A little biographical background please Giles?

My parents were both from Warwickshire, England. They emigrated to Canada shortly after the war with their two kids, my older brother and sister. I was the only one in the family born over here until we later adopted another brother very close to my own age, much to my delight. I was born in Windsor, Ontario, and spent the first ten years of my life in a tiny little town called Amherstburg. Then we moved four hundred miles north to the small city of North Bay. I went to a priest-ridden, all-boys school called Scollard Hall for three years but eventually escaped to Algonquin Composite for my final two years. They had girls there and my attendance improved dramatically. Then I studied English Lit in a four-year programme at the University of Toronto.

After college I worked as a social worker for a few years. The reason I got the job was because my father ran the Children’s Aid Society in North Bay so I’d had lots of experience working summers for them. But I had wanted to be a writer for a long time by then, so I quit that job in order to write full time, with the easily predictable result that I ended up working at a lot of tedious jobs: bartender, room-service waiter, copy editor.

You are Canadian by birth but have worked in the US on such screenwriting projects as Law & Order and some other TV series. How did you get into this career and how did the transition to crime writing come about?

I fell in love with the movies in the seventies when movies were still directed at adults rather than the developmentally challenged. Films such as Taxi Driver and Chinatown and Midnight Cowboy just knocked me out. So I set out to become a screenwriter and moved to New York, being under the impression that you can make a living doing that in New York. Actually, the only people that do are people who made their name doing other things like Bill Goldman and John Sayles. Anyway, a New York production company saw a couple of my scripts and optioned both of them, and also hired me to write the pilot for a show called Diamonds which was a Moonlighting clone. It was a perfectly awful show and ran for two years. They also had me write for a much better show called Night Heat.

I was lucky enough to meet Bill Goldman shortly after I moved to New York and he gave me two pieces of advice if I wanted to succeed as a screenwriter. The first was to move to Los Angeles, which I didn’t take. The second was to write a novel. It’s not true anymore, but at the time it was certainly true that a big percentage of the movies being made were based on books. You could look at Variety’s top 50 and easily 20 of the pictures were from novels. A couple would be from plays. And then there would be some from sequels, comic books, and studio-generated ideas. (Virtually none of them were from a spec script by an unknown writer.) Nowadays they use far fewer books. They draw on TV shows, video games, comic books, and sequels—and even sequels of TV shows like Charlies Angels II. Very few books get made.

Anyway, one day I was walking along 72nd Street and saw the front page of the New York Post. It had a picture of a man killing himself by doing a swan dive off a high-rise. And I thought, What a cold eye the guy must have who took that picture. Because he would have had to have been waiting there to take it, waiting for the man to jump. And I wondered how a man might get to that point. I came up with a Faustian story about an artist who paints violent subjects. I knew it was far too dark to ever sell to Hollywood so I took Goldman’s advice and wrote it as a novel. Cold Eye wasn’t a crime novel. It wasn’t a genre novel at all, but it was marketed as horror. Anyway it got optioned in Hollywood, though not made there, and was eventually filmed in Italy by a French director named Alain Jessua.

I lobbied the producers of Law And Order for six months to get a job writing for them. I sent them scripts, I sent them Night Heat tapes, and finally I sent them my novel. I think it was the novel that got me the job writing a script for them, because most of the writers on that show—David Black, Robert Nathan and others—were novelists. I co-wrote an episode with Nathan, a wonderful writer, and it went really well. Sponsors loved it, audiences loved it, it was repeated endlessly. But they never hired me again. That was what decided me on pursuing novels and novels only. I thought, if you can do really good work for someone and still you can’t get to work for them again, this stuff just isn’t worth pursuing. I’d made far more money from Cold Eye than I did from my TV work. So that’s how I got to writing fiction full-time.

I then wrote a couple of novels which have so far not been published. But I had long wanted to do something based on the Moors Murders in England, which had always terrified me. And I had long wanted to do something about a cop who was himself under investigation, who is himself guilty of a crime. That’s how I came up with Cardinal and Delorme, the woman who is investigating him. It all fell into place when I was jogging along the shore of Lake Nipissing one winter day (not a wise move, I can tell you) and far off in the snow I could just make out the dim outline of a tiny island with a mine shaft on it. And I thought, What a fabulous place to begin a crime story.

