Bullet Points: Post-Getaway Edition

So I have finally returned to Rap Sheet headquarters after an almost two-weeks-long train journey through western Canada, mostly touring Banff National Park and Jasper National Park on the British Columbia/Alberta border. The relaxation time was much needed; I didn’t touch a computer or cell phone the whole time I was away, and only read a newspaper twice. I’m feeling rested and ready to gather my latest assortment of crime fiction-related news items.

• Five years after Elmore Leonard passed away, his son Peter is set to reinvigorate one of Leonard’s best-recalled series characters, Raylan Givens, in Raylan Goes to Detroit, which is due out next month from Rare Bird Books. Here’s the plot synopsis offered by Amazon:

After an altercation with his superiors in Harlan County, Kentucky, Deputy U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens is offered two choices. He can either retire or finish his career on the fugitive task force in the crime-ridden precincts of Detroit.

Acting on a tip, Raylan and his new partner, Deputy Marshal Bobby Torres, arrest Jose Rindo, a destructive and violent criminal. Rindo is also being pursued by the FBI, who arrive shortly after he is in custody. Raylan bumps heads with a beautiful FBI agent named Nora Sanchez, who wants Rindo for the murder of a one of their own.

When Rindo escapes from the county jail and is arrested in Ohio, Raylan and FBI Special Agent Sanchez drive south to pick up the fugitive and bring him back to stand trial. Later, when Rindo escapes again, Raylan and Nora―still at odds―are reunited and follow the elusive fugitive’s trail across Arizona to El Centro, California, and into Mexico, where they have no jurisdiction or authority. How are they going to bring Rindo, a Mexican citizen, across the border without anyone knowing?

• While I was away on vacation, I received word from publisher Eric Campbell that the fourth edition of Down & Out: The Magazine is now ready for purchase. Featured among the contents of this issue: a new Inspector Kubu short story from the writing team of Michael Stanley; a vintage yarn by Frederick C. Davis; new fiction by Arthur Klepchukov, Lissa Marie Redmond, and Brian Silverman; and my latest “Placed in Evidence” column, which surveys the extensive field of Jack the Ripper novels—just in time for the 130th anniversary of that murderous fiend’s rampage through London.

• By the way, I just noticed that Kevin R. Tipple has reviewed the first two issues of Down & Out: The Magazine in his blog, Kevin’s Corner. Look here for his Issue 1 assessment, and here to see what he said about Issue 2. I am pleased to learn that he’s enjoying my “Placed in Evidence” contributions.

• This week’s release, by William Morrow, of Scarface and the Untouchable: Al Capone, Eliot Ness, and the Battle for Chicago has brought with it a spate of associated Web postings by co-authors Max Allan Collins and A. Brad Schwartz. In CrimeReads, for instance, the pair look back at Capone’s fondness for self-publicity, while on the Strand Magazine’s Web site they compile “10 Surprising Facts About Al Capone and Eliot Ness.” The authors fielded questions today from Reddit users. And in a piece for History News Network they try to make sense of Donald Trump’s bizarre effort to compare Capone with his indicted former campaign manager, Paul Manafort.

• Who will play Perry Mason now? Deadline Hollywood reports that Robert Downey Jr., who’d long hoped to portray Erle Stanley Gardner’s highly successful criminal defense attorney on screen, doesn’t have time enough in his schedule to star in an HBO-TV series that “reimagines” the protagonist. Deadline Hollywood adds, though, that “Robert and Susan Downey, who developed the project, remain executive producers along with Joe Horaceck. Team Downey originally had a Perry Mason feature reboot set up at Warner Bros. six years ago with Downey Jr. attached to star.” Also stepping aside from this project is Nic Pizzolatto, who had been on board to write the Mason series, but is now devoting himself to Season 3 of HBO’s True Detective.

• Nancie Clare’s most recent guest on her Speaking of Mysteries podcast is the frequently funny Chicago novelist Lori Rader-Day, who has much to say about her new novel, Under a Dark Sky.

• Happy 16th birthday to the Literary Saloon blog.

• Canada’s Globe and Mail carries a good profile of Linwood Barclay, emphasizing his interest in scripting films and TV shows.

• I missed this news during my holiday travels. Fortunately, B.V. Lawson picked it up in her blog, In Reference to Murder:

Sisters in Crime Australia announced the winners of this year’s Davitt Awards at the annual awards dinner this past weekend. Best Adult Crime Novel was won by And Fire Came Down by Emma Viskic; the Readers’ Choice winner was Force of Nature by Jane Harper; Best Debut, The Dark Lake by Sarah Bailey; Best Non-fiction Book, Whiteley on Trial by Gabriella Coslovich; Best Young Adult, Ballad for a Mad Girl by Vikki Wakefield; and Best Children’s Novel, The Turnkey by Allison Rushby. The awards are named after Ellen Davitt, author of Australia’s first mystery novel, Force and Fraud (1865), and as of 2018, are sponsored by Swinburne University of Technology.

• Meanwhile, Mystery Fanfare has posted the list of finalists for the 2018 Silver Fanchion Awards, to be dispensed during the Killer Nashville conference in Tennessee (August 23-26). The categories of contenders include Best Mystery, Best Thriller, and Best Suspense.

• The Detroit Free Press bids a fond farewell to Aunt Agatha’s. After 26 years in business, that popular Ann Arbor, Michigan, bookshop will close its doors for the last time on August 31.

• In mid-July, editor and scholar Steven Powell wrote in The Rap Sheet about his latest book, The Big Somewhere: Essays on James Ellroy’s Noir World (Bloomsbury Academic). More recently, he excerpted the opening chapter from that work in his blog, The Venetian Vase. As he explains, it “examine[s] the influence of Raymond Chandler’s writing on Ellroy’s work.”

• Speaking of Chandler—and following on from my July 26 piece for CrimeReads about how other authors have “revived and reinterpreted” his series private eye, Philip Marlowe—note that Open Letters Review features a thoughtful critique of what it calls “one of the summer’s least likely and most fascinating volumes”: The Annotated Big Sleep, edited by Owen Hill, Pamela Jackson, and Anthony Dean Rizzuto (Vintage Crime). Kevin Burton Smith supplies his own generally favorable comments about that notes-heavy version of the first Marlowe novel in The Thrilling Detective Web Site, together with some unexpectedly laudatory remarks about Only to Sleep, Lawrence Osborne’s new tale imagining Marlowe as an older gent investigating an insurance scam in 1980s Mexico. Smith’s bottom line: “what works best in this book is all the ways it’s not Chandler, but merely Chandleresque.” I couldn’t agree more.

• A books and culture site I’d never heard of before, called Signature, has posted a worthwhile rundown of what it claims are the “100 Best Thrillers of All Time.”

• Not to be outdone as a cultural arbiter, National Public Radio has compiled a list of its “100 Favorite Horror Stories.”

• Oh, and cable-TV provider AMC has slated November as the broadcast month for its mini-series adaptation (co-produced with the BBC) of John le Carré’s Little Drummer Girl.

