Locations Map

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

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.




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Free e-book

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.



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Go With Me and The Murder Stone

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

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

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

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






.

How Books Are Made

Thanks to Bookninja.

Hula Hoop or Frisbee?

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?



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The 10 Rules - Part Five

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

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

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





Opinions? Suggestions? Anything?

Puck Bunnies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Bouchercon meta-fiction

Before heading off to Bouchercon this year I started to write a bit of fiction about the trip. I present the beginning of it here and will post the rest of it over the next few weeks.

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


The Ten Rules


When I wrote my novel, Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, I used Elmore Leonard’s Ten Rules of Writing, and I’m pretty sure that Declan Burke used them when he wrote his novel, The Big O, so it was natural when we teamed up to pull armed robberies on our way to Bouchercon in Baltimore, we’d use Elmore’s Ten Rules for Success and Happiness from his novel Swag.

In both cases we had to make minor changes to the rules. For one thing, grocery stores and bars never have much cash on hand anymore and one exclamation point for every hundred thousand words? Come on, these are crime novels, people getting robbed and beaten up yell.

In Swag, Frank Ryan, a used car salesman from Detroit, meets Ernest ‘Stick’ Stickley, a car thief from Oklahoma and they team up to rob people. I knew a Frank when I lived in Calgary in the late 70’s, Frank Kloss, and he was a used car salesman. When I met him he was selling truck parts for the same company where I worked in the warehouse. Calgary at that time was a lot like the Detroit Elmore Leonard described in Swag -- full of young people moving in from somewhere else to make money. The apartment building the guys live in in the book was an awful lot like the townhouse complex I lived at in the Woodlands, in the southwest of Calgary. Young people, under thirty, thirty-five anyway, all making money and not thinking past the weekend. In fact, a band from Calgary at that time, Loverboy, had a hit with “Working for the Weekend.” In Swag the women sitting around the pool were stewardesses and models working the car shows and in Calgary they were hairdressers and oil company secretaries but they had the same kind of snotty attitude they thought was being independent and they didn’t mind trading up if a guy making more money moved in. Pretty much everybody living there was from somewhere else.

Frank, my Frank, didn’t live in the complex, he was married already and had a couple of kids, but he was a lot like the Frank in the book. He could see a car drive by and tell you within fifty bucks how much he could sell it for and you just knew he was right. Frank had his scrapes with the law, too, and I always wondered how far he’d go if he didn’t worry he’d get caught. Or if the pay-off looked big enough.

At the same time, My uncle John got out of jail in Nova Scotia and like so many maritimers came out to Alberta. He stayed with his sister, my aunt, Mary, just like I did when I first got to Alberta. And John was a lot like Ernest ‘Stick’ Stickley. Being from Nova Scotia is like being an Okie, especially if you can take cars apart and put them back together and you just got out of jail. We were driving around Calgary, trying to find work on construction sites and John said if things got really bad he was, “sitting on two grand,” and it took me a few minutes to realize he meant his Pontiac Parisienne. Frank might’ve been able to get two grand for it, but John never would’ve gotten more than a grand. Anyway, it was that way of thinking about his car that made me think of Stick. That, and the way he stood up to guys in bars and never raised his voice or lost his cool and you could tell he wasn’t going down without a fight. Well, I could tell because I knew what he went to jail for.

So it was easy for me to see Swag come to life, the characters were so real for me, they were people I knew.

Now, twenty years later, living in Toronto, I’m a successful Canadian novelist, which means I don’t really make any money form writing and I meet this Irish writer, Declan Burke, online. We have the same US publisher, Harcourt, and had the same editor, Stacia Decker, till the company merged or got bought or something, and she got laid off.

Declan and I’ve both had our Elmore Leonard comparisons – the Irish Mail on Sunday said he was, “Elmore Leonard with a harder Irish edge,” and Publishers Weekly said I was, “a clear disciple of Elmore Leonard... not a bad thing for a fun read.” Ken Bruen said nice things about both of us.

So, we came up with this plan to do a mini promo-tour together, driving from Toronto to Bouchercon in Baltimore, stopping at as many bookstores along the way as we could. The first night at Sleuth of Baker Street went well and the next day we hit the road. Driving the boring 401 from Toronto to Kingston, we got to talking about the Elmore Leonard comparisons and how, sure, it’s great, but pretty fucking hard to live up to.

