Fact, fiction, history combine
Award-winning author is now writing under pen name. Pat St. Germain explains.
A Canadian author writing under a pseudonym for the first — but almost certainly not last — time, M.J. Cates blends fact and fiction in a wide-ranging story that defies categorization. Set in the early 1900s, it has a timeless quality, exploring ideas of reality vs. perception, friendship and fidelity, self-delusion and self-discovery, all tied together with a thread of star-crossed romance.
Inspired by the life of psychoanalyst Dr. Phyllis Greenacre, who started her career in 1916 as a psychiatric resident at Baltimore’s Phipps Clinic, the novel follows a similarly intrepid young woman, Dr. Imogen Lang, as she travels a near-parallel career path.
Haunted both by childhood traumas and the reported death of her best friend in college — a young man named Quentin Goodchild, who joined Canadian army after she rejected his romantic overtures — Imogen is frustrated in her career and in her love life, until a series of unfortunate events prove to have a silver lining.
The novel’s backdrop cuts a swath, from genteel academia to First World War battlefields, from a primitive New Jersey asylum where doctors use extreme surgical procedures — pulling teeth and removing other “infected” organs to eradicate mental illness — to the progressive Phipps Clinic and finally to New York City, where Imogen trains for private practice.
Along the way, she has to find the strength to defy societal expectations, challenge authority in a male-dominated world and confront some hard truths in her personal life. Like Imogen, several secondary characters are loosely based on real people. Cates also incorporates a popular novelist who writes under a pseudonym and who may or may not be based on fact.
All we know about Cates is that he or she is an award-winning writer of “many” novels, who studied psychology and literature at the University of Toronto and has lived in Ottawa, North London and South Kensington.
In an email exchange, Cates, who now lives in Canada, said writing under a pseudonym has its pros and cons. There’s a sense of creative freedom — particularly since fans have not been forgiving in the past when he or she delivered a book that thwarted their expectations. But publishers don’t relish the task of promoting an anonymous writer. And keeping a secret identity poses practical difficulties. One has to avoid leaving crumbs via technologies like caller ID and email IP addresses, and then resist the temptation to spill the beans to friends and fans.
“You get excited about your story and you can’t tell anyone about it!” Cates writes. “You have to forsake the pleasure of having your name attached to a work you hope readers will find exciting, touching, memorable. All of which is to say I don’t think anyone would embark on such a venture to do only one book.” There’s no mystery about who wrote a pair of new whodunits in bookstores this month.
While award-winning author Thomas King (An Inconvenient Indian, The Back of the Turtle) adopted a pseudonym, Hartley Goodweather, when he introduced Cherokee cop Thumps DreadfulWater back in 2002, he followed up under his real name with The Red Power Murders in 2006 and Cold Skies in 2018.
His latest, A Matter of Malice (HarperCollins Canada), opens a few months after DreadfulWater solved the Cold Skies case, when a producer for a television reality show, Malice Aforethought, comes to Chinook to cover an old case and ends up in the morgue herself.
Meanwhile, prolific author Kelley Armstrong, who has some three dozen fantasy, young adult and crime novels under her belt — and who adopted the pseudonym Katey Wolfe for standalone romance novel Undone — returns to her Rockton crime series with Watcher in the Woods (Doubleday Canada).
This time out, detective Casey Duncan has to deal with a U.S. marshal who arrives in the secretive Yukon hamlet to fetch one of its residents, only to end up catching a fatal bullet.