GOING BACK TO GUERNSEY

Forty years after living on the island, I am back again.  The cab from the airport takes us past Elizabeth College, where my brothers went to school, and past the old house on the Grange, where my mother had an apartment for a while.  I say, “a while” because, on an island that measures about seven by five miles, my mother moved four times in ten years.  She always used to laugh about her “itchy feet.”  Those itchy feet had taken her to Guyana to teach, where I was born, and then back to England and all over the map.  At least here we stayed within the narrow compass of the island for a decade.

In the distance, towards St. Sampson in the north-east, I can see a gigantic almost-skyscraper, something unheard-of when I lived there.  “Baring building,” says the cab-driver.  It houses Barings international bank and a huge supermarket apparently.  Le Riche’s, once a genteel grocery store on the High Street, catering to the carriage trade, now owns supermarkets and shopping centres in the offshore tax haven Guernsey has become.  Most of the greenhouses are gone.  Euros instead of tomatoes; finance instead of freesias.  Surreal.

But the tide still retreats thirty feet, and outside our hotel window it is on the turn.  A cormorant dives for fish beyond the harbour wall in a seascape the colour of a Canaletto – greyish, pinkish, opalescent.

The next day we walk along the Esplanade around the harbour, the islands of Herm and Jethou clear against the horizon.  In the shop at Castle Cornet, the eighteenth-century fort that guards the harbour at the end of its long pier, the woman behind the counter remembers many of the people I knew from the Ladies’ College, where we both went to school.  Barbara and I go through the names together.

“Do you remember the twins?  Angèle and Suzanne?  Angèle was such a devil!”

“She is dead.”

“Dear God, they were younger than me.  One of my boyfriends, Michael Le Cocq, so handsome.  Is he –?”

“Dead.”

And beautiful, brazen Sabrina, with her flaming red hair and her sex appeal, who married the son of one of the richest men on the island?

Not dead, but divorced, crippled by Parkinsons.  Dear God, I say again.  Time, for them did not stand still, as it has for me when I remember them.

Barbara dives into her memories, talks about the club she and her friends formed.  They picked holly leaves from the large bush at the bottom of the Ladies College drive, pricked themselves and swore an oath of eternal friendship, written in blood.  They put the bloodied leaves and their pledges in a tobacco tin, and buried it under the holly bush.  Years later, the bush was cut down.

“I often wonder if they found a tin beneath it,” she says.

Holly bushes are cut down, golden lads and lasses vanish and decay, but some things are as I remember them.  On the tiny island of Herm the elderberry bushes are tall as trees, the bank beneath them thick with wild leeks, pennywort, fuchsia, New Zealand flax, abuzz with bumblebees and tortoiseshell butterflies.  Shells still drift in to shell beach on the Gulf Stream from all over the world, miniature marvels.  Black and white whorls like jaw-breakers, tiny perfect pink fans, yellow and orange buttons.  On Guernsey we walk the miles of cliff paths over one of the most beautiful coastlines in the world, gorse and fern around us.  There’ll be thousands of blackberries soon.  Gulls wheeling overhead, soft mossy turf underfoot, and below us the sea creaming around brown, grey and black rocks, streaked golden with lichen.  In the hedges along the lanes the honeysuckle sweetens the salty air as we pass pretty, pretty houses painted soft lemon, peach and dove-grey.  And that marvellous granite, like dark grey harris-tweed.

But the present connects me most powerfully to the past through the restored monuments of a terrible war.  The guns have been remounted on the batteries along the coast, and the U-boat refuelling bunker is now a museum chronicling the sufferings of the slave labourers who built the underground labyrinth of tunnels that honeycomb the island, for Hitler’s Organisation Todt.  These monstrosities were there when I was there, but they lay in ruins, barred and bolted, memory suppressed.   Now the tourist and day-tripper can walk past glass cases of whips, knives, stilettos, read about bravery and betrayal, starvation and survival.

In Alice Through The Looking Glass, the King says to the Queen, “The horror of that moment I shall never, never forget,” and the Queen says, “You will, though, if you don’t make a memorandum.”

Guernsey has made a memorandum.

And, although it was not planned this way, Barbara’s holly-bush memory creates a screen-play, and Daggers and Men’s Smiles comes into being.

Jill Downie is the author of A Passionate Pen: The Life and Times of Faith Fenton, awarded the Drummer General’s Award by Richard Bachmann of A Different Drummer Books, and Storming the Castle: The World of Dora and the Duchess, which received the Hamilton and Region Arts Council Literary Award for non-fiction. Previously, she published five historical novels and has had plays performed at various festivals, including the Toronto Fringe. She lives in Ancaster, Ontario.

