John McFetridge

What Was the First Album You Bought?

2012-01-27T12:51:00.004-05:00

Whenever the topic of “first concert” comes up I’ve got a great story. In January 1974 (I was fourteen) my cousin Mike was on his way out west and the day he stopped at our place in Montreal Bob Dylan was playing the Forum. Mike asked me if I wanted to go see the show and I said it had been sold out for months. Mike said, no problem, we headed down to the Forum and Mike bought us tickets (and maybe a little something else ;) from a scalper in Atwater Park.

The concert was great, though I have to admit I was too young to appreciate Bob Dylan and my favourite part was The Band.

But when it comes to “first album” I don’t have such a good story. The first album I bought was K-Tel’s “Fantastic: 22 original hits 22 original stars” in late 1973.

Oh sure, it had Bill Withers’ “Lean On Me,” and two Elton John songs, “Crocodile Rock” and “Rocket Man” it also had Vicki Lawrence’s (Mama, from The Carol Burnett show?!?) “The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia,” and something called “Bongo Rock” by The Incredible Bongo Band.

At the time my favourite songs on the album were probably Stories' "Brother Louie," and The Five Man Electrical Band's "I'm a Stranger Here." This was in the era beore "Disco Sucks" so there's an odd mix, for sure.

Here’s the complete song list:

Stories- Brother Louie
Elton John- Crocodile Rock
Dawn (featuring Tony Orlando)- Tie A Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree
Focus- Hocus Pocus
The Sweet- Little Willy
Bill Withers- Lean On Me
Lobo- It Sure Took A Long, Long Time
Vicki Lawrence- The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia
The Incredible Bongo Band- Bongo Rock
New York City- I'm Doin' Fine Now
Barry White- I'm Gonna Love You Just a Little More Baby
Maureen McGovern- The Morning After
Chester -Make My Life a Little Bit Brighter
Les Emmerson- Cry Your Eyes Out
Charlie Daniels- Uneasy Rider
Albert Hammond- The Free Electric Band
Foster Sylvers- Misdemeanor
Five Man Electrical Band- I'm A Stranger Here
Stampeders- Minstrel Gypsy
Peter Foldy- Bondi Junction
Jim Stafford- Swamp Witch
Elton John- Rocket Man

Turns out there was a TV commercial for this album but I don’t remember it:

Also, it seems that K-Tel had the same albums in the US and Canada with slightly different song lists.

So, what was the first album you bought?

George McFly Day!

2012-01-24T20:38:00.004-05:00

My friend Adrian McKinty has started something called George McFly Day. It's the day when the author copies of a book arrive at your house. Well, today is George McFly Day at my house as my copies of Tumblin' Dice arrived.

ECW Press have done their usual excellent job with the book and together with the previous three it's starting to look like a real series.

This will also be the first book in ECW's, "Buy a book, get the ebook free," promotion.

Official publication date is March 1st.

Oh, and the about the book runs like this:

The High, a band with a few hit songs in the late 1970s, have reunited to play the nostalgia circuit at casinos. But for bassist Barry and lead singer Cliff, this tour promises to be unforgettable and even more worthwhile than ever. In this fourth installment of the Toronto series, these two band members turn the tables on the gritty underworld of casinos, as they rob the loan sharks and drug dealers who work at every stop of the tour. After finding their old manager who had swindled millions from them years ago, Barry and Cliff decide to go for the big score and get it all back — and more. But when the Saints of Hell, the notoriously dangerous motorcycle gang, get involved, all bets are off.

As usual with my books there are probably too many characters, too many sub-plots and not enough mystery but as my son Douglas (on the right in photo above said, "You sure use the f-word a lot," so there's that.

Free ebook with purchase

2012-01-19T15:27:00.005-05:00

My publisher, ECW Press, is trying something new with their spring catalogue books including Tumblin' Dice; buy a book, get the ebook free.

Here's what the press release says:

“When readers pay top price for one of our books, we feel they should be able to read it in the way that fits best with their life: a printed book in a comfy chair, an eBook on their phone on the bus, whatever,” said David Caron, ECW Press co-publisher. “We also wanted to find a way to include bookstores that don’t sell eBooks, so that both the store’s customers and the bookseller feel that they are getting good value from an ECW Press book.”

The way it works is that when you buy a book in a bookstore or online you send an email to ECW, and include where you bought the book, the receipt number, and your preferred ebook format. ECW will send you the file, and a request to include you on their newsletter list, as well as some more ways to connect with ECW Press.

I like this plan, I think it's a good idea to be able to get the book in every format you want with one purchase.

I also like the idea of finding a way to involve bookstores that don't sell ebooks - indies, really. I saw an interesting post a little while ago from author Dean Wesley Smith about "gift card" ebooks that could be sold in bookstores. He described it like this:

"You walk into any major store and see a huge stand of gift cards. Now imagine that rack full of cards are all cards that represent electronic books. All the buyer of the card has to do is log in a code on the back of the gift card to download the book to any device."

And there's no reason it has to be a "major store," it could just as easily be a local independent bookstore. You could still browse, talk to a human being, get recommendations and make your purchase locally.

Getting back to ECW's spring list, there are a few books I'm looking forward to (in addition to Tumblin' Dice, of course), mostly the Mike Knowles Mystery Omnibus containing the first three Wilson novels.

Just in time to get caught up before the fourth Wilson novel, Never Play Another Man's Game is published in May.

Below the Line for Kobo and Nook and now Kindle, too.

2012-01-05T11:35:00.005-05:00

The first book I had published, Below the Line, is now available as an e-book for the Kobo and the Nook.

First published in 2003 as a trade paperback from Signature Editions, the description goes like this:

Admit it. When there's a film shooting in the neighbourhood, we all slow down to get a closer look, secretly hoping to catch a glimpse of a real live movie star. But who are all those other people bustling about the set with cables and lights and power tools? They're the Canadian crewmembers: the location scouts, caterers, make-up artists, grips, gaffers, and armies of assistants. These are the folks who bring the stars their breakfast, park the trucks, and paint the set the director's latest favourite shade. On budget sheets and cost reports they are known as the crewmembers "below the line." Inspired by their own experiences in film, authors John McFetridge and Scott Albert have created an authentic backdrop for their novel, with script pages, call sheets, and camera reports, giving the reader a complete behind-the-scenes experience.

I'm not sure how all those, "script pages, call sheets and camera reports," look in the e-books (they required the trade paperback to be a little extra-wide). When writing the book Scott and I made up a complete schedule for the movie being made (Life and Death in Little Italy ;) and fit our short stories around that. It was a lot of fun to do.

I don't know when the book will be available for the Kindle.

The Nook edition is here.

And the Kobo edition is here.

Edit: The Kindle edition is now available here.

Audiobooks!

2011-12-21T12:46:00.003-05:00

No details yet, but ECW Press have just signed a deal with audible.com to bring out my four novels as audiobooks sometime in 2012.

I only recently started listening to audiobooks as I walk the dog and I'm enjoying the experience quite a bit. Last week I was listening to Philip K. Dick short stories and I had this odd feeling that I was closer to the future he was describing - with my "portable listening device" - than I was to the past in which he wrote the stories.

Accounting for Musical Tastes

2011-12-12T11:17:00.003-05:00

My book titles have been from song titles and the books have been full of musical references. When I couldn't find a song title that I felt worked well enough for a book, I made one up, Swap, but I credited it to the band Smiley's People -- a band I was in during the mid-80's.

Finally, with Tumblin' Dice music is front and center as the main characters are in a band, The High, that has regrouped and is playing the casino circuit. And there are crimes. And cops. But mostly there's music.

And it's pretty much all 70's music.

Do I have terrible taste in music? Maybe. For a while there I was embarrassed by my musical taste and my lack of, oh, let's say adventurousness. My tastes are pretty mainstream and stuck mostly in the past.

According to Daniel Levitin, (Associate Professor, McGill University Department of Psychology and the McGill Program in Behavioural Neuroscience, who holds the Bell Chair in the Psychology of Electronic Communication) it turns out, "Our musical tastes begin to form in the womb. By 12 weeks, the fetus has a completely functioning auditory system and is able to hear music through the amniotic fluid (it sounds something like listening under water). One-year olds show clear preferences for music that they heard in utero. Until roughly the age of eight, children absorb whatever music they hear, during the time when the brain is working hard to make billions of new connections."

And he goes on to explain that it's pretty common to stick with the music we heard when we were young:

"Just as there are "critical periods" for language acquisition, there appear to be critical periods for the acquisition of music listening. As children hear music, they develop neural systems -— schemas — to capture the structural and tonal regularities of that music. Beginning around age 10, as the brain's mission shifts toward pruning out unused neural connections, musical tastes focus around the music we're used to. At about age 12, music begins to serve a social bonding function and we use music to distinguish our social group from others: this is the kind of music people like us listen to, that music is for them. As young teens, our musical tastes are further refined by what our friends are listening to. Most of us base our adult musical tastes on what we liked when we were 12 to 16. In some cases, through effort, we can expand our musical tastes as adults. But if we had relatively narrow tastes in our developing years, this is more difficult to do because we lack the appropriate schemas, or templates, with which to process and ultimately to understand new musical forms."

Prof. Levitin has written a very interesting book, This Is Your Brain On Music: The Science of a Human Obsession, although I got these quotes from a website.

So, maybe I just haven't put in enough effort to expand my musical tastes. Maybe it's not too late.

But for now, Tumblin' Dice is full of stuff like this:

Swap now available for the Kindle

2011-11-20T15:07:00.005-05:00

My novel, Swap, is now available for the Kindle. It's only listed at Amazon.com, not Amazon.ca but it does ship (download, I guess) to Canada.

You can find it here.

It is also listed at Amazon.com under the US title, Let It Ride, but that one doesn't download to Canada.

I'm very pleased that my next book, Tumblin' Dice, will have the same publisher for the USA and Canada (ECW Press) and there won't be any of this confusion between territories.

The Pitch

2011-11-13T17:17:00.004-05:00

My first Kindle book.

The cover pretty much says it all, but here's the Amazon description:

After working as a writer on the CBS/CTV cop drama, The Bridge, novelist John McFetridge (Dirty Sweet, Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, Let It Ride) began pitching his own ideas for TV shows to American and Canadian networks. The four stories in The Pitch are based on pilot scripts written for three of these potential series; Pulp Life, a comedy-noir half-hour cable series about a crime novelist helping an ex-con write his memoir – and commit crimes; East Coast, a network-style police procedural about narcotics cops on the Maine-New Brunswick border and; Revolution, a spy story set in Montreal in 1968 with a KGB agent as the hero.

One of the two Pulp Life stories first appeared in the Do Some Damage anthology, Collateral Damage, and the story East Coast has been available from Smashwords for a while.

The Second Pulp Life story and Revolution have never appeared anywhere before.

I've had this idea for a while to write e-books as if they're TV series - a "season-long" story arc playing out over 6 or 13 "episodes" but each one also having a self-contained story. Maybe publishing the "episodes" once a month and then also making them available as single collection, like a TV series box set of DVDs.

The stories in this collection were adapted from pilot scripts I wrote so the two Pulp Life episodes are about the same length that half-hour TV shows would be and East Coast and Revolution about the same length as an hour-long TV episode.

If you're interested, you can find the book here.

And maybe you could let me know if you think there should be any more 'episodes' of any of the 'series.'

The Cold Cold Ground

2011-11-12T18:36:00.001-05:00

What is it with novelists setting books in the years when they were around ten years old?

I'm working on book now set in 1970 - I was born in 1959.

Stephen King has a new book out this week that starts in 2011 and the main character time travels back to 1958 - Stephen King was born in 1947.

Adrian McKinty has a new book coming out in January set in Northern Ireland in 1981 - Adrian was born in 1968.

I like Stephen King's books and I expect I'll read this new one soon and like it well enough but I was lucky enough to read an advance copy of Adrian's, The Cold Cold Ground, and it is a fantastic book.

The back of the book description says:

There may be troubles ahead...Northern Ireland. Spring 1981. Hunger strikes. Riots. Power cuts. A homophobic serial killer with a penchant for opera. And a young woman's suicide that may yet turn out to be murder. On the surface, the events are unconnected, but then things - and people - aren't always what they seem. Detective Sergeant Duffy is the man tasked with trying to get to the bottom of it all. It's no easy job - especially when it turns out that one of the victims was involved in the IRA, but last seen discussing business with someone from the UVF. Add to that the fact that as a Catholic policemen, it doesn't matter which side he's on, because nobody trusts him - and Sergeant Duffy really is in a no-win situation. Fast-paced, evocative and brutal, "The Cold, Cold Ground" is a brilliant depiction of Belfast at the height of the Troubles - and a cop treading a thin, thin line.

I really hope there are more Sean Duffy books, the guy's a great character.

Tumblin' Dice

2011-10-27T11:42:00.004-04:00

Apparently the ARCs of my new novel, Tumblin' Dice, are going out this week. The official publishing date is March 2012.

I've asked the publisher if we could have some kind of promotion, maybe price the e-books of my previous novels at $2.99 or maybe give away a free e-book of one of the previous novels with the purchase of Tumblin' Dice.

What do you think?

Pulp Life

2011-06-14T12:58:00.004-04:00

My contribution to the new DS anthology, Collateral Damage, is a short story called Pulp Life – Episode One; The First Rule.

The reason it’s called “Episode One” is because I adapted it from the pilot script to a TV show I was pitching. I have a few more episodes in script form and I may adapt then into short stories as well, if anyone is interested in them.

Here’s how the story begins:

1

They’re sitting in Angelo’s BMW X5 in the alley behind East End Scrap Metal, been there less than ten minutes when Angelo says, “There he is,” and pulls the ski mask down over his face.

Danny’s looking in the side mirror, seeing a skinny guy getting out of a pick-up carrying a white plastic bag full of take out go up to a steel door with no handle on the outside of it and knock. Danny says, “Okay,” and pulls on his ski mask.

Getting out of the Beemer Angelo says, “You do the talking, they might recognize my voice,” and Danny looks at him, all three hundred pounds, and says, yeah, right, “That’s how they’ll know it’s you.”

“And just say ‘down on the floor,’ that’s all you say.”

Now Danny’s moving down the alley watching the kid as the door opens and Angelo says, “Right?”

“Right, I got it.”

For such a big man Angelo is fast, pushing past Danny and going up behind the kid with the take-out, slamming into him and the guy who’d opened the door, sending them both sprawling into the room beyond.

Danny gets to the door and steps into the office, seeing the kid and the guy who’d opened the door still on the floor and Angelo holding his gun on them – and on the six guys sitting around the table covered with money and cards.

