Walsh murder mystery set in Newfoundland
The sleepy Newfoundland town of Paddy’s Arm felt so real to Alice Walsh’s readers, they couldn’t believe it was made up.
“Some people were concerned with trying to figure out where it is, because they thought it was a real place,” says Walsh. “I was deliberately vague about it, but people — especially people from Newfoundland — wanted to know the exact location.”
Paddy’s Arm and its residents — detailed in Walsh’s latest novel, Last Lullaby — were invented in the windowless office in the basement of her Lower Sackville home. Walsh says it might be nice to have a window in there, but it could be distracting if she spent too much time gazing outside. Instead, she focused on crafting a story around the sudden death of a child. It’s originally thought to be a case of SIDS (sudden infant death syndrome), but then there’s a homicide arrest — and another child goes missing.
“I’ve been told it has a lot of twists and turns, which is nice to hear,” says Walsh. “Surprises are important in a mystery novel, so it makes me happy when I can surprise people — especially since it’s only my second mystery.”
Yes, second. Walsh admits she “wasn’t a big mystery fan” until she started writing mysteries, and now she loves reading them. But her writing career began decades before she became fascinated with the idea of a good whodunit.
She grew up in Port Saunders, halfway between St. Anthony and Deer Lake on the Great Northern Peninsula. The outport is 11 kilometres from Port au Choix, where remains of the Maritime Archaic Indian were discovered.
Walsh says she remembers the discovery, and it would eventually inspire her to write the YA novel, Buried Truth — set in the ’80s while archaeologists worked on the Maritime Archaic habitation site.
She moved to Halifax in the late ’70s and put down roots in Lower Sackville five or six years after that. She wrote for newspapers and magazines in the ’80s, and eventually joined a group for children’s writers.
Walsh remembers not really wanting to write for children but it was the only writing group she could find. When she learned she’d be expected to read plenty of children’s literature, she was equally disappointed.
The group sometimes brought in guests to speak. An editor from Nimbus Publishing came and said they were looking for new novels to serve as supplementary reading for students in Grades 4-6.
Walsh thought she’d see what she could do and wound up writing her first children’s novel, Something’s Wrong With Kyla’s Mother. Although she insists that it “wasn’t very good,” the book on alcoholism did well in schools and inspired her to keep going.
She’s currently reworking her first mystery, Murder on Darby’s Island. It was pitched to Nimbus as a novella but they wanted it at least 60,000 or 70,000 words. Now, she’s expanding it.
She may not have windows while she writes but she does have time. “When my children were little, I was quite disciplined about writing while they were in school. They’re now adults so I can be much more flexible. It’s opened up new opportunities.”