I said, “The thing is, with these kinds of characters, crooks, but professionals – not insane serial killers or unrealistic James Bond stuff – we all want them to be as real and natural as possible, so that’s going to mean sounding a little like Elmore.”

Declan said, “You don’t call him Dutch?” and I said, no, I don’t.

At that time I was about halfway through writing a novel called either Tumbling Dice or Emotional Rescue, or maybe even Some Sing, Some Dance after the Michel Pagliaro song, and the car stereo was blasting out late 70’s top forty – Fleetwood Mac, Gerry Rafferty, - research I called it, the novel being about a late 70’s band called The High who reunite to play the casino circuit and rob a few along the way. Declan had an iPod and was fingering the headphones, trying to be polite and not just stick them in his ears.

Then I said, “And really, it’s hard not to follow those Ten Rules of Writing, they really do make for a good book.”

“Oh right, yeah.”

“Said is a shortcut for me. I pick up a book, I flip through it, if people are exclaiming, or announcing or demanding, I put it back on the shelf.”

“Or querying,” Declan said, “never heard anybody query in my life.”
To be totally honest, I’d been thinking about this for a while, so I started talking about Swag, how everybody says it was the real breakthrough for Elmore, took him from cult status to mainstream and Declan said, “Fantastic book.”

I said, yeah, fantastic. “And it had ten rules in it, too.”

“That’s right, the original title was Ryan’s Rules. What was it, Frank’s rules of robbery?”

“Frank Ryan’s Ten Rules for Success and Happiness.”

“Right,” Declan said, “written on bar napkins. Ten rules. Have you read Troy Cook’s 47 Rules of Successful Bank Robbers,” and I said, 47?

“Good book.”

We’d been driving an hour, we were finally out of Toronto, passing through Oshawa, it’d been city all the way but now there was some countryside, flat and bland. Traffic was still steady, three lanes in each direction. It was a dull October day, the leaves gone off the trees but no snow yet.

Declan said, “You’re right, though, 47 is a lot. I’d have to carry the book with me on robberies.”

“Right, ‘hang on, everybody stay on the floor, I’ve just got to look this up.’”

“Don’t see it working.”

“No,” I said. “But the general idea, the armed robbery.”

Declan said, “Yeah.”

“Like in The Big O. Karen pulling the stick ups.”

“Till she meets Ray. Did you notice,” Declan said, “we both have women with similar names, Karen, Sharon, both involved in illegal activities who both meet guys named Ray.”

Oh, I’d noticed. Our books also had exactly the same dedication, mine’s, “For Laurie, always,” and his is, “For Aileen, always.” It was freaky.

I said, “In my new book, Swap, I have three women pulling stick ups at spas.”

“Spas?”

“There was an article in the paper, three women robbed some spas in Toronto. They got caught and one of them turned out to be a beauty queen. Miss Toronto Tourism, something like that.”

“Do they always just hand you the material in Canada, then?”

“Pretty much. Hand me all kinds of ideas.” I waited a moment, saw Declan looking at the miles of nothing we still had to drive, holding his earphones, and then I said, “You just have to follow the rules.”

“Right, back to Elmore. I can see he has a point about not opening with weather here, how long could you hold a reader talking about grey clouds?”

“I was thinking about the other ten rules,” I said. “Frank’s. Be polite, don’t say more than you have to, never call your partner by name – they all make sense.” Declan was looking bored and I was thinking the driving was longer and straighter than he’d imagined. I said, “You know, in Swag Frank gets the idea because he read an article in the paper, too. A couple guys who had a three or four year run doing exactly what he was talking about.”

Declan said, “Yeah.” He was still looking straight ahead at the highway, probably getting near the end of being polite.

I said, “Elmore must have read that article.”

Declan said, “You think?”

Yeah, his patience with the road was coming to an end, and probably his patience with me. I said, “You wan to stop for a coffee,” and he said he’d kill for a smoke.

Pulling into the gas station I said, “If you were going to take that kind of risk, wouldn’t you want a bigger score than a cigarette?”



(okay, that's it for part one)