That’s how I came to write Forty Words for Sorrow. It was turned down by sixteen publishers and I was pretty much ready to quit writing. Then I happened onto my agent, Helen Heller, who actually knew what she was doing, which most agents don’t. (This is a little-known aspect of the writing business whether in film or fiction. Most agents don’t have a clue. Assuming they send your stuff out at all—a fairly large assumption--they send it to editors who are exactly wrong for it. They send your political novel to Mysterious Press, for example. Or they send it out with something totally different by somebody else so it looks like part of a yard sale. And most of them don’t even like selling, which is their job. They have no imagination, no initiative, and consequently little success. I’ve had some truly terrible agents.)

  You now live back in Canada. Is Algonquin Bay based on your home town?

Yes, I try to keep Algonquin Bay as close to North Bay as possible.

Although Canada does have a legacy of crime writing it is little known outside of the country itself rather like Australian crime writing. Were you a fan of the genre and aware of  the legacy of other Canadian crime writers?

Neither. I had not read a single Canadian crime writer at the time I wrote Forty Words.

I was a great fan of Martin Cruz Smith’s Gorky Park, and I loved John Le Carre’s early work, particularly Tinker, Tailor (probably the best whodunit ever written) and The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. The only series books I’d read were Ross MacDonald’s Lew Archer books, which I’d read when I was trying to write a mystery screenplay. I really enjoyed them. And Thomas Harris’ Silence of the Lambs and Red Dragon. Wonderful. But mostly I find crime fiction dull: the characters are flat, you get page after page of cliches, the situations are rife with implausibilities, and they don’t touch you in any way. Partly that’s a function of the genre: you’re dealing with issues like Where did he get the gun? How did he have the time to kill her when he was across town? These are often crucial in crime books but they are issues that never come up in most people’s lives.

So unless you have a lot more going on than your crime story—a strong sense of place, vivid characters, some meaningful contact with the everyday world—you get a great fat bore. So I was not a fan of the genre and I’m still not. But I love individual books within the genre. Mostly my favorite writers are those who work somewhere between genre and pure literary work—Graham Greene, Ruth Rendell, Patricia Highsmith, and Brian Moore. I loved Martin Amis’ Night Train. I thought that a brilliant use of genre to study the meaning and impact of suicide. It was ignored by genre lovers, when they didn’t outright sneer at it. There’s a lot of reverse snobbery in this crime writing business, don’t you find?

Was there ever a temptation to set your books in the US?

I do set some of my books in the U.S.  But I thought I could bring more to a crime novel set in northern Ontario. Having grown up there, I knew it well, but having lived in New York City for twenty years, I approached it with a very long lens. There’s something about snow and crime stories that’s very attractive. Gorky Park, A Simple Plan, Smilla’s Sense of Snow...love ’em.

Why did you decide to centre the books around two cops?

You have to have your guy talking to someone, otherwise he ends up talking to himself—if not literally than in endless interior monologue. “He wondered about the girl: was she telling the truth? If so, it meant this. If not, it meant that. And what about the peculiar mister so-and-so?” You get reams and reams of this stuff in some crime books and it’s just stunningly boring. Whereas if you have someone to talk to, you get opportunities for revealing two characters at once, you get opportunities for conflict, and in the case of Cardinal and Delorme you get opportunities for romance. Repressed romance, in their case. Needless to say, you don’t want two cops in every scene or you clutter everything up.

How much research do you do and how accommodating are the various law enforcement agencies?

I did tons of research for Forty Words for Sorrow, and even more for The Delicate Storm. I interviewed Mounties, morgue workers, pathologists, New York cops, North Bay cops, a hydro worker, several doctors. And in the case of DS I visited all the sites of the October Crisis of 1970. Basically people love to talk about their work. The trick is to find someone who talks well, then you can get really lucky. CSIS was the only agency that wasn’t all that co-operative, but you tend to expect that from a spy outfit.

Is organised crime on the increase in Canada?

I haven’t been back long enough to really know, but I suspect it’s on the decrease, because law enforcement has been targeting them for a long time now. Not the mafia, which you almost never hear of here, but we have this terrible problem with motorcycle gangs. Everywhere else they seem to be an irritant rather than a scourge, but here they commit a lot of murders, particularly in Quebec. I think Kathy Reichs and John Farrow deal with them in their books.

Cardinal and Delorme are an unlikely pairing which is probably why they work so well. How difficult was it to develop their relationship across the two books?

