Gloria Ferris - For the Love of Mystery

WHY A MYSTERY WRITER?
( OR, I Love You, Ellery Queen)

The books I most enjoyed reading throughout my life were mysteries, thrillers, suspense, or crime stories. So, when I started writing fiction, the genre was never in question. It would be Mystery.

My first exposure to mysteries was L.M. Montgomery who wrote about spunky girl-protagonists and their secrets. Every book held some element of mystery and I read them all again and again. Later came Nancy Drew and the Hardy brothers. By the time I was eight years old, I had read all the classroom books and, since there was no library in the tiny town I grew up in, I had no choice but to turn to my older sister’s True Romance magazines.

Uh, True Romance was not appropriate for a pre-teen. I’m betting my mother didn’t know I was sneaking outside with those trashy stories to read them under the chokecherry bushes. I read newspapers too, and traumatized myself for life with articles about kidnapped and murdered children and other foul crimes. My arms weren’t long enough to hold the newspaper open, and I remember laying it on the floor and reading the frightening stories springing from those over-sized pages. I was horrified but intrigued.

Thankfully, about this time, my dear mom joined the Book of the Month Club. I read each one after she was finished, even the romances. But my favourites were the mysteries, especially Ellery Queen. I realize that many EQ novels are what we would now term psychological thrillers. So I didn’t understand the whys, but I sure ate up the who, what, and whens. At eight, I thought the tall, cerebral Ellery with the athletic build and pince-nez was – strangely attractive. There was something about him that made me hope this month’s selection was an Ellery Queen.

I adored Ellery Queen and his mysterious experiences. Every other genre was just plain boring after that. The required reading in school was no doubt intended to give me an appreciation of literature. I suffered through the classes, then went home and read a mystery. Ahhhh. That was so much better. Sure, they made us read Shakespeare which is full of blood, guts and crime but, if it weren’t for Coles Notes, I’d still be in Grade 9 trying to figure out the language in The Merchant of Venice. I now know the works were written in Klingon which many of us earthlings are not capable of understanding. No offense to Shakespeare fans, but the Bard’s plays may claim no credit for my love of mysteries.

Writing this piece made me remember the Ellery Queen novel that most impacted my burgeoning imagination. It was about a serial killer in a big city (New York) who strangled people with silk cords – pink for women, blue for men. An internet search gave me the title: Cat of Many Tails. I can’t remember who The Cat was – the doctor who delivered the victims, or his wife. Or someone else. And I certainly can’t recall why.

But, now that I’m a little-bitty older, I have to know who, and understand why. So I just logged off the Amazon site where I ordered a used paperback copy of Cat of Many Tails. Decades have passed since the book was written, and it will undoubtedly appear dated in many ways. But, I know I won’t be disappointed. I will read the book with appreciation for the craft, and with a wink to the shade of Ellery Queen who inspired in me an enduring love of mysteries and sexy detectives.


A former technical writer, Gloria’s first paranormal mystery, Cheat the Hangman, was recently nominated for the Bony Blithe Award. Corpse Flower will be published early next year and she is working on a sequel. She occasionally writes a short story just for the heck of it.

www.gloriaferris.com 
gloriaferrismysteries.blogspot.ca

Scott Mackay - In his Element

The Criminal Element

My criminal career started at the age of ten when I was arrested by an RCMP officer hitchhiking along British Columbia's Lougheed Highway playing truant for the twenty-sixth time with my delinquent friend, Terry Johnson. I'm terribly glad this RCMP officer came along. Terry and I were just getting into a white van. The man who drove the van had rope in the back and a “mother” tattoo on his arm. If that officer hadn't come along, a crime far greater than just truancy might have taken place.

We were returned to our school, and remanded into the custody of Mrs. Niemeyer, a dark catechetic principal who, considering it was our twenty-sixth time, decided she couldn’t hold off on corporal punishment any longer and retrieved from a shelf high above her filing cabinet an instrument eighteen inches long, one inch wide, made of hard rubber, and imprinted with the brand-name Imperial – an implement that has since been outlawed in all Canadian jurisdictions.

Terry and I were given six lashes on each hand.

“We don’t need the criminal element in this school,” said Mrs. Niemeyer when she was done, putting the Strap back on its high shelf.

I was ashamed of myself, humiliated, and suspected the whole school thought we were idiots – I suppose we were.

