vancouver, well, that was a little closer to home. Maybe there were some crime novels set in Toronto?

Many Canadian mystery novels later, and completely by coincidence, I found myself working for the people that published Sucker Punch, and get the chance to talk about how it changed my reading habits right here on the blog during Murder Week. I hope you’ll give some Canadian mysteries a chance, and if I might make some recommendations, consider 74 Miles Away and Bright’s Kill, two excellent books by J.D Carpenter

How did you come up with the idea for this work?
As a police officer, I have always been interested in investigating frauds. They were cases that had all of the elements of an investigation: victims, witnesses, a trail of evidence and an accused. They allowed officers to hone their skills in investigation and interviewing. As a detective with the Commercial Crime Unit, I found that most victims had heard of various schemes – the Nigerian Letters, the credit card skimming, the Ponzi schemes, but no one understood how they worked or how they could get caught. That is when I realized that there was very little information that explained these scams in basic terms.

How did you come up with the title?
What else would a con man say?

Did you have a specific readership in mind when you wrote your book?
Everyone has heard of the big Ponzi schemes that involved millions of dollars, or the stock schemes like Bre-Ex, however, although devastating to those involved, they affected a smaller number of the population. The majority of fraud cases are made up of small amounts of money (under $5000), but the impact to the victim can be just as great. I wanted to reach out to the average person who may be a victim of everyday frauds, such as a mortgage fraud or a Ponzi scheme, to explain how they work in order to protect themselves.

What inspired you to write your first book?
Somehow I felt that the message should get out that these con-artists are taking advantage of good, trusting people. They are not the folk heroes that often get portrayed on television and in films. Nor can we rely on just the police to stop them and protect ourselves. We have to take responsibility to look after our own interests and the best way to do that is to be informed.

Gordon G. Leek was a member of the Calgary Police Service for more than 25 years. In 1987 he was seconded to the Calgary Police/Royal Canadian Mounted Police Joint Forces where he developed and wrote the security handbook used by police officers and security volunteers at the 1988 Winter Olympic Games. With the Commercial Crime Unit he served as the primary investigator and liaison for the Calgary Police Service with the Alberta Partnership against Cross-Border Fraud. He lives in Calgary.

And it is with Labour Day that we bring “Dundurn’s Summer of Murder and Mayhem” to an official close. It’s been a great few weeks of reviews, giveaways, and inside info on your favourite Dundurn detectives. We’ve had great feedback from authors and readers alike, and must thank you all for your participation.

It’s back to regularly scheduled blogging next Tuesday, but keep checking back for more murderous tidbits. After all, crime doesn’t stop with daylight savings, and sometimes the Winter blues can take on a whole new meaning….

****

IN SEARCH OF A FISH

In my first published novel – The Last Thief – an old Russian bandit and a haunted gypsy woman fish for a fat black bass in the early autumn of the middle north; the bass creates a bond between the two mutually suspicious fisherfolks. The fish – named dyed; Russian for grandfather – is caught but freed and the bandit and gypsy ultimately return to the complicated life of their modern underworld. There’s death, there’s betrayal, there’s a kind of redemption.

In Free Form Jazz a badly scarred methamphetamine chemist sees a fish jump in a small lake near his remote “laboratory” in the northern woods; he realized this means something, something perhaps profound, although that word wouldn’t occur to him. But when he goes to buy fishing equipment he begins a spiral of events that lead to his death.

Fish. Damn the fish.

I don’t know where they come from. Except that I live in a city on a lake, I’ve been mentally landlocked all my life. I’ve traveled to some of the great port cities but never imagined teeming schools of fish boiling beneath the surface. Except for a well-made bouillabaisse I rarely even eat fish.

But they’re there. Scattered in scenes from my first novel and in every piece of fiction I’ve written since. It wasn’t as though I was a fisherman – when I wrote the scene of the Russian bandit and the beautiful gypsy woman I’d only fished a couple of times in my sober adulthood, the most recent a depressing event in Algonquin Park where the fish were big and fat and black in the thick autumn water. When my hugely successful companion shouted, “Net boy”, I wielded the net for him and absorbed his pitiful laughter and gained a regrettable nickname.