And no one’s saying anything. For what seems like fucking forever until one of the card-players, Little Mickey, says, “So?”

Angelo’s looking back at Danny, his eyes bugging out of the holes in the ski mask and Danny says, oh right, “Yeah, down on the floor, let’s go, everybody, down on the floor.”

The card players all sigh and shake their heads slow and make a big deal of pushing back their chairs and Little Mickey says, “You assholes are dead.”

Angelo tosses a gym bag to Danny who starts picking up all the money on the table and then a book falls off and makes a loud thud on the concrete floor and Danny looks down at it, trade paperback of Wiseguy by Nicolas Pileggi, and says, “Who’s reading the book?”

No one says anything.

Danny leans forward, points his gun at the closest guy and the guy just shrugs so Danny holds his gun in both hands and points it at the next guy and says, “Who’s reading the book?”

No one says anything. The whole place is tense, about to explode and Little Nicky says, “For fuck’s sake, Vinny, the novel?”

Danny says, “It’s not a novel,” and Little Mickey shrugs and says, “What the fuck?”

“It’s not a novel, it’s non-fiction, it’s journalism.”

Everybody at the table is staring at Danny, not saying a word, no idea what the fuck he’s talking about and Little Mickey says, “It’s a fucking book.”
Danny grabs the rest of the money and says, “No one reads novels anymore.”

And Angelo shoves him out the door.

Six months before he started his career in armed robbery Danny Menard saw his third crime novel published to the enthusiastic tweeting, FaceBook posting and blogging of his online friends and the same complete lack of sales as his first two books. He was still teaching Intro to the Novel part-time at Humber College and thinking about writing porn and self-publishing it to Smashwords and Kindle when his agent, Sarah Benson, called him with an offer.

A guy named Angelo Gonidis had been a member of the Rebels motorcycle gang in Toronto and was getting out of prison after six years and he’d written a book. A memoir. Sarah said it was good, while he’d been in prison the Rebels had patched over to the national Saints of Hell and become big business and Angelo was pissed off about that and was telling everything in juicy detail but the writing was terrible. She already had publishers interested (bigger publishers than the one publishing Danny’s books) and even a movie deal in the works.

So Danny agreed to ghost write it and went and visited Angelo in Millhaven Maximum and they got along pretty well. Once every couple of weeks for six months Danny took the three hour bus ride from Toronto to Kingston and sat in the visitor’s room with Angelo and listened to his stories. At first Danny figured if Angelo’s book was no good he could use the stories in his own crime fiction and then Angelo made parole.

It was a bit of a surprise. He’d told Danny before the hearing that it would probably take him one more time, see the nice people again in another eighteen months, and Danny had said, “So that’s what this is about,” and Angelo’d said, “What?”

And Danny said the whole book deal was just to look good for the parole board and Angelo said, “No way, man, I’m serious about this,” and Danny had to admit that Angelo’d read all the books he’d dropped off, The Friends of Eddie Coyle (Angelo said, is this guy supposed to be a loveable loser?), Swag (gotta watch out for the chicks), The Big O (get better guns, man, and again, watch out for the chicks) and a couple of the biker memoirs (be better of they weren’t trying to suck up so much and pretend they didn’t like what they were doing).

So, no doubt, Danny liked Angelo and wanted to help him.

But the thing was, Angelo wasn’t finished with his life of crime and he took Danny along. They’d been at it a week, robbing Angelo’s old buddies, his partners in crime, as he called them that didn’t want him back. So fuck them.

________________________

And it goes from there. Nerdy writer Danny gets better and better at crime and lifelong criminal Angelo gets more and more interested in writing a really good book.

It was supposed to be one of those half hour cable series like Entourage or Weeds, a comedy but with sex and violence.

So, what do you think, should there be more episodes?

And if you'd like to read the whole story, it's in the anthology, Collateral Damage, available for the Kindle here.

Just In Time for Father's Day - a DSD collection

2011-06-13T11:39:00.006-04:00

Available here for Kindle (other formats to follow).

Once again the eight authors of DoSomeDamage.com bring together eight stories of murder and mayhem in these linked stories.

TERMINAL DAMAGE, a Spinetingler Magazine nominee for best anthology, featured stories linked together by one awful day in an airport.

The brand new COLLATERAL DAMAGE builds on the success of the earlier collection, this time focusing on Father's Day.

This collection boasts stories from Joelle Charbonneau (SKATING AROUND THE LAW, SKATING OVER THE LINE, the Paige Marshall mysteries), John McFetridge (LET IT RIDE, DIRTY SWEET), Dave White (WHEN ONE MAN DIES, WITNESS TO DEATH), Russel D. McLean (THE LOST SISTER, THE GOOD SON), Sandra Ruttan (THE FRAILTY OF FLESH, SUSPICIOUS CIRCUMSTANCES), Scott D. Parker (HANFORD: A Harry Truman Mystery, ROUND ONE), Jay Stringer (OLD GOLD, SCORCHED EARTH), and Steve Weddle (NEEDLE Magazine).

From the introduction:
Collateral Damage:

A Father’s Day Collection of Mayhem

To follow the immense fun -- um, I mean HUGE FINANCIAL SUCCESS -- of our TERMINAL DAMAGE collection, we came up with this book.

TERMINAL DAMAGE was tied together in that all the stories took place at an airport on the same day – when all hell broke loose.

The eight stories in COLLATERAL DAMAGE are tied together by Father’s Day. Revenge, mysteries, killings and more bleed through the pages of this book.

We hope you enjoy this one as much as folks seemed to enjoy TERMINAL DAMAGE.

Evening of Mystery at Sleuth of Baker Street, Toronto

2011-05-14T16:54:00.005-04:00

Thursday June 9th from 7:00 to 9:00 ECW Press is hosting an evening of readings by crime fiction authors at the NEW! IMPROVED! (actually I haven't been to the new store yet but I know it'll be full of books and Marion and JD will be there so it'll be at least as great) Sleuth of Baker Street at 905 Millwood Road (which isn't that far from the old location on Bayview).

There will be readings by Anne Emery, Mike Knowles, Brent Pilkey, Ross Pennie and me.

I think because I live closest to the store I've been asked to act as MC for the evening and introduce everyone. Rather than stand there and read biographies I've taken from each author's webpage I had this idea that I would ask each author a question.

Any suggestions for questions I should ask?

How I Came To Write This Book

2011-01-20T13:45:00.002-05:00

My friend Patti Abbott runs a series on her website once in a while featuring writers talking about how they came to write a particular book and today it's me talking about how I came to write Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere.

The blog is here.

Thanks Imagining Toronto

2010-12-29T12:54:00.002-05:00

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

2010-12-22T10:56:00.003-05:00

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

2010-12-13T09:33:00.002-05:00

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

2010-12-04T12:36:00.003-05:00

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

2010-11-23T17:46:00.005-05:00

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

2010-11-16T13:31:00.005-05:00

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

2010-11-10T09:23:00.002-05:00

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

2010-10-21T10:52:00.006-04:00

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

2010-09-14T13:00:00.003-04:00

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

2010-07-23T14:30:00.004-04:00

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

2010-07-20T22:55:00.002-04:00

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

2010-05-21T14:19:00.003-04:00

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

2010-05-20T15:47:00.004-04:00

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

2010-05-10T19:54:00.003-04:00

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

2010-04-30T16:03:00.005-04:00

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

2010-04-20T09:38:00.007-04:00

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

2010-04-08T13:24:00.004-04:00

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

2010-03-31T12:22:00.004-04:00

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

2010-03-24T10:12:00.001-04:00

Cheap e-books!

2010-03-23T09:05:00.005-04:00

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

2010-03-17T08:44:00.003-04:00

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

2010-03-09T10:44:00.002-05:00

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...

2010-02-23T14:47:00.003-05:00

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

2010-02-18T09:29:00.006-05:00

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

2010-02-16T10:07:00.003-05:00

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

2010-02-03T09:41:00.004-05:00

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

2010-02-01T11:12:00.003-05:00

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

2010-01-21T09:20:00.003-05:00

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

2010-01-19T11:22:00.004-05:00

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.

Santa in a Red Dress - Live!

2009-12-20T11:43:00.003-05:00

ECW Press recorded the readings at their Lit Party a couple of weeks ago and here's me reading the short story, Santa in a Red Dress that's in the December issue of Driven Magazine.

I've done a few of these readings the last few years so you'd think I'd be getting better at it, but no. Still just stare at the page and read.

The other ECW authors who read were really good and you can see them all here:

http://www.youtube.com/user/ecwpress

Judge slapped for bias in pot case

2009-12-17T13:00:00.004-05:00

He's right, but does that matter?

This is the kind of story that makes the background for my books. While sentencing a man convicted of running a marijuana grow op, the judge rejected a federal prosecutor's argument that a jail term was necessary to discourage people from getting involved in the drug trade.

"What's your basis for saying that?" the judge pressed. "Because nobody has been deterred. People have been going to jail for drug offences for – for a couple of generations now and the drug – the drug plague is worse than it ever was."

Allen questioned why, when a form of sentencing "doesn't work," he would try it again and again.

"Isn't that a form of insanity?" he asked.

And then the judge said what I've been writing about for three books now:

All society is really doing by prohibiting the production and consumption of marijuana is "giving the Hells Angels several billion dollars worth of income every year," Allen said.

Of course, I try to just present the criminal world as I see it. I try hard not to moralize or make my books too didactic. I have no answers to the "drug plague" as the judge called it, but if he's right about this part:

... the chances of a Dutch teen smoking marijuana – which is available at their local coffee shop – are substantially lower than the likelihood of an American teenager using the drug, he said.

It might be worth looking into.

A few years ago a teenager told me that he and his friends smoked dope because it was easier to get for them than beer. This kid claimed it was because stores that sold beer and alcohol (privately owned or government owned - I've lived in places with each system and there's little difference) didn't want to risk the fine and the criminal charge for selling to them but the drug dealer they bought from was already committing a criminal offense, so he didn't care.

To me there's no doubt that the drug trade supplies organized crime with a huge amount of capital and like all capitalists they reinvest that money and try to 'grow' their business into other areas.

And for now, it's all material for me.

And there's no shortage of material.

The Toronto Star article about the judge is here.

Santa in a Red Dress

2009-12-12T17:19:00.003-05:00

Driven Magazine's December issue is now available online and includes my short story, Santa in a Red Dress.

There's also a really good interview with Stephen King about his new novel Under the Dome and a whole bunch of cool gift ideas.

The whole issue is available as a .pdf here.

Suspicious Canadians

2009-12-01T09:51:00.007-05:00

This was sent to me by my good friend, Adrian McKinty.*

Very funny.

* I've never atually met Adrian, but I follow his very well-written, thought-provoking and entertainingly opinionated blog and I highly recommend his novels, the most recent of which is Fifty Grand.

Apparently Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top gives people his business card that has only his name and, "Friend of Eric Clapton," printed on it. I was thinking I'd like cards with my name and, "Friend of ___," but thanks to this interweb thing it would have to list an awful lot of people, suspicious or not.

Flash Fiction Challenge

2009-11-30T09:30:00.004-05:00

The flash fiction gang (Patti Abbott, Gerald So and Aldo Calcagno) are running another Flash Fiction Challenge, this time it's called, Wal-Mart: I Love You and my contribution is up on Do Some Damage, along with stories from Steve Weddle and Jay Stringer.

The People of Wal-Mart website was the inspiration, and I certainly used it for my story.

New Short Story

2009-11-14T14:07:00.003-05:00

On Thursday, November 12th I was very pleased to be a part of the ECW Press-Fine Print Fall Lit Party in Toronto.

My excellent editor, Michael Holmes, introduced the five writers and we each read a little from our latest works.

Richard Rosenbaum read his introduction from the anthology he edited, Can'tLit: Fearless Fiction from Broken Pencil Magazine which was great. He said out loud all those things we think about boring, conservative Canadian literature, the kind of stuff that pretends to be deep but really just reinforces the soft liberal world view of middle-class Canadians.

Damian Rogers read poems from her collection, Paper Radio. In his introduction Michael said that sometimes as writers grow older they can be embarrassed about their earlier writing (sometimes!?! the best thing that can happen to a young writer is not getting published) but that's not something Damian will ever have to worry about, and based on the poems she read, he's right. A poem about a roller rink in Windsor? Great stuff.

Mark Sinnett read from his novel, The Carnivores (which I bought after the reading), a great scene that took place during the buildup to Hurricane Hazel which hit Toronto in 1954. It was form the point of view of a young cop working that night and while I liked everything he read, his description of people on the roof of the Gladstone Hotel thowing beer bottles into the river flowing down Queen Street, and, "The fact that instead of smashing they simply bobbed west seemed to strike them as miraculous," sold me. I'm only halfway through the book and it is terrific.

The final reader of the evening was Sky Gilbert. He read a few poems from his latest collection, A Nice Place to Visit. Sky and I have some very different memories of Costa Rica. His poems were funny - laugh out loud funny - and then heartbreaking. A real pro.

I decided not to read from Swap and instead read an entire short story that will be in Driven Magazine later this month. I said in my introduction that I really like Driven, it's a glossy "men's magazine" that usually has a car or a celebrity on the cover that also has fiction. Of course, as I said, it usually has fiction from a big-name, award winning, bestselling author. So, I was thrilled when the editor called me and asked me if I could write a story for the mag. After I said sure, he admitted that they had a big-name, award winning, bestselling author lined up but he dropped out at the last minute, so could I write it over the weekend? Um, ah, yeah, sure. Then he said, "Oh, and could you call it Santa in a Red Dress?"

For now I'll post the openingof the story. After it comes out in the magazine (November 23rd) I'll post the whole thing:

JT had been with the Saints of Hell going on two years, since almost the day he got back from Afghanistan, moving up from hangaround to prospect, still doing the shit work till he could get his patch. Like this: driving two days to Moncton to meet a guy who’d picked up 80 kilos of coke offshore.

Just before dawn, the freighter Sharon David, carrying low-sulphur coal from Maracaibo, Venezuela, to Sydney, Nova Scotia, passed by a mile off the coast, and one of the Filipino crew members tossed an oil drum overboard. At sun-up, a lobster fisherman named Jerry McNeil and his brother-in-law followed the GPS signal to the drum and pulled it onboard.

They had the drum open and the coke in three hockey bags before they even got back to shore. Later that day, Jerry drove almost four hours from Port Dufferin to the Magnetic Hill Motel in Moncton, parked his pickup in front of room number six and went to the coffee shop. Ten minutes later, JT came out of room number nine, took the hockey bags, 60 pounds apiece, and left a backpack with 40 grand in cash—enough to get Jerry through one more season, maybe even another, the price of lobsters didn’t go down as much as the price of fuel goes up.

