I’m excited about my Calgary Public Library online event tomorrow night, Wednesday, Jan 26th.
Books and Ideas: How Canadian Mystery Novels Connect us to our Country’s People, Places, and Stories
Mystery novels are fun to read, but crime fiction set in Canada teaches us about our country. Join Calgary mystery author, Susan Calder, in a lively conversation with Margaret Hadley, University of Calgary Instructor Emerita of English. They’ll discuss how Canadian crime novels portray our unique characters, regions, history, and contemporary life.
At last year’s Ontario Library Association’s online conference, I sat on a panel about novels set in Canada. The moderator divided the topic into three parts–Canadian characters, settings, and stories–and asked each panelist to discuss one of the sub-topics in relation to one of our novels. To my relief, I was assigned setting, which I considered the easiest of the three. The other two stumped me. When I create characters, I think of them as people, not Canadians, and my stories lean toward the psychological, rather than events particular to Canada.
I chose Ten Days in Summer, the most Calgarian of my novels, to illustrate how I include specific setting details and how they shaped the story. The novel takes place over the ten days of Calgary’s annual Stampede Festival, when the whole city goes wild-west. People wear cowboy hats and boots to go shopping. Beer tents and free pancake breakfasts pop up everywhere. I explained how I looked for opportunities to set scenes at Stampede happenings. Paula, my sleuth, first encounters two of the suspects while she’s watching the parade that launches the festival. She later meets one of them in a sports pub featuring an inflatable football player wearing a bandana. Paula’s Stampede clothing style is to wear a different coloured bandana each of the ten days. Does that make her uniquely Canadian?
No, but it does make her Calgarian. I realized the characters in my mystery series naturally reflect the people who live in Calgary. In Ten Days, there’s a wannabe cowboy. I have several Calgary friends who own horses they board on acreages outside the city and ride on weekends. When I lived in Montreal, I didn’t know anyone who did this. Many characters in the series, including Paula, have moved to Calgary from elsewhere. Through its history, Calgary has attracted newcomers during its periodic boom times. In contrast, other locales might be characterized by the absence of family and friends, who have left for greater opportunities. The type of people in any story tells us as much about the place as its landscape.
I still don’t see Paula and friends as particularly Canadian, although readers outside of Canada might notice behaviours I simply see as ‘normal’. Maybe Canadian novel characters tend to be remarkably polite.
Reflections on Canadian characters got me wondering about the third aspect discussed on the panel, uniquely Canadian stories. I find these most noticeable in historical mystery novels, especially ones that fictionalize a real murder from our country’s past. In Ten Days in Summer, I had fun making up a crime related to a lessor known fact of Canadian history. King Edward VIII, who famously gave up the British throne to marry Wallis Simpson, was a wannabe cowboy. When he was Prince of Wales, he bought a ranch in southern Alberta, which he visited with his wife after his abdication. My research suggested the Duchess of Windsor was less than enthralled with life on the range. I wove that into an imagined crime that played a small, but pivotal, role in the Ten Days in Summer murder.
I have read Canadian mystery novels that deal with contemporary events and issues that are uniquely Canadian. Since the time of U.S. Prohibition in the 1920s, our long and friendly border with the United States has prompted cross-border crime that continues today. Disputes over pipelines and clean drinking water on indigenous reserves have resulted in fictional murders.
People generally read mystery and thriller novels for entertainment, and in the process learn much about a country’s people, place, and stories. When I travel, I like to read novels set in the location I’m visiting. But I also read to learn about myself and my own country.
My post today, on the BWL, is about Canadian Mystery novels and how they highlight our country’s unique people, places, and stories. https://bwlauthors.blogspot.com/
The Pincher Creek Library kindly invited me to visit them again and talk about my new novel, Winter’s Rage. This time I’ll be speaking on Zoom. Everyone’s invited. Call 403.627.3813 or email- outreach@pinchercreeklibrary.ca to register for this free virtual author visit!
My first writing project for 2022 is to prepare for my Calgary Public Library Zoom presentation on Wednesday, January 26, 7-8 pm. Here’s the topic description:
Mystery novels are fun to read, but crime fiction set in Canada teaches us about our country. Join Calgary mystery author, Susan Calder, in a lively conversation with Margaret Hadley, University of Calgary Instructor Emerita of English. They’ll discuss how Canadian crime novels portray our unique characters, regions, history, and contemporary life.
I hope you’ve had a happy and healthy holiday season. Mine was quiet this year. For the first time ever, Will and I were on our own. We still went through our usual rituals — decorating the house, baking gingerbread cookies, buying presents, filling stockings. We also did lots of Skyping and Zooming with family and friends, which almost felt like the real thing.