Yet at recess, the other kids treated Terry and I with the respect and awe the Pinkertons must have felt for Frank and Jesse James. We were revered for our criminal act. Our crime – truancy – played into the collective imagination like a two-man rebellion, and I came to realize there was an undeniable zest to being a member of the criminal element.

Terry and I had other exploits (I have to confess, I was a delinquent) involving anything from gasoline to laundry mats, vending machines, and cash registers. It was Terry’s family, you see. His brother would come home on a routine basis with five watches on each wrist. His sister seemed to have a new car every other week. His father had men over late at night, and they would go to the garage, and leave with strange garbage bags and shovels.

What a Family – please note the capitalization.

In being close to the Johnsons, first as a boy then as a teenager, I found the impetus which drove me to write crime fiction later in life.

So what happened later in life?

Terry would go on to serve time at New Westminster Penitentiary – something to do with a gun, a girl, and a truck full of broadloom carpeting.

I would reform myself and move to Toronto and work as a musician for twenty-five years.

Yet despite my reformed status, it seemed I was still destined to encounter the criminal element.

Working as a musician, and mostly living on the fringes of mainstream life, I often rubbed shoulders with part-time and not-so-part-time criminals. I remember one incident in particular, working late at a club in Toronto's Italian West End and getting a lift home by the club owner in a two-tone 1979 Thunderbird. Before he started his vehicle, he checked the chassis thoroughly. When I asked him what he was looking for, he serenely stated, "Bombs.”

At that West-End club, we were a family. What a Family.

So for me, it's the heightened netherworld criminals inhabit that drives me to write fiction the way I do, a world I've seen up close, one without compass, and of rebellion, where there is no moral compass, where life is lurched through from crisis to crisis, where a bullet in the head is a real possibility, and jail a fact of life.
It all makes for great drama, and writing that keeps things moving along.

Also, when I write crime fiction, I feel I’m in my element.

And I think you know what element that is.

Scott Mackay has published more than fifty stories and thirteen novels in six languages.

He's a winner of the Arthur Ellis and Okanagan Awards.  His latest mystery, The Miser of Cherry Hill, came out last year.  His new short story, Cruel Coast, appears in the July, 2012 issue of EQMM.

Roger White - For the Love of Mystery

Why I'm for Crime? 
It's Elementary.

As an eight-year-old kid, I liked the sci-fi ‘Godzilla’ movies on black and white TV with giant lizards stomping and chomping on thousands of little screaming people – heck, who wouldn’t? But rocket ships, space travel, flying saucers? Hmm, fine as far as it went.

And way back then, there was a brand of comic book, Classics Illustrated, which probably got a lot of people hooked on reading, in the full-length flesh so to speak, Bram Stoker, Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, and other horror/supernatural genre authors. There was nothing like sucking back on a cowboy canteen of grape kool-aid in the shade of a pup tent on a cicada-buzzing summer’s day, devouring those scary comics.

But that Christmas, I was given a set of Sherlock Holmes stories, abridged for young readers. I can still visualize the covers of those books – A Study in Scarlet, The Sign of Four, The Adventure of the Speckled Band, The Hound of the Baskervilles..... That was it. Crime and mystery became an abiding specific addiction from that point.

There’s a lot of very cleverly conceived and well researched historical fiction out there –though some of these constructions putting real figures into imagined situations seem awkward and a bit of a stretch. I’ve got nothing against romance. A televised version of Sebastian Faulks’ novel Birdsong was aired on most PBS affiliates recently. A seemingly never-ending fund raising auction bumped this from our local schedule, but I defy anyone not to break out into a sweat while reading the novel’s depiction of the sexual tension building between the two main characters.

No, when it came to putting an idea that just wouldn’t go away on paper, there was only one real choice of genre for me. It’s all about what you know and love, and being aware of your own limitations. Or something like that.

Roger White’s first crime novel, Tight Corner, has been shortlisted for this year’s Arthur Ellis awards. He is working on a sequel.

rogerwhite.ca

Ian Hamilton - Crime and Fortune

“Behind every great fortune lies a great crime.”


Crime books were always my favourite read and I devoured series after series – despairing only occasionally when a brilliant original idea devolved into a caricature of itself, or the protagonist became trapped in a time warp of plots that just kept repeating themselves with only the most minor variations.

Luckily, for every one of those, there were geniuses like Richard Stark with Parker, and Michael Dibdin with Aurelio Zen – and more, many more - who kept growing and expanding plot lines and characters.