JT drove back to Toronto, 15 hours in a brand-new Camaro, 300 horsepower and a Boston Acoustics stereo. On the Trans-Can through New Brunswick he saw a few signs for the US border: twelve miles, nine miles, always so close, and he thought how the coke he was carrying would bring almost twice as much wholesale in Canada, over 40 grand a kilo, because the market was so tightly controlled. Of course, the retail price in Canada was less than in the US, maybe 50 bucks a gram instead of 70 or 75, because the Saints sold to anybody and let them fight it out on the street. But that wasn’t his problem.

Getting the patch, that was his problem. Once JT had that, he’d never have to touch the product again...

What a Great Idea!

2009-11-05T14:06:00.005-05:00

An article in the Toronto Star today told the story of Catherine Raine and her mission to visit - and write about on her blog - every one of the 99 branches of the city of Toronto Public Library system.

The article is here and Catherine's blog is here. It's really good.

Now, Toronto has all the problems of any big city but the library system is fantastic. My family and I use the library all the time. Our local is Beaches Branch:

The building was renovated a few years ago and it's terrific, right on Kew Gardens Park, a great place to do some research or just sit and read a book.

But the thing that makes the Toronto Library system so good is that I can go online and order any book (or CD or DVD) in the whole system and have it delivered to my local branch.

I grew up in a small, mostly english town in Quebec called Greenfield Park and the library was an old house on Chruchill Street. It had narrow, rickety stairs and the science fiction books I loved were shelved in what was the attic. Isaac Asimov should know how many fears I had to overcome to go get those books by myself.

Now, Greenfield Park has been incorporated into the city of Longueil and has a very nice library branch. It's still on Churchill, across the street from the old haunted house.

So, what's library system in your town like?

Two Readings in One Week

2009-11-03T16:47:00.003-05:00

On Tuesday, November 10th, I'll be at the Princess Theatre in Waterloo at 7:00 pm as the opening act for Robert Rotenberg and my pal, international bestseller, Linwood Barclay.

Robert Rotenberg is a good guy, too, and his first novel Old City Hall received some great reviews.

Tickets are ten bucks but you can get in free if you buy Linwood's new book, Fear the Worst.

The event is being put on by Words Worth Books in Waterloo and they've put up a good website with info here.

Then on Thursday, November 12th, I'm very happy to be part of the ECW Press Fall Lit Party.

It's at Supermarket, 268 Augusta Avenue (in the heart of Kensington Market) and starts at 7:30.

Also reading will be Sky Gilbert, Damien Rogers, Richard Rosenbaum and Mark Sinnett.

It'll be a lot of fun.

Everybody Knows - the paperback

2009-10-28T12:30:00.003-04:00

I have a post up at the Do Some Damage blog to day about Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere's roundabout trip to paperback - which comes out this week.

And I want to thank everyone for all their support for that book, and for all my books. You're all fantastic.

It's here.

Is He Vince?

2009-10-22T10:10:00.004-04:00

So, my co-writer Dannis Koromilas and I are adapting Dirty Sweet into a screenplay.

So far so good.

We don't want to get too far ahead of ourselves, but it's good to be optimistic (at least for me, makes those days where we have to cut out so many of my beautifully crafted scenes easier) so we're talking about our ideal cast.

And I'd like to know if people think that guy - Russell Peters - would make a good Vince.

If the movie gets made it's likely Russell will be in it somwhere. In Hollywoodspeak, Dannis has a "relationship" with him.

I think he'd make a terrific Vince.

One thing we really noticed breaking down the novel for the screenplay is that Vince doesn't do all that much, he mostly watches other people do stuff. He reacts.

When you watch Russell perform, a lot of his act is interacting with the audience - reacting to what people say. He's very good at it. He's one of those guys who can express an awful lot with very few words and a raised eyebrow.

So, what do yo think. Is he Vince?

Interview and Review

2009-09-29T14:42:00.003-04:00

An interview I did a few weeks ago with my own publisher is up on their website now:

http://www.ecwpress.com/[catpath]/john_mcfetridge_interview

An interview with your own publisher has to be the very definition of softball questions, but it is kind of fun.

Also this week, Scene magazine in London, Ontario reviewd Swap. There's no link, but I'm happy to post the whole thing here:

Following on the heels of the well-received 2008 release, Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, Canadian author John McFetridge returns to the gritty streets of Toronto with his newest novel, Swap. When a husband and wife are murdered in their car on a busy downtown onramp, their unusual deaths spark an investigation leading police into the darkest recesses of the city’s criminal underworld. All of a sudden Toronto the Good isn’t looking so good anymore, and in McFetridge’s vision, the multicultural metropolis seems to assume a personality all its own - brooding, worldly, corrupt. Typical demonstrations of underworld power are passé here, and biker gangs consisting of well-groomed men driving European sports cars or Hummers roam streets filled with peeler bars and massage parlors. On the other side of the tracks, the cops are in disarray – having been the subject of a recent internal affairs probe - and rifts have started to fracture the force. Detectives Price and McKeon find themselves following the finest thread of a lead in the married couple’s murder case to an exclusive Toronto swinger’s club, where their investigation really starts to pick-up steam. McFetridge’s readership will recognize some of the shady characters from his earlier book here – Richard, Nugs, J.T. - but that knowledge is hardly required to appreciate the story. The magic of the writer’s electric prose lies in his sense of pacing and his ability to create plausible dialogue between characters. McFetridge doesn’t judge their actions; he lays bare their motivations, and benefi ts from all the tantalizing narrative possibilities he finds there. Come to think of it, so do we. ~ Chris Morgan.

.

Two Reviews - one good, one bad

2009-09-17T15:35:00.005-04:00

Last week the Winnipeg Free Press ran a negative review of Swap:

Torontonian John McFetridge shook the manicured trees of Hogtown complacency with last year's gritty cops-and-bikers saga, Everyone Knows This Is Nowhere. But he seems to have lost his GPS in Swap (ECW Press, 240 pages, $25), a grimy sequel that seems designed only to set off another round of "oh-we-bad" titters among the overreaching Big Smoke glitterati.

The corps of ethnically hued cops is back, but this time they're little more than aw-shucks narrators on the sidelines of a greasy show that's all about the bad guys.

McFetridge strives for whorehouse/grow op-in-the-burbs shock value, but it all just seems like a low-rent Sopranos episode, full of suburban mob angst and endless reminiscing about gang warfare past.

An unrelieved dumpster-dive into Canada's criminal underclass, Swap is just too earnestly exploitive, a sleazy travelogue for dirtbags.

I think it's good to get some bad reviews. In this case it's tempered by the fact the reviewer also didn't like the new Dexter or the new Kathy Reich (full reviews here), but also I think I tried to write a book that didn't please everyone. If the book is going to be something that some people really like, it's also going to be something that some people really don't like.

Of course, that review is also tempered by a starred review in Canada's book magazine, Quill and Quire:

In Swap, John McFetridge gives readers an in-depth look into the world of organized crime in the form of outlaw biker gangs, and the difficulties law enforcement faces trying to quash them...The tension is palpable and the reader waits for the one spark that will ignite a bloody turf war...Swap’s dialogue displays much of [Elmore] Leonard’s sparkle, and the novel’s terse, staccato prose evokes [Ken] Bruen. But Swap is more than just the sum of its influences. It grabs you by the throat and squeezes until you agree to read just one page, just one more page.

You gotta take the bad with the good, right?

Street Performers

2009-09-14T06:27:00.010-04:00

Do you like them?

Buskers?

You're walking down the street minding your own business and suddenly some guy is in your face juggling a bowling ball, a rubber chicken and a cross-country ski - is that fun?

Well, yes, sometimes it is. I've seen some great buskers. Some of the best musicians I've seen in my life have been playing in the subway or on the sidewalk ignored by almost everyone (and often by me).

This year at the CNE in Toronto we watched a guy try and do a routine that involved laying down on a bed of glass while someone stood on a bed of nails on his chest. I say "try" but actually the routine was good - it was just going on at the same time the planes were practising for the air show so everyone in the audince kept looking up to the sky.

All this is by way of explanation, of excuse, for how I got myself into a street performer's act in Dublin.

Normally if a busker asked me for help I'd run away. But here I was walking down Grafton street in Dublin with a video camera in my hand and I stopped to watch a guy set up his act. I kept the camera running. The act started. The guy was enthusiastic and funny but the audience was deadpan.

I started to feel for him. I was thinking about that poor guy at the Ex.

The next thing I know the guy on Grafton Street, Figo he calls himself - is standing in front of me asking to borrow my jacket. And to make it worse, he'd already asked another guy who refused. I could see this guy's act slipping away and I felt for him. I've given readings in front of two people, I know what it's like when the audience just isn't interested.

So I hand him my jacket.

And good luck to him, I think.

But the next thing I know, he's pulling me out in front of the audience.

Wait a minute, this isn't what I signed up for. My jacket, okay. I didn't even mind that he was joking how he might set it on fire while he did his trick with the cigarette (he was making it disappear, saying it would only take about five minutes as he smoked it. He also said he didn't actually smoke, that was just for his act - he was up to about thirty acts a day) but there was no way I'd go out there in front of the crowd.

But I do like to see a big crowd when I do a reading.

So maybe this busker and I were sort of in it together. I couldn't very well ruin his act, he's some guy trying to make a living.

The next thing I know I'm handing my video camera to a woman beside me and I'm in front of the crowd.

Maybe I don't like a big crowd for a reading. Maybe that intimiate connection between a writer and a single reader is the way to go.

Or maybe I should dress up in red tights and make cigarettes disappear.

Maybe not.

But Figo made the cigarette disappear and didn't even burn my jacket.

Great, now I can get off stage.

Oh wait, what's this? Now he's blowing up a balloon and saying he's going to swallow it. Good for him, I'll just get my camera back and film that, might even put it up on YouTube, the guy is pretty entertaining and what's this?

Now he wants me to walk around in front of the audience holding the balloon.

Did I mention the Bobby hat?

Then I probabkly also forgot to mention he's asked me to walk around looking as "butch" as I can.

The really sad thing, now that I see this picture, is that's exactly what I'm trying to do.

Before he swallowed the balloon, though, he put a rubber glove over his head and blew it up.

The rubber glove, I mean, not his head.

But really, he's just getting warmed up.

The big finale involves Figo laying down on a bed of broken glass.

And me standing on his chest.

Now it really feels like that poor guy at the Ex who couldn't get anyone's attention. I can't give up on Figo now.

As he's setting it up he asks me how much I weigh and I think does Ireland use that weird "so many stone" meaasurement because I have no dea how many stone I am and if I say ____ pounds will anyone get it and then I realize I'm not going to put a number on it, so I just say, "Too much."

He's a good performer, he can work a crowd and Figo goes with that. Makes a bunch of jokes that good Canadian diet and pats my stomach.

So here I am in front of a big crowd of people showing off my fat stomach.

Figo and I are no longer in this together. I am going to put my full weight (however many freakin' stone it is) on him. Oh yeah, baby.

He gets a kid out of the audience to help me balance.

He tells the sudience if they don't each put at least five Euro in his hat he'll go back to his old job of selling drugs to children and the kid who's supposed to help me balance says, "Can I have some."

This is the same kid who, when Figo said not to worry, he wasn't going to burn my jacket yelled, "Burn it."

Now I'm going to stomp on Figo and then punch this smarmy kid in the face.

But I can actually hear the glass crunching as I step on this guy. His face is red and he's tensed up every muscle in his body.

This is actually pretty cool, this guy is really trying to entertain this crowd.

And the kid manages to keep my huge body weight steady for ten seconds, so good on him, too.

Now I'm actually excited to be a part of the act.

The audience does a big countdown from 10 and when they get to, "Zero!!!" I step off.

Figo jumps up to accept the appluase and I see chunks of glass stuck to his back.

He's right, I think, that deserves five Euro.

Figo tells me it's only like two bucks.

All in all a pleasant afternoon in Dublin.

Though I can't help but think Peter Rozovsky comes to Ireland and he sees the hurling final, a once in a lifetime exciting game, and I get to stand on a man's chest.

The Globe and Mail Review

2009-09-06T22:10:00.004-04:00

It's always stressful waiting for reviews of a new book - or really just wondering if you'll even get any reviews.

I've been very fortunate with my books to have received generally very good reviews.

I must admit I've been surprised that Margaret Cannon of the Globe and Mail has been so supportive. I guess I've always felt that she usually favours more traditional mysteries with a central detective, lots of suspects, clues and a resolution. But the fact that I don't really have any of those things in my books doesn't seem to bother her.

Here's her review of Swap:

If you're interested in learning about the backside of Toronto the Good, Swap is a great place to begin. Drugs, guns, gangs and just plain nastiness hide in the suburbs, just outside the shiny city centre. For Vernard McGetty, a Detroit homeboy in search of lucrative partnerships, Toronto's biker gangs are a perfect fit. They deliver the dope, he delivers the guns. Of course, he's a bit mystified by bikers who ignore their Harleys in order to drive SUVs, but who cares about appearances?

While Get is planning his get, Toronto detectives Price and McKeon have a pair of dead bodies on their hands. The couple are Mr. and Mrs. Clean, not so much as a traffic ticket. Someone sailed by and shot them as their car headed up a freeway ramp. Who knows what company these nice family folk may have been keeping?

McFetridge has his difficulties keeping the plot moving, and some of the dialogue owes a bit to Quentin Tarantino, but this is a slick little story.

Pretty good, I think.

In Stores Now

2009-08-30T12:41:00.006-04:00

In Canada.

The official publication date is September 1st, but I was in my local bookstore yeterday and there was Swap.

It sort of feels like it's been snuck into stores in some kind of stealth operation. No reviews yet, but there is a fantastic blurb on the back from Ken Bruen:

"Swap is a stunning leap forward from an already fine author. This is John channelling Elmore Leonard at the height of his game and with dialogue Tarantino would kill for. A plot that moves lik Pulp Fiction but with a nice Canadian slant that keeps it fresh and different. John's creation of the African-American characters is like Sallis at his finest. With a wicked sense of humour that is irresistible, Swap moves Canadian mystery right to the top."

There's also a nice blurb on the back from Adrian McKinty and one from Tom Piccirilli.

Of course, I had a lot of help writing this book (and everthing else I've ever written) and I don't do those thank-yous in the books because I'll either leave people out or they'll be dozens of pages long but in this case I do want to make a special thank you to Patti Abbott for reading the manuscript and helping me with the Detroit references. I never would have come up with, "... a big house in Grosse Pointe, six bedrooms, a fucking library and a Sub-Zero on the patio in the backyard."