Knowing this quiet period lay ahead, we got in some excitement before Christmas, with an almost four week holiday in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. Highlights were beaches, pools, daily sunshine and highs of 30 degrees Celsius, numerous walks, delicious fresh fruits, restaurant meals with great food and ocean views, and visits with a friend who lives there year-round and Will’s sister, who joined us for one of the weeks. Mexico’s relatively low number of COVID-19 cases, strict protocols, and outdoor lifestyle made us feel comfortable there.
We returned to Calgary on December 16th, in the midst of a snowstorm and plunging temperatures. At the airport, I was randomly selected for my second PCR test in three days. The tests were set up by the airport exit. The administrators all wore parkas because the outside doors constantly opened, letting in freezing air. At home, I had to isolate for a couple of days while waiting for the test result (negative). This wasn’t a hardship when there was unpacking and laundry to do, it was cold outside, and I now had an excuse to send Will on all our errands.
The cold temperatures persisted through much of the holidays and show no sign of letting up. Will and I had talked of rejoining our fitness centre after the holidays, but Omicron is now making this unwise. This prompted me to finally look up Zumba classes on Youtube. I found a Christmas-themed one I like. This week, I’ve tried to get the 30 minute workout in most days, and sometimes twice. I plan to look up a new program each week. Continuing with online Zumba is my New Year’s Resolution.
One thing I discovered when I began writing novels thirty years ago — I can’t write from an outline. After a few failed attempts, I learned my natural process was to start with some basic ideas for people, locations and storylines, add an inciting event, and then develop the characters and plot in the course of writing. This makes starting each novel a leap in the dark.
Last month I plunged into the fourth book of my Paula Savard mystery series. In addition to not outlining, I have a bad habit of doing something different with each book. The first one was an amateur sleuth mystery; book #2 was a classic whodunnit. Book #3 added multiple narrators and two timelines. All three introduced a dead body in Chapter One. Book # 4 doesn’t.
I didn’t realize why this new story had to start this way until I was a couple of chapters along. At the end of book #3, Winter’s Rage, Paula is so rattled by the story events that she vows to never get involved with another homicide case. Paula needs to be tricked into it for there to be a book # 4. From the start I could see a problem. How would I sustain reader interest without a corpse?
My initial plan was to repeat the style of Winter’s Rage, with a narrator other than Paula relating a past storyline. This backstory would have a murder early on. I circled the idea (procrastinated) by writing this backstory as a short story, but it didn’t work as fodder for my novel. I couldn’t see its relevance to the main plot I had in mind or that a past murder would make up for the main plot’s meander out of the gate.
Well, I’d stalled long enough. Time for the leap into the novel. I wrote Chapter One, by hand sitting out on my patio enjoying Calgary’s warm fall weather, and continued with Chapter Two. Then an idea hit. I’d insert two secondary viewpoint narrators, two detectives, who know something is going on that Paula doesn’t. Through them, readers would see murder lurking and get into the suspense of Paula becoming involved despite herself.
I hoped.
The approach worked for me and held my interest through the subsequent chapters. Now I’m 1/4 way through the manuscript and planning to add a fourth narrator, Isabelle, an erratic character established in previous books. One of my detective narrators is also a regular in the series. It helps that I already know these two characters well, but I feel a pressure about finally giving them voices and worry this will mess with how readers and I had pictured them before. Isabelle and both detectives will work at cross purposes with Paula to complicate the plot. The story feels like it’s beginning to gel. I’ve outlined the next four chapters and expect they’ll lead to a corpse around the novel’s midpoint. I’m almost sure who the victim will be. The killer is probably one of three suspects and there might be a second murder later in the book.
This discovery stage used to be my favourite part of writing novels. With my first books, I let the stories go wherever they wanted and fixed them up later. This required a lot of fixing. But from experience, I’ve developed a sense of pacing. In this current novel first draft, I’ve rewritten and cut scenes that didn’t work or slowed the story down before moving forward in the plot. This makes writing first drafts harder and they take longer. Now I find the next stage, revision, more enjoyable than the excitement of leaping to an unknown place. Maybe I’m just getting older.
Over the years I’ve read writing advice books and heard many writers talk about their writing process. I’d estimate the split is about 50/50 between novelists who outline and us “pantsers,” who fly by the seats of our pants. There’s a third group, a minority sometimes called “quilters,” who write scenes they later assemble in order. I don’t understand them, as my process is linear. Although I find myself thinking of part-scenes for the chapters coming up, so perhaps I’m learning to quilt a little.
I have to take a short break from the manuscript now. Drat! Now that I’ve got the beginning in place I’m less scared and I’m excited to see where the story and characters are going.