My second favourite read were non-fiction books about businessmen gone bad, not necessarily in an illegal way like a Bernie Madoff or the fools at Enron, but those whose egos and greed got in the way of common sense and in the process brought down conglomerates and actually threatened entire countries and, arguably, the world’s economy. Barbarians at the Gate was a masterpiece; and I think Michael Lewis’s books The Big Short and Boomerang will be regarded the same way.

Balzac wrote in Le Pere Goriot, “Le secret des grandes fortunes sans cause apparent est un crime oublie.” It has been paraphrased in English as “Behind every great fortune lies a great crime.”

So when I sat down to write it made sense to see if I could blend those two genres, and introduce readers to economic crime - which in their own way have an impact that can be more devastating, wide-spread, and longer-lasting than any crime of passion, than any murder. My protagonist, Ava Lee, means it when she says that she and her partner, Uncle, aren’t just in the business of recovering money that has gone missing, they are in the business of helping people reclaim their lives.

Ava is an accountant, which may seem a strange occupation for a crime novel, but in real life accountants – particularly forensic accountants – are unsung heroes. They actually do find money that has gone missing; they actually do save lives. The only difference between them and Ava, is that they are normally burdened by legal process. Ava bypasses court. Her motto is "People always do the right thing for the wrong reason", and she has become adept at finding the wrong reason and turning it to her advantage. Law suits are never an option. Coercion is.

Ava and Uncle’s methods of operation are based on the reality of the money collection business in Hong Kong – and some other countries - where the protection that bankruptcy is supposed to provide isn’t accepted by the people who are owed money, and who think that responsibility for a debt extends well beyond any law. Forget threatening phone calls and dunning letters from collection agencies – they are just as likely to send a guy with a machete to your office.

In terms of the businesses and scams that Ava and Uncle get dragged into, I tried to keep them outside of the normal Ponzi scenario, and fortunately there were lots to draw on, including several that I had personal experience with in my own business life.

The shrimp scam in the Water Rat of Wanchai actually did occur as described. The on-line poker fraud in The Disciple of Las Vegas was based on an actual case, and the dollar amounts involved were equally accurate. The Wild Beasts of Wuhan detailed art fraud involving an auction house; no more than four months after I finished the manuscript, The Independent newspaper in the UK reported that exact type of fraud.

There is no shortage of material when it comes to economic crime, but there is a definite downside in terms of transforming it into something that the genre of my choice can assimilate. For example, as one agent (not mine) pointed out to me, ‘you need a fucking body in the first chapter’. Well, I have no bodies, and I have no smoking gun. Instead, I have an accountant methodically – because how else would an accountant work? – tracking down money and the people who stole it, and then in her own persistent, polite, Canadian, way trying to them persuade to return it.

Thank God the money isn’t always easy to find. Thank God the thieves are always reluctant to give it back. So although there may not be bodies in the first chapter, there is the chance they’ll show up later in a book.

So as to the question - what brought me to crime? The answer is quite simply - because its existence in the economic world is of endless interest and variety, and I felt someone had to capture it.



Ian Hamilton is the author of the Ava Lee series - four books of which will be in print by September with the release of The Red Pole of Macau. The first, The Water Rat of Wanchai, has been published in more than 20 countries and is a Quill and Quire top five novel of 2011, and short-listed for the Arthur Ellis Awards.

Phyllis Smallman - Accidental and Backwards

I came to crime writing like I did most good things in my life, accidentally and backwards.

I was a potter and in my mid-forties when I heard Peter Gzowski interviewing an editor from Harlequin. She said that Harlequin needed new writers for romances. I always had a secret wish to write but it seemed an impossible dream. Now, because it was a romance, I thought, “I could do that.” The fact that I didn’t read romances didn’t distract from my arrogant assumption that it must be easy, after all, “It’s only a love story.” In my head you only needed to come up with a plot-line, write it out a bit, and then some editor would polish it and I’d make a million dollars. I could probably write one of those things a month. So I started writing. And I started getting rejected. “Dear Sir or Madame...”

After I’d been rejected enough that I made a paper-mâché bowl out of the letters, I decided that if I was going to get turned down it might as well be for something I’d want to read. You see in my head mysteries were far harder to write than any other form of writing. Romances just needed a man and a woman and some little problem. Literary novels only required lots of angst and people who cared deeply. Plot was not required. But mysteries, ah, they needed plots and twists and dark deeds and life and death situations. Mysteries are a quest for truth and justice, a journey to right wrongs...important stuff. They also deal with social issues that affect every one of us, drugs, and mental illness and of course crime.