It’s no coincidence, then, that Jill Downie’s new mystery, Daggers and Men’s Smiles, is available now at your favourite bookseller. We thought it’d be interesting for fans of the genre (or fans of exotic locations in general) to get a bit of insider knowledge from the wordsmith herself. Keep an eye out over the next few weeks for some guest posts from Jill about the inspiration for her novel.

TALIA’S FAMILY AND DAGGERS AND MEN’S SMILES

When I first thought about writing a mystery, the island of Guernsey seemed the perfect fit.  I lived on the island for about ten years, so I knew it as an insider, and not as a tourist – although “insider” is not quite the right word.  I was not born there, I was not an islander, but I think this gave me some advantages.  I was fascinated by the folk-tales, the customs, the ancient patois – things most islanders took for granted.  I was intrigued by the multi-layered mix of inhabitants, the old families with island names – Bisson, Falla, Brouard, Robilliard – and those rather exotic individuals attracted by remote communities and places.  It was the memory of one such colourful expatriate family that gave me the idea of making my detective, Ed Moretti, half-Italian, and gave me the Marquesa Vannoni and her family, who play a crucial role in Daggers and Men’s Smiles.

One of my friends, Talia (not her real name, nor was her family name Vannoni), was not a friend I made at school.  I met her at a party, and she intrigued me.  Her looks were not conventionally pretty, but striking: tall, slender, smooth olive-toned skin, aquiline features. She spoke flawless English with a slight American accent, and she invited me out to spend a day at the family’s country place, which was a converted lighthouse on one of the island cliffs.  While there I met her uncle and her brother, who both had the same accent, and a strangely formal, almost outdated, manner of speech.  They seemed to my fanciful teenage mind like strangers from another time dimension.  We all remained friends for a few years, but always there was this feeling of separation, distance – not so much a force-field around them, as a moat guarding their privacy.  On one visit to the lighthouse I learned why I never met them in their home.

“Our grandmother, the contessa, does not like us to have our friends at home.  Too much noise for her.”

Perhaps, I thought, this explains their softly modulated voices, their antiquated speech forms.

“Your grandmother?  Are your parents abroad?”  This was a pattern I was familiar with.  My own father was in Africa.

“Our father is in the States.”

Then I watched as they looked at each other, and the shutters came down over their eyes.  Nothing about their mother.  I knew if I pressed, I would not see them again.

But I decided to see their house.  What would the house of a contessa in exile be like, I wondered?  I cannot remember how I knew where Talia lived, but perhaps she had told me when explaining the lighthouse visits.

The house of a contessa in exile was a mansion, one of the old seigneurial estates on the island.  It stood at the end of a long, rather neglected driveway, ivy-swathed, turreted, like something out of a Daphne du Maurier novel – My Cousin Rachel meets Rebecca in style and atmosphere.  I almost turned back, but saw a giant bell-pull alongside the massive front door, which I couldn’t resist.  I pulled, it clanged.  And clanged, and clanged.  Then I saw the notice by the bell-pull.

Only personal friends of the contessa may use this door.  All other visitors must use the back entrance.

Decades later I would use that message in Daggers and Men’s Smiles, making the contessa a marquesa, and changing the surname.

Talia forgave me my impertinence, but I never got beyond the front step, nor could I see much over her shoulder as she said I must leave.  Someone who knew one of the servants said it was an Aladdin’s cave of wonders inside.

We kept in touch for a while, but then lost contact.  The last letter she wrote was from the States.  I have tried to find her on Facebook but, if she is there, it is under another surname.

Perhaps there is a mundane explanation for the presence of her contessa grandmother on Guernsey, like avoiding taxes.  Perhaps the shutters coming down about family were to do with divorce (much rarer in those days) rather than anything more intriguing or mysterious.  Talia’s family underwent a transformation into the Vannoni family in Daggers and Men’s Smiles, their magic and mystery intact.

Perhaps it is better this way.

Jill Downie is the author of A Passionate Pen: The Life and Times of Faith Fenton, awarded the Drummer General’s Award by Richard Bachmann of A Different Drummer Books, and Storming the Castle: The World of Dora and the Duchess, which received the Hamilton and Region Arts Council Literary Award for non-fiction. Previously, she published five historical novels and has had plays performed at various festivals, including the Toronto Fringe. She lives in Ancaster, Ontario.

