THE DEVIL'S DUST
by C.B. FORREST
Dundurn Press

Say it isn't so! That this isn't the final Charlie McElvey novel! But, alas, it is. Even though detectives have been known to come out of retirement and even rise from the dead, C.B. Forrest, the creator of McElvey, has stated that this is his final book in the series of three.

That this is the finest in the series makes it even more poignant. That's not to say that The Weight of Stones and Slow Recoil were lesser books. They weren't. In fact, the first was short-listed for an Arthur Ellis Best First Novel. And Slow Recoil was short-listed for Best Novel. They are all well-crafted novels, all award-worthy.

The sad thing about no more McElvey is that there goes a very human character, someone who has no illusions when it comes to his world and himself. He's an ex-cop by novel three, having survived the death of a fellow officer, his own wounding, the breakdown of his marriage, and most tragically, the murder of his son. He has abused his body and his sense of morality; he has doggedly sought the truth and struggled to help the victims; he has finally, in The Devil's Dust run away from himself but found himself in so doing.

This is not just the story of a rundown cop returning to his home town and then slipped back into cop-mode to help yet another victim -- the town itself. The story goes beyond the drugs that are crippling the town's youth, the backroom deals that put the brakes on the progress each segment professes to be pursuing, and the fact that Charlie McElvey has cancer.

Forrest has the gift of getting into McElvey's soul and sharing that with the reader. We live his anguish and his redemption. We feel the despair of the town and the hope. We're invested in tracking down the drug kingpin, solving the murders, and facing the truths. C.B. Forrest is that powerful a writer that the characters are real, therefore the story is also real.

I get it -- why this is the final McElvey. There is no more to be said about the man. It is a fitting ending to a powerful series. Which leaves all readers wondering what's next for C.B. Forrest and hoping it won't be too long before we read all about it!

The Devil's Dust is a June release! Be sure it's on your reading list! The launch date is Tues., June 12th in Ottawa.

CRIME ON MY MIND

Why do we do it?

That question came to mind via a circuitous route. A colleague asked me how my sales were going and I thought, 'I haven’t a clue'. My next thought was, what’s wrong with me? Shouldn’t I be in tracking mode?

I’ll admit to being terrified when A Killer Read came out, that no one would buy the book. When it hit #2 on the Barnes & Noble bestselling list and #28 on their overall list, I was gobsmacked and then heaved a sigh of relief.

The terror then shifted to the reviews and assorted comments from readers. What do you know…they liked it, generally speaking. There was the reader who didn’t finish it because there were too many references to other titles and their authors. Uh…that’s what the book’s about. There was the email from the reader who pointed out an author error. I thanked her, pleading carelessness. What I really meant was a brain that wasn’t functioning at the time. But in general, the book was well-received.

But I’d never thought to track the sales. Sure, I’m hoping they’re strong so that the series will continue. But basically, I’m writing it because I enjoy doing so and also, because I want readers to feel a connection to the characters and setting.

I feel challenged each time I re-enter this world I’ve created and try to choose the right words, plant the enticing clue, play logic games with myself, and basically make it all make sense.

I think most writers write for themselves first, for the readers second, and thirdly for all those other trappings. Do you agree?

However, I'm now wondering how those sales are doing...

Linda Wiken/Erika Chase

A KILLER READ
Berkley Prime Crime, now available
READ & BURIED, coming Dec., 2012
www.erikachase.com

LADIES' KILLING THURSDAYS

May is madness...

In her blog on Wicked Wednesday, Linda commented on the crazy life of a writer. I had to smile, because it all sounded so familiar. I too have a looming book deadline, May 31, for my latest Inspector Green novel. I am down to the wire on final rewites before sending it off into the publisher’s hands. I too had to interrupt that process to deal with the proofs of another book and to answer the long, convoluted marketing questionnaire sent by the Inspector Green publisher. And with a publisher’s party, a Scene of the Crime board meeting and the Bloody Words Mystery Conference all coming up within the week, I have two trips to Toronto, a panel to prepare for, a manuscript to critique and numerous wardrobe choices to make. Yikes. For a writer who spends most of her days in T-shirts and jeans, finding two clean banquet outfits that fit is enough to boggle the mind!

Meanwhile, in between the rewriting, blogging, Facebooking, emailing and what-not, there are the demands of daily life. An elderly mother who requires a lot more emotional and physical support than she used to, grown children who thankfully still turn to me for advice and support. A house in dire need of a spring cleaning, a yard being overtaken by weeds, a cottage in the midst of do-it-myself renos, and dogs that insist on walks and games of fetch every time I stand up. Not to mention a six-year old computer that requires much prayer and cajoling as it wheezes its way towards its grave.

Oh yes, I’m also supposed to be hosting fifteen people for dinner on Saturday night. Or maybe not. I hope I know that before I head off to Toronto this morning, as I will have to find time to shop.

