Thanks Imagining Toronto

The website, "Imagining Toronto" has a list of, "100 Toronto Books You Should Read" and I'm very happy to be wedged in between Maureen Jennings and Robert Rotenberg on the "genre" list.

Genre Fiction

61. Kelley Anderson, Bitten
62. Rosemary Aubert, Firebrand
63. Linwood Barclay, Bad Move
64. Pat Capponi, Last Stop Sunnyside
65. Nalo Hopkinson, Brown Girl In The Ring (eagerly awaited: her forthcoming novel, tentatively titled T’Aint)
66. Tanya Huff, Blood Price (or any other of Huff’s Blood series. Bonus point for Gate of Darkness, Circle of Light)
67. Maureen Jennings, Poor Tom Is Cold (or any other of her Murdoch Mysteries)
68. John McFetridge, Dirty Sweet or Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere69. Robert Rotenberg, Old City Hall70. Robert Charles Wilson, The Perseids and Other Stories

The whole list is very interesting.

When I first moved to Toronto about twenty years ago I was writing generic stories without much sense of place - and that's probably a big reason why I wasn't selling any of them.

Then Scott Albert and I wrote, Below the Line, and set the stories specifically in Toronto - on the set of an American movie being filmed in Toronto so we had plenty of jokes about location scouts looking for buildings that looked "New York" or "Chicago," and we included the line someone said once about Canadian crews being, "Mexicans in togues."

Then when I started to write Dirty Sweet I was deliberately trying to get to know the city better, to get into more neighbourhoods and to try to get to the character of the city a little more. I've really just been trying to do that ever since.

Recently someone said that it's become a cliche to say that, "setting is a character," in fiction, especially in genre fiction and especially in serial fiction in which the same characters (including the setting) are in more than one book, but that doesn't mean it isn't true.

Toronto is a character in my books and a character with some serious internal conflict.

Well, any interesting character is going to have some serious internal conflict, right?

Christmas Noir

Over on the Do Some Damage blog we're running Christmas flash fictions all week and they're very good.

Check them out here.

Finally - Dirty Sweet for the Kindle

One of the biggest stories in publishing this year has been the breakout of e-readers. We seem to get anothr news story about the increase in e-book sales and the lowering of the price of e-readers everyday.

A little while ago I was given an iPad as a gift and I use it all the time. I have all the book apps - Kindle, Kobo, Stanza and iBooks and I've been buying more books than ever. The price is a big deal. I picked up Keith Richards', Life, for $9.99 an Elmore Leonard's Djibouti for $8.99 when the only other way they were available was as thirty-five dollar hardcovers (or long waiting lists at the library). I also bought, Atomic Renaissance, a collection of crime stories by women writers in the 1940's and 50's - an impulse buy for $5.99, which would have been a lot more expensive and likely a special order from the bookstore.

So, I'm a fan. And now my own books are becoming available as e-books for reasonable prices. Everbody Knows This Is Nowhere has been available for a while at $9.99 for the Kindle and now Dirty Sweet is available for the Kindle for $7.16 (I'm sure there's a reason for such an odd price, but I don't now what it is).

Both books are also available for less than ten bucks for the Kobo.

The Crossbow - murder weapon of choice in Canada

In Louise Penny's terrific first novel, Still Life, a murder mystery set in the small of Three Pines in Quebec's Eastern Townships, the murder weapon is a crossbow.

I thought of that this week when a man was killed at a branch of the Toronto Public Library with a crossbow (well, with the "bolt" which is apparently what the thing that gets fired from a crossbow is called).

The crossbow seemed oddly at home in a murder mystery, but it seemed weird in a real murder.

And then newspapers in Canada started running stories with headlines like "Crossbow Incidents in Canada," and it turns out it's a fairly long list:

•In July, a Mission, B.C., father was charged with attacking his son who was shot in the forearm with a crossbow.

•In November 2007, a 26-year-old man was charged with murder and attempted murder after his mother was killed and father was injured by a crossbow in St-Cesaire, Que.

•In October 2002, a dairy farmer was shot in the back and injured with a crossbow in St.-Bonaventure.

•In August 1998, a man asleep in his Hamilton home was shot in the head and injured by a man who fired a crossbow.

