Well, Sam Montcalm is a bit of a lonewolf. And he’s not liked too much by his investigative counterparts. Oh, and CSIS has a pseudo-file on him.

****

Brief Biography of Sam Montcalm (from CSIS Files)

Samuel Tristram Montcalm. Private investigator, Ottawa. Residence 77 Buchan Street, Kitchissippi. Telephone 613-992-0751, email=smontcalm@webstar.ca. No cell phone.

The subject was born in Santa Barbara, California on October 15, 1959. Father: Charles-Louis Montcalm, born Neuville, P.Q., Canada, 1915, died Los Angeles, 1985. Mother: Celia Snowdon, born Guelph, Ontario, 1924, died Los Angeles, 1983. Montcalm’s brother, Theodore Roosevelt Montcalm, born Ottawa, 1950, died Vancouver, B.C.,1977, by suicide. Vietnam volunteer and deserter, drug addict.

Samuel Montcalm attended UCLA, B.A. in Humanities Studies, studied criminology at University of Ottawa. Settled in Ottawa in 1985, private investigator, mostly cheating spouse and divorce investigations, background checks, undercover investigations, missing persons, fraud and work place investigations, obtaining and verifying sensitive information, and miscellaneous tailored enquiries. Montcalm is reported to have ties with Point-Blanc, an Ottawa scandal magazine and zine, and seem to have done various (unspecified) jobs for them. Despite his background, the subject has limited Francophone connections.

Informants report possible connections between the subject and foreign investigators (FBI, in particular), with respect to information-generation regarding Canadian politicians and Rockcliffe “movers and shakers.” This may be erroneous, given the subject’s declared support of leftist political views and agendas. Links to communist-anarchist groups are so far unspecified but possible, though some reports conclude that Montcalm is a wild card whose ideological commitments vary with his moods. The latter thesis, if accurate, would make him unpredictable, and potentially dangerous. It is therefore essential that periodical surveillance be maintained. Since the subject’s emotional attachments seem random and promiscuous, although solely heterosexual, it is suggested that “honey trap” methods would constitute a useful adjunct, should closer observation and control be deemed necessary.

It should be noted that the subject is assisted at times by Jacob Leonard Smith, a musician and musical scholar, often employed as a piano technician, who rents space at the subject’s Buchan Street address. Smith is a former draft resister and fugitive, born in New York City, and now a Canadian citizen. Smith’s sentimental left-wing views are known to overlap in many instances with those of Montcalm.

Last updated, July 1, 2010—file under “Ottawa Private Investigators-Montcalm.” See files XBT-2001-2007 for detailed records of meetings, contacts, sources.

Tell us about your book.

How did you come up with the idea for this work?
Someone told me about cops doing surveillance on a camper van and, ahead on the road, it exploded because it was a drug lab on wheels.

How did you come up with the title?
I think most of what anyone does is free form jazz. There’s an artistic facet even to police work and interrogations. No one actually knows what they’re doing much of the time. You engage in motion and hope it becomes action. Writing a novel is like falling down a flight of stairs.

Tell us a little about the overarching theme of your work, and why you felt compelled to explore it.
Folks say I write crime stuff but I write relationship stuff. Characters just happen to be cops or crooks.

Did you have a specific readership in mind when you wrote your book?
No.

How did you research your book?
Stumbling around talking to people.

What was the creative process like for you?
There’s no creative process: you just write and let the story and characters take you where they want to go.

Describe your ideal writing environment.
My writing room, my cats, my wine, my Chicago blues and my smokes. Night-time while my wife sleeps.

What was the hardest part of writing your book?
Not starting another one in the middle of it because the characters needed their own book.

What was your first publication?
Toe poems under another name in around 1969-1970.

What inspired you to write your first book?
Needed the dough; non-fiction.

In your own work, which character are you most attached to, and why?
All, because they’re all based on folks I know and I love them all, even the minor characters.

What’s the best advice you’ve ever received as a writer?
Write out your outline in about 17 words as if it was a movie synopsis in the TV Guide. Stick to it but don’t be stupid about it.

Describe the most memorable response you’ve received from a reader.
“It hit my sweet spot.” Whatever that is.

Has a review or profile ever changed your perspective on your work?
No. Bad reviews are by goofs; good reviews are by smart, intelligent, canny experts.

Who did you read as a young adult?
Couldn’t read without moving my lips until in my teens.

What are you reading right now?
My new manuscript. I don’t read good stuff because it shows my shortcomings; I don’t read bad stuff because it frustrates me.

