A balance of mystery and elegy
Time period serves as backdrop for a story examining fear
In the winter of 1983, when I was nine years old, I took a hard look at the tall bookshelf outside my bedroom door and made a deliberate decision. Staring out at me was the spine of Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, the fourth in her long series of Hercule Poirot detective novels.
I decided not to read it, at least for a year. I went so far as to spin the book around and place it back on the shelf, spine in, so that the word murder couldn’t be seen.
I had just lost my friend Sharin’ Keenan. She’d disappeared from a Toronto playground on a January afternoon. Her body was found two weeks later in a downtown rooming house. It’s been 32 years since she first went missing.
I was a precocious reader and had followed the case closely in the newspaper. Standing in the hall that day, struggling to process what I’d learned, I promised myself — with a kind of naive self-awareness — a whole year off before reading any books about murder.
The kettlebell of fear I swallowed that winter dogged me through adolescence and beyond, although my memory of the time is, like all memory, a pastiche of true events, photographs and stories I was told later.
Some 30 years after that moment in the hallway, it’s that internalized fear, I think, at the heart of my first novel, The Devil You Know — a thriller set in Toronto in February 1993, the very moment of Paul Bernardo’s arrest for the murders of Kristen French and Leslie Mahaffy. It also made researching the tragedy of those crimes that much more difficult.
The germ of The Devil You Know (Simon & Schuster) came from an idea I’d once had for a short story about a missing girl. For a woman of my generation, setting the real time of the book against the culture of anxiety created by the Scarborough Rapist in Toronto made sense.
The novel itself is not explicitly about Bernardo nor those crimes, but the time period serves as a backdrop to a story that is primarily about fear. These were crimes that traumatized a generation of young women, setting up an emotionally intense and historically important hurdle for the book’s protagonist, newbie reporter Evie Jones.
My own recollection of the Bernardo case is marked by the publication ban the courts brought down to protect both the families and the case itself.
I was away at university by the time the case went to trial and remember my roommate’s friends driving down to Buffalo to buy the newspapers there. They came home grim with facts. I made a conscious decision not to reproduce elements of that
case, unless they truly served to ground the story in this period that has, so far, barely been touched by literature.
From a writerly point of view, the real trick in approaching that time was limiting Evie’s knowledge of the case, and other cases like it, to what was known in the moment.
In the slim two-week period I wrote about in The Devil You Know, little had been discovered about Karla Homolka’s involvement — as a result, she barely figures in the novel at all.
I relied on Toronto newspaper archives to guide me on a day-today level. (Fun fact: The Toronto Star updated its online archives only as I was in the final-edit stage of writing Devil. So for most of that research, I was looking at images of the actual newspaper pages as they were published, making my own experience more similar to Evie’s microfiche research than you might expect.)
Having lived through my particular childhood, I had the victims’ families in mind and at heart as I did my research: While the thriller aspect allows us to talk about fear, I knew the novel also needed to do the work of elegy.
The missing girls who appear in the background of the fictional story are all too real — all too often, media focus turns quickly from the victim to the villain. I wanted the girls to be more than villain’s property.
It was their stories I returned to most often when I was writing. Sharin’ Morningstar Keenan, Alison Parrott, Nicole Morin, Cedrika Provencher, Katherine May Wilson: Girls, as Evie says, “found in ditches or lost from bike rides home after school, girls taken to movies and never seen again, girls lost at the playground.” Girls whose true stories we will never know, because their stories were taken from them.
There’s no question, in terms of influence, that the little girl at the hall bookshelf rests at the core of The Devil You Know. While I later went on to become a voracious reader of mystery novels, particularly Poirot, it’s notable that to this day I’ve never read Ackroyd.
It may also be telling that the story I returned to most often while writing the novel was Alice Munro’s disconcerting and ambiguous Fits — a story that, with three words, makes you instantly go back over it again. A story you feel compelled to solve.