•In 1998, Edward Stuart Walker shot a pregnant Stephanie Celestine Thomas with a crossbow, then stabbed her 46 times in Central Saanich on Vancouver Island.

•In September 1994, Yvon Gosselin was driven to a gravel pit near Terrace, B.C., where he was killed with two bolts from a crossbow.

•In May 1995, a man armed with a crossbow entered the Winnipeg Convention Centre shortly before then prime minister Jean Chretien arrived to deliver a speech. The suspect was arrested.

•In January 1993, B.C. Institute of Technology student Silvia Leung, 22, bled to death in the campus parking lot in Burnaby after being hit in the shoulder by a crossbow.

•In November 1991, Ottawa lawyer Patricia Allen was killed with a crossbow by her estranged husband Colin McGregor.

So here's my question, does anyone know of any other novels in which a crossbow is used?

DarkLit Fest of Durham

Saturday, November 27th, I'll be one of the guests at the Oshawa Public Library (McLaughlin Branch) DarkLit Fest of Durham.

It's a full day of events. The schedule is here.

I'll be on the, "Getting Away With Murder: Writing Chilling Crime Fiction" panel along with Jon Evans and Howard Shrier, moderated by Brent Laporte at 1:45.

Should be very interesting.

Terminal Damage

Another short story.


Every Wednesday I blog on the Do Some Damage website and a while ago one of the other folks there suggested we put out a collection of short stories.

Because we were all very busy and barely keeping up with the blogging we decided to make it a little tougher on ourselves and link up the stories. So, every story has a little something to do with JFK Airport.

For example, my story, The Gladiator Resort, starts:

The plane was two hours late landing at San Jose, Costa Rica, JT saying they were delayed at JFK, place was locked down, “Somebody probably tried to bring shampoo on the plane.”

If you're familiar with my books you probably recognize JT (he also shows up in my story in the Discount Noir anthology) and the Gladiator Resort was being planned way back in Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere.

So now the Terminal Damage anthology is available for Kindle here.

The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald

This moring on the radio I heard that today is the 35th anniversary of the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald. Of course, like most people my age I first heard about this tragedy from Gordon Lightfoot and at the time I really had no idea how good his song is.

I did a little research into laker freighters for my novel, Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, because I walk my dog along the waterfront in Toronto and saw quite a few of the big boats and I thought that might be a good place for a marijuana grow-op. The old brewery in Barrie had just been discovered to be a huge grow-op and I figured any big, empty space would do. And then I moved on to the next book and pretty much forgot about laker freighters. I still see them when I'm walking my dog and they still seem really cool.

And after mentioning the anniversary, the radio played Gordon Lightfoot's song, The Wreck of the Edmud Fitzgerald, and I really listened to it for the first time and realized what powerful storytelling it is. All those things they try to teach us in writing classes about using the fewest words to paint the biggest picture, to try and get the emotions across and not just the details.

"Concluding some terms with a couple of steel firms
When they left fully loaded for Cleveland..."

Just enough detail.

"When supper time came the old cook came on deck
Saying fellows it's too rough to feed ya
At 7PM a main hatchway caved in
He said fellas it's been good to know ya."

Personal, matter-of-fact, it's Heningwayesque.

"Does anyone know where the love of God goes
When the waves turn the minutes to hours..."

I've read novels that used page after page, hundreds, thousands of words to get that same emotion across. There are a lot of lessons for writers in the simple, direct, personal storytelling of this song and maybe the most important one is the respect that Lightfoot shows for the men who lost their lives. That respect is something we talk about a lot in crime fiction and I need to remind myself about often.

Discount Noir

A while ago Patti Abbott and Steve Weddle had a flash fiction challenge looking for stories inspired by the website, People Of Wal-Mart.

There was some worry that maybe we'd be making fun of the people featured on the website but when the stories were posted - about forty of them - and as I travelled around the web that day I was very pleased (and should not have been surprised) to read the terrific stories.

The big discount store (at least one of the stories takes place somewhere in the UK and it isn't the same chain) is just used as a symbol, I guess the way the real Wal-Mart has become a symbol for a lot of things these days.