By the time I started writing crime fiction I’d accepted that I was never going to be published but I was well and truly hooked on writing. I knew I’d go on writing even if I never saw my books in print. My first mystery, Margarita Nights, eventually won the inaugural Ellis Award for Unhanged Arthur from the Crime Writers of Canada. This award is the reason I was published. I’m very grateful to CWC for that.

It turns out that I’m better at murder than seduction and accidentally and backwards I’ve come to the place I was meant to be.

“Smallman...is at the top of her game in this fast-paced tale.” Globe and Mail
The Sherri Travis Mystery series was one of six mysteries chosen by Good Morning America for a summer read in June 2010. In 20ll, Zoomer Magazine picked the fourth book in the series, Champagne for Buzzards, for its summer cottage reads feature. Highball Exit will be out in the fall of 2012.

www.phyllissmallman.com

Alison Bruce - Chooses Crime

Hobson’s Choice

Yes, I grew up surrounded by my mother’s library of classic mysteries. Yes, I wrote a grade five book report on Arthur Hailey’s Airport. Despite this, I did not choose to be a crime writer. Crime Writers of Canada chose for me.

It was a beautiful summer afternoon. I was getting sun-burnt while wandering around the tables and tents at Word on the Street in Toronto. I just finished editing a fantasy novel and wanted to scope out possible publishers and agents to approach. As well as the fantasy, I had a western, a paranormal suspense and the beginnings of a science fiction detective novel.

Checking the program, I found out that Robert Sawyer would be signing books and sought out his location. I shared a table with Robert at an awards lunch many years ago, and he was very supportive. We chatted briefly and I picked up information about the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Association.

Nearby, the Crime Writers of Canada table was set up next to the table for Bloody Words. The people at both tables were friendly and I walked away with two more brochures. Not long after that, I ran out of time. I had to get back to Guelph and pick up my kids who were with their father. It was probably a day or two later that I really looked at the material I had picked up.

Bloody Words was out. I just couldn’t afford the money and with two young children to take care of, I couldn’t see myself taking off the weekend. Taking off the afternoon to go to Word on the Street was hard enough.

The Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Association was in my budget, but you had to be published to join. All my published works were nonfiction, marketing or educational at that point (plus two poems in a literary anthology).

Crime Writers of Canada had associate memberships. It also had a newly introduced contest for unpublished novels. At the time, I thought you had to be a member to enter the Arthur Ellis competition, so I joined. I set aside my fantasy for a later date and finished my near-future detective story in time to enter that year. I became a crime writer.

My story made the long list that year. A few years and several edits later, it was published by Imajin Books as Deadly Legacy.


Copywriter and editor since 1992, Alison Bruce has also been a comic book store manager, small press publisher and web designer. She currently manages publications for Crime Writers Canada and is the author of Deadly Legacy and Under A Texas Star.

www.alisonbruce.ca
alisonebruce.blogspot.ca
@alisonebruce

Kay Stewart's List of 10

Ten Reasons I Write Mysteries

1. I grew up reading Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys, and Zane Grey, books in which the good girls and guys always figure out the answer and triumph over the villain. If I’d grown up with Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter, my writing could well have taken a different path.

2. Mysteries were my leisure reading during a working life of teaching mainstream literature; so writing mysteries feels like fun (most of the time!), whereas writing mainstream fiction would likely feel like – work.

3. I like puzzles—jigsaw puzzles, crossword puzzles, puzzle plots (Sudoku eludes me)—and so I enjoy piecing together a complex plot.

4. Solving imaginary crimes is a good way to avoid housework.

5. I’m an introvert who gave up sports for good grades, and so I like having an alter ego, RCMP Constable Danutia Dranchuk, who is out in the world taking physical risks.

6. I grew up in an authoritarian, racist, sexist culture in Texas where right and wrong were often assumed to be absolutes. Writing mysteries gives me a chance to explore the grey areas in our attitudes and our behaviour.

7. My family was working class, which may account for my preference for mysteries over romance. Life problems seemed too real to be solved by a tall, dark, handsome man, however rich.

