GUEST BLOG

Standalones vs. Series
by Vicki Delany

There are, basically, two types of mystery novels: standalones, in which characters appear once, never to be seen again, and series, in which characters feature in book after book.

As a reader as well as a writer, I am torn as to which I prefer. I believe that in real life a person, unless they’re a secret agent or bodyguard to a crime boss, has only one great adventure in them. Police officers will tell you that the job’s pretty boring most of the time, and crimes, even murders, are mundane things, easily solved.

A standalone novel gives the protagonist that one opportunity to achieve great things; to have that grand adventure; to meet the everlasting love of their life; to conquer evil, once and for all. In a standalone, the characters face their demons and defeat them.

Or not.

My first books were standalone novels of suspense. In Scare the Light Away the main character confronts, for one last time, the debris of her traumatic childhood. In Burden of Memory, the protagonist faces down the ghost of a past that is not hers, but is still threatening what she holds dear.

I then switched to writing series books, but returned in 2012 with a standalone gothic thriller, More Than Sorrow, about a woman attempting to recover from a Traumatic Brain Injury caused by an IED explosion in Afghanistan. The focus of the novel is on Hannah Manning’s attempts to recover her life while she experiences visions and fears she is losing her sanity. Her inability to explain where she was and what she was doing (even to herself) when a woman disappears, puts her in the cross-hairs of an old enemy.

Not a story line you could drag out over a series of books. How many old enemies can a woman realistically have?

As Barbara Peters, owner of the Poisoned Pen bookstore in Scottsdale says. “In a standalone the reader has no safety net. The reader knows it is possible the main characters may die. You can assume in a series they will not.”

Now I’m back to Constable Molly Smith, Sergeant John Winters and the town of Trafalgar, B.C. with the sixth book in the series, A Cold White Sun.

Series novels present different problems. The central character, or characters, confronts their demons, but they do not defeat them. Their weaknesses, all their problems, will be back in the next book. In each story the series character stands against, and usually defeats, someone else’s problem or society’s enemy, but she or he moves only one small step towards the resolution of their own issues, if at all.

It can be a challenge to keep the main character interesting and growing and changing (and not dying) but to do it so slowly that the reader’s interest in the character can be maintained over several books and several years.

In the Constable Molly Smith novels, set in a small town in the mountains of British Columbia, Molly is haunted by the death of her fiancé, Graham. It was a meaningless, preventable, tragic death and, even in her grief, Molly knows that returning to the small town in which she grew up and becoming a cop won’t help her to make sense of Graham’s death. But she does anyway, and as the series unfolds, Molly is able to confront the gulf that Graham’s death has left in her life and, eventually, move on. By the time we get to the sixth book in the series, A Cold White Sun, Molly has put Graham’s death behind her, and said her good-byes. Now she has a new man in her life, Constable Adam Tocek of the RCMP. But new problems arise.


`Was Tony flirting with her? He certainly was. It felt nice. He was a good-looking guy; he obviously found her attractive. He was a good skier. What could it hurt? She thought about Graham, her fiancé, dead for almost five years now. She thought about Adam. She thought about putting in a twelve-hour night shift and how she’d feel following that.
“I won’t be here until around one.”
He gave her a huge smile. “What a coincidence. So will I. Probably hanging around at the top of Hell’s Vestibule.”
“Molly, are you coming? I’m starving!” An exasperated Glenn said.
“I’m coming. Don’t be so impatient.” They carried the laden trays to their table.
Molly Smith knew Tony’s eyes were following her.
A Cold White Sun by Vicki Delany

Which do you prefer, standalones or series?

I suspect that, like me, you’ll vote for both.

Vicki Delany’s latest book is A Cold White Sun from Poisoned Pen Press. If you’d like to read the first chapter, please go to: www.vickidelany.com. Vicki can be found on www.facebook.com/vicki.delany, and twitter: @vickidelany. She blogs about the writing life at One Woman Crime Wave (http://klondikeandtrafalgar.blogspot.com)

MYSTERY REVIEW

MORE THAN SORROW
by Vicki Delany
Poisoned Pen Press

It's been a few years since Vicki Delany wrote a gothic thriller. She's been busy with her Const. Molly Smith police series, set in B.C., and her Klondike mysteries. All very good reads. But it's with the standalones that Delany really shines. Indeed, sparkles.

In More Than Sorrow, we're drawn immediately into the gripping story of Hannah Manning, a journalist who's recovering at her sister's farm in Prince Edward Country after suffering a serious brain injury from a IED during her stint in Afghanistan.

Hannah's new world is frightening and foreign. She's not in control of the blinding headaches that send her to bed for hours on end. She can't read, frustrating for a journalist, but she's also lost her desire to work. She's unable to pitch in and help with the farm work, something that's starting to grate on her brother-in-law, Jake, as the young family struggles to sustain an organic farm. In fact, her young niece often has to keep an eye on her.

The doctors say it will take time; that the brain works in mysterious ways. It's not enough for Hannah and her frustration grows. She's found she can handle handwriting and starts reading her way through old journals and letters found in the attic of the old farmhouse, which had originally belonged to Jake's family but has wound its way through many other owners.