And now all of the flash fictions have been collected (and edited by Patti and Steve) and will be published on October 22nd by Untreed Reads as an e-book for $4.49, available here.

It'll also be available from Amazon, Barnes&Noble, Chapters-Indigo, iBook, Smashwords and more. So far I really like what I've seen from Untreed Reads.

I also really like the idea of this collection. In this case the flash fictions really do fit together. It may have been one of those moments of serendipity, the ideal things to link the stories at the ideal time but I hope to see more like this.

And this kind of collection seems like ideal material for an e-book.

I have a feeling this is just tip of the iceberg stuff, that e-books and online distribution will have a greater effect on content as things progress.

What do you think?

Kobo

It's taken a while to make my books available for the Kindle - so far it's just Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere - and at the price I'd like (less than ten bucks) but I've been able to get both Dirty Sweet and Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere up on Kobo for $8.19 each (seems like an odd price, doesn't it? Who knows how that happened).

Available here.

Kobo also has two of my short stories available for free, Grow House and Barbotte.

I'm not sure if these are only available in Canada or not. Kobo is the e-book division of the Chapters-Indigo bookstore chain.

Short Story -- Grow House

This story was originally published in Demolition Magazine online and now I've made it available through Smashwords.




It can be read online or downloaded for Kindle, Sony e-reader and a lot more devices, just click here.

The description I used at Smashwords is:

Stand-off in a suburban grow op. Freddie is robbing the place, Victor has come to kill him, Steve is caught in the middle and Holly is looking for a quiet evening at home. Any house in any neighbourhood could be a grow house...

Here's the first paragraph:

Steve Barrett had been back from Afghanistan two weeks when he got back to stealing cars, this one a brand new BMW X5, leather interior, V8. What he did was, he stood around the parking lot of the Vaughn Mills Mall in north Toronto until some woman pulled in driving it and he followed her inside. Then he gave a couple of teenagers fifty bucks to steal her purse and while she was giving the mall security guard shit for half an hour, Steve drove the car to a garage on Dufferin owned by a biker named Danny Mac who gave him ten grand cash.

CBS Cancels The Bridge

Or so I've heard. Too bad, this Saturday was sceduled to be an episode I co-wrote with Dannis Koromilas.

Still, it looks like there will be a Season Two on CTV next year.

short story - Barbotte

A couple of years ago a short story I wrote appeared in an issue of Dave Zeltserman's webzine, Hard Luck Stories, edited by Ed Gorman.

The story is called Barbotte and takes place in Montreal in 1946.

Now that Smashwords has made it so easy to make stories available, that's what I'm doing.

Barbotte is available here for free.

At the time Hard Luck Stories used this illustration by Jean-Pierre Jacquet and he's given me permission to make it the cover image of the e-book.



Jean-Pierre Jacquet's website is here.

Parnell Hall Signing in the Waldenbooks

This is really good:



There's a blurb from Parnell Hall on the back of Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere (Canadian hardcover). When I found out that he had agreed to read the book I was thrilled. I had just finished reading his novel Hitman and liked it a lot. It's one of his private eye novels, not one of his "puzzle mysteries," which I haven't read yet.

So, when I saw the video above I laughed and cried. Mostly I cried. Then I laughed.

Free e-book - East Coast

After working on The Bridge I began to develop a TV show I called East Coast. I decided to adapt the pilot episode into a short story and make it available for free download (or online reading).

Click here.

The Kindle edition will be available soon.

I've been calling East Coast, The Wire in a rural setting because it's also about cops fighting the seemingly unwinnable war on drugs. I'm not sure if I'm going to write more episodes of this series, but I do like the format and the length. This e-book is about the same length as a one-hour TV show.


All feedback is appreciated.

Needle, the mag

My Do Some Damage buddies Steve Weddle and Scott Parker and a bunch of other cool people (inlcuding Naomi Johnson, Daniel O'Shea and John Horner Jacobs) have published a terrific magazine of noir stories called Needle, which you can buy right here for seven bucks.




Seven bucks?!?! No wonder they're having a big discussion about how to pay the writers.

Which would be great, because the stories are all great.