I didn’t have any Huckleberry Finn moments in my childhood or youth. My own discovery of nature came very late, in my late forties and early fifties. My wife’s family has a cottage in Muskoka and we run up there for weekends. Other family members have places they use in Algonquin Park. Your first sight of majestic moose outside a window while you’re preparing breakfast is stunning and puts your heart racing and no writer I ever read has found a descriptive word big enough. Fitting the image into a story of urban criminal free-for-all is a challenge.

It might be the silence – or the apparent silence. Nature is seldom quiet, I’ve learned. Nature is a very busy place. The sloppy bang of a lazy paddle on an invisible canoe in the dawn mists across Smoke Creek. The jumping of a fish when the water surface is carpeted thickly with bug life. Insect noises. Mysterious cracklings in the bush. The haiku lap of water at a dock footing or a rocky shoreline.

Early in the mornings I invariably take my mug of coffee to the edge of the water. Sometimes I stand for a while watching absolutely nothing; mostly I bait a line and put it out. Barefoot I sit on my tackle box, sometimes in my pajamas under a jacket and wearing a comical and conical Vietnamese peasant’s hat, and watch little jitters skitter across the water’s surface.

This is the true writing time. Not the time of actual tap-tap-tap mechanical writing. That comes later and except for note taking back at the cottage – maybe – it is instead the time of mental drifting with my characters and stories. There’s a Zen aspect to it I suppose but I try to stay away from overly examined beatnik hipster life; and even if I didn’t I’d resist imposing it on anyone.

Suffice to say: it’s quiet and nobody around and you don’t have to be a bald monk in a saffron robe to appreciate it.

Eventually a yawning nephew or niece wanders sleepily down to the dock.

“What are you doing?”

“Fishing.”

“You catch anything?”

“Not yet. Had a nibble.”

The kid looks around the lake as though expecting something to happen then looks at me. I’m sure he or she has one thought in mind: my uncle’s a nerd.

I think on some level I use fishing – and nature – as a redemption for the worst of my characters. My scar-faced criminal chemist – a depraved killer and kidnapper – only becomes less than cardboard to me when he recognizes the possibilities of the natural world, when he sees a fish jump in a little glass lake.

“Anyway, I got bored and I went up to the farm and just hid out,” my character, the Harv, says to his dope dealing partner, Cornelius Cook. “You know there’s a lake up there, way in on our property? Not a big thing, but I came across it out walking. Saw a fish jump in the air. There was a bear on the other side.”

“Yeah? Yeah, really? Fish? No shit. A bear. But, no mischief-making up there, Harv? You didn’t pull out the recipe book, start baking little pink cakes in the barn?”

“Naw. No, Cookie. There’s nothing up there to cook with. I decided: Fuck it, take it easy. Just me and the fishes and the beasts.”

This made me a little maudlin so I turned the conversation immediately to the mechanics of a kidnapping, which without volition became a key event in the tale.

There are life’s lessons to fishing and they’re probably the same lessons you can pick up any place at any time unless you’re dead to a fragrant degree. I’m sure people have been bolted by jazzy satori while fishing but probably golfers and runners and swimmers have had the same experience; so have people who have sharply been hit on the head by a windfall chestnut.

My six-year-old nephew Ross and I were in Algonquin a couple of years ago. We’d worked lures along the shoreline of Potter’s Creek and caught nothing. Back on the dock, resting up, he cast a worm and it was immediately taken. His rod bowed impressively. He yelled for help and he worked and reeled. Having nothing on my line, I jumped into inaction:

“You’re on your own, kid,” I told the little guy and put my hands into my pockets. I watched as he brought it in; it took him a very long time and I have to admit I admired his sweat. His mother netted the bass. She gave me the same look a woman gave me at the supermarket recently when I took fifteen items into the eight-or-less line.

It was his first fish of significance and it was, as we say, a keeper. It was beautiful in the pure utilitarian way of a fish, about two-and-a-half pounds and it had that healthy ink sheen of early autumn.

“Well,” I said, “what are you going to do?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well,” I said, thinking uncles with wisdom say the pontifical Well an awful lot, “well, you want to let it go or kill it and eat it?”

