MYSTERY REVIEW

Bonus Interview!
Fradkin’s latest a masterfully-written page-turner

WHISPER OF LEGENDS
Dundurn

By c.b. forrest

An apprentice author takes comfort in beholding the fruits of a life dedicated to the craft of writing. To see P.D. James release one of her best recent works (Death Comes To Pemberly) at the age of 92. To behold as Cormac McCarthy’s writing somehow, almost impossibly, grows closer to the bone as he nears 80. Checked out any James Lee Burke lately?

All of this to say, while Barbara Fradkin is not anywhere near 80 or 90 (like maybe half that – cheques made payable to ‘cb’, thanks), she does have a considerable oeuvre in her Inspector Green mystery series. And so it was a pleasant surprise as a reader to see Fradkin take a big risk and move her protagonist from the known urban environment of Ottawa to the wild and tangled Northwest Territories. And it was an even more heartening as a fellow writer to see her reach a whole new level with Whisper of Legends, the ninth in the Green series (Dundurn Publishers, $17.99).

The premise for the story is every parent’s nightmare: Green’s daughter Hannah goes missing while on a canoe trip to the mind-bogglingly massive Nahanni River (30,000 square kilometres, 600 grizzlies, and countless insects to drive the city boy Green crazy). A canoe believed to belong to her four-party group is found onshore, but the local Mountie detachment isn’t convinced the teens qualify as “missing” yet, and it would be like looking for a needle in a haystack at any rate. Ever the pragmatist, Green decides to do the job himself. He turns to his reliable and longtime friend, Staff Sergeant Brian Sullivan, to accompany him to the Northwest Territories to find Hannah and bring her home.

Things get more tangled than the woods of the Nahanni when Green finds out that Hannah’s boyfriend on the trip has unclear motives for failing to register their expedition with park authorities. The ensuing search allows Fradkin to richly describe the park and the river in turns of phrase that will transport you there to the point where you begin to scratch at imaginary mosquito bites.
‘Green slept fitfully, disturbed not so much by the tandem snoring of the other two men nor the by the eerie grey of the northern night, but by fragments of dreams lurking at the borders of his consciousness.’

Green’s city-boy-goes-wild offers new opportunities for Fradkin to mine the soul of this man and his feelings for his loved ones in new and deeper ways than ever before. After nine novels, that’s saying something about Fradkin’s respect for the reader, her craft, and her protagonist. Green is vulnerable, he has no jurisdictional authority, and so we see the evolution of new thinking and problem-solving from this cop who has supposedly “seen it all”.

The story evolves from a mainstream novel in the first several chapters to a bona fide murder mystery as bodies are discovered and new and very interesting characters are introduced (ie. Elliot the expert tracker) to full effect. There is an unexpected twist ending that again displays Fradkin’s chops in the department of plotting. With Whisper of Legends, Fradkin has written her best work yet and it will stay with the reader like the lonesome call of a loon across a midnight lake.

I managed to catch up with Fradkin for a phone interview while she was on a book tour through the Northwest Territories and Alaska with talented and prolific fellow author, Vicki Delany.


CBF: You took a break between Beautiful Lie The Dead and Whisper of Legends. Did you need to recharge or were you busy with other projects?
BF: A bit of both. I wanted a break because I had something else I wanted to write. Series, even when you enjoy the characters and the place immensely, are constraining. If you want to explore other characters or types of stories, you have to break out. In my case, I wanted to write a biography of my father.

CBF: Taking a series character away from his setting - especially when that setting is an important aspect of the character - is a risky venture. But taking a gritty urban lead out to the middle of the woods is even Riskier. What pros and cons did you weigh when you decided to set the novel in the Nahanni?
BF: None, actually. I just wanted to write the story and I didn't think how risky it might be to the series. I was more focused on how risky it would be to Green, and that was an exciting prospect. Writers are always looking for tension, conflict and novelty, which Green vs. Nahanni had in spades. As I was writing along, I did wonder whether I would lose those readers who enjoy the urban grit and who, like Green, have no interest in wilderness. Time will tell. But I also hope that new readers who passed over the series because of its Ottawa setting will tune in.

