Canadian Crime Fiction

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

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

An article in the Irish Times put it like this:

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

(the full article is here)

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

Have we?

It's Really All About the Story

Cheap e-books!

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

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

Available here.

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

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

This Week's Bridge - The Unguarded Moment

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

It was a mess.

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

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

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

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

This Week's Bridge

Friday at 10:00 on CTV:



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

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

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

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

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

In case you missed them, here they are:

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

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

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

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

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

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


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



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

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

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

Bald-Faced Liar - er, Creative Writer

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

So, here it is:

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

Let It Ride - Available Today in the USA

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

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

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

The Bridge - March 5th - 9:00

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




From the CTV website:

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


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

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

Hamilton Spectator Review

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

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

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

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

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

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

Authentic and riveting.

Here's the link.

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

Book Trailers

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

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



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

A Crime Novel

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

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

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

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

Santa in a Red Dress - Live!

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

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

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

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

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

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!

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

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.