8. I’m interested in the interplay between individual psychology and social circumstances that may result in criminal behaviour: the victim of life-long verbal abuse, for example, who erupts in murderous rage.

9. I love doing the research! Exploring new settings, having a reason to talk to strangers (see introvert, above), learning obscure facts that may or may not find a place in the finished manuscript (do you know what happens to rental cars after six months?).

10. Writing mysteries forces me to confront some of my own fears of violence, and to affirm that in a world of senseless wars, planetary destruction, and social ills of every description, there is also goodness and occasionally, justice.

Kay Stewart was co-chair of Bloody Words 2011 and is a past president of Crime Writers of Canada. Sitting Lady Sutra (TouchWood, March 2011) is the second in the Danutia Dranchuk series of mysteries. The first, A Deadly Little List, was co-written by Kay and her husband Chris Bullock, with whom she is working on the third novel. She lives in Victoria, BC.

www.kaystewart.ca

Anthony Bidulka - Checher la femme

The Women Who Drove Me to Crime

Like many others who live a life devoted to crime, I have a secret.

Here it is: I never started out to be a crime writer. And no, I’m not referring to when I was a teacher, shoe salesman, bull cook, or a Chartered Accountant. I’m talking about when I first started out as a full time writer. You see, my very first manuscript was not a mystery. It was not based in Saskatoon. It did not feature a gay hero. It contained no travel. There was little in the way of humour. My first manuscript was none of the things that would later become hallmarks of my career—at least to date—as a writer.

On that first day—post-accountant—when I sat down at my computer and pondered what to write, I made a decision. I would write a great thriller. That decision resulted in my very first manuscript, with the title “On the Eighth Day”. It was also to become my first bottom shelf liner.

“On the Eighth Day” was complete and making the rounds of agents and publishers. What to do? Keep writing. But this time, I thought to myself, write for the love of it, write with joy and exuberance, write without care for attracting a publishing contract. And so, I turned to mystery.

For that I thank six women. Jill. Sabrina. Kelly. Kris. Tiffany. And Julie. Recognize them? No? They were Charlie’s Angels. The original TV version. I’m not exactly sure why I selected that particular show for this great experiment, but I did. When the show was on the air—at the time I was, oh, probably fifteen or so—I’d just been gifted with my very own hand-me-down tape recorder (recognize that?). I decided to tape each week’s episode. Then, in the privacy of my room, I would type out (yes, on a typewriter) the entire episode from opening to closing credits. Not only the dialogue, mind you, but the background scenery, the wardrobe, the look on the bad guys’ faces, the hairstyles as well. I’d take dramatic license with things like how things might smell, internal dialogue, and character motivation. And of course, I’d pay special attention to the crime. I loved the crime, and the solving of it. I have to give credit for this to one more woman: Agatha. Christie of course. By that point I’d read her for years. Who can forget The Man in the Brown Suit? And Then There Were None? Marvelous stuff.

From there I continued to love crime in all its formats, TV, Movie, and especially books. The clash of protagonist with antagonist. The satisfying resolutions. There was, and still is, something quite gratifying about it. And universal. As I grew older, and perhaps a bit more sophisticated in my analysis of such things, I also came to appreciate the genre for its ability and versatility as a vehicle to tell good stories in so many different ways, with so many different slants and angles and bents.

A crime story can be funny, it can be character-driven, it can be educational, it can make you cry, it can even be a thriller. I came to realize, thankfully very early in my career, that with crime, I could have it all. And so was born Russell Quant, the world’s first and only, world-travelling, wine-swilling, wise-cracking, gay, Canadian prairie private eye being written about today, anywhere by anyone. I dare you to dispute it. And in April 2012, with the release of Dos Equis: A Russell Quant Mystery, I am now the proud author of eight crime novels.


Anthony Bidulka’s mystery series tells the story of a world-travelling, wine-swilling, wise-cracking, gay, Canadian PI living a big life in a small city. Only parts are autobiographical. The Russell Quant series is a multi-award nominee including for the CWC Arthur Ellis Award, and was awarded the Lambda Literary Award for Best Men’s Mystery.

