MONTREAL, CRIME MECCA
Crime fiction authors discuss the role of place
Is it just chance, or is it something about us? Some perfect storm of overlapping conditions — politics, language, weather, poutine, traffic, a maddeningly mediocre hockey team?
Whatever it is, it’s been increasingly evident over the last couple of decades that Montreal and environs are producing a disproportionate share of crime fiction, even if the styles on display vary to a degree where it’s impossible to identify a Montreal School.
Talking to five genre practitioners from the city and nearby on the role of place in their work, some common themes emerge — and maybe some surprising differences, too.
KATHY REICHS
Chicago-born Reichs, who has been commuting between North Carolina and Montreal since the 1990s, might just beth e biggest selling Montreal-connected writer ever. Her novels starring forensic anthropologist a fiercely loyal reader ship, and have been translated into seemingly every living language. She parlayed their success into a producer’s role on the hit TV series Bones, inspired by the novels. And as she tells it, it all might never have happened had she not found herself living here for career reasons that turned out to have direct bearing on her writing.
“I actually started a manuscript of what became (debut novel) Déjà Dead before I ever went to Montreal ,” Reich s recalled by phone from her winter home in Charlotte, N.C., last week. “It didn’t yet have that title. I was writing in third person, I did about 200 pages, but it was boring. So I put it in the drawer, as writers say.
“Then I started working in Montreal. (Reichs shares her fictional heroine’s profession, and came to the city in 1988 to work as a consultant for Quebec’s Laboratoire de sciences ju di ci ai reset demé de cine légale.) That completely changed my perspective. I switched to first person and I brought Montreal to the very forefront, almost as a character in the story. And that’s what was published.”
For Reichs, some of the appeal of her( half) adopted home was down to sheer newness.
“You know how when you live in your hometown, you don’t go and visit things until you have out-oftown visitors? It was a bit like that. I wanted to see everything. I covered so much of the city, and had I grown up there I might not have done that.”
Montreal as a setting, it turned out, had its pragmatic advantages.
“I knew I wanted to shop the book to a U.S. publisher, because it’s just a bigger market,” she said. “I chose Montreal, where I had spent several years by that point, because I thought it was exotic enough that it would have that appeal — the multicultural aspect, the overriding Frenchness — but also be close enough to be comfortable for American readers .”
Safe to say it worked, and not just for Americans. And lest we forget, that was still something quite rare when Déjà Dead came out in 1997.
“I remember speaking to a Canadian author at the time who had written a thriller, and the publisher said they liked it but asked that it be moved out of Canada and into upstate New York. I like to think I helped change that.”
Two Nights (Simon & Schuster, 336 pages, $17.99 paperback) is a standalone thriller featuring new character Sunday Night. A new Temperance Brennan novel is due in August.
TREVOR FERGUSON
“Setting is critical ,” said the Montreal-raised Hudson resident better known to international readers as John Farrow. Ferguson adopted the crime nom-de-plume in an audacious and successful mid-career switch from lauded but underselling literary novelist to lauded and big-selling crime novelist.
“In genre fiction, there’s no illusion that this is perfectly real. The reader knows that from the beginning. So for me, the setting helps build the authenticity of the piece.
“Another thing I’ve only learned over time is that readers feel a personal connection when they know the place, but also when they don’t know the place, as long as it feels real. (The 1999 Farrow debut) City of Ice was a bestseller in South Africa. Probably just because of the title. Ice is so foreign to their own landscape, but somehow they related.”
For Ferguson, another advantage to an authentic, meticulously mapped setting is the narrative leg-up it provides.
“Doing a crime novel set in Montreal at that time (1999, when City of Ice introduced long-running protagonist Det. Émile CinqMars), it was perfectly natural to incorporate the Hells Angels. The (biker war) bombs were going off, an 11-year-old girl was murdered. I thought, ‘I cannot ignore what’s going on, so what’s my way into this?’ Yes, it dovetailed with my need to move into crime, but there was no better way as a writer to approach what was going on.”
Has he ever run into his own industry roadblocks regarding Quebec as a salable setting?
“Not any time recently,” he said. “I really think Kathy (Reichs) helped open that door. Now, with the success the Scandinavians have had, and that people like Kathy and Louise (Penny) have had, a part of (selling) the genre is, ‘Where are you going to set it?’ and the more exotic and different the place, the better.”
Perish the Day by John Farrow (Minotaur, 302 pages, $36.99)
“Without Quebec, without the townships, there would be no books. I’m convinced of it.”
Fealty to place doesn’t come more fervent than what Torontoborn Penny expresses for the area where the former broadcaster and author of the phenomenally successful Armand Gamache novels (13 and counting, from 2005’s Still Life through last year’s Glass Houses) says she found her “true home” — the Eastern Townships in and around Knowlton, inspiration for her lovingly drawn Three Pines.