By the way, while I was in the bookstore I bought a first novel by Eugene Meese called A Magpie's Smile because Margaret Cannon gave it a good review in the Globe and Mail and it's set in Calgary in the late 70's and I lived in Calgary then. The wild west. It was booming then with tens of thousands of people moving in every month and I was one of them. I'm looking forward to the book.

And, one more time, here's the trailer for Swap.

The Bridge in the paper

2009-08-25T10:42:00.004-04:00

This morning I woke up to see my boss on the front page of the Toronto Star. That can be a good thing or a bad thing. In this case it was very good.

Craig Bromell is the Executive Producer and Creative Consultant on the TV show, The Bridge. It's really his show, based on his experiences as a Toronto cop and then as head of the police union.

The article is straitforward enough, but then the comments start. Right away you can see how polarizing a guy Craig was in Toronto. Great fodder for a TV show.

In the pilot episode the character based on Craig, Frank Leo, says, "All I ever wanted to be was a cop." When he sees the way cops are treated by the brass and the politicians, the way cops are always guilty until proven innocent and the way their own bosses will sell out the cop on the street - the ones in the line of fire - for cheap political gain, it becomes too much for him and he gets elected pesident of the union.

At that point the brass go after him hard, one deputy chief telling him, "Whenever the public sees a corrupt, out of control cop, they'll see your face."

So now the guy who only ever wanted to be a good cop becomes the poster boy for bad cops.

Quite the internal conflict for a main character. Lots of emotional stuff to deal with. It's the kind of show that may take a few episodes to really find its footing so it's great that CTV and CBS are fully committed.

The Toronto Star article is here.

Creative Writing Classes

2009-08-24T09:52:00.005-04:00

About twenty-five years ago I enrolled at Concordia University for English Lit and History. (a few years before that I'd tried a year of economics and, well, it didn't work out.)

I knew I wanted to write but I was unsure about creative writing classes. Can you learn to write, or do you just have to do it and hope you have "talent?" Concordia had a creative writing program and it seemed good, so I took some classes.

At the time, and for years after, I really didn't think the classes had much effect on me. Garry Geddes, a poet and now non-fiction writer, taught the short story class I took. He had us read our stories out loud. Only years later did I realize what a valuable tool this was for understanding how important voice is in fiction.

In the intervening years I've realized that I learned an awful lot in those creative writng classes. I don't know if the other people in those classes needed to learn as much as I did, but a few of them are very good writers today.

Michel Basilieres was the guy who told me about the Concordia program. His novel Black Bird, published by Knopf won the Amazon.ca/Books in Canada First Novel Award in 2004 and was nominated for the Steven Leacock Award and the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book.

Tess Fragoulis was in that class with Garry and was probably the most fully-formed writer at the time. Her story collection, Stories to Hide From Your Mother, was published in 1997 and her first novel Ariadne's Dream (sex, drugs, Greek mythology) was published in 2001.

There was also a guy in that class named David McGimpsey who understood poetry more than anyone else in the program. I mean he understood poetry the way I understood hockey. And he frustrated the poetry profs by using that understanding to write epic poems about Gilligan's Island and baseball. David has published a few books, still in the "literary-pop culture" world. Sitcom is very good but my favourite is still Hamburger Valley California.

And now comes word that another person from that same class, Lisa Pasold, has her first novel coming out in three weeks. Lisa has published a couple of very good poetry collections, Weave and A Bad Year for Journalits and I've been looking forward to this novel ever since she let me read the manuscript earlier this year.

Rats of Las Vegas is about... you know what, she has a petty good book trailer explaining it:

And there's more info on her webpage.

So, I would say that maybe the gestation period for creative writing classes can be quite a while, but it's a good idea to study your craft.

What do you think?

Mad Men week

2009-08-16T17:09:00.004-04:00

It seems everywhere I look this week I see articles about Mad Men. Which is good, it's nice to see such a smart, well-written TV show getting so much press.

A lot of it seems to be the same, though, gushing fan stuff, so I was glad to pick up Jesse McLean's book, Kings of Madison Avenue.

Part episode guide, part history lesson and all fun, the book is an in-depth look at the show by someone who clearly loves it but isn't afraid to critisize it as well.

Of course, I don't get AMC so I'll have to wait until the third season gets released on DVD, but it seems worth the wait. It was nice of AMC to put last season's finale on their website to refresh everyone's memories.

New Blog

2009-08-03T19:31:00.003-04:00

A little while ago I was asked if I'd liked to contribute to one of those group blogs like Muderati (which I really like) and I said, "yes," before I thought about it.

Now, I'm not too sure what I'm going to have to contribute (though the TV show gig has provided a lot of ideas for rants) but my day is going to be Wednesday.

The blog went live today with a post from Steve Weddle. The rest of the team is Jay Stringer, Dave White, Russell McLean, Scott Parker and Mike Knowles.

Looks like a lot of fun. You can find it at: http://dosomedamage.blogspot.com/.

One Week

2009-07-25T12:17:00.002-04:00

My friend Alan Taylor came up with this challenge:

In the course of the next week, everything you ingest intellectually, books, TV, radio, film, magazines, papers, music will be written down.

Sounds cool, so I'm doing it. Started last night. I watched TV (I have a feeling this activity will show up more than I want it to). I saw the comedy/mystery show Castle which is good solid light entertainment and then the Dateline show about America's addiction to oil.

So far today I read the paper and bunch of blogs and I'm listening to classic rock on the radio. It's the 1969 weekend, to commemorate Woodstock, I guess, so there's been a lot of music from that year and from bands that were at Woodstock.

Okay, for one week:

Interview

2009-07-20T19:46:00.003-04:00

Author Rafe McGregor interviewed me a couple of weeks ago and has the results up on his blog today.

Please check out Rafe's website where you can download (for free!) two audio short stories; The Long Man (featuring Sherlock Holmes) and Blue Mail a contemporary noir thriller.

Swap - catalogue copy

2009-07-07T12:21:00.005-04:00

It's impossible to write a synopsis. Well, maybe it's just impossible to write a synopsis for your own work. You never focus on the right things, you over-explain the wrong parts or talk about the wrong characters.

Or maybe that's just me.

So the good folks at ECW wrote this fine synopsis which appears in their catalogue:

Detectives Price and McKeon are called to the scene — a husband and wife found slumped in their car, parked sideways on a busy downtown on-ramp, a bullet in each of their heads. That's what's in the papers, and that's all the public sees. Toronto the Good, with occasional specks of random badness.

But behind that disposable headline, Toronto's shadow city sprawls outwards, a grasping and vicious economy of drugs, guns, sex, and gold bullion. And that shadow city feels just like home for Get — a Detroit boy, project-raised, ex-army, Iraq and Afghanistan, only signed up for the business opportunities, plenty of them over there. Now he's back, and he's been sent up here by his family to sell guns to Toronto's fast-rising biker gangs, maybe even see about a partnership.

The man Get needs to talk to is Nugs, leader of the Saints of Hell. Nugs is overseeing unprecedented progress, taking the club national, uniting bikers coast-to-coast (by force if necessary), pushing back against the Italians, and introducing a veneer of respectability. Beards trimmed to goatees, golf shirts instead of leather jackets, and SUVs replacing the bikes. And now the cops can't tell the difference between bikers and bankers.

Detectives Price and McKeon? All they can do is watch and grimace and drink, and sweep up the detritus left in crime's wake — dead hookers, cops corrupted and discarded, anyone else too slow and weak to keep up, or too stupid not to get out of the way. This is Toronto's shadow city, and you won't recognize it.

That's pretty much what the book is about.

The Inside Flap

2009-07-02T16:43:00.002-04:00

ECW asked me to pull a 200 word section out of Swap/Let it Ride to put on the inside flap. "Should be more or less self-contained, and emblematic of the whole book."

Well, that' a bit of a challenge. So, I offered these three possibles. Which one do you think they should use?

I.

"With gold you don’t have to worry about exchange
rates.”

“But gold, it can go down.”

Sunitha sat up on the bed, cross-legged, right beside
Get, looking right at him. “And it can go up. It could be a
thousand bucks an ounce in a few months. It could be two
grand an ounce next year.”

“Or it could be shit.”

“No, honey, it’ll always be gold.”

Get took a drag, let out the smoke, and dropped the butt
in the coffee cup. He took his time turning back to look at
her and she waited, knowing he was interested. She
nodded, yeah, looking at him, he never even looked at her
tits, just looked right at her and said, “And you want it.”

“Yeah, don’t you?”

“You talking about stealing from these guys?”

“Yeah, why, you got a problem with that?”

He laughed. “Not if you think you can get away with it.”

“That’s the beauty of gold, you get it, you can take it
anywhere.”

“Once you have it.”

She said, right, yeah, that’s the thing. “Once you have it.”

“And you don’t know where it is.”

“They don’t exactly advertise.”

“No,” Get said, “I don’t expect they do.”

Then Sunitha said, “But I bet you could find out,” and
Get laughed. She slapped his chest, harder than she
expected, but he didn’t budge, and she said, “This isn’t
funny.”

“No? You don’t think so? Coming up with a plan to
steal a few million bucks worth of gold from guys whose
official motto is, what is it again? Oh yeah, ‘Three people
can keep a secret if two of them are dead.’ They have a
special club in the club, you have to kill somebody to get
into. You don’t think that’s a funny idea?”

She looked right at him and said, “Not if you get away
with it.”

II.

The on-ramp to the Gardiner Expressway was closed; a
fire truck, an ambulance, and a cop car blocking the way,
and uniformed men and women from all of them standing
around smoking.

McKeon popped the siren a couple times and flashed
the headlights to clear a path in the traffic and pulled
right up to the ramp on Lake Shore, under the expressway.
One of the uniformed cops, a guy in his fifties, said,
“McKeon, you’re going to love this.”

She was already out of the car walking towards the
scene saying, “I am?”

The uniform, Dixon, said oh yeah, this is a good one.

“Guy was driving up the ramp, see?” The car, a brand-
new Dodge 300 with the big front grille and the little
windows making it look like a thirties gangster car, had
gotten halfway up the ramp, stopped, and rolled back,
turning sharply so its back end was against the left side
and its front end against the right, blocking the road.
Dixon said, “And pow, somebody shoots him in the
head.”

Closer now, McKeon and Price could see the passenger
window covered in blood splatter and the driver’s head
flopped onto the steering wheel.

McKeon saw the woman’s body, waist up on the
passenger seat, the rest of her on the floor, like she was
kneeling and slid off, as Dixon was saying, “Then they
popped the chick.”

Price said, “Holy shit.”

Dixon was laughing. “You know it, detective.”

McKeon walked around to where the driver’s side
door was open and said, “His pants are down.”

“And,” Dixon said, “get a load of her outfit, love the
fishnets. Getting a little road head, eh, couldn’t wait to get
to the room.”

Another uniform cop standing beside the car, younger
than Dixon but otherwise looked just the same, said, “Or
getting his money’s worth on the way.”

McKeon said to Price, “Great.”

III.

“Okay, and how much do you think gets spent on
them in Toronto?”

“You mean all drugs? Pot and coke and X and stuff?”
and she said, yeah.

Garry said, “More than gets spent on movie tickets,
that’s for sure.”

“You really think so?”

“Come on, what do you think the average pothead
spends a week? Hundred bucks? You talking the whole
GTA, Hamilton to Oshawa?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, that’s like four million people, maybe closer to
five, you go all the way up to Barrie, Guelph, all that? All
the potheads, anywhere from fifteen years old to fifty,
fifty-five, say it’s one in twenty.”

“Five per cent. You think that many?”

“How many people you know smoke dope?”

“How many do I know don’t?”

“Say it’s only one per cent, one dope smoker in a
hundred, that’s still like, fifty thousand.”

Kristina said, “Shit.”

“Times a hundred bucks a week, what’s that, like, five
hundred grand?”

“Try five million.”

“Hey,” Garry said, “that’s why you’re the money and
I’m the art. Then, you’ve got to add the partiers, the cokeheads
— I can’t believe people are still doing coke —”

“Are they?”

“Oh my God, get out more. And crack and X and
meth, you want to count all the speed at the casinos?”

“I’m trying to figure out how much money gets spent
on illegal activities a week.”

“Activities? You want to include hookers, escorts,
massage parlours?”

“Shylocks, are they still around?”

“Every club I’ve ever been in, and they are legion, had
a ‘partner,’” Garry actually making the air quotes, “came
in with the money.”

“So, it’s big.”

Garry said, “Honey, no city in the world could operate
without it. Nothing would get done. I thought the only
reason you were in the movie biz was to launder money.”

Let It Ride cover - first draft

2009-06-30T11:11:00.003-04:00

This is the first pass at a cover for my next book, Let It Ride (Swap in Canada).

I like it. The main thing we're talking about is the image of the guy. It's an ensemble story and there are some strong women in the book, too. Plus, I just like the idea of a woman on the cover.

Here's the opening of the book:

Chapter One

Coming off the Ambassador Bridge into Canada,
Vernard pulled up to the customs booth, the sign saying it
was the longest international suspension bridge in the
world. The tunnel would’ve been faster, but there was no
way he was going underground, underwater, gave him the
willies, worse than all those caves in Afghanistan.

The Canadian customs guy looked at him and Vernard
nodded, serious, seeing the guy’s Glock, thinking, shit,
these guys just started carrying guns a couple months ago,
probably couldn’t get it out of his holster. Fucking Canada.

The guy asked him all the questions, how long he was
staying, was he an American citizen, carrying any firearms?
Vernard showed him his driver’s licence and his
Armed Forces id, blue for retired—honourable discharge,
Sergeant Vernard McGetty. Said, “Not any more.”

“What’s the purpose of your trip?”

Vernard said it was a vacation. “I’m going to the film festival.”

The guy said, oh yeah, and it’s not business?

Vernard said, yeah, “I’m Jamie Foxx.”

The guy actually laughed and said have a nice trip,
waving him through, twenty-eight-year-old black guy from
Detroit driving a brand-new Mercedes ml370 suv, leather
interior and twelve-speaker surround on his way to
Toronto to meet with some bikers, sell them a truckload of
Uncle Sam’s guns and set up a pipeline for their coke and
weed back to Detroit, stepping up to the big leagues.

Fucking Canada.

Looking back he saw the U.S. customs guys just
waving people through, too; cars and vans and campers
and trucks. Fucking trucks, must be thousands a day,
going back and forth, couldn’t check them all. Couldn’t
check two per cent of them.

Shit, Vernard was thinking, turning up his system loud,
Little Walter finding his Key to the Highway, it’s easier to
cross this border into another country than it is to cross
Mack Ave into Grosse Pointe.

