FROM NURSE TO NOVEL
Jewish General worker inspired King
Anyone who has spent the night as a patient in an emergency department knows you don’t sleep much. Certainly that was Montreal writer Richard King’s experience when his family doctor detected an irregularity in his heartbeat during an exam and sent him straight to the ER at the Jewish General Hospital.
He was kept overnight — turned out he was fine — and, from his bed, had the opportunity to observe the goings-on around him.
“In spite of the obvious pressures, the vibe was positive,” King recalled. He decided to become a volunteer there. “I thought I could be helpful and it was something I would enjoy doing.”
For more than a decade, King has devoted part of every Thursday to volunteering in the emergency department of the Côte-des-neiges hospital. He has spent a lot of time observing nurses, watching them interact with patients and occasionally overhearing their questions, and he has come to admire them deeply.
“Nurses are really good about treating patients as people,” he said. “I developed a very strong affection for their abilities and the amazing work they do. Nurses are born. They have this empathetic skill that you can’t learn.”
Now, in his latest book, his seventh, King has made an ER nurse one of the main characters. In the mystery novel A Stab at Life (Baraka Books), nurse Annie Linton and Detective Gilles Bellechasse investigate a series of stabbings in a park in Montreal’s multicultural Côte-des-neiges neighbourhood. Suspects include competing drug dealers, a vigilante-ish group that wants the dealers gone from the park, a jealous husband and a mystery woman depicted in nude drawings found by police in the bedroom of one of the victims.
“I was trying to think of new mysteries,” said King, a CBC Radio books columnist who spent decades in the book business (he was co-owner of Montreal’s Paragraphe Bookstore until its sale in
2000, and stayed with the store until 2003) and whose first three books were mysteries featuring a bookseller as a main character. He is also the author of a crime novel involving an accountant and some disreputable businessmen, and of two biographies.
“I didn’t want to write a medical mystery, but I thought it would be fun if a nurse and a cop teamed up,” he said. “A nurse’s diagnostic skills are detective skills. You have to be very observant.”
King modelled Linton on Maggie Quinsey, who has worked in the ER at the Jewish General for most of the 29 years she has been a nurse, and who has become a friend. “Maggie and I are members of an exclusive club no one wants to join: people who lost their mothers when they were young. She was 10; I was seven,” said King, 75.
Their shared loss “kind of bonded us,” said Quinsey, 49.
King dedicates A Stab at Life to the memory of Quinsey’s mother, Margaret Noseworthy (1942-1981).
“I know little about medicine or science, and I would ask Maggie questions about medical procedures,” he said. “It’s enormously helpful as a writer if you have a real person as a model — and she was a wonderful model.”
Readers who know Montreal will recognize neighbourhoods, streets and landmarks in A Stab at Life. Indeed, the city is as much a character as the nurse and the detective.
French phrases and sentences punctuate the English to indicate that “the characters are speaking French to one another,” said King, a lively writer with fine storytelling skills. “I intentionally didn’t italicize the French because, in Quebec, French is not a foreign language.” So Montreal.
The book’s Kennedy Park is modelled on Kent Park, although the author has moved it slightly, and Gursky Memorial Hospital stands in for the Jewish General. The name is drawn from the fictional dynasty of Mordecai Richler’s 1989 novel Solomon Gursky Was Here, and linking the hospital name to Montreal literary history was in part a tribute to Richler.
“As a Montreal writer, I stand on the shoulders of giants — and no one is more of a giant than Mordecai Richler,” King said. He also thought of it as “a joke that Mordecai would like if he were alive.”
When police bring patients to the ER, “we deal with them all the time,” Quinsey said. “We ask them a lot of questions. They ask us a lot of questions.” She acknowledged, however, that the stories are not as exciting as those in King ’s book.
There is “the odd stabbing or shooting,” often gang-related, but it’s rare, she said. Once stabilized, the patients are sent to the Montreal General Hospital, a designated trauma centre.
King, too, has had experience with police: there was the shoplifting that was part of working in the retail business, and a dishonest roofer meant meeting with the police department’s special investigations service. At the time, the service was in Place Versailles, an east-end shopping mall — and the location of the major crimes unit in A Stab at Life.
“When I thought about the cops I’ve met, both plain clothes detectives and uniformed cops, I realized they are pretty much normal people,” King said. “For the most part, you couldn’t pick them out of a crowd — and it’s rare that a real cop does the things that are common in mysteries and thrillers.”
He intentionally combined the genre known as “cozy,” in which violence and sex occur offstage, with the police procedural. “Like the rest of us, cops have to deal with their kids and marriages and so on,” he said. “Also, I’m a little sick of gratuitous violence. The inventors of the mystery genre — people like Agatha Christie, Rex Stout and Dorothy L. Sayers — tended to keep the blood and gore off centre stage.” He’s taking a page out of their book.
When Montreal bookstores were closed because of COVID -19, Baraka Books offered free delivery to customers who ordered A Stab at Life and other titles through its website. Now that bookstores are open again, they need as many sales as they can get to help make up for lost revenues, King said.