In for the ill
It's a murderous business, but Canada's crime wruters are shooting their way to the top of the lucrative global mystery market.
We make so much of serious literary fiction in this country, offering lavish prizes for novels that add gravitas to Canada’s presence in world literature, that it’s something of a surprise to learn that we’ve also managed to accumulate a disproportionately large number of world champions in the competitive genre of crime and mystery fiction.
“It’s worth noting there are as many as 20 writers of crime and mystery novels in Canada who support themselves entirely on revenue from their writing,” says Toronto-based entertainment superagent Michael Levine.
His recent decision to represent crime writers — including brothers David and Robert Rotenberg, whose work has been optioned for movies and TV in the U.S. — “is a profound change in direction for me,” he adds.
A closet fan of mystery literature and high-profile agent for many of CanLit’s giants, Levine concedes “crime is where the market’s going and it’s growing very quickly. That’s good for Canadian crime writers.”
The crime and mystery readings at the annual International Festival of Authors at Toronto’s Harbourfront Centre are by far the prestigious literary festival’s most popular and well attended component, “always sold out in advance,” Levine points out.
Publishing insiders and crime novelists themselves are at a loss to explain the sudden appeal in the last decade of Canadian crime stories, whodunits and thrillers, in a market that was earlier dominated usually dominated by British, American, and more recently, Scandinavian novelists.
David Rotenberg believes Canadians have had time to avoid mistakes other crime and mystery writers have made.
“The Brits and Scandinavians are less interested in social context than we are,” Rotenberg says. “The whodunit aspect interests me less than the social and historical forces at work in a mystery story. Hamlet would be just another whodunit if you stripped it of context and it would have nothing important to say.”
The Stieg Larsson effect, which has all but emptied the pool of formerly regionally successful crime writers in Sweden, Denmark and Norway, seems to have created a tolerance, if not an appetite, in Britain and the U.S. for more unusual procedurals, more remote locales and more enigmatic principal characters, some suggest. Others claim Canadian crime writers have simply figured out the rather arcane rules of the mystery game and learned to adapt to the demands of the international crime literature marketplace.
There’s no denying Canadian mystery writers are a formidable bunch whose names are familiar in parts of the world where many CanLit icons are barely known: Linwood Barclay, Louise Penny, Giles Blunt, Peter Robinson, Andrew Pyper, Maureen Jennings, Alan Bradley, William Deverell, the Rotenbergs, D.J. (Dorothy) McIntosh, Tim Wynne-Jones, Gail Bowen, Joy Fielding, Mike Knowles, Howard Shrier, James W. Nichol, C.B. Forrest, among others.
“It’s a long list now and the world is paying attention because this is writing of the highest standard,” says Penny, a consistent bestseller and something of a heroine among Canadian crime writers for having set her popular series featuring Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Sûreté du Québec in the Eastern Townships, where she lives. When Penny abandoned her 18year career as a host and journalist on CBC Radio to write full time, she says, “It was excruciatingly difficult to find an agent or a publisher in Canada or elsewhere interested in a procedural with a Canadian setting.” Less than a decade later, with eight novels — all critical successes and best-sellers — under her belt, “it’s almost a given that a well written mystery set in Canada with a strong central character, a pageturning plot and series potential” will find a home, she adds.
“Outside Canada people don’t care if a novel is Canadian or not, unless they’re looking for villains who are more polite than usual.” LINWOOD BARCLAY
While Penny has resisted, until recently, offers to transfer her Gamache mysteries to TV or the big screen (the series is now in development for CBC), TV and movie adaptations do add to a novelist’s cachet and to the profile of the locales in which they’re set.
“But I wouldn’t bank too much on the value of the Canadian setting,” says Barclay, who was born in the U.S. but grew up in Canada. He’s considering embarking on a main character crime series after several stand-alone bestsellers that have been translated into more than 30 languages.
