Talking Writing on The House of Mystery
It’s always a pleasure to chat with true crime author and podcast host, Alan R. Warren.
Glamor & Grit Spliced with McLean’s Marvelous Magic
If you’re unfamiliar with JP McLean’s award-winning supernatural crime novels, you should investigate her Dark Dreams series from the beginning. The first two books, Blood Mark and Ghost Mark, are narrated by a gnarly and lovable trio: Jane Walker, protagonist, dreamer, and bearer of magical marks; Jane’s boyfriend, Ethan Bryce, swaggering manager of the Riptide bar in Vancouver; and Jane’s loyal sidekick, former foster child, and high-class escort, Sadie Prescott. In Scorch Mark, the narration expands to include Sadie’s love interest, undercover Vancouver cop Dylan O’Brien.
In Blood Mark, we learn that the scarlet marks snaking around Jane’s body were gifted to her in an ancient Incan ritual to protect her from death. Now, McLean reveals that anyone who tries to kill Jane will end up dead themselves, and this threat has been proven true. Jane also suffers from lucid dreams in which she appears as a shadowy figure whose actions can affect history. In Ghost Mark, the blood marks transform, and she appears in her dreams dressed in whatever she wore when she fell asleep. Since she’s visible, you can imagine the problems this presents. Jane also discovers a vivid white “escape valve” on the back of her hand that rewinds a dream if she turns it counterclockwise and jumps her out of the dream if she moves it clockwise. The spectral marks remain in Scorch Mark, but in a clever stake-raising move, McLean introduces a villainous group of cowboy thugs who intend to use the marks for their own evil purposes. She also reveals much more about the old Peruvian families, the old silver offering bowl, and the Incan ritual itself.
McLean deftly intertwines three plots in Scorch Mark. In one, the psychologist who abducted Jane in Blood Mark goes on trial, and we await the verdict with bated breath. Will the defence attorneys create enough reasonable doubt for the jury to allow him and his accomplice to go free? And how will the attorneys twist Jane’s story? As is typical of courtroom drama, it’s a fist-squeezing, jaw-grinding experience for the reader. Meanwhile, Detective Dylan O’Brien is investigating “ghost guns” — a shipment of illegal firearms that have been produced using a three-D printer, and Jane is dreaming about the evil producers. Interspersed are Jane’s dangerous dreams, where she must act as a witness without being caught by the villains who are changing history. Tension anyone?
Wickedly clever, original, suspenseful, and action-packed, McLean’s impeccable writing and razor-sharp plotting will draw you in and keep you riveted. Scorch Mark is glamour and grit, spliced with a magical sense of the macabre, and wildly Canadian. Detailed, descriptive scenes of the Vancouver Law Courts will have you sitting tensely beside Jane as she watches her attacker from the gallery through thick, bulletproof glass. Then it’s a race across the country to a 12,000-acre Alberta ranch and a massive criminal takedown.
JP McLean is a bestselling author of urban fantasy and supernatural thrillers. She’s been the recipient of numerous honours for the Dark Dreams series and her six-book Gift Legacy series. Among them are a Global Book Award, CIBA and Page Turner Award, the National Indie Excellence Awards, the UK Wishing Shelf Book Awards, and the Whistler independent Book Awards.
As appears in the Ottawa Review of Books, December 2023.
Get it while it’s hot.
A WISE Ace Spins a New Cozy Tale
“Two dozen unexplained wreaths over the past year?”
When a mysterious undertaker is seen delivering floral funerary wreaths to families of the deceased BEFORE the death occurs, the WISE women spring into action in Ace’s latest cozy mystery. The police won’t touch it with a “bargepole” as the deaths aren’t suspicious. And yet, how can this undertaker know who’s going to die unless he’s been killing them? Meanwhile, using her nursing background, no-nonsense Mavis goes undercover to investigate some Suspicious Sisters, when it’s noted that narcotics belonging to recently deceased patients are disappearing in a certain hospital. A morbid aura shadows the idyllic village of Anwen-by-Wye, in the eighth installment of Ace’s WISE Enquiries series, and the bodies pile up.
By the way, WISE is an acronym for the origins of the four women who’ve teamed up to answer enquiries and solve these bizarre crimes: Carol from Wales, Christine from Ireland, Scottish Mavis, and English Annie. These bizarre crimes can only originate in the unrelenting mind of Cathy Ace. Averaging two books a year, the woman is unstoppable.