Website: http://www.anthonybidulka.com/home.php
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=613211718
Twitter @abidulka: https://twitter.com/#!/abidulka
YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/user/abidulka?feature=mhee

Catherine Astolfo - Mesmerized by Evil

What Inspired Me to Write Mysteries 

Most people who’ve met me can’t believe that I write about sordid crime, involving puppy mills and animal torture, murders by knife, gun and fire, neglect and abuse of children. They often think there must be some deep dark secret, some childhood trauma of my own, that I am hiding. Something so horrible awful that I can only allow it into daylight through my writing. Perhaps I am a psychopath who’s found a way to do my evil deeds without actually harming anyone, akin to a Dexter but without the knives.

I am here to confess what really did happen.

The event occurred in the fall of 1969 and, almost immediately, I went scurrying off into the dark and evil world of crime/mystery writing.

I became an elementary school teacher.

Not that every classroom was a breeding ground of future criminals. But the schools in which I taught and later managed definitely were hives of humanity, with all its dark and light, so I did find plenty to foster my fascination with evil. I can’t help it – I was and still am absolutely mesmerized by the evil that human beings inflict on one another, our fellow Earthlings, and the planet itself.

What causes that lack of empathy? Those empty, manipulative eyes? Deceptively charming smiles? Are truly evil people born that way or created by life experiences?

Until I retired, my “hobby” resulted in short stories, character sketches, and scribbles about life in general and bad people specifically. Book One, The Bridgeman, was based on a character sketch about a very ordinary person who hid a despicable secret. As an aside my heroine, the elementary school principal, Emily Taylor, also hid a dark past. Victim continued in somewhat the same vein, except the evil was born of greed and was partly perpetrated on the environment. Legacy is, at its heart, about many of the children who often caused me heartache as a teacher. Why does one child from terrible circumstances rise about it all, while the other becomes evil beyond all imagination? In Seventh Fire, I return to the scene of Emily’s secret.

My books are somewhat dark and tend to deal with very grim circumstances in life. (Similar to Minette Walters, I’d like to think.) Although that sounds perhaps very pessimistic and depressing, I am at heart an optimist. Thus writing mysteries is very satisfying because, in the end of my novels at least, good always triumphs. The bad guys are always caught and punished.

Catherine Astolfo is the author of The Emily Taylor Mysteries, published by Imajin Books. Her novels have been optioned for film by Sisbro & Co. Inc. Catherine is a Past President of Crime Writers of Canada and a member of Sisters in Crime Toronto.

www.catherineastolfo.com

Melodie Campbell Puzzles it Out

Why a Mystery Writer? 
It’s the Maze. 

A horrible crime occurs. Murder most foul. The police are stumped, and it looks like the criminal will get away with it. Then along comes an amateur detective who follows a set of clues, and with supreme logic, solves the mystery. Justice is served.

I want to say I write mysteries and suspense because of a deep-seated need to see justice done in the world. I really want to say that. But it’s not true.

I love to read and write mysteries because they are clever. They force me to use my brain. Who is the killer? Can I come to the same conclusion as the detective, at the same time, following the same trail of clues?

Traditional mystery novels are like a chess game. In writing the novel A Purse to Die For, I discovered that mysteries must be plotted carefully, strategically. It is a convention of mystery writing that the reader receives the information at the same time as the detective. Anything else is considered cheating. Clues must lead to the solving of the crime. The reader must be able to go back and see the trail, once he/she has finished reading the ending. But the ending can’t be too obvious – that’s no fun. So it’s the clever mix of laying several trails like those of a maze that intrigues me as both a writer and reader. The trick: only one leads to the fateful conclusion.

A good mystery with a bang-up ending – logical, but original – gives me a kick like no other book. I marvel at the cleverness of the author. In short mystery fiction, I devour that twist at the end. In my own short fiction, you can count on a twist ending.

I love the wonderful delight that comes from stumping the reader…in making them say “Ah! Didn’t see that coming.” I’ve given them a challenge, and hopefully at the end, a smile. There is no greater high.


Melodie Campbell is the author of 40 short stories and three novels, including A Purse to Die For, coming in June. She has won 6 awards for short fiction, and is a finalist for both the Derringer and the Arthur Ellis awards this year.

www.melodiecampbell.com
funnygirlmelodie.blogspot.ca

Hilary MacLeod - Wrong Turn, Right Place

It was a dark and stormy night...

...It really was – twenty years ago on Prince Edward Island. I was driving in the pitch black with the rain slicing sideways, escaping from a Bed and Breakfast, because the landlord had been drinking all day – and had taken a fancy to me. I hate to drive at night and in the rain. I was nervous. When I get nervous, I have to go to the bathroom. There wasn’t one, of course.