They're also having a contest to give away a free copy of issue #2, a t-shirt, a mug - they aren't exactly sure yet (if I win I want the t-shirt - I want to subscribe to the magazine) but to win all you have to do is take a picture of yourself reading the magazine, like this:




And then go post a comment with the link here.


You don't even have to buy the magazine, you can come over to my house and borrow my copy, but really, seven bucks? Even with shipping that's better than having to deal with Canadian border guards. You know us Canadians, we're so nice. Maybe too nice...

This Week's Bridge - April 23

The episode is called Painted Ladies. We used song titles for episode titles and as this one is about cops running an escort service it was either Painted Ladies or Roxanne and I like the shout out to Ian Thomas.

CTV describe the episode as:

Answering a call for "officer down," Frank (Aaron Douglas) discovers the victim is not a cop but a prostitute dressed as a cop. Investigating further, Frank uncovers an escort ring run by a ruthless vice cop.



Like many storylines on The Bridge, this one was inspired by events in Toronto.

There's more info on the true story here.

East Coast

For the next few Wednesdays on the Do Some Damage blog I'm going to be serializing a story I first wrote as a TV script, a pilot for a series I proposed called East Coast.

Part One is here.

And Part Two is here.

Part Three is here.



.

Canadian Crime Fiction

In Ireland right now there's a bit of a discussion going on about whether Irish writers are engaging with modern Ireland and one thing that's come out of it is this idea that crime fiction, despite being very contemporary, is entirely left out of the discussion.

Of course, we have this discussion all the time in Canada, beating ourselves up all the time because so much CanLit is stuck in an earlier time. It's not true, of course, there are plenty of contemporary Canadian novels fully engaged with "modern Canada," but like Ireland, crime fiction is entirely left out of the discussion.

An article in the Irish Times put it like this:

THE ASSASSINATION in 1986 of the Swedish prime minister Olaf Palme sent shockwaves through Sweden in particular and Scandinavia in general. One consequence was the emergence of an indigenous crime fiction, a phenomenon taken very seriously by cultural commentators in Sweden and Norway. Today, writers such as Henning Mankell, Stieg Larsson and Jo Nesbø are household names across the world.

(the full article is here)

So, what about Canada? We've had quite a few crimes send shockwaves through our country, from Paul and Karla Bernardo to the Picton murders to the latest arrest of a high ranking military man for two murders and a number of rapes. These are the kinds of crimes that might make us question ourselves in a way that literature could address - or a least start start the discussion.

Have we?

It's Really All About the Story

Cheap e-books!

E-books have certainly been in the news a lot lately and one of the biggest discussion points has been price.

I've been working with ECW to try and have my e-books priced as cheaply as possible and I'm happy to say that Dirty Sweet is now available for download from Kobo in Canada for $2.29.

Available here.

E-books from Kobo are available as ePub and can be read on smartphones (there's a good iPod app I use), on computers and on almost all e-reades, including Sony.

Hey, $2.29, that's a deal. We're still working on getting Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere on Kobo for the same price and both books on Kindle for less than three dollars.

This Week's Bridge - The Unguarded Moment

Air Date: Friday, March 19th, 2010 @ 10pm on CTV (Canada)
Written By: Dannis Koromilas and John McFetridge
Director: Stuart Margolin

Episode Synopsis: A cop is badly wounded during a robbery at a restaurant and is held hostage along with the other customers. Frank is determined to get the cop out alive. But when the Chief orders the undermanned SWAT team to stand down, Frank has to convince the Sergeant in charge to go against the Chief’s orders. Frank quickly takes over as negotiator but when the thieves refuse to make any demands for money, the situation becomes even more bizarre. If the thieves don’t want money, what do they want? As Frank races against the clock, the wounded cop’s chances of survival are quickly diminishing right before his eyes.


All that is from CTV (although I got it - and the picture - from a very well-run Aaron Douglas fansite The Chief's Deck - where I get most of the information about The Bridge).

I was hoping to include the commercial for the episode, I caught it briefly on the TV in McDonalds while I was there with my kids but I haven't seen it again and it doesn't appear to be online anywhere.

Oh well, as it says, I co-wrote the episode with Dannis Koromilas, who developed the show. This episode in which a couple of cops are taken hostage during a robbery and one of them killed is, like many of The Bridge episodes, based on something that happened in Toronto.