The jury’s still out on Ace’s view of the Welsh aristocracy. In this book, more than others, we see the colossal power held by Henry Twyst, the eighth Duke of Chellingworth, and his eccentric dowager mother, Althea. By the end of this book, they own it all, and though we applaud their generosity as patrons, the reader can’t help but notice the power imbalance. “At least we keep the village hall looking tidy. Which pleases both Their Graces,” quips one lowly villager. “Indeed, while “Their Graces” quibble over family issues, they continue to generate a rental income from the villagers and more from tours of Chellingworth Hall. Yet, Ace’s satirizing of the octogenarian dowager’s bizarre wardrobe choices, and her daughter Clementine’s plans to wed “at dawn on the summer solstice at the base of Queen Hatshepsut’s obelisk at the temple of Karnak” in Egypt, give us pause. Do I detect a mutinous murmur beneath a witty veneer?
A master of social satire, Ace presents this wry romp, slathered in details, and peppered with Welsh gems. Some favourites? The chief inspector “knew his onions when it came to his job” and “she’ll have my guts for garters.” Or this cringeworthy favourite: “Sugar was better than bile.” Annie’s “Gordon Bennett!” sent me running to Google. Ace’s dialects sparkle, her sensory descriptions wrap you in the best of the season, and her satirizing will make you smile.
Ace’s strength is in writing what she knows and doing so flawlessly. It’s clear she genuinely loves her characters and her birth country, as her prose oozes with colloquialisms. Ace emigrated from Swansea, Wales to British Columbia at age forty, and often visits home. A longtime fan of Nancy Drew and Agatha Christie, she comes naturally to the cozy murder mystery genre and is a storyteller extraordinaire. Her standalone novel, The Wrong Boy, and her Cait Morgan Mysteries have been optioned for TV by UK producers Free@LastTV. One can only hope, the WISE Enquiries follow in their wake.
Ace has been country-hopping this year, presenting at events like Gŵyl Crime Cymru (Wales’ first international crime literature festival), Calgary’s When Words Collide, and Boucheron (an annual world mystery convention). Catch her where you can and in the meantime, check out her two long-running cozy mystery series: The WISE Enquiries Agency Mysteries and Cait Morgan Mysteries.
As reviewed in the Ottawa Review of Books, September 2023
The Mother of Degrassi Tells her Tale
The Mother of All Degrassi takes us on a voyage through time and place in this, her memoir. Most Canadians will have heard of Degrassi at some point in their lives, whether they watched the television series themselves, or with their children, or borrowed episodes to use in the classroom to teach their students about life. But how Degrassi originated, its transformations, its effect on those it touched and those who were involved in its growth, and on the woman herself, is the subject of this story.
This is a tale of an ambitious, energetic, feisty, risk-taking woman who listened to her heart and her spirit, who played the game to win, transforming disastrous moments into a multi-million dollar empire. It is the story of a woman who touched the lives of millions of viewers over a period of forty years, and changed the lives of countless child stars who found their start at Degrassi.
Her memoir is about revelation and risk-taking, daring and dogmatic perseverance, inspiration and hope. And I bet you’d never even heard her name before. Linda Schuyler stood strong behind the scenes, cradling her young actors, and leading her team. I’d certainly never heard of her until recently, though I knew of Degrassi. Living near Toronto, Ontario in the early 70s, 80s, and 90s gave me an edge because that’s where it all began. Or did it?
Entangling business with personal, Schuyler’s memoir is structured somewhat chronologically but supplemented with natural turns and flashbacks when she’s touched by a certain moment or brushed by a special person, and life changes. Yet, she returns to one pivotal moment time and again.
Schuyler wanted to be a mother more than anything else yet was unable to conceive. She suffered with endometriosis, possibly caused by a bodily wrenching in a near-fatal car accident in 1968. She was working at a pub in England when she met Simon, a handsome young man who offered to take her water-skiing in the Lake Country. They were joined by his friend, Elliott. Afterwards, while driving back to London after a long playful day in the sun, their car collided with a double-decker bus. Schuyler was the lone survivor but wore the scars of that moment forever. And from that wreckage emerged a filmmaker, storyteller, teacher, and businesswoman.
Her “giddy, schoolgirl sense of excitement” (47) permeates the text. Flush with media terms like blue-skying, footage, rough picture edit, 16 mm, and Bolex, Schuyler interjects the more technical edges of film production. If you’re at all interested in media studies, this book is for you. In fact, I’d make it part of the syllabus. Yet far beyond that, in its very heart, it’s an emotional story, and a quick and entertaining read that feels real and genuine. Even moments of name-dropping feel natural—that’s just how it was when you happened to be seated next to Hugh Laurie at Bob Newhart’s table in L.A. picking up a Television Critic’s Choice Award (2005).
Rife with teachable moments—Schuyler is at heart an educator—she reminds us that writing for kids means confronting the issues of the day. Degrassi was real and raw. From the beginning, no issue was taboo, and over the years the episodes involved all manner of sociopolitical topics that affected teens. “Our serious subjects for the first season were underage drinking, parental abuse, adoption, bullying, and teen pregnancy . . . pills being sold as drugs, bad date advice, a thwarted pornographic viewing, and the formation of our one-song-wonder rock group — The Zit Remedy” (90). Later stories involved racism, homophobia, and the impact of social media.