Sometimes I meet people from my previous (very busy) professional life, who ask me how I like retirement. They remark, with a wistful tone, that it must be wonderful not to have to rush out in the morning, fight the traffic, juggle appointments, deal with pressures, conflicts and deadlines, and all that stuff I left behind. I reply that yes, I love easing into my day by lingering over coffee in my pyjamas, and my blood pressure thanks me for not climbing onto the Queensway every morning. And it’s true that a writer’s pressures are mostly self-imposed. But life has a way of tangling you up in it, and once you embark on a path, it quickly gets cluttered up with expectations. I’m not complaining. It’s a wonderful life, but I do find myself muttering, just like the old days, ‘Once I get through the next two weeks, it will get easier’. It may, but if the past is any predictor of the future, not likely.

Besides, if it did, I would probably get bored and go looking for trouble.




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 May.

WICKED WEDNESDAYS

I'm back....

Vacation is over. It’s back to work. Everyone faces that reality at some point or many points in life. However, I got to thinking, what is the perfect place for writing. Actually, what got me thinking was the fact that Erika Chase
was lucky enough to be interviewed by Elizabeth Duncan for her blog. It’s posted now at http://www.elizabethjduncan.com/blog.html

One of her questions was just that –If you could choose anywhere in the world to write your next book, where would it be and why?
I said, Sicily, being still in love with that country – the culture and the scenery, although I have to own up, I never tried writing there.

Having just returned from B.C., I did find an idyllic place to write and I made good use of it, too. Another bit of luck – a timeshare on Victoria’s beautiful inner harbour. I’d glance out the patio doors from both bedroom and living room, out onto the water, the ships at anchor, and a well-used path along the seawall. It certainly helped that the weather was ideal, also.

I could have spent my hours just staring at the scenery, and I was tempted. But it also energized me and as I said, I accomplished a lot, which is a good thing because book #3 is due to my editor on June 1st.

This is not a minor task to complete as I’ve been interrupted by the editor’s edits, a cover conference, pre-publicity for book #1, A Killer Read, a wedding in the Dominican Republic, a book launch, a mystery conference in Bethesda, MD, a mystery festival just outside Pittsburgh, my choir concert, and said trip to B.C. Also coming up, on the fated deadline weekend is Bloody Words in Toronto.

But I’ve discovered that’s a writer’s life. Just when you think you might have a breather (and an actual life), in role the emails and more work appears.

I have also toyed with the idea that next year when I return, it would be great to hook up with a writers' shared office space co-op or some such arrangement. If you know of one, please let me know.

So, thinking about the idyllic place to write is like those mini-vacations I’d hear about at staff development days when I had a regular job. Just sit back, close your eyes, and picture the spot. I’m back in that timeshare. Now that I’ve set the scene…maybe the work will continue to flow.

Maybe.

Linda Wiken/Erika Chase

A KILLER READ
Berkley Prime Crime, now available
READ & BURIED, coming Dec., 2012
www.erikachase.com

TUESDAY BRINGS TROUBLE

Waiting for Arthur

In Samuel Beckett’s play, Waiting for Godot, two men wait in vain for someone named Godot. Of course, he never shows up, and it turns out that they wouldn’t have recognized him even if he did. To while away the time, the two “eat, sleep, converse, argue, sing, play games, exercise, swap hats”—anything "to hold the terrible silence at bay."

In my case, I am Waiting for Arthur. He, too, may never show up. However, I do know what he looks like! He wouldn’t be hard to recognize, in any case. He’s a lovely soft light brown with lots of lines and spots (even though he’s only twenty-nine, he’s made out of natural wood so his complexion makes him look older).

Try to disregard the fact that he’s been hung from a rope until dead. Arthur is, after all, the award for excellence in crime writing. He’s even named after the penname (so to speak) of Canada’s hangmen.

I have definitely been employing the various ways that the two Beckett characters used to fill the time, all except the swapping of hats. But maybe I can do that on Awards Night. I have eaten a lot (always do when I’m excited and happy), slept, talked (incessantly about Arthur), argued, sang (Will I Be Blue? or Winner Takes All?), played games with the grandkids, and exercised (not as much as I should, but still…).

I’ve added one other activity: writing. I’ve tweeted, facebook’d, blogged, googled, articled, librarything’d, pinterest’d, goodread, and texted. I’m famous for writing my way through almost anything, and this waiting period is obviously no different.

I have to use at least one cliché about my experience. If anyone had told me a year ago that I would be Waiting for Arthur, I would never have believed it. In fact, a year ago, I had just finished radiation for breast cancer and had no traditional publishers for my books or my recent stories.

Suddenly, here I am, a finalist for the most prestigious award for mystery and crime writing in Canada. All four of the novels in my series (and the fifth one in progress) have a home with Imajin Books. The short story that’s Waiting For Arthur was published by NorthWord literary magazine, and they are publishing another, non-mystery story of mine too. One of my personal favourite Canadian writers, Louise Penny, emailed me the morning after the shortlist to congratulate me! I have been asked to be a guest blogger for all sorts of writers and readers (including the Mystery Maven, my literary heroes). I entitled one of the blogs, They Like Me, They Really Like Me. That just shows how Flying Nun I’ve been feeling.