I guess different things come naturally to different writers. I don’t have any difficulty developing their relationship, because it just seems entirely natural to me. What I do have enormous trouble with, though, is being their Detective Sergeant, by which I mean deciding when they should be working together in a scene and when not. When they should both be on a case and when not. Whatever you decide in Chapter 3 is going to give you problems later on in Chapter 20. Is it plausible that they’d both be here? Shouldn’t Delorme be covering so-and-so? Or conversely, would a cop really be doing this alone? Shouldn’t Cardinal be there? That sort of thing is a major headache for me. Other writers don’t seem to have the slightest difficulty with it.

Cardinal is a very complex and troubled character, his wife suffers from depression, the relationship with his father is tinged with black humour. A deliberate attempt to create a very human character?

Oh, yes. I want to make him as human as possible, and I spend a lot of time trying to develop scenes that will make him a rounded human being as well as a crime-fighting machine. It’s tricky, because you risk losing the pull of the crime story.

The harsh climate is always to the forefront in the books, an extra element the characters always have to fight against. How deliberate was this?

Very deliberate. I try to layer more and more of it into each successive draft. Sometimes it gets me into trouble, though. I initially wanted Delicate Storm to be set from beginning to end in this mammoth ice storm. But unfortunately the plot required my detectives to head off to New York, to Toronto, to Montreal, and back to Algonquin Bay, which could not happen during a big ice storm. So I had to undo all my weather description and develop the ice storm more slowly, which I hope worked out better.

The Mounties outside of Canada are usually portrayed in a heroic light, an instantly recognisable Canadian icon. Your portrayal of them errs from this image, do they have a tarnished history?

[Historical background information: The FLQ, Front de liberation du Quebec, was formed in the late 1960s, a violent group seeking independence for Quebec. Parti Quebecois was another organisation seeking the same goal but through the democratic process. The FLQ planted bombs and kidnapped high ranking officials (including James Cross). As a result the Trudeau government invoked the War Measures Act, ultimately a suspension of civil rights, the so-called October crisis. The Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) was formed to replace the role of the RCMP (Royal Canadian Mounted Police) as a security service.]

Oh, people still love them over here. In most of the provinces they are the police you deal with. Quebec and Ontario have provincial forces but a lot of the provinces don’t. Anyway, their image got seriously tarnished in the 1980s when their activities of the 1970s came to light. This is mentioned in some detail in Delicate Storm. They burned down some private property to prevent a meeting between the FLQ and the Black Panthers, they stole membership lists from a political party they didn’t like, they have iffy relationships with drug dealers, and their informants in the FLQ may have committed as many crimes as the people they were informing on. That was in the RCMP’s function as Canada’s Security Service. That mandate was taken away from them as a result and given to a new organization called CSIS, which was given the power to do legally all the things the Mounties had done illegally. This is all much worse with all the anti-terrorism legislation over here. Now they can hold people incommunicado without charging them--a giant leap backward to the time before habeus corpus.

There is a strong political element and all manner of conspiracy theories in The Delicate Storm. How factual was this and is this a rich seam for future use?

Strunk and White in The Elements of Style say something like, Inserting your opinions into a piece of writing implies that the market for them is brisk. I have strong political opinions, but most readers do not pick up a thriller to learn them, and I’m not going to make a habit of expressing them. In The Delicate Storm, Cardinal’s father is suffering from heart problems. As a result Cardinal comes face to face with the reality of Ontario’s medical system which has suffered enormously under government cutbacks.  So it’s only realistic to have them in there. I don’t think I get on a soapbox about it.

The conspiracy is another matter. It’s true that the CIA worked with the security service in Quebec. It’s true that they traded information on Black Panthers and FLQ back and forth. It’s true that an informer made bombs and wrote communiques in her apartment, and recruited young men and had them arrested; she wrote a memoir about it. It’s true that one of the kidnappers of James Cross was neither charged nor even mentioned when the FLQ members went on trial. He came to light in 1980 when he was given a one-year sentence, and I think even that was suspended. He was an anglophone named Nigel Hamer. So very little in my story is invented. But where I get into the actual who killed the minister question, that is speculation, which is why I changed all the names.

Any movie adaptations of the books in the offing and would you want to write a screen adaptation?

Haven’t had any calls about Delicate Storm, yet. There’s been tons of interest in Forty Words for Sorrow but I want it to be the best possible film and so I’m holding out for someone who could do the kind of movie I’d like to see. Of course, chances are I’ll probably end up waiting forever. Yes, I’d love to do the adaptation, should this ever actually happen. I hope it does. •