Schuyler experienced bullying beginning in grade three, when her family moved from England to Paris, Ontario. The taunts of “Limey Linda—slimy Limey Linda” haunted her. “I consider Degrassi to be probably the world’s longest running anti-bullying campaign,” she revealed at Wilfrid Laurier University in 2020. Perhaps, Degrassi was in-part her revenge. Because Schuyler’s family were immigrants like so many of the children she taught, she understood their experiences and dilemmas, and she wanted to tell their stories. In her first low-budget film, Between Two Worlds, she told the stories of her inner-city Toronto class as she taught them about media. The film was broadcast internationally, and Degrassi was born. Schuyler’s elements: “casting age-appropriate actors, taking chances on fresh talent in front of and behind the camera, naturalistic settings and dialogue, and setting the stories in a lower-middle-class environment” featured in five hundred episodes (60).
Schuyler’s memoir is a celebration of a life well lived, of a woman who loved and lost, followed her heart, then fell and rose again.
Reviewed in the Ottawa Review of Books, June 2023
A Win for LURE
I’m thrilled to announce that LURE: Jesse & Hawk just won a National Indie Excellence Award. I’m proud of LURE and how far it’s come. It was the first book I ever completed way back in the early 1990s when I deep into Indigenous Studies at Trent University. I wrapped it in brown paper and carried it around through many moves over many years. A couple of years ago, I rewrote it and launched it.
It’s hard for Indie authors these days. We’re often seen as inferior because our work hasn’t been accepted by a big publisher, so an award like this really makes me feel good.
Cambium Blue: a story of one small town against the world
Write what you know. That’s what writing coaches tell us. In the case of former small-town journalist Maureen Brownlee, the advice rings true. Her latest novel is set in the interior of British Columbia, 1995 – “Cache Creek to Kamloops and north” (65) – an area close to where Brownlee grew up and worked at her own small-town newspaper during the time the mountain pine beetle was rampaging through the forests of western North America, destroying millions of acres of pine forest. Brownlee’s insider’s view breathes life and truth into this literary text.
“When the beetles attack, they bring a fungus with them, and the fungus spreads into the tree and makes it easier for the beetles to chew through the cambium . . . It stains the wood, blue streaks all through it. The lumber buyers downgrade it” (156). With its blue cambium, prices drop, even though there’s nothing wrong with blue wood if it can be harvested before it dries out and cracks. There’s a metaphor here somewhere.
https://natural-resources.canada.ca/
An unscrupulous developer (aren’t they all?), smelling the potential for a quick buck, comes to Beauty Creek to romance the Creeksters into letting him cut the timber and build his townhouse development before it’s too late. The problem with development is that the locals end up being priced out of their own land. We’ve seen this time and time again as gentrification has crept through this province. But what else can you do when you’re about to lose the only resource that keeps your town alive? And so the debate begins.
The narrative meanders through the distinct voices of three central characters: Maggie, the widowed editor of the Chronicle, struggling to keep her late husband’s dream alive; Stevie, a bright, uneducated single mother of two, bent on independence; and Nash Malone, poet, junk aficionado, and veteran of the Spanish War of 1935. These three strong, independent characters come together when Maggie offers Stevie a decent job at the Chronicle and sends her off to interview Malone. In an unlikely pairing, the older wounded veteran and the young wounded woman strike up a friendship. When the gloves come off and the town experiences its own insidious violence, we are reminded that evil manifests itself in many forms and doesn’t always appear as strangers or insects. Small towns have a unique heartbeat, sometimes fluttering, sometimes pounding with the force of an axe.
As the mountain pine beetle threatens the economy of this small resource-driven town, we see how quickly a community can be brought to its knees. With a voice and writing style reminiscent of Barbara Kingsolver, especially her Prodigal Summer and Poisonwood Bible, Brownlee spins a tragically beautiful tale. A monstrous blue sadness chews its way through these pages, while the haunting memories of Nash Malone weave through the text like a magnificent memoir. I must confess that I was captivated by Malone’s richly sensual writing, but found the typeface, which I know was intended to evoke an old-fashioned smudgy typeface, very hard on these aging eyes. But that has nothing to do with Brownlee’s brilliant eco-fiction, and Nash Malone is a truly tragic hero.
Cambium Blue is a slow-burn winner and destined to become a B.C. classic. It has been shortlisted for the George Ryga Award, an annual literary prize for a B.C. writer who has achieved an outstanding level of social consciousness in a new book.
As reviewed in the Ottawa Review of Books (May 2023)