CRIME ON MY MIND

Getting back to reality...

I'm through stashing bodies. It's been fun, alright, in a ghoulish kind of way, but also very enlightening. When you travel through a new city it's easy to be blown away by the awesome sights -- the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe, the incredible beauty of the cathedrals -- but that's only one level of the city.

It pays to look beyond and deeper. If you're playing tourist with a writer's eye to locations, you notice a different aspect of the place. The carved caverns on a hillside, the stillness of a turn in the river even with traffic zooming past only a few blocks away, the innate detail of a passageway beckoning the viewer into the unknown.

The mind takes flight, the ideas flow, and the city becomes a more complete entity.

Of course, there's also that urge to toss someone into that river or through the passageway...on paper, of course.

I doubt I'll ever set a novel in France. Well, certainly not my current series anyway. Ashton Corners, Alabama will never meet Lyon, France. However, the images are stashed in the brain and might surface in a short story or perhaps a flight of fancy for a protagonist in the future.

Time to get back to work and start in on book #3, which is due in 9 months. Yikes! I'll leave the travel and those inquiring thoughts until the next trip. Or, maybe not. It's to the Dominican Republic and I'll be there as the mother-of-the-groom. The two might not mix.

Or maybe they will.

What far away places are beckoning you?


Linda Wiken/Erika Chase
A Killer Read coming April, 2012
from Berkley Prime Crime

LADIES' KILLING THURSDAYS

Where yu to, me bye?

I’m a great proponent of travel. Not only does it provide constant novelty and excitement, but it broadens one’s perspective and increases one’s understanding of others. You can’t stare out over a canola field in Alberta, yellow and empty as far as the eye can see, or brace yourself against the swirls of Toronto’s Kensington Market, without getting at least a glimpse into what life is like for people there. My current trip to Canada’s Maritimes has been full of insights and serendipity.

Prince Edward Island is perhaps Canada’s best known island, chosen by the Royals on their recent visit as their only Maritime destination. This is thanks to L.M. Montgomery and her tales about a little red-headed orphan named Anne. PEIslanders are proud of their distinctly different way of life – gently rolling terrain, picturesque villages clustered around sandy coves, white houses with green roofs and window boxes, and a speed limit that puts your average mainlander to sleep.

But Newfoundland is truly a place apart. Whereas PEIslanders are as gentle and agreeable as their island, Newfoundlanders are rugged, independent, feisty, and right proud of it. After five hundred years of isolation and hardship, durability and fight are bred into their bones. Even the little trees stick stubbornly up out of the clifftops, half their needles blown off by the wind but new tufts of fresh growth sprouting from their tops. Newfoundland is ragged bluffs, stony ground and jumbled villages clinging to the edges of tiny coves. Roads are narrow, bumpy and full of twists and hills as they try to follow the torturous outline of the coast. The speed limits are set at 80 to 100 km./ hour, a suicidal notion for your average mainlander which Newfoundlanders manage it with ease.

For centuries, Newfoundlanders lived by and off the sea. Each village had a unique origin and history, and travel between them was limited to boat. Goods, services and mail were delivered by boat too, subject to the vagaries of ice, storm and tide. Accents, words and customs emerged unique to each area. It’s impossible to

describe a Newfoundland accent without reference to the region. In the farthest outports of the east coast, a local could speak to me for five minutes without my recognizing a single word. In St. John’s, the sin capital of The Rock, hints of an accent remain only in the occasional flattened vowel or quirky preposition.

Getting the accent and words right will be a challenge for any writer but that’s another trait of Newfoundland. Nothing comes easy on this island and by god, why should it be easy for anyone else? But what a sense of triumph at the end of the road.


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 have
won 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 new Rapid Read from Orca, The Fall Guy, was launched in May.

LADIES' KILLING THURSDAYS

When you read this I will have climbed into a zodiac and left the shore at

Kugluktok (once called Coppermine) in Nunavut to board the Clipper Adventurer for a 17 day cruise out of the Northwest Passage, north along the coast of Ellesmere island to Grise Fiord, our most northerly civilian community, across Davis Strait and Baffin sea and down the coast of Greenland stopping in at several sites. I love the Arctic and am lucky enough to be able to afford to be making my third visit. Will I set a mystery here? Given my past record it seems unlikely and I don’t know why.

Three years ago I visited Spitzbergen, one of the most northern communities in the world, a place where every individual who leaves the townsite of Longyearben is legally obliged to carry a rifle to protect herself from polar bears. In the hotel a sign instructs everyone to park their rifles in the hotel safe as there is no danger of bears within the building. I wondered if this focus on the danger of bears might be an exaggeration until recently when a bear attacked a number of young men from the UK and killed one of them. I did attempt a short story about this wonderful island and to do it I did internet research and discovered all kinds of interesting things that made me want to return but not necessarily to write any more about it.

This summer the regular contributors to this blog are travelling to far flung parts of Canada and abroad. The question - will these trips influence their writing?

It’s a good question. I think everything in your life contributes in one way or another to your writing. You may not refer directly to what you’ve seen in an outport in Newfoundland, the food you’ve eaten in a French bistro, the chill of the sea you’ve felt swimming in the North Atlantic or the smell of a convivial pile of walrus snorting and socializing between dives for shellfish.

But you will internalize the experiences. If you’re an author like Vicki Delaney, Barbara Fradkin or Robin Harlick you will capture the essence of your trips in a book. In her short stories set in the Rideau Lakes Sue Pike reveals her detailed knowledge not only of the flora and fauna but also her love of the area. Early next year we’ll look forward to learning more about Alabama when we read the first in Linda Wiken’s trilogy.

Books must be set somewhere and the degree to which location influences the ambiance and plot development vary from writer to writer. Each author must decide how important location will be to the work. Whether or not I will ever set a short story or book in the Arctic remains a mystery. My question - does foreign travel stimulate you or do you prefer well known, non-exotic locations?






Joan Boswell is a member of the Ladies Killing Circle and co-edited four of their short story anthologies: Fit toDie, Bone Dance, Boomers Go Bad and Going Out With a Bang. Her three mysteries, Cut Off His Tale, Cut to the Quick and Cut and Run were published in 2005, 2006 and 2007. In 2000 she won the $10,000 Toronto Star’s short story contest. Joan lives in Toronto with three flat-coated retrievers.