But there was a large, empty Tim Horton’s cup on the passenger seat.

I pulled off the road and poised over the cup. A friendly islander swung in ahead of me and got out of his car to see if he could help. I had only one hand to gesture that I was fine. The other hand was clutching the dashboard keeping me perched over the coffee cup, which was now full.

Fortunately, my roadside rescuer left. Unfortunately, I could have used his help. I thought I was going west to Charlottetown, but was headed east to Tignish.

Then I saw it by the side of the road. For sale -- a tiny one-and-a-half storey cedar shingle house. Abandoned. Windows nailed on. Porch falling off. Perfect. The house by the sea I had dreamed of, where I would write a novel, a historical romance I had shoved in a drawer somewhere years before. I bought the house and spent twenty summers at Sea View, on the beautiful North Shore, doing everything but writing. I stripped wallpaper, painted, drywalled, mowed the lawn. A few years later, I bought a second house on PEI. Ten rooms. More stripping, painting and mowing. Still no novel.

One summer I wrote a series of broadcast columns for CBC PEI called “Letters from Sea View” and in 2000 another series – this time for the CBC National afternoon show Richardson’s Roundup. It was my millennium project, a journal of a sabbatical year spent on PEI. Still no novel, but I was getting to know my subject. In the long winter nights, I read M.C. Beaton’s Hamish MacBeth mystery series. He’s a cop in the Scottish highlands in a village full of eccentric characters. I thought PEI would be a perfect setting for a similar light mystery series. Inspired, I churned out 35 pages.

I bought a third house – in Ontario. With two houses in PEI, I thought I should have one where I lived. Houses: 3 Novel: Zip.

Seven years later, I still had those 35 pages. Approaching a milestone birthday, I took another sabbatical to finally write a book. I discovered that I hadn’t wasted twenty writing years. Sea View, the land, the ocean, the character of the people, their way of living and speaking had seeped into me, and began to pour out. I had found what I was meant to write about, and it wasn’t the historical. It was a murder mystery, based on those 35 pages inspired by Beaton.

My fictional The Shores is an alternate Sea View, a maritime Brigadoon, where murder mixes with a gentler way of life. The characters jumped onto the pages, as if they’d been waiting for me to get started. Gus, the octogenarian whose quilts mirror the mystery. Hy McAllister, from away, clumsy and curious who frequently tumbles head first into the investigation – and sometimes onto the corpse.

There’s April Dewey whose white cake is so good it has killed a man; Rose Rose the minister’s wife who almost didn’t marry him because of his last name – and her first; Jared MacPherson, the local scumbag; and Jane Jamieson, the Mountie who doesn’t have a heart – or does she?

With tongue in cheek and an eye to the macabre, I plotted my first book, Revenge of the Lobster Lover, mixing humour and mystery, social satire and death, killing and smiling simultaneously. Mind Over Mussels, the second in the series, features the same village characters, along with fresh murderers and victims, all from away, of course. All is Clam, book three, takes place at Christmas, and the villagers have lit up The Shores so it can be seen from space. Like a diamond, sparkling in the East.

This little gem has become my writing place and the place I write about. I still have that historical on hold. I’ll pick it up one day, but not until I reach the end of the road that led me to murder that dark and stormy night.

Hilary MacLeod is author of The Shores mysteries set on Prince Edward Island. Eccentric characters, social satire and black humour characterize  Revenge of the Lobster Lover, which won a CBC Bookie in 2011 and Mind Over Mussels, published 2011.  All is Clam, a Christmas mystery, comes out this year.

www.hilarymacleod.ca
www.facebook.com/hilaryjmacleod.author

May is National Crime Writing Month

 Inquiring minds want to know...
What makes an author turn to crime?

We asked our author members to tell us why they decided to write mysteries and suspense, as opposed to fantasy or science fiction or romance or historical fiction. Of course, one can (and our members do) write mystery-suspense novels that are also fantasy, science fiction, romance and/or historical. But crime comes first.

Check back often to find out the answers. We're packing as many authors as we can into the 31 days of May.

This blog isn't the only place National Crime Writing Month is being celebrated...

"Get ready crime lovers, Canada Writes has partnered with the Crime Writers of Canada to present a whole 31 days of mystery, murder and mayhem. We’ve got lots in store for the crime writer (and reader) in you."

Also check CWC's Author Events for more activities.