Penny made up for a comparatively late writing start with tenacity and steadfastness.
“When I was trying to find a publisher, and everyone was turning me down, one of the constant reasons given was that no one would be interested in a mystery set in Canada,” she said by email from a book tour in Europe. “Some asked if I could relocate it. But instead of doing that, I decided to make sure there was absolutely no doubt. These novels were not just set in Canada, but Quebec. And not just Quebec, but the Eastern Townships. The characters are clearly sons and daughters of Quebec. The history, the culture, the cuisine is Quebec.”
While stressing that “novels can be set anywhere and be equally compelling, as long as the writer feels strongly about the place,” Penny doubles back to her own specific thematic needs.
The key, she maintains, is the tension between arcadia and corruption.
“I could not have written these books set in downtown Montreal,” she said, emphasizing her desire to depict “the shattering effects of murder on a small, apparently close-knit community. And then for (Chief Inspector) Gamache to have to insert himself. To not bully, or threaten, but to quietly expose all that is hidden.”
Glass Houses (Minotaur, 400 pages, $33.99)
These novels were not just set in Canada, but Quebec. And not just Quebec, but the Eastern Townships.
SHEILA KINDELLAN-SHEEHAN
“We’re a feisty people. The politics and the weather have made us that way.”
Former high school English teacher, one-time competitive tennis player and author of three increasingly popular novels starring Italian-Canadian police detective Toni Damiano, Kindellan-Sheehan is trying to summarize the city she has come to love with an intensity she says she has a hard time expressing.
She also points out a great irony of Montreal’s standing as a crimefiction locus: it’s not an especially crime-ridden place.
“There are only roughly 27 murders a year here, and of those only one is a Murder One — that is, one that takes real solving,” said the Pointe-Claire resident.
In the Shadows makes central use of Café Cléopatra, the Lower Main landmark that represents an unlikely holdover from a largely lost era. It’s a choice typical of Kindellan-Sheehan’s deep-dive approach to local landmarks and lore: her last novel, Where Bodies Fall, made a plot device of the abandoned Wellington Tunnel.
“Readers love to be able to say, ‘I know this place,’ so you have to make sure you’re getting places right,” she said, referring to her thorough and hands-on research. She went into that tunnel, she climbed the Cléopatra staircase, she has visited the city morgue and established contacts with the police, the better to chart that institution’s labyrinthine politics and corruption — a network the charismatic Damiano negotiates gingerly.
At least one chunk of Kindellan-Sheehan’s readership is unlikely to say, “We know that place.” Outside of Canada, her biggest pocket of support is in Russia, where her last two novels have been published in translation.
“Apparently we’re doing well there,” she said. “I like to think it shows an affinity. And you know, Russians love to read.”
In the Shadows (Véhicule Press, 260 pages, $19.95)
MICHAEL BLAIR
“Peter Robinson once told me, ‘Never let reality interfere too much with your fiction.’ ”
Blair has been putting the advice of a crime-fiction master into practice through a peripatetic life and varied career, now seven books to the good. Which is not to say he writes fantasy, only that his realism is of the relaxed variety.
“I’ve always thought you don’t have to have lived in a place in order to write about it ,” theMontreal native said .“I wrote about Vancouver just because I really love the city. I used to go to the West Coast to ski, and I fell in love with Granville Island. I remember thinking, ‘I’ll probably never be able to afford to live in one of these floating homes, so I’ll just do it vicariously.’ ”
From novel as wish fulfilment, Blair progressed to a different form of inspiration for last year’s The Evil That Men Do. The pageturner found its real-life spur in the mind-boggling malfeasances of Earl Jones, the N.D.G. raised Ponzi schemer who bilked investors for 20-plus years before being caught in 2009. “It certainly fell into my area of interest, namely crime,” Blair recalled of his first thoughts when the Jones story broke.
“I read every word that (Montreal Gazette reporter) Anne Sutherland wrote about him. She did a great job of characterizing him. He was a creepy character in many ways, somewhere on that line between sociopath and psychopath. He’s not in the book by name because … well, I’m a cautious writer, I suppose. I don’t like to include references to real people. I don’t want them to get mad at me.”
As for why this native Montrealer waited until several books into his career to write a novel set in his home city, he said it’s partly down to an insecurity around hometown depiction that he’s only now getting over.
“As an essentially unilingual anglo, I’ve always felt I don’t really have the right to write about certain aspects of the city. The language situation, for example.”
A considerable complication in life and work hit Blair last year: he suffered a stroke, and though much improved, he is still staying in an assisted facility for therapy purposes.
Not always the most conducive setting for writing (“It can get a little noisy here”), it’s nonetheless providing plenty of time to ponder future work, something he’s eager to get back to — though, in the sacred literary tradition, he’d rather not say exactly what he’s got in mind.
The Evil That Men Do (Linda Leith Publishing, 371 pages, $18.95)