• Finally, the Columbophile recently asked its readers to choose their favorite episodes of Peter Falk’s 1971-1978 NBC Mystery Movie series, Columbo. Not surprisingly, the top 10 list resulting from that poll includes 1974’s “Exercise in Fatality” (guest starring Robert Conrad) and “Negative Reaction” (with Dick Van Dyke), along with 1973’s “A Stitch in Crime” (featuring Leonard Nimoy) and “Any Old Port in a Storm” (also from 1973, with Donald Pleasance as the murderer). It’s a shock, however, to not see on this roster any eps guest starring multiple offenders Robert Culp (who appeared in three installments) or Patrick McGoohan (who featured in four).

Bullet Points: On the Mend Edition

After spending most of the last two weeks under the weather, it appears I am finally on the rocky road to recovery. My recent decimation of the world’s Kleenex supply has diminished significantly, and I am no longer coughing my way through whatever program happens to be playing on television any given night. I would say these are favorable signs. Maybe I can get back to a more regular schedule of blog writing soon. For the time being, though, here are a few odds and ends drawn from my file of recent crime-fiction news bits.

• Blogger Gerald So, a member of the Short Mystery Fiction Society, has posted brief, formatted interviews with all 19 of the finalists for this year’s Derringer Awards. The winners of those commendations, in four categories, will be chosen through an online vote of eligible SMFS members (polls to remain open through April 29), with the names of this year’s prize recipients to be declared on May 1.

• Organizers of Bouchercon 2017 have announced the roster of authors whose work will appear in the Passport to Murder Anthology, scheduled to be available for advance ordering this coming summer and on hand for purchase during the Toronto convention in October. Among the 22 honored fictionists are Craig Fautus Buck, Hilary Davidson, Gary Phillips, and Chris Grabenstein.

• Speaking of Bouchercon, anyone who is eligible to nominate this year’s Anthony Awards contenders but has not yet filled out the survey (which should have been sent via e-mail) should remember that the deadline is April 30!

• Here’s a gift opportunity to keep in mind when shopping for Agent 007 fans: The Complete James Bond: Goldfinger—The Classic Comic Strip Collection, 1960-66, released this month by Titan Books. The blog Spy Vibe points out that this is the third in Titan’s series of volumes collecting Bond comic strips that were originally syndicated in British newspapers from 1958 to 1983. Those strips covered 52 story arcs, the earliest ones being based on Ian Fleming’s stories. “The new hardcover edition,” says Spy Vibe, “includes strips from 1960-1966: Goldfinger, Risico, From a View to a Kill, For Your Eyes Only, The Man with the Golden Gun, and The Living Daylights.” The two previous volumes, issued last year, were James Bond: Spectre: The Complete Comic Strip Collection and The Complete James Bond: Dr No—The Classic Comic Strip Collection 1958-60. Amazon shows a fourth book, The Complete James Bond: The Hildebrand Rarity—The Classic Comic Strip Collection 1966-69, as due for release this coming November.

• By the way, From Russia with Love—Fleming’s fifth Bond escapade—celebrated its 60th anniversary earlier this month. As The Book Bond notes, the book was first published on April 8, 1957.

• Happy birthday also to Grauman’s Chinese Theatre! That famous Hollywood Boulevard landmark, now known as the TCL Chinese Theatre, opened on May 18, 1927—meaning it commemorates its 90th anniversary of operation today.

• Smithsonian.com supplies some context to America’s early 20th-century “movie palace” boom.

• Having greatly enjoyed 2015’s The Man from U.N.C.L.E., I am pleased to read that a sequel might finally be in the works. In its post about this, though, The Spy Command cautions that the plan is still in its infancy, and “studios and production offices are littered with scripts that were never made into films.” I’ll keep my eye on this.

• Huh. I hadn’t heard this before. According to Sergio Angelini at Tipping My Fedora, screenwriter Howard Rodman’s “unlikely inspiration” for the 1974 TV film Smile Jenny, You’re Dead—the second of two feature-length pilots for Harry O, the often-underrated 1974-1976 ABC private-eye series—“was Harry Greener, the aged ex-vaudevillian in Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust reduced to peddling ‘Miracle Solvent’ silver polish door-to-door until he finally keels over and dies. That book’s feeling for California’s alienated and disenfranchised also comes through in the romantic and mytho-poetic undercurrent to this vehicle for David Janssen.”

• Screen Daily reports that “principal photography has wrapped in Sudbury, Ontario, on Never Saw It Coming,” a suspense film based on Linwood Barclay’s 2013 novel of the same name. The site explains that the story focuses on “a young woman who passes herself off as a psychic. When the charlatan targets the family of a missing woman, she becomes entangled in the dark secrets of the husband and daughter.” The supposed clairvoyant, Keisha Ceylon, is being played on-screen by Montreal-born Emily Hampshire (from the Canadian sitcom Schitt’s Creek); Eric Roberts plays Wendell Garfield, whose wife has gone missing. The Toronto Star says, “the aim is for Never Saw It Coming to be finished by late summer, in time for fall film festivals.”

• Linwood Barclay’s latest thriller, Parting Shot, comes out this week in Great Britain, and Ali Karim had a chance to talk with him for Shotsmag Confidential.

• Elsewhere in that same blog, Ayo Onatade has word of Henning Mankell’s final novel, After the Fire, which is due out on both sides of the Atlantic in October. Here’s the plot brief:

Fredrik Welin is a seventy-year-old retired doctor. Years ago he retreated to the Swedish archipelago, where he lives alone on an island. He swims in the sea every day, cutting a hole in the ice if necessary. He lives a quiet life. Until he wakes up one night to find his house on fire.

Fredrik escapes just in time, wearing two left-footed wellies, as neighboring islanders arrive to help douse the flames. All that remains in the morning is a stinking ruin and evidence of arson. The house that has been in his family for generations and all his worldly belongings are gone. He cannot think who would do such a thing, or why. Without a suspect, the police begin to think he started the fire himself.

Mankell died back in October 2015.

• “CBS Television Studios has pre-emptively bought the rights to Edgar-winning author Meg Gardiner’s forthcoming novel, UNSUB, to adapt for television,” reports In Reference to Murder. “The thriller follows a female detective on the trail of an infamous serial killer—inspired by the still-unsolved Zodiac case—when he breaks his silence and begins killing again. The detective, who grew up watching her father destroy himself and his family chasing the killer, now finds herself facing the same monster.”

• Look for the May 21 premiere of Site Unseen: An Emma Fielding Mystery, a Hallmark Movies & Mysteries TV presentation based on Dana Cameron’s novels. It’s the opening installment in the network’s newest teleflick franchise, Emma Fielding Mysteries. As Mystery Fanfare explains, Courtney Thorne-Smith (formerly of According to Jim and Ally McBeal) will star as Fielding, “a brilliant, dedicated, and driven archaeologist who discovers artifacts that have been lost for hundreds of years—and she's very, very good at it. Emma has recently unearthed evidence of a possible 17th-century coastal Maine settlement that predates Jamestown, one of the most significant archaeological finds in years. But the dead body she uncovers on the site pushes Emma into a different kind of exploration. Her dig site is suddenly in jeopardy of being shut down, due to the meddling of local treasure-hunters and a second suspicious murder. Emma must team with the handsome FBI agent investigating the case to dig up dirt on the killer, before Emma and her excavation are ancient history.”