He’s a gentle kid. He suffered a bit of angst. “What should I do?”

“Well,” I said looking at the far horizon across the lake, thinking wise uncles do a lot of staring away and pondering, “well, you can keep it or let it go. There’s no wrong decision unless you kill it and don’t eat it. At that point you officially and forever become a dork.”

He’s a gentle kid but not a dork. With much thought his face became serious. He said: “Let’s eat it.”

He studied my brother-in-law’s particularly bloody technique for killing, scaling and gutting; he watched it being cooked. He didn’t flinch. He ate a very small mouthful, which was absolutely okay with me. I gorged.

Afterward I sat alone with my rod and reel on the sinking dock and watched bright canoes pass silently across the black water, heading for late portage. I thought: what would happen if a criminal, the worst of criminals, the very yeoman of criminals, was sitting here instead of me at the end of a day? What if my killer or kidnapper or trafficker or smuggler took a break from the day-to-day slugfest of crime and found himself in this place at this time, witnessing a young boy passing through a ritual, making a decision that said an awful lot about who he was and who he would become?

Or what if he was that young boy, just born late, elsewhere?

In my mind I’d been shaping out the vague silhouette of a minor character named Phil Harvey. Badly burned in a meth lab explosion, the Harv was a master criminal, kidnapper, trafficker, killer, extortionist. An all-around guy.

In the early writing of Free Form Jazz, the Harv lived in his role was fairly tiny, consisting of cooking methamphetamine and Ecstasy and shooting a couple of people – meat puppets who could easily be disposed of when the story needed a splash of blood.

Between the time I reflected out on the dock and later finished the book he’d morphed into one of those characters who writers come to love. The odious and precious birthing experience aside, I wanted nothing more than to take him up to Algonquin and watch him fish, to see the baddest man in the world in the most beautiful place on earth. This was an intersection I could work as efficiently as I could angle the place where a river feeds a lake.

****

Lee Lamothe is the author of several non-fiction books, including the bestsellers The Sixth Family: The Collapse of the New York Mafia and Bloodlines: The Rise and Fall of Mafia’s Royal Family. His previous crime novels are The Finger’s Twist and The Last Thief. He travels widely in Asia and Europe from his base in Toronto.

And it is. Not only am I revisiting an old manuscript (working title: Up Where We Go), but I am revisiting the person I was 25 years ago. The experience is not unlike looking at an old photo album, or rummaging through a chest of toys you had as a child. The writing is youthful and lyrical and, admittedly, derivative (of Hemingway, Faulkner, and Steinbeck). And the characters — naive and idealistic compared to the grizzled and world-weary characters I use today — are refreshing, even though I know that life will beat them down, even during the progress of this story.

But I shouldn’t project too far into the book. I haven’t reread it in all these years, and although I have a rough idea of how the plot unfolds, I am constantly being surprised by what happens next. I have no recollection of writing certain scenes; odd, because sometimes I’ll remember precisely the next six or eight words that complete a sentence I haven’t seen in a quarter of a century.

I’ve also noticed that I use “free indirect style” (a species of third person narration in which the narrator possesses some, but not too much, of the attitude of the character over whose shoulder he is looking). I was just reading about this technique several weeks ago in James Wood’s edifying How Fiction Works, and didn’t think I’d ever heard of it before. Well, in fact, I hadn’t. I just used it in ignorance back when I was beginning to write, before I settled down with more conventional forms of narration.

I’ve just completed Chapter 1. I’ve changed a few things here and there, but I haven’t tampered with the spirit of the story. That would be a mistake. So far, I’m having fun. And I’m very excited to see how it ends.

In any case I haven’t read it since. Nor did I ever submit it again. But a few months ago, I told my girlfriend, Karen, about it, and she asked if she could read it. When she was finished, she said, “This is the most beautiful thing you’ve ever written,” which was a very nice thing to say, but a very depressing thing to hear, because she’s read everything I’ve written since.

I know what she means though. She likes its youthful lyricism, its unjadedness. She likes the fact that it’s a story about a family. She likes the fact that it’s not a murder mystery, that it’s non-genre.