CBF: Writing this series represents a significant portion of your adult life. Have you looked way down the road and imagined a time when you wouldn't have an Inspector Green novel on the go?
BF: Yes. I know no series character can go on forever. I don't know when, because I don't plan ahead, but sooner or later Green will run out of cases. But I have a lot of other ideas to pursue, all it takes is courage to break out.

CBF: You are in Yellowknife right now, and were at Malice Domestic a few weeks ago. What are some of the key ingredients a writer needs in order to be successful?
BF: Wine, actually. And at this point I can only think of three ingredients: perseverance, belief in self, and an independent income stream. Rich spouses fit the bill.



C.B. Forrest’s short story, Hangover At Sunrise, will appear in June’s Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. He is nearing the completion of an epic saga about modern organized crime whose title he will not divulge though he believes it will be a best-seller translated into twenty-seven languages, including his own.

WICKED WEDNESDAYS

New tricks for an old dog

Writers are creative multi-taskers; we are often promoting one book while doing final edits on the second and brainstorming the first draft of yet a third. The wheels of the publishing world move very slowly and unless we are a couple of spins ahead, there will be long gaps between books.

Thus it is that I find myself writing the initial chapters of the tenth – tenth!! – Inspector Green mystery before the ninth has even hit the bookshelves. The Whisper of Legends is due out in April 2013, and I am thinking about launches, book tours, signings, appearances and all that fun stuff. But lest there be another two-year gap between books, I am also preparing the next book for submission to the acquisitions editor. With my new publisher, this process includes writing a dreaded synopsis. Every writer’s nightmare.

The challenge for me is that I have always written without an outline or any clear idea of where I’m going, what’s going to happen and how it will all be resolved (including whodunit). Difficult to write a synopsis when you don’t know the plot. When I absolutely could not get out of writing a synopsis, I did it after the book was written.

However, an interesting thing happened to me on the way to this new book. I wrote two Rapid Reads easy-read novels for another publisher. Quite a different writing process and style! These books are short, linear and chronological. For the submission process, three opening chapters and a detailed chapter outline were required. Chapter outline? Even worse than a synopsis, where at least you can fudge the middle and maybe even the ending.

I managed to do the outline for the two Rapid Reads books, because they were short and linear, and I also found that, contrary to my fear that the outline would stifle my creativity during the actual writing, I was able to move easily back and forth between the outline and the actual story, allowing each to influence and improve the other.

That was an interesting revelation. But surely it only worked on these simple books, with their uncomplicated story arcs and limited subplots and characters.

So I embarked on my first draft of the newest Inspector Green using my time-tested “fly by the seat of my pants” technique. I wrote the first four chapters in this fashion, enjoying the freedom but being troubled by the niggling question of ‘where was this going?’ Until this book, that question had never bothered me, but now I was fretting about the synopsis I still had to write about the rest of the book. What would I say? What were the plot twists and discoveries?

After finishing the chapters, I sat down to sketch out some plot ideas, and before I knew it I was writing a chapter outline all the way to the end! (Sort of). Aack! I was going to short-circuit the creative process and end up with a paint-by-numbers book!

The chapter outline is now sitting on my computer, waiting for me to play with it, throw it out, use it for the dreaded synopsis and then throw it out, or maybe even use it to help me write the book. But it is there, concrete proof of my first foray into the world of pre-planned writing. Whether it will improve my writing or not, it’s been an interesting experience. It’s the first time I’ve had a vision, however flawed, of the whole book including the end. I know the outline will be a comforting refuge when I confront those moments of terror every writer experiences. That moment when you wonder where on earth you’re going and why are you pretending to be a writer anyway.

So stay tuned for further updates on my first draft efforts of None So Blind, and the success of the outline approach. Does it improve or stultify? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Barbara Fradkin is a child psychologist with a fascination for how we turn bad. In addition to her darkly haunting short stories in the Ladies Killing Circle anthologies, she writes the gritty, Ottawa-based Inspector Green novels which havewon back to back Arthur Ellis Awards for Best Novel from Crime Writers of Canada. The eighth in the series, Beautiful Lie the Dead, explores love in all its complications. And, her Rapid Read from Orca, The Fall Guy, was launched last year.