• I finally caught up with Season 4 of the British TV series Ripper Street on Netflix. (Yeah, I know, I’m a bit late to the party—again.) I’ve mentioned before what a fan I have become of that sometimes brutal but nonetheless elegantly written crime drama, set in London in the aftermath of Jack the Ripper’s 1888 murder spree. But Season 4 really demonstrates this program’s strengths, with plots involving Detective Inspector Bennet Drake’s promotion as commander of Whitechapel’s H Division police force, forensic expert Homer Jackson’s desperate efforts to save his wife (former brothel madam “Long Susan” Hart) from hanging, Edmund Reid’s return to detective duties after a self-imposed exile (with his once-lost daughter, Matilda) on the English seacoast, police corruption, and Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. Oh, and there are rumors of a golem leaping about the rooftops of the East End, biting bloody chunks out of his victims, and a rabbi’s murder may be in need of some further investigation. Believe me, this isn’t a program through which one is likely to sleep. What I hadn’t expected was that Season 4 would conclude with such a shocking cliffhanger! A great set-up for the fifth and perhaps concluding series of Ripper Street, which was already broadcast in Britain last October, but likely won’t make it to Netflix in the States until this coming October. You can watch the trailers for Seasons 4 and 5 here.

• Criminal defense attorney-turned-author Allen Eskens has won the 2017 Minnesota Book Award, in the Genre Fiction category, for The Heavens May Fall (Seventh Street).

• Donald Trump isn’t an enthusiastic reader, unlike President Barack Obama, his Democratic predecessor. But yesterday, Republican Trump finally took to Twitter to praise a new book. Wouldn’t you know it, though, the work he touted has no words in it.

• Raymond Chandler was no fan of the FBI.

• But count me as a Mary Ann fan.

• Nancie Clare’s most recent guest on her Speaking of Mysteries podcast is Alex Segura, whose Dangerous Ends—the third novel featuring Miami gumshoe Pete Fernandez—was recently released. You can listen to their exchange here.

• Meanwhile, the third episode of Writer Types, hosted by S.W. Lauden and Eric Beetner, “was mostly recorded on site at the inaugural Murder & Mayhem in Chicago conference and features interviews with none other than Sara Paretsky, William Kent Kreuger, Sean Chercover, Marcus Sakey, Dana Kaye and Lori Rader-Day, among many others.” Click here to hear the whole show.

• And on the latest edition of Two Crime Writers and a Microphone, Steve Cavanagh and Luca Veste talk with Steve Mosby “about his brand-new book, You Can Run, his career so far, the dark side of crime fiction, … [and] whether beards have more fun.”

• Other recent interviews of significance: Jeffery Deaver talks with Crimespree Magazine about his new novel, Burial Hour; Robin Yokum answers questions about A Welcome Murder; Joe Ide speaks with S.W. Lauden about his first Isaiah Quintabe novel, IQ, and its coming sequel; Lori Rader-Day (The Day I Died) submits to at least two sets of questions, one from Chicago Review of Books, the other from Mystery Playground; Crime Fiction Lover asks Mason Cross about his new Carter Blake thriller, Don’t Look for Me; Jenni L. Walsh recounts the background of her Bonnie and Clyde novel, Becoming Bonnie, for the Tor/Forge Blog; the Kirkus Reviews Web site carries a brief exchange with authors Rosemarie and Vince Keenan on the subject of their second Lillian Frost/Edith Head mystery, Dangerous to Know; Megan Miranda offers MysteryPeople some insights into her latest psychological suspense yarn, The Perfect Stranger; and in advance of this year’s Malice Domestic conference (April 28-30), Art Taylor chats with Martin Edwards, winner of the 2017 Poirot Award.

• Crime drama news from TV Shows on DVD: Be on the lookout for the release of Police Story, Season Two on July 25; T.J. Hooker: The Complete Series on July 18; and the re-release of McCloud: Season One on June 13. Oh, and The Rockford Files: The Complete Series will go on sale—in both DVD and Blu-ray formats—in June.

• Finally, Crime Fiction Ireland offers a selection of noteworthy authors slated to take part in this year’s St. Hilda’s Mystery and Crime Conference, scheduled for August 18-20 in Oxford, England. Iceland’s Yrsa Sigurðardóttir is to be the guest of honor.

A Principled Stand

Canadian thriller writer Linwood Barclay announced yesterday in a piece for The Globe and Mail newspaper that he has cancelled his upcoming U.S. book tour due to Donald Trump’s “ill-conceived presidential executive order rooted in racism and ignorance suddenly bann[ing] entry to the United States from seven predominantly Muslim countries.” He added: “At this moment, entering Trump’s America feels akin to patronizing a golf course that excludes blacks, a health club that refuses membership to Jews.” One wonders whether other foreign authors will follow Barclay’s example.

Macdonald Mines His Own Life

Toronto author Linwood Barclay had a splendid piece in this last Friday’s Globe and Mail newspaper, assessing the new Library of America omnibus, Ross Macdonald: Four Novels of the 1950s, edited by Tom Nolan (and about which I also wrote recently). As a college student, Barclay was fortunate enough to correspond at some length with private-eye fictionist Macdonald, and he offers Globe & Mail readers some of his memories of the man. But I also like what he wrote about the stories featured in Nolan’s collection:

The first two novels are of the hard-boiled variety, and owe much to Chandler and Hammett. But Macdonald believed he could do better than that, particularly better than Chandler, whose loose plots were designed to create good scenes, whereas Macdonald viewed plot as a vehicle for meaning.

His approach has evolved by the time he writes The Doomsters, about an escapee from a psychiatric facility who comes to Archer for help, and The Galton Case, in which a woman engages Archer to find her long-lost son. Archer himself is rarely the story. He’s not hired by old girlfriends with long legs and ample bosoms who now find themselves in a jam. As Macdonald himself had said, Archer was so two-dimensional that if he turned sideways, he would disappear. I wouldn’t go that far. Archer feels fully realized, has a strong moral code, a sense of decency. But he is also a device, a kind of gardener who unearths dirt to allow sunshine in and expose diseased roots. Unlike the earlier novels, where Archer often tangled with common thugs, in The Doomsters and The Galton Case the detective’s clients are more upscale, but their sins run just as deep.

The latter is seen by many as Macdonald’s masterpiece, and it may well have been at the time, but his career highs would come in later decades with The Chill, Black Money, and The Underground Man. The Galton Case, however, marked a period where Macdonald mined, in a more direct way, his own life for material. It explores his feeling of displacement that came from being born in the United States but raised in Canada. Plus, there’s the theme of the absent father: Macdonald’s abandoned the family when he was a boy; in Galton, Archer is on the trail of a young man named John who’s in search of his own. (Macdonald’s father’s name was John.) Many of the 18 Archer novels, and short stories (one called, interestingly, “Gone Girl”), are about disappearances, and it doesn’t seem to be reading too much into things to surmise that much of Macdonald’s writing was about finding what he himself had lost.

