SCHMOOZING WITH VICKI DELANY

1.Who has influenced you the most in your writing career?

My friends. And I have so many friends. When I decided to take up the life of a writer, about the last reason was to meet interesting people and make new friends. And that's turned out to be the very best part of it. The Canadian crime-writing community is close, and I cherish the support and friendship it gives me very much.

2.What are you working on now?

The second book in the Lighthouse Library series for NAL-Penguin. The first book is titled By Book or By Crook and will be released in Feb 2015. I am using a pen name this time out - Eva Gates.

3. In what ways is your main protagonist like you? If at all?

I am always a bit stumped by this question, because I have so many protagonists. Constable Molly Smith of the series of that name is a young policewoman. She is nothing at all like me. Fiona MacGillivray of the Klondike Gold Rush series is smart, ruthless, determined, and totally without scruples. She is also the most beautiful woman in the Yukon. She is not the least bit like me. Perhaps the protagonists of my standalones are more like me. Just ordinarym women, caught up in events beyond their control, trying to do the right thing.

4. Are you character driven or plot driven?

Again, depends on the series. I'd say usually character driven, certainly in the standalone novels and the Klondike books; the Molly Smith ones are more plot driven. The Klondike books are probably more setting driven. Everything that happens and all the characters are determined by being in Dawson City, Yukon in the summer of 1898.

5. Are you a pantser or a plotter?

In the past I would have said a pantser with a bit of an idea for what I wanted the plot to do. But with the Lighthouse Library books I have to submit a detailed outline first, and I've found that I really like working like that. So from now on, I intend to be a plotter.

6. What do you hope readers will most take away from your writing?

The love of reading and the tremendous variety to be found between the pages of a book. My books are not intended to provide biting social commentary, and they have entertainment value first and foremost. But I hope they have something to say about the world we live in. In the standalone novels I try to say something about the present, through giving the reader a glimpse of the past.

7. Where do you see yourself as a writer in 10 years?

I really can't say. On April 1st, I will have sixteen published books. I have a three book contact for the Lighthouse Library series, I hope to do another cozy series. I'll write as long as I enjoy it and then I won't any longer.

8. What is one thing your readers would be most surprised to know about you?

I am one of the world's great introverts.

9. What do you like to read for pleasure?

Crime novels almost exclusively. I love the modern gothics by the likes of Kate Morton, and I love the British police procedurals by people like Susan Hill or Peter Robinson. I read a lot of Canadian mysteries, often for the setting. Our people, telling our stories.

10. Give us a summary of your latest book in a Tweet.

Under Cold Stone: A Constable Molly Smith Novel Banff National Park. A hotel inspired by a Scottish castle.A romantic weekend. An unlikely couple. An estranged son, and a call for help.

Vicki is one of Canada’s most prolific and varied crime writers. She is the author of the Constable Molly Smith series and standalone Gothic thrillers from Poisoned Pen Press, as well as the light-hearted Klondike Gold Rush books from Dundurn. Her first Rapid Reads book, A Winter Kill, was shortlisted for the 2012 Arthur Ellis Award for best novella. In April she will see two books published, Under Cold Stone, the seventh book in the Smith & Winters police procedural series and Juba Good, a Rapid Reads Novella from Orca Books set in South Sudan. Visit Vicki at www.vickidelany.com, on Twitter @vickidelany and Facebook at www.facebook.com/Vicki.Delany. She blogs about the writing life at One Woman Crime Wave klondikeandtrafalgar.blogspot.com.

CRIME ON MY MIND

Remembering with mysteries

On this day of remembering, it’s interesting to note that not that many Canadians have used the wars as settings for mysteries. There may be many reasons for this. That war itself is a mystery. That in itself, war is such an immense reality that it’s difficult to narrow it down to one event, say a murder. That using a war as a setting would require such intense research that many writers give it a pass.

But what better way to begin to understand the impact of war on individuals’ lives than by isolating an incident, a murder and building a story around not only the investigation but how it all affects those touched by the death. To give these participants the added burden of a lifestyle gone off the rails, of imminent tragedy on a broader scale, can only intensify the stakes.