Through Windsor it was all Taco Bells and KFC and
Burger King, didn’t seem like another country at all
except for the place selling Cuban coffee, Vernard thinking,
right, that’s not the only thing from Cuba in there.

Outside of Windsor this part of Canada was flat and
bleak, farms, gas stations, fast-food places, and lots of
traffic. Vernard was surprised there could be this much
open space so close to Detroit, a foreign goddamn country,
and you’d never know it was there.

Four-hour drive, Detroit to Toronto, six lanes of steady
traffic going in both directions.

An hour in Vernard pulled into a gas station. Filled up
and parked in the back behind the Wendy’s with all the
trucks, shit, looked like hundreds of them all lined up. He
went inside and saw the guy he wanted sitting there eating
a cheeseburger and drinking a shake.

“You keep this up, you might get fat.”

The guy, three hundred pounds at least, his whole face
smiled, shaking his big bald black head, standing up and
saying, “Fucking Get, man, they let you in this motherfucking
country?” They hugged, backslapping, and sat
down across from each other in the little plastic seats.

“Saw your cousin on the news, man.”

The big guy, once Corporal Duane Thomkins, now just
Tommy K, looked off into the distance. “She so fine, all the
reporters want to talk to her, all dressed up in her fatigues.”
Vernard, sliding easy now back to being just Get, said,
“They knew what she was sending home, man, blow they
muthafucking minds.”

“You know it.” Tommy laughed out loud. Then he
said, “Eat up, man, next stop is all Mickey Dees.”

“I’ll wait till I get there.”

They walked out back to the truck lot behind the
restaurant, stopping to look at Get’s new car, Tommy
saying, “Motherfucking German-ass piece of shit, man.
Drive American.”

“What do you drive?”

“Fucking Peterbilt, man, 370, air ride, mp3, dvd, got a
satellite map, goddamn double bed. Look at these sorry-ass
motherfuckers; Volvos, Swedish fucking bullshit, Hino,
what the fuck kind of rice paddy piece of shit is Hino?”

Get said, “You’re loyal, Tommy, patriotic. That’s cool.”

They got to Tommy’s red Peterbilt hooked to a fiftythree-
foot trailer and he opened the door, saying,

“Fucking right I’m patriotic, man. Where’d we be without
Uncle Sam?” Climbed into the sleeper and came out with
a dark green duffle bag.

Get didn’t even look in the bag, he just hucked it over
his shoulder feeling the weight, nodding, yeah. “We’d be
some sorry-ass niggers.”

Tommy said, “No hassle at the border?”

“Guy was happy to see me,” Get said. “But you never
know, next time they could tear my car apart.”

“Shine that fucking Maglite up your ass.”

Get said, oh man, don’t even joke.

Tommy smiled again, that full of life-is-good enthusiasm,
and said, “Don’t sweat it, a million trucks a day, they
can’t look at every one. You got somebody crosses here
every week,” and winked. Then he said, “There’s only one
can.”

“Yeah?” Anybody else Get would have given a hard
time, matter of respect, but not Tommy. Get was the boss,
but Tommy would never really be an employee. “Guess I
just have to shoot the motherfuckers one at a time.”

Tommy said, yeah, make every shot count.

Get said, “You going to Toronto?”

“The Big Smoke?”

“What?”

Tommy laughed. “Assholes call it that, looking for a
name, be cool, play with the big boys.”

Get hefted the bag, said, they playing with the big boys
now.

“They don’t even know it. Naw, man, I’m going to
Montreal. Some fine French chicks there. And the food,
shit, food alone’s worth the drive. You should come.”

“Maybe next time.”

“You say that, man, but you all business, never take a
break. You still that skinny-ass nigger on the bike.”

“Yeah, but the Army made a man out of me.”

Tommy laughed and gave him a hug, saying, “You
fucking funny, you know it. Shit. Your mama be proud.”

“Thanks man.”

“Don’t have to thank me,” Tommy said. “You paying
me.”

Get said, yeah, but you’re worth it.

Tommy got into his rig and started it up, saying,

“Every penny.” He blew the air horn on his way out, and

Get walked back to his car, his German-ass suv.

Three hours to Toronto, see what it’s like, this Big
Smoke, wants to play with the big boys. Meet with these
bikers think they’re running the show, sell them this
weaponry, see if they really can deliver the meth and X
and coke and the tons of weed they say they can.

Get felt good, ready to really step up, make some
changes in the Motor City, make his mama proud.

Back to Books

2009-06-23T13:16:00.001-04:00

We're getting close to the end of shooting the first season of The Bridge and I'm starting to think about writing books again.

Swap will be out in Canada in September from ECW Press and in the USA from St. Martins in April, as Let It Ride.

I'm now working on the next one, which I'm hoping will be called Tumbling Dice in both countries.

Here's how it starts:

CHAPTER ONE

The High had been back together and on the road for a couple of months playing mostly casinos when the lead singer, Clifford Moore, got the idea to start robbing them. Not the casinos so much, the shylocks working them.

It was two in the morning, they'd played the Northern Lights Theatre at the Potawatomi Bingo Casino in Milwaukee, nostalgia show with Grand Funk and Eddie Money, and Cliff was in a minivan in the parking lot getting a blowjob. Out the van window he saw the bass player, Barry Nemeth, walking between parked cars, looking around like somebody might be following him and putting a wad of cash in his jacket pocket. Cliff said, "What the fuck," and the soccer mom looked up at him and said, you don't like it, and Cliff said, no, it's good, honey, "Really good, I'm almost there." When he finished he signed another autograph, the mom saying the first time she saw The High was in Madison, must have been seventy-eight or seventy-nine, her and her friends still in high school sneaking into the show at the University of Wisconsin. She said, "It was you guys and Styx, remember? I had a crush on you ever since."

Cliff caught up to Barry standing outside the tour bus having a smoke and asked him about the money, when did he have time to get into the casino, and Barry said, no, he didn't win it, he stole it.

Cliff said, "You mugged somebody," and Barry said, fuck no, "The money's from a shylock. Come on," and got on the bus. Cliff started to follow, felt a hand on his arm and looked around to see two very hot chicks, had to be teenagers, but maybe legal, looked exactly the same; long blonde hair, tight jeans, low cut tees, like twins, same serious look on their faces and he said, "Hey ladies, looking for some fun?"

One of the girls said, "No, we're looking for our Mom, she was talking to you before."

Ritchie came up then, squeezed between the girls, shaking his head at Cliff, saying, "At least they're not looking for their grandma," and Cliff said, "Fuck you."

On the bus Cliff walked past Ritchie and sat down beside Barry, saying, "What're you talking about, shylocks?"

They were settled in then, heading to Niagara Falls, going to open for the Doobie Brothers and Barry said, "You know, loan sharks working the casinos."

Cliff said, "They work for the casinos?" and Barry said, no, "They don't work for the casinos, they work at them. They cash cheques."

"We don't get paid by cheque," Cliff said, "it's direct deposit."

"They buy jewellery, cars, whatever. Usually the same guy sells the speed and meth."

"So how'd you get the money?"

"This guy, I sold him a microphone," and Cliff said, shit, "Now you have no mike," and Barry said it was one of Grand Funk's, "So the drummer doesn't sing back-up, so what?"

Ritchie walked down the aisle then, going into the bathroom right behind Barry and Cliff and Dale, the drummer, sitting across the aisle beside his wife Jackie said, "You take one of your monster dumps in there, you fucking hot bag it," and Jackie said, "Dale, please."

She looked across the aisle at Cliff and Barry and said, "What is it happens to you guys, you get on the road and you're teenagers again?"

Cliff said, "Again?" pointing at Dale, saying, "He ever poke you as much as that PS2," and Jackie rolled her eyes and looked away. She and Dale married nearly twenty years, she was the only wife left on the bus. Dale said, "Do not stink up this fucking bus, there's bags in there."

Now Cliff was whispering but nobody was listening anyway, saying, "They fired a roadie, it was you? How much you get?"

Barry said he got two hundred for the mike, five hundred for the Stratocaster he lifted from Eddie Money – guy never played it anyway -- and a hundred and fifty for the back-up singer's leather boots back at the Northern Lights Casino in Minnesota. Cliff said, shit, "That chick was so pissed off, man, that was a catfight, she went after the black one hard."

Cliff was looking right at Barry now and he said, "All this time we haven't seen each other, it's like I don't even know you anymore."

Barry said, yeah.

Cliff said, "They always have the cash to pay you, just like that?"

"Shit, these guys are mobile fucking pawn shops, they buy anything. They buy cars, it's all cash, people take it right back into the casino."

"Full service business."

Barry said, you know it. "This guy tonight, he probably had twenty, thirty grand on him. I'd like to get my hands on that," and Cliff said, what do you want to do, sell them the bus? But that's when he had the idea.

Ritchie came out of the bathroom, dropped a plastic grocery bag in the aisle between Cliff and Jackie and said, "Here, you want it so bad," and kept going back to his seat behind the driver.

Jackie said, "Oh for Christ sake," making a face like he dropped it in her lap and Dale reached past her, grabbed the bag, opened the window and threw it out in one motion, saying, "I'm not riding in a stinking bus."

Cliff said to Barry, "Twenty grand? You think so?"

"Remember that hockey player's brother, guy on the Red Wings, got picked up at the casino in Detroit, loan sharking?"

Cliff said, yeah, vaguely, he remembered something about betting on games, too, wasn't the brother a goalie? "Wasn't he tied to the Saints of Hell, the motorcycle gang?"

"Probably. Gotta be tied to somebody to work the casino. They picked him up, it was on the news, him and his girlfriend, had forty-five grand in cash on them, a pile of jewellery they'd bought, government cheques they cashed."

Cliff said, shit.

Barry said if they could get their hands on a big money item it would make the tour worthwhile and Cliff said, "This whole reunion thing was your idea, you think I wanted to get back on the fucking bus, ride with these assholes?"

Barry said, no, "You wanted to keep selling yuppies half million dollar fucking bungalows in Toronto, bust your hump seven days a week, suck up to everybody in sight, hoping they don't do the deal with their brother-in-law."

Cliff didn't say anything but he thought, yeah, the real estate was getting tough. Tough to get a listing, tough to keep a client, working eighteen hour days, always on call, working every minute of long weekends. He was ready when Barry called with this idea of putting The High back together, heading out on the road.

Cliff said, "Maybe you don't have to sell them anything," and Barry said, what do you mean? Cliff said he had an idea, but wait a minute and he went in the bathroom.

There was a plastic bag full of other plastic bags in the little sink and Cliff got one out and stretched it over the toilet seat thinking it was just like all the dog owners in his neighbourhood back home, always carrying bags, always ready to pick up the shit. Won't give the homeless guy in front of the Tim Hortons a dime for the newspaper he's trying to sell, but they get on their knees to pick up dog shit.

He started to undo his belt and thought, no, really just need to take a leak, this is just nerves, butterflies, but bad ones, worse than getting up on stage ever felt, and then realized, well, you start thinking about ripping off connected guys in casinos, it's got to give you some nerves.

Gives you a rush, too, though. Cliff pulled the bag off the toilet and started pissing, thinking, yeah, add twenty grand to what they were getting for a night on stage, putting the band back together starts to look like a great idea.

Short Stories

2009-06-20T23:29:00.005-04:00

Today I was in a bookstore and I picked up these three books. It was only at the cash that I saw the similarities and the theme I was working with. It seemed like a punchline. What we have here is....

... the midlife crisis of a guy with a short attention span.

2009-06-17T13:53:00.003-04:00

Half the writing team of The Bridge - Dannis Koromilas, me and Peter Mohan.

Clearly craft services is doing a top notch job on this show.

The Bridge - Anytown North America

2009-06-06T11:16:00.005-04:00

There's an article in the New York Times today about Canadian TV shows in the US and about "The Bridge" it says, While members of the Strategic Response Unit on “Flashpoint” sport Canadian flags on their jackets, “The Bridge” seems to be moving toward a more generic sense of place. “Cops are the same in Italy, Canada, Spain,” said the show’s star, Aaron Douglas, best known as Galen Tyrol in “Battlestar Galactica.” “I’m playing it like Anytown, U.S.A.”

The article is here.

In my novels the Toronto setting is very important. The way the city has emerged over the last twenty years as the biggest in the country and the financial centre affects the way the people interact. Those changes to Toronto's character (and the change to my hometown of Montreal over the same time - all those head offices and people moving from Montreal to Toronto, "Bill 101 or the 401" and all that, not to mention the move of organized crime from Montreal to Toronto) are, I hope, deeply ingrained in the novels.

But "The Bridge" has different themes that aren't as dependent on setting. The stories that inspire the show are from all over North America, the challenges for the citizens and the police are, as Aaron Douglas says, pretty much the same all over the world.

Setting is an important consideration in a novel or a TV show and it's more than just a patriotic stance. If you look closely, "The Bridge" takes place in Toronto, but it could take place in any big city in 2009.

My novels could only take place the way they do in Toronto.

I think these are the right choices for both "The Bridge" and my novels.

More from The Bridge

2009-05-14T10:43:00.002-04:00

Publicity is starting to heat up for The Bridge. Here's an interview with the star, Aaron Douglas:

http://watch.ctv.ca/etalk/tv/extended---the-bridge/#clip169797

I particularly like the part around 2:08 when he talks about how good the scripts are ;)

Of course, the credit for that really has to go to showrunner Alan Difiore and co-exec producer/writer Peter Mohan (as well as the other writers Tracey Forbes, Graeme Manson and Dannis Koromilas). I'm learning an awful lot from all of them.

Also, exec producer Craig Brommell keeps us honest and never lets us take the easy way out. We've only started to scratch the surface of his experiences as both a cop and the president of the union, but maybe more important is the attitude he brings.

It's very exciting as the show comes together. The cast really is good, Aaron Douglas is terrific as the beat cop-turned union president and the rest of the cast is excellent as well.

Aaron is right, I think, there's a lot of stuff here that hasn't been in previous cop shows. There are a lot of conscessions to the limitations of the real world - people can't do everything they want. Budgets are tight, manpower is limited, priorities have to be set - which all means some very tough decisions have to be made - usually on the fly.

July 9th, 10:00 pm.

Swap/Let It Ride

2009-05-10T10:33:00.004-04:00

The new book will be called Swap in Canada and Let It Ride in the USA.

This is what the Canadian cover will look like:

I like it, it's really starting to look like a series. Well, in Canada, anyway.

Swap comes out in Canada in September (should be right around the time the epsiode of The Bridge that I wrote will be shown) and Let It Ride will be out in the USA in early 2010.