It's a timely episode because just this week the killer has been granted, "temporary unescorted prison absences."

When we researched the story it was very emotional and complicated from a storytelling point of view. There were internal problems in the police department between the rank and file and the officers (which is what the whole series is about), there was a shift change during the hostage taking, there were personalities involved, inexperience, unknown elements inside the restaurant. And drugs were a very big factor.

It was a mess.

I wasn't in on all the details about the creation of The Bridge (well, I wasn't in on any of them, of course) but almost all the material we discussed in the beginning was complicated and difficult. We're all influenced by The Wire (and in my case by writing multiple POV novels) and we were eager to dive into the material.

But it's a network show, not cable, so it's more episodic. The kind of character development you see over a season of The Wire - where tensions between characters builds, where consequences take time to play out but you know they will - were played down in favour of 'crime of the week' stories.

Some people really like The Bridge, and I'm glad about that. Some people really don't. The National Post called it the first, "right-wing pro-union show."

And this review is worth reading: http://the-legion-of-decency.blogspot.com/2010/03/guy-with-movie-in-his-head.html

This Week's Bridge

Friday at 10:00 on CTV:



In this trailer you get a couple of quick shots of the fantastic main set, the union HQ.

And a hint of the complications that will ensue, of course.

And the Bald-Faced Lie, er, Creative Writing Is...

Last week I took part in one of those internet things where you're supposed to tell some outrageous lies about yourself and slip in one true thing.

In my case the true thing would have stuck out too easily because I've never had anything really outrageous happen to me in my life so instead I listed six things that have happened in my books -- five which were based on actual incidents and one I completely made up.

In case you missed them, here they are:

1) Eight members of a motorcycle gang were murdered in one night on a farm northwest of Toronto.

2) An out of commission brewery just north of Toronto was turned into one of the world's biggest indoor marijuana grow ops with fifteen people working in it.

3) There is one golf course in Afghanistan and when the Taliban were driven out and it reopened a local shephard walked his flock on it for two weeks to make sure the land mines had all been removed before play resumed.

4) A Great Lakes freighter was turned into a giant, floating grow op and meth lab.

5) Eight senior members of the Toronto Police narcotics division were arrested on charges of corruption, drug dealing and violating witnesses' rights by RCMP officers brought in by the chief and after years of legal manouvering none were convicted of anything.

6) There really is a "Hobbyist Review Board" site online where men who visit prostitutes (which they refer to as "the hobby") review the women's services like restaurant reviews.


And the one that I completely made up is....



4) A Great Lakes freighter was turned into a giant, floating grow op and meth lab.

Although I shold say that while I was doing the research and finding out how much it would cost to leas a freighter, hire a captain and crew, get contracts to haul ore or salt around the lakes and fit out the cargo holds I started to wonder, is this a novel or a business plan?

I don't suppose if someone actually turns a freighter into a giant floating frow op and meth lab I could sue them, but if they get busted I might get some publicity.

Bald-Faced Liar - er, Creative Writer

Mike Dennis has pegged me to take part in the Bald-Faced Liar (no wait, “Creative Writer”) Blogger Award.

So, here it is:

• Thanks, Mike, for asking.
• Tell up to six outrageous lies about yourself, and at least one outrageous truth – or – switch it around and tell six outrageous truths and one outrageous lie. (See below.)
• Nominate some more “Creative Writers” who might have fun coming up with outrageous lies of their own. (Check the end of this post.)
• Post links to the blogs you nominate.
• Leave a comment on each of the blogs letting them know that you have nominated them.


All right, but I'm going to change things up a little. The thing is, I live an uneventful, boring, very happy life so anything I wrote that was "outrageous" would be a lie and everyone who knows me would know that.

I've always been that way. When I was a kid I liked sports but I was never good enough to get in the game much so I spent a lot of time on the bench, honing my keen observational skills. It may be like that for a lot of writers, what we're good at is watching things, figuring them out and explaining them to other people.

So, what I'm going to do is list six things that happen in my books. Five of them will be based on true stories I got from the newspaper and one will be something I completely made up. Okay? Here we go:

1) Eight members of a motorcycle gang were murdered in one night on a farm northwest of Toronto.