Click here to find Barclay’s complete article.

Pierce’s Picks: “No Safe House”

A weekly alert for followers of crime, mystery, and thriller fiction.

No Safe House, by Linwood Barclay (New American Library)

The Gist: “Seven years after barely surviving the terrors of No Time for Goodbye (2007),” explains Publishers Weekly, “the Archer family of Milford, Conn., once again tempts fate in this darkly comic if decidedly creepy thriller … History seems to be repeating itself as mom Cynthia fights to set limits on 14-year-old Grace, who defies her--much as the rebellious 14-year-old Cynthia herself did the night she got drunk with local hood Vince Fleming and her parents and brother disappeared. But Grace’s latest lapse in judgment--agreeing to joyride with pistol-packing bad boy Stuart Koch, whose father assists the now-grown Vince--plunges the entire clan into a deadly perfect storm of greed, violence, dog walkers, and ruthless rival crooks at cross-purposes.” Reviewing the Evidence says this novel plays to the author’s strengths: “Here we are on familiar, if still effective, ground for Barclay. He specializes in mining a suburban angst rooted in the suspicion that the leafy streets and tidy homes sit atop a subterranean fault line that constantly threatens to split wide open and engulf their earnest and respectable citizens in unexpected anarchy. He is particularly good at situating the threat in the teenaged characters, who behave in that familiar and maddening combination of reckless daring and moral superiority most parents of adolescents will recognize instantly. Grace in this case does something thoroughly foolish yet almost sweetly naïve. When she learns what she may be responsible for, she has to be almost physically restrained from rushing off to the authorities to confess, while her exasperated but loving father does what he can to protect her.”

What Else You Should Know: For a piece in The Big Thrill, A.J. Colucci “asked Barclay why he chose to go back to the story after all these years. ‘It was my U.S. publisher, Penguin, that really wanted me to do a sequel, and seven years seemed like the right amount of time. The daughter in the book, Grace, is the same age as her mother Cynthia when the first event happened, and that had some symmetry to it.’ … Barclay enjoyed going back to the original characters and imagining how they developed. ‘When something traumatic happens in the context of a thriller, even when you find out all the answers, you have to wonder--what’s it like for those people afterwards? How does their life change? What does it do to them personally? I knew how it would affect Cynthia and her relationship with her daughter. That’s the stuff I wanted to get into, how she would be so obsessively overprotective. It’s the law of unintended consequences--the more you try to achieve one thing, the more you achieve the opposite. The more Cynthia tries to rein Grace in, the more she fights back. We’ve all been there.’” The Minneapolis Star Tribune adds that “While this is a sequel to No Time for Goodbye, familiarity with that earlier thriller isn’t required to enjoy this look at a family trying to maintain cohesion. What makes the story work is the depth and strength of the Archer family and their love for each other that oozes off the page while bad things continue to happen around them.”

Tapping Into Barclay’s Methods

I was lucky enough last week to interview Linwood Barclay, author of the new thriller A Tap on the Window. You’ll find the results of our exchange in my Kirkus Reviews column posted earlier today.

I’ve encountered Barclay at a couple of Bouchercons over the years, but strangely, we’ve never taken the opportunity to sit down and talk about our mutual interest in crime fiction. Via e-mail, though, this 58-year-old resident of Oakville, Ontario (who, by the way, is celebrating his 36th wedding anniversary this week), seemed quite pleased to discuss subjects ranging from his writing history and his story-plotting process, to his favorite authors and the debts he owes to renowned California detective novelist Ross Macdonald. Barclay joked that after three decades of working for newspapers (during part of which he penned a humor column), he’d learned to “turn stuff around fast”--so responding to more than a dozen of my queries must barely have caused an interruption in his day’s schedule.

Unlike some previous author interviews I have put together for Kirkus, I left less of my conversation with Barclay on the cutting-room floor. But there were parts I had to cut out, and those I am posting below for your delectation. After you read the Kirkus portion of our interview, the Q&As here should make more sense.

J. Kingston Pierce: I have to say, you’ve weighted down your protagonist, upstate New York private eye Cal Weaver, with extraordinary burdens of guilt and pain in this novel, especially in the closing chapters. Did you ever think he might have deserved to walk away from this story with at least a modicum of happiness?

Linwood Barclay: I was kind of mean to him, wasn’t I? But my hope is that the readers feel a hint of Cal’s pain, that this is a book that will stay with them for a while. There’s a major event near the end of the novel that I could have avoided, but to not do it felt like a cop-out. I thought, “I’m going all in.”

JKP: Without giving away too much of Tap’s story, let me just say that I liked how Weaver’s exploration of young Claire Sanders’ disappearance ultimately shed new light on the recent death of the P.I.’s son, Scott. Did you know, when starting on the book, how that would work out in the end? Or was the solution to Scott’s death revealed to you during the process of writing?

LB: I knew from the outset it all had to be linked. Just how worked itself out as I went along. For the most part, I think everything in a thriller has to be there for a reason. If we start a book knowing Cal’s son has passed away, there has to be a reason why that’s in the story. It has to matter.

JKP: As you unmask the “bad guys” in this tale, we comprehend--but only slowly--the depths and tragic purpose of their misdeeds. Other writers can be much more black-and-white in portraying their villains. How important do you think it is to be subtle in exploring the characters of fictional malefactors?

LB: No one is black and white. I like to think there are not only shades of gray to the bad guys, but the good ones, too. Cal is far from perfect.

JKP: Stories by which other crime, mystery, and thriller authors--old and new--do you most enjoy reading?

LB: So many, one hates to single anyone out. I just finished the latest James Lee Burke (Light of the World). How does somebody write a book like that every single year? Blown away. I love, in no particular order, George Pelecanos, Michael Connelly, Ian Rankin, Tess Gerritsen, William Landay, Lisa Gardner, Lawrence Block, Stephen King, Alafair Burke, Michael Robotham, Donald E. Westlake, Ed McBain ... I could go on. And Ace Atkins is doing a nice job with Spenser.

JKP: After all this time, what weakness do you still have as a writer?

LB: How much space do you have? I learn with every book. I think authors are their own worst critics, and thank goodness my readers don’t see all the things wrong with my books that I do. I have a friend who is a satirical writer and artist, and he said he’s never done a drawing that was as good as he saw it in his head. I get that.

JKP: Finally, if you could have grown up to be any other novelist, who would it have been? And why?

LB: I imagine most authors sometimes think, “Oh, I wish I’d had his success and fame,” but then you’d have also had to have had their life. When I was in my teens, I wanted nothing more than to be Ross Macdonald, writing a book a year to critical acclaim, but having read Tom Nolan’s brilliant bio on him, I think, “Was his a happy life?” I’m not so sure. I wouldn’t trade the life I’ve had, the years [my wife] Neetha and I have shared, the wonderful times we’ve had with our kids, for anyone else’s.