So my next project is before me: to revisit Country Music (alternative title: Up Where We Go) and decide whether I think it’s as good as she does. If I think it’s salvageable (like an old shipwreck still rocking on the ocean floor), I will commit a year to rewriting it. I hope to begin reading it this week. I am looking forward to experiencing again the scenes I worked so hard on a quarter century ago, and I am looking forward to a judicious application of those skills that I have developed in the process of writing six subsequent novels — one of which I never submitted for publication, four of which have been published, and one of which is currently awaiting my editor’s attention — to what may seem to me a callow manuscript.

But part of me hopes that Karen is right. Part of me hopes that it is the most beautiful thing I’ve written.

Next Installment: An Update on Country Music

For the novel I’m writing, Black Tupelo, my two main characters, Campbell Young and Priam Harvey, pursue a miscreant named Wendell Honey through the American midwest and southern states. Although my imagination was up to the task of creating the scenes I needed, I wanted — for the sake of authenticity — to see the actual places I had my characters visit. And so it was that in the summer of 2007 I undertook a journey which followed the itinerary my characters followed, a journey that would eventually consume five weeks, take me to 20 states, and cover more than 12,000 kilometres.

FROM CHAPTER 13 OF BLACK TUPELO:

It was noon by the time Leonard picked Harvey up in front of the library. Harvey insisted the cab driver have lunch with him, and they went to Leonard’s favourite restaurant, an unassuming diner just outside the Quarter.
“This is the best sausage I’ve ever eaten,” Harvey said, midway through the meal. “And red beans and rice go really well together.”
“They was made to go together. Benny!” Leonard called out to the waiter. “More beer!”
“More beer?” Harvey said. “Don’t you have to drive this afternoon?”
“I’m takin’ it off, gonna show you ’round my town.”
Several hours later – after standing in line at the Toulouse Street wharf with a bunch of old people carrying deck chairs; after taking a two-hour cruise, featuring a calliope concert, of the lower Mississippi River aboard the steamboat Natchez; after a leisurely drive up St. Charles Avenue through the Garden District to Tulane University; after several cold Coors at the Famous Door on Bourbon Street; and after a visit to Leonard’s favourite tourist attraction, Ripley’s Believe It or Not Museum (“It’s goin’ out o’ business,” Leonard told Harvey. “I gots to see it one last time.”) – Leonard dropped Harvey at the Best Western. They shook hands and said goodbye. “Y’all got my number if ya need me,” Leonard said.
“I will. Thanks for everything.”

A follow-up conversation between Campbell Young and Priam Harvey expands the visit to the Ripley’s Believe It or Not Museum:

“What did you see there?”
“Well, let’s see, I saw a wax reproduction of Robert Wadlow, the tallest man who ever lived, and a model of the London Tower Bridge made out of two hundred and sixty-four thousand matchsticks, and the car Lee Harvey Oswald drove the day he shot Kennedy. Oh, and the world’s largest tire. Thirteen thousand pounds.”

There’s a fine line between using such details to make scenes richer and simply showing off. The writer must be careful not to overdo it: within the context of Chapter 13, these details should occupy a very small space.

Next installment: How I keep my tools sharp

But I did, and a couple of  years later, I began my second novel, Men in Groups, which was about teachers and teaching. When it was finished, however, I came to the conclusion that I didn’t like it and never submitted it.

Recently I reread both manuscripts and have decided to see if I can’t resurrect them. As soon as I’ve completed one more revision of my Campbell Young mystery,  Black Tupelo — which should happen within the next week or two — I’m going to start with the teacher novel.

The prospect of retyping these manuscripts (I only have hard copies of them, nothing on disc or floppy or memory stick, let alone hard drive) was daunting, so I was mightily relieved when the proprietor of the local printshop agreed to try to scan them onto disc for me. I gave him the 500 pages of Men in Groups, and a week later he gave me –  for the very reasonable price of $85 — a disc with the novel on it in both Microsoft Word and Word Perfect. There are some glitches (the scanner read “home” as “horne”) but they will just make the process of rewriting the novel more challenging.