2) An out of commission brewery just north of Toronto was turned into one of the world's biggest indoor marijuana grow ops with fifteen people working in it.

3) There is one golf course in Afghanistan and when the Taliban were driven out and it reopened a local shephard walked his flock on it for two weeks to make sure the land mines had all been removed before play resumed.

4) A Great Lakes freighter was turned into a giant, floating grow op and meth lab.

5) Eight senior members of the Toronto Police narcotics division were arrested on charges of corruption, drug dealing and violating witnesses' rights by RCMP officers brought in by the chief and after years of legal manouvering none were convicted of anything.

6) There really is a "Hobbyist Review Board" site online where men who visit prostitutes (which they refer to as "the hobby") review the women's services like restaurant reviews.


Okay, there you go. If even one of those was true I'd say we live in a bizarre world, but really five of them are true.

Now I'm going to tag:
Jay Stringer, Dana King, Scott Parker, Bryon Quertermous, Steve Weddle and Keith Rawson.

Let It Ride - Available Today in the USA

My third novel, Let It Ride (which is called Swap in Canada) is published today in the USA by St. Martins Press and I want to thank everyone who helped make it possible. My family, my friends, the folks at St. Martins and ECW - it really takes a lot of peope to get a book from vague idea to finished product.

As I've said before, if I listed everyone who helped on an acknowledgements "page" it would be as long as the book.

I posted a little from the first chapter on Do Some Damage today.

The Bridge - March 5th - 9:00

CTV announced yesterday that the two-hour premiere of The Bridge will air Friday, March 5th at 9:00 and the show will then run Fridays at 10:00.




From the CTV website:

The Bridge peels away the veneer of a big-city police force to reveal the political machinations underneath. After the rank and file unanimously vote street cop Frank Leo (Battlestar Galactica's Aaron Douglas) into office as union head, he begins his quest to put street cops first and clean up the force from the ground up. But the old boys' network running the police force and the city's self-serving politicians are not about to sit idly by while a former street cop makes up his own rules. Frank walks a thin blue line as he battles wiretaps and a concerted campaign to bring him down, letting nothing stop him from fulfilling his unwavering vow that when cops are in trouble, he will be there.


The show looks great. I think the episode that I co-wrote with Dannis Koromilas will be episode number 4 or 5 and the episode I wrote (crooked cops running hookers - it was ripped from the headlines, or like my stuff usually is, ripped from the weird news on page six) will be number eight or nine.

Still no news on USA air dates. Maybe this summer.

Hamilton Spectator Review

This review by Don Graves appeared in the Hamilton Spectator last week:

The raw rhythm of the dialogue is unpredictable; rapid fired and shaping Let It Ride's characters from their outer persona to their inner fears and reflections.

It's relentless, at times almost too much so, but it pushes you from character to character, cop to hooker, drug dealer to lesbian spa -- from dream to nightmare.

There's a pot at the end of the rainbow--the Saints of Hell biker gang's gold bars. The road to get there is littered with flawed redemption, and painful, self-serving arrogance.

The pacing is hell on wheels -- sharp and bloody, with dialogue to match.

I wanted to come up for air at times, couldn't find a spot and was swept up again by the undercurrent of the writing. The ending made me smile.

Authentic and riveting.

Here's the link.

I feel like I need to keep pointing out, though, that Swap and Let It Ride are the same book.

Book Trailers

It seems we like talking about book trailers more than we'll ever actually like book trailers.

For Swap/Let It Ride I was fortunate to have some very talented writers say some very nice things about it so I put those quotes on this bit of video driving over the Ambassador Bridge from Detroit to Windsor, Ontario and I'm calling it a book trailer.



And I want to thank, again, all the people who have helped me so much in writing my books.

A Crime Novel

This is the cover for Swap in the USA where it's called Let It Ride.

This one says, "a crime novel," instead of, "a mystery," which I think is more accurate as there are no mysteries in my books for the reader.

There are a lot of characters in the book and maybe there could've been a woman on the cover, too, but otherwise I like this a lot.

The publication date is set for February 16th, 2010.