* * *

You can watch a promotional trailer for A Tap at the Window here. And CBC News has posted a video interview with Linwood Barclay--wordsmith and model train enthusiast--here.

Pierce’s Picks: “A Tap on the Window”

A weekly alert for followers of crime, mystery, and thriller fiction.

A Tap on the Window, by Linwood Barclay (NAL):
This is one of those stories in which nothing seems to go right. Ever. Start at the very beginning, when middle-aged private eye Cal Weaver makes what he realizes right away is a terrible mistake, picking up a blond teenage girl who’s hitchhiking outside a bar in the (fictional) Niagara River town of Griffon, in upstate New York. It turns out she knew Weaver’s only son, Scott, who’d died not long before this in a fall--presumably a suicidal leap, while he was hopped up on drugs--from the roof of a local furniture store. The girl’s name is Claire Sanders, and she’s hoping Weaver will wheel her home on this rain-soaked night. However, partway there she asks him to stop by a landmark ice cream and burger joint, saying her stomach “feels a little weird all of a sudden.” When she doesn’t return to his car right away, Weaver goes looking for her ... only to find her snugged back in his passenger seat. He quickly realizes, though, that it’s not Claire. Yeah, she looks like her, but this girl’s a phony. A stand-in wearing a wig. Weaver confronts this second girl as they drive, but before he can learn what’s really going on, the teenager leaps out of his car and disappears into darkness.

The next day, when Weaver learns that Claire is missing, along with the girl who replaced her in his car, Hanna Rodomski, he takes it upon himself--out of guilt as well as curiosity--to join the search. Not that Claire’s father, Griffon’s mayor, wants him involved; in fact, he denies that Claire is actually missing. Officers of the Griffon Police Service are equally unenthusiastic over Weaver’s involvement in the investigation. Nonetheless, the P.I. keeps asking questions, in the course of that inciting the ire of his brother-in-law, Griffon Police Chief Augustus Perry, and drawing the attention of people who’d very much like to see Weaver pitched over Niagara Falls. Without a barrel.

Then Hanna is found. Dead and perhaps raped.

So why did Claire Sanders feel it was important to vanish, putting her friend Hanna’s health at risk as a consequence? Why do local cops appear to be watching Claire’s father’s house so intently? And who is behind the wheel of a black pickup that Weaver is sure has been following him as he probes these and other mysteries? For Weaver to locate Claire, he’ll have to find answers to these questions. Along the way, he’ll also rip the scabs off a few of his town’s closely held secrets and discover that everything he thought he understood about his troubled son’s death was wrong.

Barclay, a former columnist for the Toronto Star, has earned a handsome following over the last decade by penning twist-driven thrillers (including last year’s Trust Your Eyes). He demonstrates his familiar skills here in escalating tensions, raising doubts about characters involved in the case, and propelling readers forward with cliffhanger chapter endings. Although he could have spared his protagonist a bit of agony at the end, and still produced a work of suspense that was somewhat higher in literary quality than its competition (really, it’s a wonder that Weaver doesn’t commit himself to an insane asylum by Chapter 67), A Tap on the Window offers a story the reader won’t easily forget, one sure to burnish Barclay’s cred as a concocter of top-shelf suspense fiction. You might say that’s the only right thing that results from his plotting this novel.

Trust in Barclay

(Editor’s note: This is Part II of a feature by British correspondent Ali Karim. Part I appeared yesterday in The Rap Sheet.)

I’m still reeling from my reading last week of Linwood Barclay’s new techno-thriller, Trust Your Eyes (NAL), and marveling at the author’s skill in producing such a captivating and elegant work. Before moving on to other projects, I contacted Barclay because I wanted to ask him a few questions about this novel--which came out earlier in the month in the United States, but was released only yesterday in Britain.

During our exchange, Barclay--who lives in Ontario, Canada--explained why the title of this new book underwent a change; why Bill Clinton figures into the narrative; the link between Trust Your Eyes and Rear Window; and why his supporting character, Keisha Ceylon, from 2007’s No Time for Goodbye, is making a comeback in his latest novella.

Ali Karim: What was the genesis of Trust Your Eyes?

Linwood Barclay: Wow. Where does any idea come from? However, I think I should thank Winston, our friend’s dog. When the Google Street View car passed by their house, Winston was looking out the window. If you look up the address, you can see him. I got thinking, What if, instead of a dog, that car driving past, capturing millions of images for its online mapping system, happened to catch something happening in that window that was far more sinister?

AK: Your novel can be described as a reworking and updating of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window, using modern technology. But of course, the source material for that 1954 film was Cornell Woolrich’s short story, “It Had to Be Murder.” Have you ever read Woolrich’s original tale?

LB: I’ve only seen the movie Rear Window--and probably 25 times. The similarities between the book and the movie didn’t actually occur to me until the project was underway. But there is one line in the novel that is a direct lift from the movie. It’s my homage to Hitchcock. I wonder how many readers will find it.

AK: This book has a very intricate plot. Did you have to map it out or storyboard it extensively, or did you do a “high-wire act”?

LB: I didn’t really map it out or storyboard it. But I had a lot of it figured it out in my head before I got started.

AK: I understand that your original title was 360. Can you tell us why you changed the title to Trust Your Eyes?

LB: We were worried that a numeric title might be confusing and difficult to find online. We were afraid anyone trying to order the book would end up with an Xbox. My agent, Helen Heller, came up with the alternative title. I didn’t like it at first, but now it seems perfect. Don’t tell her I said that.

AK: So was Helen Heller the first to read the manuscript, or did Bill Massey of Orion Publishing read it before her? Or what is the process you deploy when you feel a manuscript is ready for sending on?

LB: Helen’s the first. I’ll usually send her the first 100 pages, too. Once Helen thinks the book is in shape, we will send it to Bill and my U.S. and Canadian editors.

AK: Did Massey or Heller suggest other changes in the book?

LB: Nothing too horrendous. Probably the biggest changes concerned the [journalist] Julie [McGill] character. She was poorly drawn in the first draft, so I ditched her from the last half of the novel. But when I rewrote her, everyone liked her so much, I had to put her back into the last half of the book. There were other changes, too, but this was not one of my more difficult books.

AK: There’s some real darkness in this story. Yet there’s also subtle humor, usually connected to the eccentric nature of Thomas Kilbride. Did you have to rein yourself in when it came to light relief?

LB: I don’t make a point of trying to inject humor into the story. I just let it come out where it seems to make sense. I think, when your heroes are regular people who are ill-equipped for dealing with bad guys, there can be humor in how they react. And Thomas’ characteristics do allow for some light touches, so long as you remain respectful of the condition he has to live with.

AK: Your use of former U.S. President Bill Clinton in this yarn is really amusing. Did you know that he’s a big mystery reader?

LB: I know Bill Clinton is a big thriller reader. He particularly likes Lee Child, Janet Evanovich, Daniel Silva, and Sue Grafton. I actually used George W. Bush in an earlier draft, but for reasons I can’t explain, it didn’t feel right. Maybe because Bush is an even more polarizing figure than Clinton (at least in my mind). Clinton just seemed right.

