New Blog

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Short Stories

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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The Bridge

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.




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