TUESDAY BRINGS TROUBLE

When your main character goes to Cuba sometimes you find yourself along for the ride. Looking at the surroundings a little more closely, perhaps.

The first few days my thoughts were about the wedding in the novel, the restaurants, the surroundings.

Then we went to Havana. It was an assault on the senses. There is the architecture, the seas, the tropical plants, the beautifully restored buildings. Then there are the broken and dilapidated houses. The blast of construction vehicles with no mufflers in narrow cobbled streets. A woman with a sleeping toddler begging for money.In the next street music, street performers, bright colours and dancing. The sweating crowds bump up against you, the cobble stones are rough under your feet. The touch of a cool mojito glass in a high ceiling bar where pictures of Hemingway adorn the walls. The scent of peppermint in your nose as you sip the drink. Back outside, another street, more construction, an overturned toilet, the smell of shit. It goes on like this with images and experiences constantly juxtaposed.

Returning to the resort exhausted after the twelve hour trip. The wind in the palm trees. The grit of the city in your clothes and in your hair, on your hands.

But you return after being stimulated in the most pleasantly unpleasant, beautifully ugly, aromatic stench, uplifting depressing assault on your sensibilities.

I don't know about you but I'm ready to write.


Garry Ryan taught for a little over thirty years in Calgary Public Schools.

His first published novel was Queen’s Park (2004). The second, The Lucky Elephant Restaurant (2006), won a 2007 Lambda Literary Award. A Hummingbird Dance (2008) and Smoked (2010) followed. Malabarista was released in September of 2011. In 2009, Ryan was awarded Calgary’s Freedom of Expression Award.

LADIES' KILLING THURSDAYS

Reflections on location research

When it comes to trying to capture the sight, feel, smell and sense of a place through words, a writer has a few choices these days. The internet and multi-media has brought much of the world to our fingertips, and we don’t have to leave our computer desk to witness the thrill of a whitewater run or the call of a loon. If a specific piece of information is not on the internet, we only have to pick up the phone. Or fire off an email to a contact found on a website.

Normally I visit all the locations I write about, not only so I can immerse myself in the feel and sense of them but also so I can get my facts right. Savvy Montrealers would have tossed the book at the wall if I had located Schwartz’s Main Hebrew Deli on the wrong side of the street in Beautiful Lie the Dead. I drove around Halifax and rural Nova Scotia, dragging my good friend Mary Jane Maffini with me, in order to get the perfect descriptions for Honour Among Men.

However, my latest Inspector Green book takes place largely in the Nahanni National Park, which is several thousand kilometers northwest of Ottawa, not to mention several thousand dollars out of reach. Not so easy to jaunt off there for a day or two with my notebook in hand. I have relied on websites, Google searches for images and information, the kindness and experiences of friends, and my various contacts who know the North.

Still, there is nothing quite like being there. I would never have attempted to write about the Nahanni if I hadn’t at least visited another wilderness river park in the North for an eleven-day rafting trip. And if I hadn’t done quite a lot of canoe camping and other outdoor adventures. I know I will get things wrong, but I hope I will capture the spirit of the Nahanni with enough power and realism that readers will feel they are there, sharing the awe, the thrill and the terror with my decidedly urban detective.

The past six weeks my sister and I have been traveling around Canada’s Maritime provinces researching a book about our father. We were gathering facts, interviewing oldtimers and researching the history of the places he lived. But the main reason for the odyssey was to walk in his footsteps, to experience the places

and the people as he did, to smell the salt air, and to listen to the rush of surf across the rocks and the cry of the gulls when a ship neared port. Photos and videos can’t do it justice, nor can mere words capture the full sense of it. It’s not enough to describe the impressions of the five senses; it is the visceral connection that comes from the totality. That sense of wonder at the rose-coloured dawn over the ocean, or the terror of 100 km. winds tearing across the clifftop.

I hope I can come close to that with my Nahanni book. I will surround myself in images, in memories and descriptions, and I will hope my imagination can take me there. And that the words I come up with will take my readers there as well. It won’t be the real thing, but I hope it will do.


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.

WICKED WEDNESDAYS

Research, research and then, more research...

Write what you know or know what you write? If you have no choice & it has to be the second option, then research is the answer. Of course, all writers are aware of that fact. Even if you know a topic, there's still something to be learned and then woven into your story.

But if you're setting your mystery in a location, either fictional or real, where you've never traveled, this could be tricky. If you can visit the place, by all means do so. That's the best way to get both a visual and more subtle feel for it. The intangibles, such as how people treat each other, the fragrant smell of a flowering shrub, the angle of the sun in early evening...you can read about these things but once you've experienced them, it will be evident in your writing about them.

If it's a fictional town, I recommend modeling it on a real one. Someplace nearby that you can visit. A town that looks like and feels like the place you're writing about. Then change the street names, the flowers and shrubs (if you're in a totally different growing zone), and of course, the name of the town.

If it's a real place but you can't get there, take heart. Mystery novelist John Spencer Hill who wrote in the mid-1990's, set his two Detective Carlo Arbati novels in Florence, Italy. John, who lived in Ottawa, admitted he had never visited Florence. But you'd never guess that when reading The Last Castrato and Ghirlandaio's Daughter. Of course, I've never visited it either but when reading the books, I felt transported to Florence and that's what mattered. He did it by reading books about and set in Florence, and using a map. I'm sure he had other methods, too but this was before such things as Google Earth, Streetscape, and the wealth of research information available via the Internet. (Sadly, John died before being able to finish his third novel in the series.)

Google also offers wonderful photo albums, such as house styles (I used it for antibellum mansions) and reference pages with images of foliage.

Besides the vast array of information using the Internet, there are bound to be numerous books about the area in question. Your public library is a good source for these reference books and even fiction novels set in your chosen part of the world.I also borrowed a workbook with CD for actors which taught southern dialects. It helps me when creating dialogue to hear that southern lilt in my head.

If you're a member, the CAA is a great source for maps and their popular Tour Books. And, don't forget to use DVDs. Here again, they offer visual and audio cues that help in building your location.

And, don't forget to ask. If you know someone who lives in that region, or can find a friend of a friend...don't hesitate to ask for help. You'll probably find they're dying to talk about their towns.

I'm sure there are a lot of other methods for writers doing research. What have you found useful in research locations?


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