AK: You wrote sections of this novel in first-person from Ray Kilbride’s point of view, but then peppered third-person sections in between. Why didn’t you just write the whole narrative in third-person?

LB: I like first-person. Ray tells the bulk of the story, and I can get more into a character’s point of view when I write in first.

AK: Without giving away the ending, especially the final reveal(s), how happy were you that readers would not be able to second- or third-guess you?

LB: I love pulling the rug out from under people. I think I did it better here than in any of my other books, although Fear the Worst [2009] and The Accident [2001] have twists I’m very proud of.

AK: I see you have released your childhood memoir, Last Resort, as an e-book. Can you tell us a little about that work and why you felt compelled to write it?

LB: That book was published in Canada--and only in Canada--in 2000. It had gone out of print, and a lot of people, from beyond Canada, were asking about it. We got the digital rights back on it so we could give it a second life as an e-book. It’s my own coming-of-age story, which I think is unique enough to make it worth writing about. It’s also about my development as a writer, including the story of how I came to know Ross Macdonald, who wrote the Lew Archer novels, and whose real name was Kenneth Millar.

AK: Tell us a little about your e-book novella Never Saw It Coming, as it’s a coda to the 2007 thriller No Time for Goodbye.

LB: Never Saw it Coming is a much-expanded version of the [2011] novella Clouded Vision, which I wrote for the UK Quick Reads program. The novella was very open-ended. There was much that could come after it, and in Never Saw it Coming I tell you the end of the story. And yes, it does star a minor character from No Time for Goodbye, the bogus psychic.

AK: So why did Keisha Ceylon resonate so strongly as a character, that you had to write about her again?

LB: We only see one dimension of her in No Time for Goodbye. She’s a con artist, plain and simple, who preys on families where someone has gone missing. She offers, for a price, to use her psychic powers to help find them. She’s still up to her tricks in the new book, but we see other aspects to her now. As a mother, as someone in an abusive relationship, as someone seeking some redemption. This book is a bit shorter than my regular novels, but I think it’s every bit as much fun.

AK: Why is Never Saw It Coming already available as an e-book in the States, but not scheduled for release in the UK until early 2013?

LB: In the U.S. they’re asking, how come the UK gets it as an actual book you can hold in your hands, and we don’t? It’s out in North America as an e-book only, and its release was timed to build interest in Trust Your Eyes.

AK: So tell us what you are working on currently. And how do you plan to top Trust Your Eyes?

LB: I don’t know whether I can top Trust Your Eyes right away, but next year’s novel, A Tap at the Window, is done. Next up, I plan to write a sequel to No Time for Goodbye. I’ll plan that in November and December, and probably start writing the first of the new year.

AK: Finally, I hear that you’ll be attending Bouchercon in Cleveland next week. What are your plans while you’re there, and do you have any panel assignments?

LB: I’m on one panel, on thrillers. Mostly, I’ll be dining and drinking and hanging out with friends, like you, that I only see once a year.

(Author photo © 2012 Ali Karim)

Won’t Get Fooled Again

(Editor’s note: This is Part I of a feature by British correspondent Ali Karim. Part II should appear in The Rap Sheet tomorrow.)

I have followed Linwood Barclay’s work ever since the 2007 publication of his breakout novel, No Time for Goodbye, and as much as I was captivated by last year’s The Accident, I still found myself unprepared for the intensity and elegance of Trust Your Eyes (NAL).

During the experience of reading this new novel, I found myself laughing, touched, puzzled, and horrified. Even as someone who can usually see well beyond technical misdirection in narratives, this book’s twists got me every time. There’s no deus ex machina deployed by Barclay. The clues are clearly visible and in plain sight; but as the book’s title suggests, you have to trust your eyes. That’s something I failed to do. Although this is not a puzzle book, per se--because its characters are fully realized, breathing a compassionate dimension to every chapter--it is still a work of labyrinthine plotting, containing all the defects and nuances of human nature.

Frankly, I am amazed that Linwood Barclay was not forcibly committed to an insane asylum, injected with Thorazine and strapped to a gurney in a straitjacket after completing this manuscript. Because I’ll tell you, every little detail, every location, every character’s nuances and back-story added to the narrative, propelling it slowly, gently, inch by inch to a final, shocking dénouement. To have worked on this book must have required the mental fortitude of Zeus. Trust Your Eyes is a remarkable book, a Zeitgeist-affecting work that you won’t walk away from without your worldview having been nudged, or maybe wounded.

What makes Trust Your Eyes so special is the author’s voice, empathetic and nonjudgmental. It leads you into places you would probably rather avoid. The easygoing manner in which you are thus directed will result in many shocks--chilling and troubling--along the dark length of narrative that Barclay has laid.

Barclay writes in what some observers would term the “cheating first-person.” His main story is relayed from the perspective of Ray Kilbride, a freelance cartoonist in a fast-changing media market. His younger brother, Thomas--who suffers from a form of schizophrenia--sees changes in modern life too, but from the point of view of cartography. The world of maps and mapping is shedding paper presentation and moving into the digital realm, thanks to advances in satellite navigation and the Internet’s “Whirl360,” a fictionalized version of Google Street View. Ray’s journey between the rigid covers of this book is interspersed with third-person prose, highlighting a cast of complex characters--some real, some hidden, and some very bad, all converging in the story like passengers in a slow-motion car crash, destined to result in multiple fatalities.

Among the attractions of Trust Your Eyes is that no one here is totally bad, just as nobody is wholly good (or completely innocent); even the really bad guys claim flaws and redeeming aspects. Barclay shows a deep understanding of human facets and flaws. The inner psyches and motivations of both the protagonists and antagonists in this book can be directly related to the decisions they’ve made in their lives. There is morality suffused through this narrative, though at times it’s so murky, you may need to bring a torch.

This is a troublesome book to review, as spoiling its complex, sometimes dizzying plot would be a sin. The simplest description of Trust Your Eyes is to say that it’s a rebooting for our digital age of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1954 film Rear Window (which was based on Cornell Woolrich’s short story, “It Had to Be Murder”).

After 62-year-old widower Adam Kilbride dies in a sudden, tragic accident while operating a lawn-mowing tractor, family lawyer Harry Peyton contacts Kilbride’s elder son, Ray, the graphic artist who lives in Burlington, Vermont, urgently calling him back to the family home in Promise Falls. Ray comes as soon as he can, because Adam Kilbride had been living in the family home and looking after his younger, paranoid son, Thomas, who cannot be left on his own. Ray is not surprised, but is certainly irritated with his brother when Thomas refuses to attend their father’s funeral. However, he chalks that up to Thomas’ mental instability.