The artwork for the USA edition should be ready in about a month.

Reading at the TPL - Northern District

2009-04-27T17:17:00.003-04:00

As part of the Keep Toronto Reading Lit Lunch program, I'll be reading at the Northern District branch of the Toronto Public Library, 40 Orchard View Boulevard on Thursday, April 30th at 12:30.

View Larger Map

If I can find three pages in a row from Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere without too much sex, violence and profanity I'll read that. Otherwise I guess I'll be reading my kids' homework assignments.

.

The Bridge - trailer

2009-04-16T10:34:00.003-04:00

Here's the promo trailer for the TV show I'm working on, The Bridge.

This is what they give for the show synopsis:

It is the role of the police to protect society - but who is there to protect them? The police union has become powerless against the politically-motivated police department and street cop Frank Leo (Aaron Douglas) is sick of it. By popular vote Frank becomes president of the 8000 strong police union but makes many powerful enemies in the department along the way.

Inspired by the insights of a former police union head, The Bridge lays bare Frank's struggles - he not only battles criminals on the street but sometimes his own bosses and police force corruption, in order to protect his fellow officers and ultimately society.

That pretty much says it. It really looks like it's going to be a great show.

Lush Life and Google Street View

2009-04-06T10:28:00.003-04:00

Richard Price's Lush Life is a fantastic novel for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is its incredible sense of place. The whole book pretty much takes place within a few blocks of New York's Lower East Side.

Now, I've never been to the Lower East Side and the book gave a complete feel of the place, but I was still a little curious to see the area, so I looked up one of the addresses given in the book, 27 Eldridge, on Google Maps and then hit the street view.

Google Street View has been controversial and I really don't know what to make of it, but it was very cool to spend a few minutes, "walking around," in Lush Life. It looks exactly the way the novel feels:

View Larger Map

So, what do you think? Is this something you're likely to try? Do you ever have a desire to see even more of a place you read about?

Writing episodic TV is like writing Haiku

2009-03-08T10:39:00.003-04:00

Two weeks into my new job as the most junior story editor on the TV show The Bridge (premiering July 9th on CTV and CBS at 10:00 pm), one of the more experienced writers said, "Writing TV is like writing Haiku, you have to fit everything into the structure," and I thought, yeah, that's right, people don't complain that Haiku is too formulaic.

Then he said you could also use dirty limericks as the example, but that's not as classy.

The writers' room is a very funny place and a fun place to be.

It's quite different than writing novels. When I write a novel I start with a couple of characters I think would be interesting to follow and I follow them. I have a vague idea where they might take me, but most of the story emerges from the writing. I'm never sure exactly how the novel will end or even who will emerge as the main character. In Dirty Sweet there's an unnamed, low-level biker in one scene and he doesn't say anything, he's background. In Everybody Knows This is Nowhere he gets named J.T. and has some lines and some scenes. He's pretty much a main character in Swap. This was certainly no clever plan I had worked out in advance.

But the whole season of The Bridge (11 episodes actually, the pilot has already been filmed and is going to run as the first two episodes) is getting worked out in note form on a big whiteboard across an entire wall of the writers' room. All six story editors contribute to the outlines of every episode and the head writer (the Showrunner, in TV-speak) is the final word. Then each writer is assigned one or two of these detailed outlines and writes them up as scripts.

The speed at which all this happens is also making my head spin. I'd fallen into a schedule that worked around my kids' school schedule. They start school in September and I start writing a book. For the past couple of years I've been able to finish by June when they finished school.

We started outlining this TV show two weeks ago and the first episode we're working on will air July 23rd. When the producer told us this, I said, "July 23rd, 2010, right?" I was only half kidding. Filming starts in April.

So, everything has to fit. It has to be like Haiku.

Looks good so far.

Noir at the Bar T.O. style

2009-02-20T15:16:00.005-05:00

I'm very excited to announce Noir at the Bar Toronto featuring Howard Shrier and Sean Chercover. Peter Rozovsky will be asking very tough, insightful questions (if his Noir at the Bar in Philadelphia with me and Declan is any indication).

Tuesday, March 10th at Scotland Yard Pub,56 The Esplanade, one block east of Yonge Street and one block south of Front Street.

7:30 pm.

Should be fun.

The Bridge picked up by CBS

2009-02-19T20:27:00.003-05:00

The TV show I'm going to start working on next week, The Bridge, has been picked up by CBS for broadcast in the USA, probably in the fall of '09.

A website called TV, eh has all the info.

I like this description of the show:

Written by five-time Gemini Award winner and six-time nominee Alan Di Fiore (DA VINCI’S INQUEST, THE LIFE, THE HANDLER), 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 GALLACTICA’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.

Gemini Awards are the Canadian version of the Emmy Awards. Five-time winner, Alan Di Fiore. I'm looking forward to learning from him.

Flash Fiction Challenge: Pass It On

2009-02-09T22:30:00.006-05:00

The challenge from Patti Abbott, Gerald So and the Mystery Dawg as explained by Patti:

Write the first paragraph of a story, send it to me by January 20th. I will stir the pot and send it back out to another writer. Write a 750 (or so) word story using it.

There's a list of all of today's stories on Patti's blog here.

Here's the story I wrote:

Cozy Noir

by

John McFetridge

The first time George Heartwell e-mailed the writer, Margaret Roberts, on June 22nd, he suffered all morning. He re-read the letter over and over and wished to hell he hadn't ever done such a stupid thing. Christ, what was she going to think?

Well, she was going to think she was being blackmailed, sure, but what would she think of the writing?

“There are cameras everywhere, Margaret, in phones, in pens, in computers - some even look like cameras. There was one on the eleventh floor of the Lord Baltimore Radisson at Bouchercon.”

He wanted it to be the fewest words possible, noir style, none of that purple prose like her cozies. Her bestselling-around-the-world cozies.

Now here it was almost winter and George was driving highway 21, looking for the entrance to a closed provincial park for his meeting with Margaret. They’d gone back and forth for months, she’d answered his email with a simple, “What do you want?”

That surprised him, he’d expected a denial or some excuses, some convoluted story about it being a misunderstanding, how there was nothing going on really, but she got right to the point. Not very cozie-like at all.

She must’ve read his hardboiled flash fiction online.

Back then George’d wanted to get her help with agents and publishers but she pointed out their writing didn’t really have anything in common, people would suspect something was going on between them if she started showing his work around – her husband would find that suspicious for sure.

So he settled for money and Margaret asked him to meet her at the Ipperwash Provincial Park on Lake Huron. It had been closed since a group of Native protestors took it over claiming it was on native lane – it probably was for all George knew – and Margaret and her husband lived in an old farmhouse somewhere nearby.

He’d expected more trouble getting into the park but he just drove in like Margaret told him in her email. Typical Canada, there was a sign that said, “Closed,” but no locked gate or anything. He drove a few miles through the woods until he came to the Park Store, the building boarded up and falling apart. The parking lot was surrounded by trees, the perfect location for a drop. Well, not perfect like it would have been in one of George’s books, some back alley all gritty and dark, or a massage parlour.

George parked and waited. He had a copy of Margaret`s latest book with him and he thumbed through it. The author photo was pretty good, she looked great for a woman a little over fifty and he liked the first page; a woman walking her dogs comes across a guy who committed suicide in his car, attatched a vacuum hose to the exhaust pipe with tape and ran it through the trunk.

Everyone bought the suicice except the woman walking her dogs. George couldn’t believe these cozies, amateur sleuths, the woman was a professional dog walker and now she’s investigating a homicide. Who buys this crap?

He was well into the book when a dog barked and he almost had a heart attack.

There was Margaret Roberts, walking out of the woods behind two dogs, a big German Sheperd and some small fluffy thing. Maybe that photo wasn’t retouched, she looked good.

George got out of his car and said, hey. Margaret nodded at him, said, hello, as she was opening the black bag she had over her shoulder. It was the bag from Bouchercon, the Charmed to Death logo in white, the bracelet with the little charms, the skull and the gun and the switchblade.

She took out a thermos and asked George if he’d like some tea. He said no and Margaret said, “How about a little Bushmills then?”

“Sure, why not.”

Margaret poured a little into the thermos lid and handed it to George. He drank and coughed a little and said, “Very good.” Then he said, “Do you have my money?”

“Get right to the point why don’t you?”

George drank the rest of the Bushmills and Margaret poured him some more, saying, “Don’t you think it’s beautiful out here?

George said, “I guess,” and Margaret said, “Not like one of your hardboiled stories, of course, but like a cozie.”

“Yeah.”

“I suppose people get blackmailed in hardboiled stories all the time?”

George said, yeah they do. He couldn’t believe this chick, hadn’t she ever read Hammet? Or even Robert B. Parker?

“People sometimes get blackmailed in cozies,” Margaret said. “But do you know what happens more often?” She was looking right at him now but going out of focus, saying, that’s right, “They get poisoned.”

George’s knees started to give way and he was falling over, his face hitting the gravel hard but he was already numb.

He could see Margaret getting something out of the black Charmed to Death bag, a vacuum cleaner hose and a roll of tape.

She said, “Not everyone gets published George, it’s no reason to kill yourself.”

END

.

The Bridge

2009-02-04T19:43:00.006-05:00

Recently at a discussion panel of true crime writers, one of the questions asked was, "Have you ever been threatened by any of the people you've written about?"

Most of the writers on the panel had written books about some really dangerous people; serial killers, hitmen, bikers and high ranking organized crime figures.

But the guy who answered the question said, "The only time I've ever been scared or threatened was by cops." The others all agreed. These experienced, award-winning journalists-turned-authors had all at some point been scared by police.

Which brings me to my new job. I've been hired as one of the writers on a new CTV cop show, The Bridge. The show is based on a cop who was head of the police union in Toronto, the self-professed, "most powerful cop in the country." The show was apparently pitched as, "What if Tony Soprano was a cop?" In this case he's a cop who helps other cops, gets them out of trouble and stands up for them to the brass.

Which could make for some very cool and controversial storylines.

Especially if cops are the scariest people those journalists have ever dealt with.

.

Locations Map

2009-01-31T13:32:00.004-05:00

A little while ago on CrimeSpace we had a discussion about using Google Maps for research.

It got me thinking, so I made up a Google Map with the locations from Dirty Sweet, Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere and even some from Swap marked.

Another thing about the map that I find cool is that if you view it in photo mode you can see hundreds of pictures that other people have taken and uploaded. Many of the photos are a little more "tourist board," than my books, but they do give a feel for Toronto.

The Future of Publishing

2009-01-30T09:52:00.003-05:00

Over at his blog, Jason Pinter is running a series on the future of publishing.

He asked people for suggestions and mine is one of the ones up today. I said that all versions of a book should be available at the same time; hardcover, trade, mass market, e-book, audio - whatever the customer wants.

It looks like it should be a good discussion.

.

Free e-book

2009-01-28T10:20:00.005-05:00

Some of the links to flash fictions over there --> weren't working anymore, so I put up a link to the whole e-book.

There is still a raging debate among writers giving away their work for free and I can see both sides of it, but I finally came to realize that there is a very good crime fiction community online and writing and sharing stories is one of the best things about it. I wanted to do what I could to support the great 'zines people were putting so much effort into like Spinetingler, MuzzleFlash, Powder Burn Flash, Hard Luck Stories, Demolition Magazine, Shred of Evidence, A Twist of Noir and also the flash challenges put together by Patti Abbott, Gerald So and the Mystery Dawg.

So that's where all these stories first appeared.

There are also a few interviews, stuff I did with Peter Rozovsky at Detectives Beyond Border, Declan Burke at Crime Always Pays and Linda L. Richards at January Magazine.

I'm thinking about including some of these stories and flash fictions in the paperback versions of my novels, kind of like the "bonus tracks" on CDs.

.

Go With Me and The Murder Stone

2009-01-26T08:56:00.008-05:00

Last October on the way from Toronto to Baltimore for Bouchercon, Declan Burke and I stopped in Brattleboro, Vermont and spent a very pleasant couple hours in Mystery on Main Street bookstore with the owner, David, and a few friends. It's a great place.

As we were leaving I looked at the table of 'local authors,' and asked David to recommend a book. He mentioned a few and I bought, Go With Me by Castle Freeman Jr. I think I chose it because the 'about the author' said Castle Freeman, "Has been a regular essayist for the Old Farmer's Almanac," and I've never seen that on a novel.

On the weekend I finally got around to reading the book and it's fantastic. The flap says:

The Vermont hill country is the stark, vivid setting for this gripping and entertaining story of bold determination. The local villain, Blackway, is making life hellish for Lillian, a young woman from parts elsewhere. Her boyfriend has fled the state in fear, and local law enforcement can do nothing to protect her. She resolves, however, to stand her ground, and to fight back. A pair of unlikely allies – Lester, a crafty old-timer, and Nate, a powerful but naive youth – join her cause, understanding that there is no point in taking up the challenge unless you’re willing to “go through.” In this modern-day drama, a kind of Greek chorus – wry, witty, digressive; obsessively, amusingly reminiscent; skeptical, opinionated, and not always entirely sober – enriches the telling of this unforgettable tale as the reader follows the threesome’s progress on their dangerous, suspenseful quest.

Which is all true, but the incredible writing style adds so much. Direct, clear, not a wasted word. The book's only 160 pages and there's more insight into the characters than in most books four times the length.

One of the old guys, Whizzer, tells a story about some loggers who disappeared one winter. They were from Quebec and knew how to live in the woods, so it must have been foul play, but they were never found.

That passage got me thinking about another book I read recently that mentioned guys from Quebec working in the woods, Louise Penny's The Murder Stone, the fourth Inspecter Gamache mystery. A much different book, I'd say that Louise Penny's novels are very much traditional small village murder mysteries, "cozies," set in the Eastern Townships of Quebec, but they're also completely modern because of the completely modern characters.

The opening of The Murder Stone describes the Manoir Bellechasse, built more than a hundred years ago by the robber barons of Montreal, Boston and New York. Well, as it says, "They didn't actually dirty their own hands. What clung to them was something else entirely. No, these men hired men with names like Zoétique, Télesphore and Honoré to hack down the massive and ancient forests."

The locations of these two books are only seperated by a few hundred miles, but also by an international border and some very different cultures. The writing styles here are very different, too, but I found them both to be fantastic.

CrimeSpot

2009-01-22T09:26:00.004-05:00

Graham Powell has been kind enough to list this blog on CrimeSpot (thanks Graham!), so I think I should try something a little more than self-promotion.