What is your next project?
Sequels to Free Form Jazz and The Finger’s Twist, a trilogy called Murder Town, a novel called The Act of Christian Winter, a novel called Celly’s Frame, and a novel called Flowers.

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 novel was The Last Thief. A journalist known for his investigations into the seamy underworld of organized crime, he travels widely in Asia and Europe from his base in Toronto.

This week we’ll be bringing you a multi-part installment recounting Tom’s experiences in the late 1950s as he was unexpectedly brought into an actual murder investigation, and how the case unfurled.

THE DEATH SHIP : My Big Chance to Play Detective
By Tom Henighan

Introduction
From 1957 until 1959, I served as American Vice Consul in what was then the British Colony of Aden (now part of the Republic of Yemen). After it happened, I soon tried to turn this true story into fiction; my first attempt at writing a full-length novel. I hope the readers and potential readers of Nightshade enjoy this story of my real murder mystery investigation, one full of odd details and ironies worthy of the best mystery yarns.

The Case Begins: 

American Consulate, Aden, Friday morning, October 31, 1958. “Here’s something interesting,” Cathy O’Hara, our secretary, announces, waving a telegram at me. It is a signal just received from the captain of an American military transport ship, the U.S.S. Lieutenant Robert Craig, anchored in Aden’s outer harbour. The captain’s message is not the usual perfunctory request for some minor consular intervention; on the contrary, it sounds distinctly frightened. One of the ship’s crewmen, an electrician named James T. Hill, has disappeared and may have been murdered. The Robert Craig is in a state of terror.

I climb on board a launch at the Prince of Wales Pier and head for the outer harbour. It is a beautiful Aden morning, sunlight glittering on the water, oil tankers and a few cargo ships floating lightly at anchor. We motor past these, the gulls soar and cry, and, as we move, the rocky cliffs that encircle the harbour take on a purer definition. I try to recall a few lines from a poem by Oliver St.John Gogarty about the “lapsing, unsoilable whispering sea,” although right now there is no whispering, and not a touch of roaring majesty: the sea is merely companionable, comforting in its bright, low-keyed equanimity.

When I catch sight of the Robert Craig, however, my blithe mood darkens a little. This is not from any conjured-up melodrama of expectation; the grey ship, lying low in the water, is actually a grim sight — sleek and almost menacing, with a high bow that slopes down amidships, a white bridge topped by a single stack, steely cranes fore and aft that rise like jury-rigged crosses or bare gallows trees. From stem to stern, right down to its brick or blood-red paint border at the water line, this ship is an instrument of pure utility, but lacking any Bauhaus charm.

I go up the ladder, survey the nearly empty deck, and greet the second officer, who takes me at once to the captain’s cabin. The skipper’s name is Claus Lampe. A middle-aged man, slightly bowed, with a grey careworn face, he speaks with a slight German accent. My youthful appearance does nothing to reassure him, while for my part I am surprised to find the panic of his telegram perfectly expressive of the atmosphere of the ship. As we leave the deck, faces peer from behind containers, figures move between the cargo booms. From time to time, recounting his story, Lampe glances nervously around, then pauses and listens intently, as if he were expecting a visit from the Gestapo or the Golem. Mr. Benson, the second officer, stands guard outside the cabin door.

Lampe’s story is simple, at least on the surface. Jimmie Hill, a seaman electrician, has been missing since about 12:30 p.m. the day before. At that time the ship was on the high seas at 14º 50′ north latitude, and 49º 50′ west longitude. What were later to be verified as bloodstains had been found at the stern on the port side near a door leading to two levels. The upper level held the carpenter’s shop and two storerooms, and the lower was occupied by the ship’s steering engine room. The bloodstains led from the ship’s side railing across about fifteen feet of deck and down the stairwell, stopping on the upper landing. There were two smudged fingerprints in blood on the bulkhead by the stairs. On the deck and the stairs were rag marks where someone had attempted to wipe up the blood.

Most of this I verified for myself, after reassuring the captain that we could help him. By this time my own delight and excitement were as vivid as Lampe’s gloom. I could hardly wait to get back to the consulate and report.

Before I departed, however, the captain led me to his cabin, closed the door, and addressed me with a ferocious intensity, speaking in a whisper. What he said was quite clear, but I felt as well something lurking behind his words.

“We’ve searched everywhere. Somebody murdered Hill and threw him overboard. You’ve got to bring the police. Whoever did it might kill… any of us. I don’t want anything to do with him.”

“You sound as if you know who did it.”