J. Robert Janes did it. In his award-winning St-Cyr/Kohler series set in Paris in 1942, he pitted an agent of the Surete against a Gestapo officer, and more often working together to solve everyday crimes in the greater context of two enemy countries. These were memorable reads and hopefully, still available.

Maureen Jenning’s new series focuses on women in the Land Army, in 1940’s England. Season of Darkness, the first of this trilogy, was released in August this year.

Other Canadian authors have characters who have served in war or plots that have roots in that period, although the novels are set in contemporary times. Barbara Fradkin's Inspector Green faced this theme in two novels -- Once Upon a Time, where he investigates a death tied into the Holocaust, and Honour Among Men, a haunting story involving a diary of a soldier serving on a peace keeping mission and a murder victim in Ottawa. Peter Robinson’s In A Dry Season, has Inspector Alan Banks investigating a murder that took place during the Second World War involving Land Girls and US Airmen from a nearby base.

Vicki Delany’s suspense novel, Burden of Proof, features a former Nursing Sister in the Canadian Army during WW II. And Mary Jane Maffini set

her fifth Camilla McPhee novel, The Dead Don’t Get Out Much, on Remembrance Day in Ottawa. From there, the novel travels to Italy as Camilla searches for her missing friend and uncovers secrets from the war.

There are other Canadian authors who have tied their plots into the wars of the past and present and used the settings to stretch our reading experiences. Who is on your list of authors?


Linda Wiken/Erika Chase
A Killer Read coming April 3, 2012
from Berkley Prime Crime

WICKED WEDNESDAYS

There is a condition familiar to all mystery devotees: Mid-series Stress Syndrome, or MSSS (MISS). I’m a fan, and I’ve been there. It is characterized by a tightening of the chest, and a rise in blood pressure, followed by a moment when you snap. The delicate balance of admiration and devotion alters into frustrated expectations, and your fidelity as an aficionado morphs into exasperation. It’s been too long! Where’s the next book in the series? When will the torture end!

As readers, we give our time and our imaginations into the keeping of our favourite authors and their literary creations, and our principles can become a bit skewed from the vexation of waiting. Anticipation becomes thwarted desire. An excellent
recent article in the New Yorker magazine outlined the territorial tendencies of series readers (the piece was mostly about rabid sci-fi junkies, but we mystery readers know that we too are guilty). At some point, fans become consumers, and consumers demand gratification. Hardly a new phenomenon – think of the legion of followers who would not let Sherlock Holmes die, much to Conan Doyle’s chagrin. But we’ve become accustomed to a new sort of consumer speed: when we want something, we want it now and delays are unacceptable.

In my days behind the desk at Prime Crime, it was common to hear, ‘When is so-and-so’s book due? Why the long wait? They should be chained to their computer until they finish it.’ Spoken in jest of course, but there was that edge of irritation and entitlement – they weren’t getting what they craved, no doubt due to the writer’s moral turpitude and sloth. We need our fix, before the plot of the last book fades, and the characters begin to blur. Really, we’re only half fooling about that chaining thing.

We get pretty proprietary about the series we love, and feverish waiting for the next instalment. But books differ from other ‘products’ (and how I loathe that term in relation to works of the imagination.). What writer hasn’t longed for a big hit, only to discover they’ve become a commodity? There’s a delicate contract between authors and their follower; as the New Yorker points out, there is an ever-closer connection with all the blogs, Tweets, web pages, and Facebook updates, but this all takes a lot of time – time spent not writing. Their work has to be produced the old-fashioned way: one person, an empty page, and an inspiration – you can’t get it ‘on demand.’ Writers have lives, and they have to live to write, as well as write to live.

Sylvia Braithwaite has been in the book world in one way or the other, her entire life: fanatical reader, bookseller, publicist – and occasional writer. This summer, she is spending a lot of time in her garden, which also involves plenty of reading in the shade, and dreaming up plots as well as tending them.