Ray’s return to his father’s house is troubling, as Thomas’ mania about mapping the world from the safety of his bedroom has taken over his life. It seems that Thomas hears voices. He says that he receives calls from former U.S. President Bill Clinton and is working on a clandestine mission for the CIA. That mission demands that Thomas memorize all of the world’s maps, using the online computer program Whirl360. Thomas believes--via the CIA--that an immanent threat has been identified, one that will wipe out all of Earth’s digital maps. Because of Thomas Kilbride’s astounding memory and mental abilities (not unlike those of Dustin Hoffman’s character in Rain Man), the Agency--apparently under Clinton’s direction--has supposedly recruited Thomas Kilbride to memorize and map all of the world’s cities, so when the anticipated “incident” occurs, Thomas can guide the Agency’s various assets around the globe to safety. Thomas is convinced that as world maps are being digitized, the paper versions are being discarded--so after the “incident,” the world will be thrown into chaos.

Ray learns from Thomas’ psychiatrist, Dr. Laura Grigorin, that his sibling’s delusion regarding President Clinton’s voice and the CIA assignment is all-encompassing. Furthermore, Grigorin suggests that the voices inside Thomas’ head are associated with a childhood trauma that her patient refuses to talk about, or even acknowledge. Instead, Thomas spends all of his free time between meals and sleep working through Whirl360, trying to commit to memory every alleyway from Lincoln, Nebraska, to Osaka, Japan, and e-mailing progress reports to the CIA in Langley, Virginia.

This all seems like reasonably innocent behavior from a troubled and deluded mind--until the day that Thomas sees in the window of a New York City apartment what he believes is the face of a woman being murdered by suffocation!

Ray is understandably skeptical of his brother’s interpretation. After all, what he saw might actually have been a storefront mannequin with a plastic bag over its head; or he might have witnessed some sort of sick prank, rather than a homicide in progress. However, Thomas’ obsessive nature will not let that image of the woman go, and he prints it out and hands it to Ray in hopes that the latter will investigate.

Ray’s attempts to make sense of what Thomas witnessed--as halfhearted as they are initially--introduce into Barclay’s yarn an assorted cast of flawed and driven individuals, all harboring their own agendas. Among them: waitress Allison Fitch, who is behind on the rent she must pay for an apartment on Orchard Street in the Lower East Side of Manhattan that she shares with one Courtney Walmers--the very same apartment in which the troubled Thomas Kilbride says he saw (thanks to the World Wide Web) a woman with a plastic bag knotted over her noggin.

Also looped into this mystery is New York Attorney General Morris Sawchuck. A politician with ambitions toward higher office, Sawchuck’s future has been threatened by his wandering eye for women as well as by a deal he struck with CIA Director Barton Goldsmith--now dead from suicide--to protect possible Al-Qaeda terrorists. But Sawchuck has been saved from his own errors more than once by Howard “The Taliban” Talliman, his longtime friend and Machiavellian adviser. It was Talliman, too, who arranged for Sawchuck to marry his third wife, the beautiful young Bridget. Now, though, another dangerous difficulty has arisen: It seems Bridget Sawchuck and the financially troubled Allison Fitch have an unexpected linkage, one that could destroy AG Sawchuck’s political career once and for all. The desperate Talliman will have to depend on all of his connections--especially those with ex-NYPD tough guy Lewis Blocker and an assassin named Nicole--if he’s to keep Sawchuck’s reputation at all clean.

As Barclay’s story develops further, we learn not only how Nicole became a ruthless killer, but also how Allison Fitch discovered that her true inner purpose is to be ruthlessly selfish. This aspect of Allison’s character will lead her down a path that collides with Nicole’s own past. Those two women, and the other characters in these pages, are shown to be largely the creations and victims of choices they’ve made.


Linwood Barclay and Ali Karim at Bouchercon 2008 in Baltimore, Maryland (© 2008 Ali Karim).

With encouragement from his love interest, journalist and former high school acquaintance Julie McGill, Ray Kilbride eventually goes to Manhattan hoping to take a look-see at the apartment where Thomas alleges a murder was committed. Ray is hoping to put an end to speculations about what his brother really saw; instead, he helps spark a sequence of events that will lead to death, tragedy, and the realization that even simple liaisons can trigger the worst aspects of human nature. As events tumble over one another, and killings escalate in number to protect a political machine, readers are offered some of the most emotionally wrenching scenes I’ve ever found in thriller fiction. Thankfully, Barclay leavens his plot occasionally with lighthearted moments (most of which play on the madness of Thomas Kilbride) that help a bit to balance the shocking developments with humanity and compassion.

The Kilbride brothers soon realize that the voice of Bill Clinton may be on to something more important than either of them realized.

Despite being well read in the thriller genre, I found myself caught out on occasion, because Barclay’s ability to misdirect is quite phenomenal. In the center of this book, for example, there is a pivotal scene that reminds me of the closing section of Thomas Harris’ The Silence of the Lambs, in which FBI agent Clarice Starling knocks at serial killer Buffalo Bill’s house ... while members of a well-armored SWAT team also knock on what they’re convinced is Buffalo Bill’s house. To misdirect readers this successfully in a novel is a tall order, and as in Harris’ book, I was totally fooled by Barclay--so much so that I had to go back and re-read the chapter, and was then compelled to cry out into the silence of my house, “Barclay, you had me!”

The closing sections of Trust Your Eyes are like Russian nesting dolls: every time you open one up, you find another complication inside. Once the political dirty games are revealed, the plot shifts back to Adam Kilbride’s tragic accident, and then Barclay delivers a shock with his very last line. After digesting that ending, I went back to re-read the Prologue, only to understand the significance of what I’d considered Barclay’s theme here: The windows we open in our lives to show people who we are may be less significant than what we don’t show people--because most of the time we place curtains over those windows to protect ourselves from seeing what fate, circumstance, and the decisions we’ve made did to shape us.

This must have been an extremely difficult novel to write, edit, and ultimately polish, as the level of detail is fairly mind-boggling. There is not a word, phrase, or so much as comma out of place or unnecessary in this work. Even in a world, like ours, that already offers ample excellence in thriller fiction, Trust Your Eyes stands out. It made the synaptic pathways in my brain fire like detonation charges.

Trust me on that.

* * *

If you’d like to learn more about Trust Your Eyes, check out this dramatic book trailer or this excerpt from the novel, read by none other than the author himself.

Part II: an interview with Linwood Barclay

READ MORE: “Todd Phillips to Direct Thriller Trust Your Eyes,”
by Jeff Sneider (Variety).

Barclay’s Success Is No Accident

As I gear up for the very long trip across the Atlantic to St. Louis, Missouri, and this week’s Bouchercon, I’m already hoping to buy a beer for another attendee, author Linwood Barclay. That is because his latest thriller, The Accident, was my top summer read while away last month in France. I already saw Barclay once this year, at the Theakstons Old Peculiar Crime Writing Festival in Harrogate, England. Shortly after that, his publisher, Orion, kindly sent me a review copy of The Accident, which I saved for my week in France--and what a treat it was!

Canadian author and former Toronto Star columnist Barclay burst into the thriller genre in 2007 with No Time for Goodbye, which plumbed the dark heart of middle-class suburbia. Each subsequent novel--Too Close to Home (2008), Fear the Worst (2009), and Never Look Away (2010)--has helped to cement his reputation for crafting intelligent tales packed with tension and misdirection.