This year I'm the vice-president of the Crime Writers of Canada. I like the organization, it's small but it's coast to coast in Canada and a pretty diverse bunch; from international bestsellers Linwood Barclay, Louise Penny, Giles Blunt and Peter Robinson to "pre-published" members.

We hold our Annual General Meeting at the Bloody Words Convention which this year will be in Ottawa from June 5th to 7th.

The CWC represent crime writers at events like BookExpo and Word on the Street, we publish a catalogue of member's books, send out a newsletter and notices of member's book launches and readings and organize the Arthur Ellis Awards for crime writing in Canada.

So far in my vice-presidency all I've managed to do is talk to the folks at Sony about a discount on their e-reader for our members (right now it looks good, more info to follow).

My question now is, what do people look for in writers' organizations? What should we be doing at the Crime Writers of Canada to better serve our members and maybe even to get more members?

Of course, this wouldn't be my blog without a little self-promotion, so I'll just say that yesterday Thomas Dunne Books agreed to publish Swap in the USA in early 2010. I'll have more on that soon.

My Boys

2009-01-19T23:16:00.003-05:00

That's Doug on the left and Jimmy on the right. They're brothers and they're friends and I'm proud of them.

Tomorrow their school will have an assembly to watch the inauguration of Barak Obama.

I have no idea what the future holds for my boys, but the world they're growing up in is different than the one in which I grew up.

My father believed the world I grew up in was better than the one he'd grown up in and I feel the same way now, looking at my boys.

The SWAP Canada Trailer

2009-01-16T10:53:00.004-05:00

Thanks for all your input everybody, I think I'm going with this:

.

How Books Are Made

2009-01-13T10:13:00.002-05:00

Thanks to Bookninja.

Hula Hoop or Frisbee?

2009-01-11T15:27:00.005-05:00

This morning my lovely wife Laurie and I were reading the paper and she mentioned a young, popular actor she doesn't think will be working much in ten years.

Then Laurie said, "These guys can't tell if they going to be a hula hoop," gone in a year, or have staying power, like, we decided, a frisbee.

So, that led to a game, Hula Hoop or Frisbee?

Ian Fleming - Frisbee. Alistair MacLean - Hula Hoop.

Lord of the Rings - Frisbee. Harry Potter ??? What do you think?

What else today looks like it could become a Frisbee, and what looks like it has the makings of a Hula Hoop?

.

The 10 Rules - Part Five

2009-01-09T00:03:00.004-05:00

As always, the disclaimer - it's fiction, all of it, every word of it.

And it starts with part one here.

The small hotel we’d stayed at in Philly didn’t have a parking lot, so we’d left the car a few blocks away. It was funny, the hotel was really only a few rooms above a bar and when we walked in Wednesday afternoon and told the owner – who could have been the brother of the drug dealer in Central Park – that we we’d booked a room he said, “Yeah, look, I don’t want to make any assumptions about your lifestyle or anything,” and I thought, holy shit, he’s going to tell us he doesn’t want any trouble with the law, he doesn’t rent rooms to criminals, but he said, “the thing is, there’s only one bed in the room, and you two don’t look like you’re a couple.”

Behind him the bartender laughed, smirked really and rolled his eyes and I could tell he didn’t think we were well dressed enough to be gay. I was about to tell him we were on the road, you know, give us a chance to clean up and Declan said, “No that room won’t work,” and I realized, yeah, focus, man, focus.

The owner said he’d give us a second room for half price, it’d be ready in a couple hours so we went for lunch at a Mexican place and dropped the car in the lot.

Now we were picking up the car and it was the same guy working the lot, big guy, friendly, he was the one told us about the Mexican place. He saw my car was from Ontario and said he loved Toronto, said he went to a hockey tournament there every year.

I said, “So, you think the Phillies are going to win this thing?” and the guy laughed and said, “Fuck no.” They were playing the Dodgers for the National League Championship.

He said, “Don’t get me wrong, I’d love it if they did, but this is the Phillies, right?”

I said you never know and pulled out of the lot.

Declan said, “We paid him cash, right?” and I said, yeah, so what, and Declan said, “Everyone probably does, there’d be a lot of cash in that little booth,” and I said, yeah, “But he wrote down my license plate number.”

Still, Declan didn’t look convinced. Shit. So I told him about the ’93 Series when the Phillies lost to the Jays, what a great time that was in Toronto. I said, “Joe Carter hit a home run in the bottom on the ninth, two on and two out, won the whole thing. A real Hollywood ending, you know, you can’t make that up.”

Declan said, no, I guess not, and he was looking distracted, making me nervous so I did what I always do when I’m nervous, I kept talking, telling him how Joe Carter’s Series winning homer probably didn’t become the mythical event it would’ve – should’ve - because it hadn’t happened in America and how that was the last time the Jays won the Series, but it was a lot more recently than the Phillies. “Or the Cubs, this year makes a hundred years since the Cubs won it.”

Declan said, oh yeah, still not interested. Then he said, “Man, I’m tired, I didn’t sleep at all last night, and I though okay, good, maybe now we can talk about this crime spree we’re on, but he said, “Started reading that Ice Harvest, shit it’s good, isn’t it.”

I said, “Yeah it is.” It’s got an ending I never saw coming but couldn’t have been anything else, so satisfying, made me want to turn back to page one and start reading again right away.

Then Declan said, “Look, I’ve been thinking about these ten rules, these robberies,” and I thought, fuck, finally.

“Yeah?”

He said, “Yeah. That cheque cashing place was good but otherwise there’s just not much money in it.”

“Right, not really worth it.”

We were pulling up to the toll booth and Declan said, “Right. That’s why so many books, like Elmore’s Fifty-two Pick-Up, they turn to kidnapping.”

I said, “Yeah, and Riding the Rap,” before I realized it and Declan said, “Yeah, that’s right,” finally looking awake.

I handed the money to the guy in the booth, so short and fat he could barely see over the edge of the window and he grunted when he took the money so I got all cheerful and said, “Thanks!” and he grunted again handing me my change and I said, “You have a great day.”

As we drove away Declan said, “Ah, it’s a wonderful thing to see a trade stay in the family, passed on from generation to generation.” He was smiling and rolling a cigarette with those dark brown papers he uses and I didn’t know what he was talking about and he said, “You can see his ancestors scrambling out from under the bridge, demanding passage.”

I started laughing, too, “Good thing we didn’t have to answer him his questions three.”

Must have been the nervous tension but we both started laughing and making jokes about trolls.

Then Declan said, “So yeah, kidnapping. Seems the odds of a big score are better,” and I said, “You want to kidnap someone at Bouchercon?”

Declan said, “Someone there must have had a bestseller, made some money.”

I thought, yeah, but a writer, who’d pay to get them back?

Tighter

2009-01-07T17:28:00.004-05:00

Second draft, it's a little tighter and the text should be easier to read.

Thanks for the input so far, keep those cards and letters coming.

Book Trailer

2009-01-06T10:05:00.004-05:00

So, I'm kicking around ideas for a book trailer. This is what I've got so far:

Opinions? Suggestions? Anything?

Puck Bunnies

2009-01-04T13:01:00.006-05:00

Mike Knowles, author of the terrific debut novel, Darwin's Nightmare, interviewed me for Allan Guthrie's Noir Originals website.

Mike is also Canadian and that comes up in the interview. It's possible that the espression "Puck bunnies" is unknown in the rest of the world, but it becomes pretty self-explanatory. Of course, the Urban Dictionary helps out, here.

Some interesting questions, for sure, but I make no promises the answers measure up.

The interview is here.

The 10 Rules - Part Four

2008-12-31T15:26:00.004-05:00

Phildelphia, home of the Broad Street Bullies, the city of brotherly love.

Part one of this totally fictional adventure is here.

Part Four

Wednesday morning we took the Lincoln Tunnel out of New York and driving by the huge port in New Jersey Declan said, “Can you imagine the amount of graft in there every day?”

I said the black market economy in there must be as big as the economy of lots of small countries and Declan said, yeah, “Everybody getting a piece.”

Thousands of containers, millions of them, coming off ships and being put on trucks, probably twenty-four hours a day.

I said, “Scams and graft,” and then I thought that might be a good name for the rock band in Tumbling Dice, the book I was working on, Ladies and Gentlemen, Scams and Graft! Maybe the management company.

Then I said, I always like a good scam. “There were these guys, when I was living in Alberta, welders or gasfitters or something, they made a fake cover for an overnight bank deposit drop, put it on a different bank branch everynight. It was pretty clever, it fit right over the real one, looked just like it but it caught the deposit bags. They’d leave it up for a few hours, collect the bags, take the fake front and move on.”

Declan said that was pretty good, clean. “But you’d need to be a pipefitter, wouldn’t you?”

I glanced sideways at him and realized he was thinking of how to work something like that.

“They got caught, it was funny, because the fake front they had was for the Bank of Nova Scotia and they spelled it wrong, they had it down as Scotai instead of i-a.”

“So you’d have to be a pipefitter who could spell, then?”

I said, yeah, I guess so, and figured I’d better not mention any more scams because Declan was looking at them all as business plans.

Noir at the Bar in Philly was great. Peter Rozovsky has a brain the size of a planet and could easily be the most annoying, arrogant guy around – I know I would be if I was half as smart as he is. But he’s not. Declan and I each read from our books and then answered questions and it turned into a great night. We had a few beers with the nice people who’d come out, one of them was Scott Phillips who wrote The Ice Harvest and I bought a copy after reading the first page and getting hooked by the description of a waitress in an empty bar on Christmas Eve as having, “dishwater blonde hair that looked like she’d got shitfaced and decided to cut it herself.” At about one thirty we walked back to the little hotel we were staying at on the other side of downtown.

We were both in a good mood, talking about writing books and feeling like professionals, like we had some idea what we were doing. It was strange then, it still is, to have people ask questions as though we know something other than, “It sounded cool so I wrote it down.” People looking for some kind of secret to writing and publishing, something other than, make it the way you really want it and then send it to publishers. We’d both, Declan and I, got amazingly lucky and we knew it.

Then Declan said, “Look,” and I saw the car, slowing down in front of the bank, the girl getting out of the passenger seat, looked to be in her twenties, if that. She was carrying a gray canvas bag and going to the night deposit drop.

Declan was moving then, saying, “Don’t have to spell for this,” and running past the girl, not even slowing down as he grabbed the bag.

The girl just stood there staring at him and a guy started getting out of the driver’s seat but his huge fucking gut got in his way and he stumbled, falling into the street, yelling, “You fucking punk, I’ll fucking kill you.”

It might have been his keys in his hand and it might have been a gun, I was running too fast and shaking too hard to really tell.

Declan was gone, down the alley and into the dark.

I looked back and saw the girl – she looked like the waitress from Noir at the Bar, she sure didn't get shitfaced and cut her own hair – laughing and shaking her head but not moving and I saw the fat guy getting up and telling at her to get in the fucking car.

Then I heard, “Over here,” and I saw Declan, maybe ten feet into the alley leaning against the wall looking like he was waiting for a bus.

I said, “What the fuck?”

He pointed and said, “That’s our hotel,” and there it was, across the street from the bank where the fat guy and the waitress were making the deposit. The car was long gone, I guess the guy figured we’d still be running and he was trying to catch us.

Declan dropped the canvas bag and was looking at the cash, disappointed it wasn’t more, saying, “Fucking credit cards, no one pays in cash. All this credit, it’ll go bad, you know.”

Yeah. I followed him back to the hotel thinking the news was full of people worried about the credit crunch, the sub-prime mortgages starting to default. That’s our big problem, too much credit.

Just like in books my heart was pounding and my fingers were numb. There was no way I’d get any sleep before the drive to Baltimore.

Good thing I had that Ice Harvest to read.

Isn't that cool

2008-12-18T14:42:00.003-05:00

A Christmas present from a friend in Japan.

I've been making my way through the French edition of Killshot, though it's taking me a long time. I'll never be able to read Japanese, but it's a very cool addition to my collection.

I'm still working on the Bouchercon "fiction" but I've been busy taking meetings with TV guys about possibly joining the writing team of a new Canadian cop show. Looks very interesting, quite a new take on the cop show, possibly very controversial. More soon....

e-book of Dirty Sweet now available

2008-12-13T22:58:00.008-05:00

These guys are now offering a .pdf version of Dirty Sweet for $7.68.

Check it out here.

We'll get back to The 10 Rules next week. See what the Broad Street Bullies are up to in Philadelphia and find out what went on behind the scenes in Baltimore...

Riding the Bus in Toronto

2008-12-10T10:01:00.005-05:00

A little break from the road trip.

A couple of videos about the Toronto Transit Commission, our beloved TTC:

Today:

And 22 years ago:

I love this town.

The Ten Rules Part Three

2008-12-08T09:57:00.002-05:00

A little later than I'd planned, here's Part Three.

Remember, it's fiction. It's all made up. All of it.

You may want to start with art one, below.

The Canada-US border had changed a lot since the last time I drove across, pre-9/11. Back then the people working there were called Customs Officers and they asked you where you born and where you were going and they hoped you'd have a nice day. Now they're called Homeland Security, they carry big sidearms and they don't seem to care how well your day goes.

We waited in line and when it was our turn we pulled up at the booth. The guy inside had already typed my lisence plate number into the computer and he kept looking at the screen as he asked us where we were going.

I said, “Baltimore,” and he said, “Baltimore, New York?”

Shit, I was thrown off already, I didn't even know there was a Baltimore, New York. Then I blanked on what state Baltimore was in and I said, “No, um, Baltimore,” and I was about to say where the Orioles play and I remembered and said, “Maryland,” as if I'd won final jeopardy.

“What's the purpose of your trip?”

“We're going to a convention, a writer's convention.” I didn't think I should say, 'crime writer's convention,' I didn't want to say the word crime.

The guy said, “Are you both Canadians,” and Declan said, “No, I'm Irish.”

The guy typed on his computer some more and said, “Pull up over there and go inside.”

Shit. Everybody's border nightmare, pull up over there.

We did.

Across the parking lot a couple people were repacking their car, rolling up sleeping bags and shoving them into the trunk. Their stuff was spread out on the ground all around the car.

Declan said, “That doesn't look pleasant,” and he took the toy gun out of the glove compartment and put it into the paper Tim Hortons bag our donuts had been in.

We got out of the car and on the way into the building Declan dropped the Tim Hortons bag onto an already-full garbage can and kept walking. Just like that. Shit. I was starting to realize I didn't know this guy at all. It was fun and games when I told people I was taking a road trip to Bouchercon with a guy I'd never met, a writer from Ireland I met online, but it didn't seem so weird to me. I liked his books. So what if they're full of criminals and guns and violence, so are mine, didn't mean anything.

Well, not in my case.

