Tom chatted about his first adult mystery novel, Nightshade, the debut of his detective, Sam Montcalm, and how his own experiences have inspired his writing.

Check out part one and part two of Tom’s interview at the Dundurn website.

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.

Tell us about your book.
The Boy in the Picture, my third book, is the one with which I have the strongest personal connection. It tells the story of young Edward Mallandaine, the boy in the iconic photo of the driving of the Last Spike in the Canadian Pacific Railway. That momentous occasion back in 1885 (125 years ago this year) resonates with me because I knew Edward – when I was a small boy and he was an old man! The book recounts his leaving home to volunteer for the North-West Rebellion, only to find the uprising quelled and Louis Riel captured before Edward can reach the prairies. His real adventure begins when he catches on as a dispatch rider carrying mail and supplies by horseback across the unfinished gap of the railway in British Columbia’s Monashee mountains. That puts him in the right time and place to be part of the driving of the Last Spike.

Did you have a specific readership in mind when you wrote your book?
I see teen-agers, anywhere from 12-year-olds to mid-teens or later, as the primary readers for this book. I have meshed story telling with the historical record and I hope I have treated Edward’s adventures with the same enthusiasm that young people bring to their view of the world. Of course, I won’t mind railway fans of all ages reading The Boy in the Picture!

How did you research your book?
My research for the book came in two phases: My personal recollections of the stories Edward Mallandaine told me when he was an old man, and archival research into papers and documents about Edward and his family. I found these primarily in the Royal British Columbia Archives in Victoria, the Glenbow Museum in Calgary, and Library and Archives Canada in Ottawa. I also dug up a lot of contemporary newspaper accounts, some of them written by Edward.

What’s the best advice you’ve ever received as a writer?
The best advice I’ve ever received as a writer comes from Guy Vanderhaeghe, the stellar Canadian novelist of western themes: “Write the book you want to write and hope someone will want to read it.” What he means, I think, is that you have to believe in your own work if you expect anyone else to believe in it.

What are you reading right now?
Right now, I am reading an anthology of Agatha Christie short stories, Masterpieces of Mystery and the Unknown, a Franklin D. Roosevelt biography by H.W. Brandes, Traitor to His Class and Marci McDonald’s new book on the Christian right in Canada, The Armageddon Factor.

Ray Argyle has written for publications such as The Beaver and the National Post and is the author of several books, including Turning Points: The Campaigns That Changed Canada and Scott Joplin and the Age of Ragtime. He lives in Toronto.

I can think of nothing better than to enjoy the summer by the side of a remote lake, as Gerard Kenney is fortunate to do. Here he tells about his recent book, Lake of the Old Uncles, and his life-long trip to that cabin.

Tell us about your book.
My book is about a one-kilometre trip that began over three-quarters of a century ago when I was born in my grandfather’s country inn in French-speaking rural Quebec. The trip will end one day in the village cemetery, one kilometre away from the inn. A short trip, but there were more than a few detours along the way and I fill in with details.

How did you come up with the idea for this work?
I got to thinking that there had been many wonderful and interesting things that happened to me in life and that it would be fun just to write a story around them. And besides, it would be good for my two daughters and one grand daughter to learn a more about their backgrounds, things that only I could tell them.

How did you come up with the title?
In the early ‘70s, I was lucky to acquire, for a ridiculous sum, a good-sized piece of forested land with a small lake in the middle of it. This lake has become a central part of my life and my book is built around it. Its name is Lac des Vieux Mon-Oncles in French, which translates as Lake of the Old Uncles in English.

What was the creative process like for you?
The creative process was, and has always been a great pleasure for me. Twice in my writing career I have written commissioned articles, but I quickly found out that if I wrote something someone else wanted me to write, there was no passion, there was no love in it. It was not fun. So I’ll keep on writing for myself, and then seeing if I can interest someone to publish it. My successful writing has always been on spec as far as publishing goes.

Describe your ideal writing environment.
There are two parts to my preferred writing environment. The thinking, the creation of ideas, the mulling over of things is best done in the log cabin that I built on Lake of the Old Uncles. I have never brought a computer to the cabin. It would seem like a contradiction of philosophies to do so. I handwrite my notes. The next step of writing is done in my quiet office at home in the City of Ottawa inputting what I have done at the cabin into the computer, where I hammer out the X number of re-writes that eventually end up becoming the final product.

What was your first publication?
My first publication was a magazine article I wrote in 1970, Arctic Shangri-la, after working in the Inuit village of Port Burwell in Arctic Quebec, a village that no longer exists. The Arctic so impressed me that that I just felt I had to write up my experience. I was thrilled when it was accepted. It was the very first submission of my writing career.

What inspired you to write your first book?
I was inspired to write my first book, Arctic Smoke & Mirrors, in 1994 because of the misunderstanding that existed in Canada at the time about the Inuit relocations. I wanted to set the record straight.

Who did you read as a young adult?
Ernest Thompson Seton, Jack London, Henry David Thoreau. One has to put a lot of time and repeated readings to get the most out of Walden. I almost always travel with a copy of Walden because I know I can open it up at any time, at any page, and gain some new insight into passages I have read before.

What are you reading right now?
A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle. One also has to put a lot of effort into reading Tolle, although he is a completely different type of writer than Thoreau was. I have learned a lot from both authors.

What is your next project?
I am tossing around the idea of gathering together material that I have written in the past but have never published, along with articles that I have published in the past, and seeing if I can make a book out of it all.