Looking for a book to read this summer? A great choice whether you’re lounging in the sunshine (hopefully) or curled up in a comfy chair avoiding the rain (preferably not), is Reluctant Dead – the newly released exciting third novel in the Quin and Morgan Detective series by John Moss. Previously a writer of literary criticism, John Moss was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2006 for his work.  Since switching to mysteries he has published two other titles in the Quin and Morgan series, Still Waters and Grave Doubts, under the Dundurn imprint Castle Street Mysteries. We asked John some questions, not only about the inspiration behind his most recent work, but also about his overall thoughts on writing and the creative process. Read his answers below!

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

Reluctant Dead brings together a number of passions I’ve nurtured over the years that led up to my writing mysteries. I have trekked over much of Baffin Island as a self-contained unit, carrying all my gear on my back as I explored the Arctic landscape and wrote about my experiences. Beverley Haun, my partner in crime, pursued research on legendary Easter Island in the South Pacific and I have had the good fortune to travel there with her on several occasions. For years it struck me that there are profound similarities between these two very different parts of the world, but it was not until I turned from academic travel writing to mysteries that I was able to bring them together. Both the lands of the Inuit and the Polynesian island “at the centre of the world” are repositories of ancestral memories only dimly perceived that still inspire their peoples to remarkable pride. I tried to capture some of this fierce resilience in a context of intrigue and mystery that would allow me to revisit both places and excite my readers with the story of a people who refuse to fade away. My perspective is through the eyes of keen outsiders – police detectives who, after being to the Arctic and the South Pacific, return to Toronto to piece together their separate stories.

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

I’m attached to all my characters. If I’m not, if we don’t connect, they’re not real. And if we do connect, they are so real to me they continually surprise me. Even my most minor characters have back stories and authentic personalities. Life is too brief to spend time with them otherwise. The featured detectives in my Quin and Morgan mystery series are first and foremost engaging humans dealing with life and death, passion and fear, logic and intuition; working homicide for the Toronto Police service through the comedy and tragedy of life under duress. Miranda Quin is in her late thirties. The reader and I share in knowing her, who she is, how she thinks, what she remembers. David Morgan is in his early forties and a very different character. And yet we meet inside his life in much the same way.

Describe your ideal writing environment.

I am a compulsive writer. In another age I might have been a voluminous diarist. I write while I’m out on the land in the Arctic and on the beaches of Polynesia, but I’m happiest with my laptop poised on my knees for three or four hours every morning, writing in front of an open fire at our old stone farmhouse in Peterborough.

What was the creative process like for you?

What we call the creative process is a phrase to describe artistic endeavours when they’re going really well. Inspiration, itself, is a foundling. There must be the desperate urge, the rage, to create. As William Blake observed, without inspiration and rage struggling together in the writer’s breast, there is no true creation. This holds true for the genre writer as much as for the laurelled poet.

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

 The best advice I ever received as a writer is to go through the first draft, select all the best parts, and delete them. The best advice I’ve ever given is to write, then re-write, re-write, and re-write.

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

Image taken from Google Images

Greetings everyone, and happy belated new years wishes to you all!

We’re getting back in the swing of things here at Dundurn after a bit of an extended holiday break. It’s taken a while for us to settle into our routine, and even longer for some people in particular (read: yours truly). After finally getting comfy back at the promo lounge, I’ve spent the last two weeks diving straight into our winter and upcoming spring releases. What better way to kick of 2011 than give you all a preview of things to come?

Many of us around here are excited for Six Metres of Pavement by Farzana Doctor to arrive back from our printers. It’s already gotten some great early praise from Publishers Weekly! Cases of parents and/or guardians accidentally leaving their children locked inside over or under heated vehicles have made the news more frequently in recent years, and Farzana’s book explores the aftermath of such incident for one man. Look for Farzana’s book trailer coming soon as well!

Triumph at Kapyong by Dan Bjarnason is a detailed look at one of the probably least-known Canadian war efforts. During the Korean War, a group of rag-tag Canadian soldiers were attacked by a band of Korean soldiers. Outnumbered and outpowered, it seemed only a matter of time before the Canadians fell… but they didn’t. They heroically stood their ground throughout the night and overpowered the skilled Korean forces. With the anniversary of this battle to be celebrated this April, the book honours an important part of our military history.

And for you mystery-fanatics out there (me! me!), Jill Downie’s Daggers and Men’s Smiles will surely hit the spot. It’s a sexy, international thriller, set on the English Channel Island of Guernsey. A film company is being attacked on the set of a new production, but when vandalism escalates to murder, the pressure is on Detective Inspector Ed Moretti to solve the case.

This is just a quick look at the titles I’m most looking forward to reading, and in some cases, working on. We’ve got a season packed with exciting YA, interesting regional history, and much more. Hope you all stay tuned!

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.