He shook his head, wiped his sweating face. “I know what I know. And, believe me, the crew are afraid. Can you get the police on board — right away?”

“I hope so … Today, I hope. Don’t worry, I’ll come back as soon as I can.”

“Tell them to bring some weapons. If you knew what we were up against, you’d understand. Everyone’s afraid. We don’t want to spend another night with a murderer.”

“Captain Lampe, I’m required to conduct an investigation.”

“You’re going to question these seamen? Do you know what you’re up against? These are tough men . . .”

How will the investigation progress? Tune in tomorrow for part two!

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.

There’s even that sense of accomplishment (despite not having moved out of aforementioned hammock) that comes from picking the murderer/up-to-no-good-sort before the final chapter. But a ‘nobody-as-yet-knows-whodunit’, I wasn’t too sure about that. Where was the successful conclusion; the killer apprehended and safely behind bars?

My first true crime book, Robert J. Hoshowsky’s Unsolved — True Canadian Cold Cases, was a chilling read. The teenage Richard Hovey, who left New Brunswick in 1967 to pursue his musical ambitions in Toronto, seemed much like any other teen of the age, except where he went missing, it’s believed, shortly after arriving in the city.

The book is a gripping account of some of the most terrible crimes that remain open. It will be a while before I view TV shows purporting to cover cold cases without expecting to see the unsettling honesty that this book conveys.

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.

One of the highlights of working for an independent bookstore is that you really get to know your customers. One of my favourite regulars was a couple that always came in Friday evenings just before we closed. One Friday they came in and made a beeline for the J section of the store and swooped up all of Maureen Jenning’s Murdoch Mysteries. They had loved the Murdoch miniseries so much that they wanted more. Flash foward a couple of years to last year, now working as a publicist for Dundurn, when the neatest thing happened to this mystery reader – I got to be the publicist for Maureeen Jenning’s new novel, and sequel to Does Your Mother Know?,  The K Handshape, which features forensic profiler Christine Morris.  And now just over a year after the publication of The K Handshape I’m delighted to announce that Maureen Jennings has been nominated for an Arthur Ellis Award for Best Novel for The K Handshape. Congratulations Maureen!

The winners will be announced on Thursday June 4th in Ottawa.

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

When I’m not working on a book — as is the case right now — I still have to keep my tools sharp.

READING – One way to keep my tools sharp is by reading; I read the New Yorker Magazine religiously and recently picked up James Wood’s How Fiction Works, Drew Gilpin Faust’s The Republic of Suffering, and John Updike’s The Centaur and In the Beauty of the Lilies.

WRITING – Another method is to write other things — diary entries, a log, letters, or, as I did for a number of years, book reviews. Although I don’t do it anymore, I used to write reviews for Books in Canada and the Kingston Whig-Standard Magazine. The advantage of writing reviews is that it forces you not only to analyze another writer’s work, but to articulate that analysis. Writing about writing can be very instructive.

EDITING – A third way is to edit other people’s writing: at the moment, I am reading my son’s novel in manuscript; he hopes, as all writers should, that an objective eye will help him improve his book. A long-time friend of mine, Roderick Jamer, who was for many years a staff writer with TV Guide, has asked me to take a look at his murder mystery-in-progress; and I am also participating in the evolution of a film script by another friend, Peter Blendell; the script involves a Stanley Cup victory by the Toronto Maple Leafs (some of you will suggest that this project be categorized as fantasy), and Peter hopes that I will be able to help with the scenes that deal with hockey itself. (I have a long history in the game, first as a player — my career peaked when I was 13; it’s been all down hill since then — and as a fan — the Leafs are what I have instead of religion, or more correctly, they are my religion; sitting down to watch a game is, for me, what going to church is for other people. And although I may bleed blue, at least I can say that the only violence associated with my religion is restricted to the arena.)

TEACHING – Although not all writers have the opportunity to teach, those who do know that teaching another writer’s work is an edifying experience. I taught Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises at least thirty times over my 25-year career as a high school English teacher. I know the book like the back of my hand — its strengths, its flaws — and may even have become more familiar with it than Hemingway himself, who wrote it in nine weeks. Hemingway said that studying a still life by Cezanne taught him as much about how to write as anything he read, and, similarly, I have learned as much about how to write from teaching The Sun Also Rises as I have from anything else.

BLOGS – Writing this blog also helps me keep my tools sharp, because I can write about whatever interests me, and I can do it whenever I feel the urge — every writer’s dream. Now if I could only make it pay …

Next Installment – Salvaging a Novel I Wrote in 1983

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