There is also the vegetables Hannah needs for the roadside store she helps maintain.
But the cellar holds something more sinister and Hannah looses herself in time when she enters the space. Many hours are unaccounted for and she's afraid to admit to what could be hallucinations. Here Delany intertwines the story of a Loyalist family that fled the States during the 1776 revolution and eventually settled in Upper Canada...Ontario. It's a fascinating story of lost wealth and position, lost family and dreams.

When a young Afghan woman, Hila, dreadfully scared in her own country, but brought to Canada to live with a family next door, becomes friends with Hannah, this leads to lengthy walks where they silently share the horrors they both left behind. When Hila goes missing and is eventually found dead, Hannah's world is once again turned upside down. She's accused of murder by a vindictive military official; she can't account for gaps in time; and eventually, her family is put in deep peril.

These are two fascinating stories -- that of Hannah and the glimpses we have of her life in the hell of war, and that of Maggie, the young Loyalist's widow who journeyed to her final resting place in Ontario. The stories intertwine as the death count rises.

Delany is an accomplished writer who draws characters that have depth and become important to the reader. The pacing helps add to the suspense and feeling of the sinister. The stakes are such that the reader is drawn in and vested until the final pages. It's a fascinating story; an intriguing plot; and, a tale that will stay with you long past the final page.

MAYHEM ON MONDAYS

LOYALISTS IN CANADA

History, they say, is written by the winner. It’s also written differently depending on what side you happen to be on.

My newest book, More than Sorrow is set in Prince Edward County, Ontario, where I live. I moved here four years ago and one of the first things I noticed was the sign as you approach the main town, Picton (pop 4,000) proclaiming “A Proud Loyalist Town”. Highway 33 which runs through the County along the north shore of Lake Ontario to Kingston is named The Loyalist Highway, and signs depict a couple in period dress. What, thought I, is all this about? Then I began seeing flags – Union Jacks? Not quite. One of the stripes was missing.

In Canada we have a reputation of ignoring our history. I can’t really be counted among those, as I’ve always had a keen interest in history. I majored in Modern History at University. (Although my focus was Modern European History.) I knew something, vaguely, about the Loyalists who settled Ontario, but obviously not enough.

So I set about learning.

American history sometimes says that all but a few scoundrels and traitors were keen on independence in 1776. Not so fast. Apparently something like 30% of the residents of the colony thought it a bad idea. When all the smoke had cleared, there were in excess of 60,000 people who chose to leave the new United States.
They were refugees in every sense of the word. The British army and government remained loyal to those who’d been loyal to them, and provided transportation away from the States for anyone who wanted to leave. Many went back to England or Scotland, many to parts of North America that were not yet American, such as Florida, and many to the West Indies.

When I was in Turks and Caicos in the winter, we visited the remains of a loyalist plantation. Slaves who had supported the British side were given their freedom and a spot on a ship out. Many of them settled in Nova Scotia, where their descendants live today, and some went back to Africa. (If you are interested in the Black Loyalist story, try the superb Book Of Negros by Lawrence Hill. The Book of Negros was the list the British kept in New York of blacks wanting to flee.)A great many of these refugees came to Canada, over a thousand to what is now Prince Edward County.

What I hadn’t fully realized is that Ontario was almost totally unsettled at that time. Canada consisted of French Quebec and some settlements in Nova Scotia. A small township had been established in the Niagara area. And that was it. So when the new settlers came to this area there was nothing but wilderness. No roads, no towns. Nothing but dark, impenetrable forest.

Not even a lot of Native Canadians. There’s a big Mohawk Reserve near the County called Tyendenaga. It was settled by Loyalists also. The Indians fought on the side of the British in the Revolution (as they did in the War of 1812) and when their side lost, they lost their land and also became refugees.

Many of these refugees were not farmers: they might be townspeople, shopkeepers, newspapermen, tradesmen, maybe soldiers (a lot of German soldiers decided to stay in Canada rather than go back to Germany). As is the case with refugees down through time, most of them lost everything except the clothes they stood in when they fled their homes. The British government gave them transportation, and some supplies with which to begin. Imagine facing the true North American Wilderness, with a handful of seeds, a hand-made axe, maybe an ox to share with your neighbours, and no farming experience. The first order of business would have been to chop down a patch of ancient forest, to clear land and get wood to start building. They lived in tents or rough shacks the first years. In Ontario – in winter!

When I decided I wanted to write another standalone suspense novel,I knew I wanted it to be a modern gothic, a book with strands of the past and hidden secrets affecting people today. I am interested in how war affects lives, particularly the non-combatants, and quickly came up with the idea of a war correspondent injured in Afghanistan and a young female Afghan refugee. Refugee? Where had I heard that before?

Thus, in telling the story of Maggie Macgregor, a Loyalist refugee, I hoped to draw parallels between the refugee experience of Canada’s original settlers with those arriving today. And hopefully I have also had something to say about universal truths, particularly of women caught up in a fight that is not their own.

Vicki Delany is one of Canada’s most varied and prolific crime writers. Her popular Constable Molly Smith series (including In the Shadow of the Glacier and Among the Departed) have been optioned for TV by Brightlight Pictures. She also writes standalone novels of psychological suspense, as well as a light-hearted historical series, (Gold Digger, Gold Mountain), set in the raucous heyday of the Klondike Gold Rush.
Visit Vicki at www.vickidelany.com , www.facebook.com/vicki.delany, and twitter: @vickidelany. She blogs about the writing life at One Woman Crime Wave (http://klondikeandtrafalgar.blogspot.com)