“It’s the writer’s sensibilities that make a book Canadian, if that’s what you’re looking for. “Outside Canada people don’t care if a novel is Canadian or not, unless they’re looking for villains who are more polite than usual,” he chuckles. More than one writer interviewed for this story credits the startling international success of Murdoch Mysteries, the Victorian-era, set-inToronto TV series based on Maureen Jennings’ novels, with having turned attention our way. “The TV show built slowly, but it has been extremely important to the success of the books,” says Jennings, who has just published Beware This Boy, the second volume in her The Season of Darkness Trilogy. “Sales have increased exponentially since the TV series found an audience (in the U.S., Britain and Europe).” Jennings also co-created the hit Global TV series Bomb Girls, about a group of Canadian women working in a munitions factory during the Second World War. Almost every writer with a successful crime series on the go, or a bestselling novel, has a TV or movie deal in the works. Barclay’s Trust Your Eyes has been optioned for a Hollywood movie, as well as two previous bestsellers, No Time for Goodbye and Fear the Worst. So has Toronto writer Andrew Pyper’s soon-to-be published The Demonologist, under the auspices of Oscar-winning producer/director Robert Zemeckis ( Back to the Future, Forrest Gump). Toronto-based Brit expat Robinson’s Yorkshire policiers have been adapted for British TV as DCI Banks, which enjoys international ratings success. David Rotenberg’s epic historical novel Shanghai and his The Junction Chronicles thrillers have been optioned for U.S. movie treatments. His criminal lawyer brother Robert’s third crime novel, Stray Bullets, is in development by Canadian production company Shaftesbury Films. And Toronto crime novelist Giles Blunt is adapting his own hit John Cardinal mysteries, set around North Bay, Ont., where the author grew up, for a CTV series. “Movies and TV can be a huge factor in the promotion and sales of novels — the money’s not big and for someone like ( bestselling American novelist) James Patterson, it’s small change,” says Blunt, who admits he enjoys writing scripts so much that it may become his new vocation. Robinsonhasn’t noticed much of a sales boost since DCI Banks started airing. “But I think that’s because everyone who might be interested already had the books,” he said. “It helped in other ways. I got to hang out on the set and take part in the process, which I enjoyed immensely. I was impressed that all this activity was going on because I wrote afew books. I look at the TV show as a free advert.” The book trade is far more sanguine about the prospects of TV and movie tie-ins. Mysteries sell, they always have, but since the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo juggernaut a couple of years ago, the genre has kicked up the crime books business, says Sarah MacLachlan, publisher at Toronto-based House of Anansi Press. It started its own mystery imprint, Spiderline, in Larsson’s wake. “We see better manuscripts coming in and all the books we’ve taken on are doing very well. We’ve been selling the rights to our direct signings all over the world and we’re particularly interested in stories that can be optioned for movies or TV.”
Publishers of crime novels are on the lookout for good story lines “and a strong lead character with the potential to grow through a series, someone readers can engage with or commit themselves to,” MacLachlan added.
“The object is to get a series up and running with a devoted readership, and writers who are committed to produce a book every nine or 12 months.
“They should be prepared to do all that’s necessary for outreach, via social media, the Internet and conventional promotion.”
Toronto novelist, screenwriter and former Star movie critic Ron Base knows what MacLachlan is talking about. He has been working on those principles for a couple of years now, writing and marketing his series of Florida-based Sanibel Sunset Detective crime novels. What sets Base apart is that he’s doing it all himself, including the publishing part.
Three books into the set — the latest, Another Sanibel Sunset Detective, will be launched Jan. 28 at the P.J. O’Brien Irish Pub downtown — Base is almost living off his earnings as a writer-publisher and says he’s “blissfully unencumbered by middle men.”
He’s also something of an expert on what makes a good crime novel, and how to sell his wares via his website, Facebook, networking and self-booked signings at pubs and bookstores in Toronto and Florida.
“Give people a reason to turn the next page and a lead character they can identify with, someone who’s flawed, like we all are, but who’s essentially a good person and likeable,” Base says, echoing what a dozen other writers interviewed for this story had to say about the secrets of crafting a good modern mystery novel.