Declan held the door open and still looked calm and cool as we went inside.

And he was calm and cool answering all the questions and ten minutes later we were walking back to the car. As we passed the garbage can, Declan didn't even slow down as he reached out and picked up the Tim Hortons bag.

Getting in the car he said, “Wal-Mart might be out of our way,” and I said, “I doubt it they're all over the place.”

Declan closed the door to my Saturn Vue and said, “Well, better safe than sorry.”

On the way to New York City we stopped in Brattleboro, Vermont. It's almost a sci-fi experience, pulling off the interstate into a beautiful mountain town where it still seems like the 50's. The folks at Mysteries on Main were happy to tell us that Brattleboro has four book stores on its main street and no Starbucks. That's good for them, I guess, but I was desperate for a triple grande latte.

The town was so nice, the people so pleasant, I almost felt bad pulling the gun in the gas station on our way out, but a car with Quebec plates left just as we pulled in and it gave me the idea to use my bad French accent to get the kid to hand over the money. It wasn't as good as the cheque cashing place, barely twelev hundred bucks, but as Declan said, “Every little bit helps,” and I figured the cops would be looking the car from Quebec.

A few hours later we were in New York City. Google directions were fine and we dropped the car in a parking garage on West 63rd right next to the Y where we were staying.

We'd made the arrangements online. I'd sent Declan some pictures of the rooms at the Y and they'd looked fine – small, but clean and with bunk beds. I had a joke all planned for when we walked into the room, I was going to say, “I haven't slept in bunk beds since jail,” but by the time we got to the room with over ten thousand bucks in stolen cash it didn't seem so funny.

And walking into the room was when we realized there was no bathroom.

Down the hall, around the corner. Public washroom. Three shower stalls. One of them covered with yellow police crime scene tape.

Declan said, “What the fuck,” and I said, “It's fun to stay at the YMCA.”

It was late by then so we walked around the neighbourhood, saw Lincoln Centre, Columbus Circle and Central Park. New York, New York.

The next morning in the elevator there were a couple of well-dressed women, business suits and carrying briefcases, and one of them was saying, if CBS doesn't give us an answer right away, we'll take it to ABC, and I was thinking, yeah, it's the Y, so what, it's New York, it's big business and here I am going to see my American publisher.

Declan said, “Those beds are noisy, though, can't even think of a wank in there.”

Things didn't go well at the publisher.

First of all, neither Declan nor I had thought to bring the address. Sign of the modern world, we stood in Columbus Circle and Declan phoned his brother in Dublin who Googled the publisher and gave us the phone number. You really can't make this stuff up.

We got the wrong subway directions. The publisher had recently merged with another company and moved offices and the nice receptionist gave us direction to the old office. We were only lost for a few minutes, though, and hopped in a cab.

The reality of the merger sank in at lunch when no one seemed too interested in any more books from either me or Declan. Fair enough, that's business, but we left bummed. Declan stopped in the Baby Gap to pick up stuff for Lilly and I walked around the block a few times trying to put the best possible spin on all this.

The weird thing was I spent more time looking at places to rob, seeing all the security and trying imagine ways around it. I used to call that kind of thing research, now I wasn't so sure.

It was late afternoon when we got out of the cab by the Y and Declan said let's take a walk in Central Park.

We walked around, talked about writing, other stuff we were working on, tried to cheer each other up. I wanted to find that memorial for John Lennon but I wasn't motivated enough. We took some pictures, telling ourselves they were for the blog but I doubted we'd put any of this up on a blog.

We were on our way out and we saw a fenced off area with swings and slides and jungle gym, the sign said 'The Dianna Ross Playground' and Declan said, “She gets the whole place to herself?” and I said, “Look,” pointing at some high school kids, two boys and a girl, all wearing maroon sweaters – the boys wearing grey pants and the girl a grey skirt – and they were going behind the playground to where there were a few trees and a guy sitting on the bench in the shade. The guy was three hundred pounds easy, big bald black head, and he nodded when the kids stopped to talk to him.

Declan said, “Beautiful day for a dope deal.”

One of the high school boys dropped something on the bench – my crime writer skills kicking in to tell me “money” and the big black guy dropped an envelope. The kids walked out past the Dianna Ross playground in no hurry.

Declan said, “Not a bad idea, that,” and I thought he meant as a scene in a book, a dope deal in the park but it was kinda boring, very matter of fact. Maybe it could get worked into something else but it'd have to happen pretty quick and move on.

Then I thought maybe he meant scoring some dope and I was going to tell him I'd be fine with a beer, maybe a Jameson if I was still bummed, but he was already walking around the playground towards the guy.

The guy said, “Gentlemen.” He was having a great day, a beautiful autumn day sitting on a bench in Central Park making money.

Declan took the gun out of the Baby Gap bag and said, “Afternoon.”

The guy said, “Oh my, they selling toy guns at Baby Gap? I'da thought Gap for Kids, maybe, but not the babies. This city,” shaking his head but still in a good mood. Then he said, “What can I do you for gentlemen, little weed or something more chemical? You feeling nostalgic today I got some genuine hippy acid.”

Declan dropped the gun back in the Baby Gap bag and said, “It's good weed, then?” and the guy said, “The best, my man, you Irish, right?”

Declan said, “Yeah.”

The guy said, “Yeah, like my man, Bo-no, gonna save the world,” and he laughed.

We bought a little weed. It wasn't 'the best,' it was okay.

The next day we were feeling a little better and ready for the drive to Philadelphia for Noir at the Bar, organized by Peter Rozovsky. The extra cash we had meant we wouldn't have to crash at Peter's place, which was good because we're all getting a little too old to be “crashing” on couches.

We're suposed to be professionals, after all.

The Ten Rules - Part Two

2008-11-26T14:50:00.003-05:00

Before heading off to Bouchercon this year I started to write a bit of fiction about the trip.

Here is Part Two.

Remember, it's fiction. It's all made up. All of it.

Part One is below.

Declan stood by the door with the other smokers, his the only hand rolled, reading the headlines in the newspapers lined up in the boxes and I went inside to get us a place in line. Every hundred kilometres or so on the 401 there’s a rest stop.
They’re all the same; a gas station and a couple of fast food places. The names are different at each stop, a Petro Canada and a McDonalds, an Esso and a Wendy’s, a Shell and a Burger King – they all have Tim Hortons.

And they all have line-ups. I’ve been back and forth down the 401 from Toronto to Montreal every month of the year and every hour of the day and night and there’s always a line. So, standing in this one I thought about how I was going to steer the conversation to robbery. I’d been thinking about it for a while, here I am at home all day, drop my kids off at school and sit down and write. What if I just popped out once in a while and pulled a robbery? No one would notice and the money would just look like it came from my writing. Wouldn't be too much money, just a few grand here and there, but it would really take the edge off.

The idea never went anywhere because it wasn't something I could do by myself. I needed a partner.

In my head, of course, I was the laid-back, cool, ex-con Ernest Stickley, call me Stick. In reality, of course, I’m the weasely, talking-too-much car salesman Frank.

Oh, I’d thought about being both, doing it all myself, but I didn’t think I could. I’d written a flash fiction, a thousand word short story called The Book Club (it was on the website Shred of Evidence about two women who leave their book club and start robbing guys going into strip clubs. It’s kind of a housewife Swag. My friend Alan Taylor made a short film out of it, The Armed Book Club. He’d make a good partner, except he lives in Montreal. And we’d be known right away as the Black and White Bandits or something stupid like that. Alan’s black.

Back when I was at Concordia, ten years of part-time night classes to get a lousy English Lit BA, my buddy Bobby Jones and I were filling out applications to med school and law school and teacher’s college and getting turned down everywhere, so we decided – one night in the Rymark Tavern on Peel after four or five pitchers of Molson Ex – that if we didn’t get in anywhere we’d start a life o’ crime. That’s what we called it, life o’ crime, and laughed and figured out how we’d get pilot’s liscences, lease a plane, set up a front business and bring in drugs from South America. The next day it didn’t sound so stupid. Just like Frank and Ernest in Swag we worked out some details, made up some rules. We figured we’d be successful because we’d be smart. We would never DO drugs, because, as Bobby says to this day, dope is for dopes. We wouldn’t flash money around and we wouldn’t be greedy. We’d get a stake, start a business, maybe buy up some duplexes in NDG in Montreal where we both lived.

Bobby’s black, too, so we would’ve been the Black and White Bandits again, but then he went and got into teacher’s college and then went to teach in Yellowknife. He’s got the balls for armed robbery, that’s for sure, but now he lives in Nova Scotia and is making too much money and having too much fun to think about a life o’ crime.

Another friend still in Montreal, Randy McIlwaine also has the balls for it, no doubt. He’s big and strong, huge shoulders and broad chest and can make his eyes look insane when he wants to. Randy walks into a bar with a sawed off shotgun and says put the money in the bag, they’d put it in the fucking bag.

Except he’s a cartoonist, you can see his stuff at his website , it’s really funny. If I mentioned this plan to him he’d get a big laugh out of it.

Still, it seemed like such a good plan, I couldn’t let it go so I thought about a few more possible partners; Michel Basilieres is living in Toronto now, his first novel, Black Bird, won the Books in Canada /Amazon award and got fantastic reviews but now he’s teaching at U of T and spending all his spare time with his son. Families really do get in the way of careers.

Families made me think of my cousin Joe, he and I got arrested in Calgary together at the Sears, something I fictionalized in Dirty Sweet, and he might have been game back then, but he’s also in Nova Scotia now, taking it easy, blasting Deep Purple and working in a greenhouse.

But now here I was on the road with Declan, a guy who obviously thought about armed robbery because he wrote a fucking great book about it. I just didn’t know how to go from talking about writing novels to actually doing it.

I was next in line when Declan came in and stood beside me, saying, “Couldn’t do it here, though, have to stand in line so long there’d be miles of footage,” and he motioned to the camera on the wall behind the cash.

I said, “Yeah, and these places are always crowded.”

We ordered, me explaining that a double-double is coffee with two cream and two sugar and Declan saying, “There’s still room for the coffee, then,” and asking for it black with sugar. We also got a box of Timbits.

Walking back through the parking lot to the car I said, “I wonder sometimes what Tim Horton would have thought about Timbits,” and Declan said, “There’s really a Tim Horton?”

“People think he’s like Ronald McDonald. No, he was a hockey player. Started the first one of these places with a cop in Hamilton.”

Back on the road, Declan said, “But there are some places you don’t have to stand in line?”

“Not on the highway,” I said. “Have to turn off into one of these small towns.”

“These small towns have banks?”

“Not much anymore, the banks are closing branches all the time, setting up kiosks in grocery stores, forcing people to use ATM’s, online banking and those cheque cashing places.”

“You’ve got that scene,” Declan said, “in Everybody Knows..., where the guy robs one of those places.”

“Yeah,” I said. “That’s right.”

“That’s a good scene, it really works.”

I said, thanks, but I don’t know, it’s a pretty straightforward scene. J.T., a biker back from serving in the army in Afghanistan waits at the back door of a cheque cashing place and when the woman comes out for a smoke he shoves a gun in her face, forces her inside and cleans out the till.

“These little towns, they have these cheque cashing places?”

“Yeah,” I said. “They do.”

We pulled off the 401 into Trenton, past the fighter jet that looks like it has a pole up its ass, and into town. We were just going to take a look around, see what was what. Trenton is really just a big air force base with a little town attatched.

I said, “The thing is, for armed robbery, you need arms.”

“Right,” Declan said, “guns.”

“This isn’t like a book, just put in a convenient character, some guy we know who can get his hands on a gun.” I laughed then, said, “Like Rossi in The Big O, worried he can’t go to Sicily with the .22, a woman’s gun.”

“Wants his .44 back from Karen.”

“Too bad we don’t know a Karen.”

Declan pointed to a road sign and said, “Bridge to USA, could find something there.”

“Yeah, well, regardless of what people say, they don’t have guns in the corner stores.”

“Regardless?”

There was some tension in the car, we were both nervous, getting serious.

I said, “Like Homer Simpson said, ‘Wait three days? But I’m mad now.’”

No laugh.

“In my story about the housewives robbing guys going into strip clubs they use a toy gun they bought at Wal-Mart.”

Decland said, “A toy? Right.”

“Because I don’t think it’s the gun, really, I think it’s the setting.”

“Setting?”

“Yeah. A kid’s playing with it in his back yard, it’s a toy, a grown man is carrying it in a back alley at night, it’s a gun.”

“Or a back alley in the day?” He pointed to a Mr. Cheque Cashing place at the end of a strip mall and I saw the Wal-Mart up ahead.

It went just like the scene in the book. I parked my car behind the big trash bins behind the store and we waited. After about half an hour a guy came out the back door and used a piece of two by four to prop it open.

Before I could say anything about how it looked like it really would've worked, Declan jumped out of the car and left the door open. We’d bought the gun at the Wal-Mart, looked just like a real gun, it’s true, especially when we painted it black with some of that model paint in the little square jars and scratched it up. I wrapped a big elastic band around the handle a few times and Declan said, what's that for and I said, I don't know, “I saw it in Tinker, Tailer, Soldier, Spy,” and Declan said, oh, okay then, but till that moment when I saw him point it at the guy’s head I didn't think we’d really do it.

They went inside the Mr. Cheque place and less than a minute later Declan came out carrying a big manilla envelope and jumped into the car.

He looked at me and said, “So, are we going, then, or should we just sit here and get arrested?”

I hadn’t even started the car, so I did, and drove back around the strip mall and out onto Division street. We went a couple blocks and made the turn up Sidney Street to the 401. No sirens, no one chased after us, nothing.

“What the hell did you do in there?”

He said, cashed a cheque, and for a second I thought that’s what he really did and I was so relieved. Then he laughed and said, “Holy fuck, there’s ten grand in here,” pulling money out of the envelope.

“Some of that’s American.”

“Good we’ll need it tomorrow in the states.” He looked at me and I think he winked and then he said, “We are going to the states, aren’t we?” and I realized we were taking the on ramp to the 401 heading west for Toronto. It’s like I just wanted to get home.

We only drove a couple miles on the 401, took the Wooler Road exit, crossed over the highway and got right back on heading east, the sign saying, Kingston 100 kilometres.

Declan said, “Holy shit, man. I thought about a little side-line to the writing, just something to take the egde off, you know,” and I said, yeah, I know.

He said, “Just a little extra income, I thought about maybe dealing a little dope, a few regulars, nothing big, but fuck, ten grand in ten minutes – that's a bit of all right.”

I thought, well, when you put it like that.

An hour and a half later we were pulling up to the American border, looking at some very serious and well armed guys in uniforms.