On the evening of the Arthur Ellis shortlist event, I was so busy organizing that I hadn’t given much thought to how I’d react if I actually made that list. My friend and I (who both had stories submitted) declared that simply making it as a finalist would be enough. And that night, it was more than enough. I was ecstatic, excited, honoured, humbled…all the emotions one might expect. (Plus my friend is on the list too!)

I have stayed buoyed ever since. Right now, I am a little overwhelmed with organizing the actual Arthur Ellis Awards Dinner, but essentially, I am thrilled. I wake up in the morning thinking about Arthur and pretty much spend all day with him on my mind. My husband is beginning to get suspicious.

But the real point is: it doesn’t actually matter who wins on May 31 (Awards Night). I’ll have had six whole weeks of pleasure. Forty-two days of anticipation, that delicious feeling of being on the cusp of something great. A thousand and eight hours to realize that my esteemed colleagues have judged my writing to be commendable. It’s rare to have such a sustained period of time where every few seconds you break out into a satisfied grin.

I almost hope the “terrible silence” doesn’t end. I like it here, in the quiet before I know for sure whether or not Arthur will show up. Right now, it’s delicious.


Catherine Astolfo is the author of The Emily Taylor Mysteries, published by Imajin Books. Her novels have been optioned for film by Sisbro & Co. Inc. Catherine is a Past President of Crime Writers of Canada and a member of Sisters in Crime Toronto. Visit Catherine and discover her series at: www.catherineastolfo.com

LADIES' KILLING THURSDAYS

Creative Writing

Elif Batuman, author of The Possessed - Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, an autobiography, notes that early in her career she applied for and received a fiction writing fellowship at an artists’ colony in Cape Cod. On a windy, cold March day she went to have a look and reached conclusions about what she called the transcendentalist New England culture of ‘creative writing’ and asked herself why it would be good for her to read short stories by short-story writers who didn’t seem to be read by anyone but embryonic short-story writers?

She found it a puritanical culture embodied by colonies and workshops and the ideal of ‘craft’. This didn’t appeal to her because she believed writing was the means to deal with the human condition, to search for meaning, to celebrate the never-ending fascination of human interaction.

Craft said nothing about this. Instead it focussed on the negatives: show don’t tell, murder your darlings, exorcise the passive voice, omit needless words etc. It was a culture of the negative paired with the challenge of using active, brisk verbs and vivid nouns.

I don’t agree with all she said because in any discipline you have to learn the basics, the ‘how’, before you can move on to deal effectively with large topics. In painting when you want to learn how to manipulate a medium it is not helpful to have an instructor tell you to express yourself because you don’t have the technical ability to do that. So too with writing. It’s true that emphasizing the negatives, may seem a joyless approach but how do you show or tell the aspiring writer how to choose the perfect word.

Despite the fact that I didn’t totally agree with her the following paragraph in which she deals with modern short stories amused me.

“The first sentences were crammed with so many specificities, exceptions, subverted expectations, and minor collisions that one half expected to learn they were acrostics, or had been written without using the letter ‘e’. They all began in medias res. Often, they answered the “five W’s and one H.””

Certainly, in mystery writing we are exhorted to grab the reader’s attention as quickly as possible but perhaps we overdo it?

Batuman goes on to attack the use of proper names in modern stories. As she says, ‘they come flying at you as if out of a tennis machine.’ “Each name betrayed a secret calculation, a weighing of plausibility against precision”. She gives examples and then discusses the fact that Tolstoy often used the same name for two characters in the same book or that Chekhov’s characters often had no names at all.

Speaking for myself, and who else can you speak for, I found the how-to books, and the summer as well as the year-long program at Humber immensely useful but perhaps this was because I aspired to write mysteries not literary fiction. I do recognize the validity of her comments and they made me think about rules and writing and the unwillingness of some writing teachers to concede that there is so much more to writing than following rules.

How important are the rules that circumscribe our writing? Does knowing the rules give you license to break them?

A member of the Ladies Killing Circle, Joan Boswell co-edited four of their short story anthologies: Fit to Die, 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, 2007 and 2007. The latest in the series, Cut to the Bone, will be published by Dundurn in November. In 2000 she won the $10,000 Toronto Star’s short story contest. Joan lives in Toronto with three flat-coated retrievers.

WICKED WEDNESDAYS

Off again!

Okay…I must confess…another blogoliday starts today. Look on the bright side – this leaves you more time for your writing!

I may surprise you with a blog thrown in here or there…as time and inspiration dictates. But for now, I’m sticking with family (on the west coast) and working to that June 1st deadline (in between family events).

Remember Bloody Words is coming – hope to see you there!

Linda Wiken/Erika Chase

A KILLER READ
Berkley Prime Crime, now available
READ & BURIED, coming Dec., 2012
www.erikachase.com