Because the novel is set in 1983, one of my first decisions will be whether to keep that setting and, if so, how to make the novel into a period piece. I’ve never written a period piece, but the idea of the research involved appeals to me. I could, I suppose, move the setting to the present day, but I haven’t been in a high school classroom in almost ten years and have no idea what teaching is like today. However, I do know what it was like back in the good old days, when I could not only choose what literature I wanted to teach (The Sun Also Rises, The Sound and the Fury, the poetry of Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath, for example) but the students actually read it.

Next installment: Finishing Black Tupelo

As well as being a writer of consummate style, Updike was prolific. Compelled to write, he tried to produce at least one book a year. In the end, he wrote almost 30 novels, more than a dozen books of short stories, nine collections of poetry, as well as books of essays and criticism and autobiography. During 2008 alone, he published two short stories, a memoir, and three book reviews in The New Yorker Magazine. Especially poignant are his musings on getting old  in “A Desert Encounter” (20/10/08); and in his powerful short story “Outage” (07/01/08) he flexes his muscles one last time on the subject of sexual tension in suburbia. His last short story (26/06/08) was — ironically and wonderfully — called ‘The Full Glass.’ He was a writer to the end.

What Updike gave me (aside from lessons in the craft of writing: he was a master and mentor, a guide and father-figure) was this: his subject matter, as sordid as it sometimes was — the bedroom society of Couples (1968), for example — was about ordinary human behaviour; he always dealt with it candidly and non-judgmentally. He was a chronicler of our time. When I learned of his death, I felt a personal loss, as if a close friend or relative had died. And that is exactly what did happen. Although he never knew me, I knew him (or at least I believed I did, and still do) through his writing, and I loved him for his candour — for showing me that he saw the world much the way I did, and for reassuring me that despite our weaknesses as human beings, we are all still capable — as he and his characters were — of noble deeds.

See Jeet Heer’s piece in The National Post (28/01/09) and M. T. Kelly’s piece in The Globe & Mail (29/01/09) by clicking here and here.

Next Installment: My next project: Men in Groups.

One such occasion occured in Dodge City, Kansas, when we visited a racetrack called Dodge City Downs. Everyone at the track was  Mexican; very few of them spoke English. My high school Spanish (”Dos cervezas, por favor”) was horribly inadequate, but we were taken under wing by Andres Lima, an owner and trainer of quarter horses, who told us that if we returned one week later, we could enjoy a full day of racing at the track and see several of his horses run.

So that’s what we did. We headed west to Denver, drove up into the Rockies, camped on the Arkansas River at Poncho Springs, camped at Mesa Verde (site of the ancient and spectacular Anasazi ruins), camped at Desert View in Grand Canyon National Park, hung out at Crazy Bill’s Saloon in Flagstaff, explored several hundred miles of Route 66 (and many of its landmarks: the Museum Club, the Twin Arrows, the Jack Rabbit Trading Post, the Wigwam Motel, the Cadillac Ranch), turned back north at Amarillo, hung out at the Thirsty Dawg Saloon in Holcomb, Kansas (which led to a drive-past of one of the most infamous murder sites in American history: the Clutter family farmhouse), and were back in Dodge in time for the vaunted day of racing, reconnoitred with Andres Lima, met his wife and daughter and granddaughter, watched two of his horses win their races, and had an all-round amazing time, all of which resulted in me writing a scene for my new book, Black Tupelo, a scene made all the more vivid because I saw how the Mexican men dressed (white stetsons and colour-coordinated — lime or salmon or powder blue — shirts, belts and ostrich skin boots), I smelled the aromas of the food that was for sale (tortillas con carne, elotes con paprika), and I heard the music played by the 14-piece salsa band imported from Mexico for the occasion.

Imagination is great, but nothing beats experience; it adds authenticity to one’s writing. Unexpected developments during our trip led to unexpected experiences which resulted in unexpected scenes. One took place in the flood-damaged Ninth Ward of New Orleans; another took place in tornado-flattened Greensburg, Kansas; and so it went. And that’s why it’s important, in my opinion, to augment your imagination with experience.

Next Installment: What I’m going to work on next.