The overriding message in The Accident is that one should never take anything at face value--not the designer-label handbags that lie at this tale’s core, or the friends peppering our lives. Set in the small suburban town of Mitford, Connecticut, Barclay’s novel introduces us to Glen Garber, a local businessman struggling to keep his modest construction company (a legacy from his father) afloat amid the world’s present economic crisis. Anchored in debt, Garber keeps his workforce occupied with minor home extensions and kitchen re-fits. His friends and neighbors are in equally precarious financial situations, and there seems little promise of help on the horizon. On top of it all, Garber continues to be beset by the investigation into a fire that destroyed a property where his men were working, and almost cost Glen his life. Garber’s wife, Sheila, assures him that everything will work out fine--but then she dies in a peculiar head-on car accident. Was it an accident, though? The ensuing probe into Sheila’s demise finds that she was massively intoxicated and asleep at the wheel when she died. Few people who knew her can believe that Sheila should have been so reckless--especially her mother, Fiona, who blames her daughter’s drinking on Glen.

It doesn’t take long for Garber to discover duplicity among the people he calls friends, neighbors, colleagues, and work mates. The folks he thought he knew turn out to be desperate, with hidden agendas that only come into focus as Garber fights to uncover the truth about his wife’s fatal accident. Add to this story a side-plot about counterfeit handbags being traded between members of the middle class--a metaphor for the falseness in some friendships--and you get a yarn that unravels with pathos and empathy, and finishes with twists that make clear how even the darkest motivations beat to the rhythm of a human heart.

I’ve had the chance to interview Linwood Barclay before for The Rap Sheet. But having been so impressed by The Accident, I wanted the opportunity to ask him some more questions. We talked not long ago about his fascination with the ’burbs, the state of Canadian libraries, his debt to detective novelist Ross Macdonald, and much more.

Ali Karim: It’s been a wild ride for you since No Time for Goodbye came out in 2007, with you now carving a niche in the field of suburban thrillers. What is about the middle-class suburbs that so fascinates?

Linwood Barclay: The ’burbs are what I know. I grew up in them until about age 13, when for a few years we lived out in the country. And years later, my wife and I bought our first house in 1981, in the suburbs, although it was a fairly old neighborhood. People living in the suburbs have the same kinds of anguished lives as their friends in the city, but what can make them interesting to write about is it’s generally thought that they don’t.

AK: The Accident, like all of your previous work, starts with a simple idea, but then it becomes a complex layering of characters with hidden motivations. It suggests that you’re an extensive plotter. Is that correct?

LB: I am, but it doesn’t come all that easily. I like to work out major plot points before I begin a book, but once I’m in the thick of it, opportunities to make the plotting more intricate present themselves.

AK: What it is like living with Linwood Barclay when you are in writing mode, and all these characters and plot lines are in your head?

LB: I’m probably just as difficult to be with as at any other time. But when I’m writing a novel, I think I’m often not entirely there when my wife and I are having dinner or going for a walk. I’m thinking about what’s going to happen next.

AK: What inspired this disturbing new thriller, The Accident?

LB: The Accident was inspired by a couple of things. First, my agent, Helen Heller, and I had been talking for some time about knock-off designer handbags as a backdrop for a plot … But I was waiting for something meatier to be the main story. Then I hit on the idea of a guy whose wife dies in a drunk-driving accident--and is blamed for it--and I saw a way to bring the various elements together.

AK: There is a great deal of empathy in your work. That’s especially true of The Accident, in which several disturbing events happen to your characters--most of whom are flawed, just like in real life. Some innocent people get caught up in the crossfire. Did you always know who was truly “good” and who was truly “bad” in this story, or did the characters evolve greatly during the writing?

LB: I knew to some degree who was good and who was had, but as I was writing the book I saw ways to make the characters more nuanced. No one is ever just good, or bad. We’re all pretty complicated. My hope is that, as I work my way through a novel, I can find ways to get that across. For example, my hero, Glen Garber, is far from perfect. He’s a good, decent person, but he’s also judgmental. It’s not an attractive quality.

AK: On the whole, though, Glen Garber is a fine, outstanding man who tries to come to come to terms with the loss of his wife, Sheila, and bring up his daughter while his business is hit by the recent economic crisis. Then he experiences a work-related fire that could ruin his future. He also seems to be a source of confusion for some reviewers. I’ve seen his surname spelled “Barber,” rather than “Garber.” Has the character been re-named in different countries, or did something figure this construction worker just needed a haircut?

LB: I've seen “Carver,” too. He’s supposed to be Garber in all editions, and is, but we had a few glitches when it came to cover copy and reviews. I have to be honest and tell you there are more than a couple of errors in the book, which I take the blame for. The Accident was the most rewritten book I’ve ever done, and I think when you end up doing several versions, there’s a greater chance the odd goof will slip in.

AK: Who is the first reader of a Linwood Barclay novel?


LB: My agent is my first reader. My wife, Neetha, most enjoys reading my novels when they are in book form, generally the advance copy that is sent out for reviews.

AK: Many video trailers for books are amateurish at best, but yours for The Accident is really slick. How was it developed?

LB: I’m delighted to hear you say that. All my book trailers have been made by my son, Spencer, who has a company called Loading Doc Productions. He’s also done trailers for Joy Fielding and promotional material for other authors. We had a great time making the Accident trailer, renting a couple of fake police cars and a fake ambulance from Canadian Picture Cars, in Oakville, Ontario, which rents vehicles for movie shoots. We did the scenes with the vehicles at the back of their lot late one night.

AK: You are now published internationally. Has this demanded more travel from you, and have you any anecdotes about your overseas trips that are worth sharing?

LB: Yeah, we’re getting to see the world. Actually, my wife has the best story. She stayed in London while I went up to Leeds and Harrogate on our last UK trip, and one night sitting alone in the hotel dining room, having dinner and reading a book, Dame Judi Dench came in and sat down next to her. In the last three years we’ve been to England, Italy, Germany, Hong Kong, Australia, and New Zealand. And people have been wonderful everywhere we’ve gone.

AK: I enjoyed watching your interview with Lisa Gardner at Harrogate this summer. But what else did you get up to while in the UK?

LB: It was a busy trip, with plenty of promotional duties. Interviews, videos, etc. On the way to Harrogate I stopped over in Leeds and did an Orion [Publishing] event for booksellers alongside R.J. Ellory, Ian Rankin, Denise Mina, and Michael Marshall. It was great. And while my time in Harrogate was rushed, I got to meet a lot of writer friends, and fans, and Lisa was terrific. We had a lot of fun doing our onstage chat.

AK: Stephen King is now one of your more avid readers. But are you also a King reader? If so, what works in his canon have you most enjoyed?

LB: I've been reading Stephen King since my early 20s. I still think Pet Sematary scared me the most. I’ve recently read two of his short-story collections--Just After Sunset and Full Dark, No Stars. I love to watch how he does what he does. He’s a genius.

AK: Can you tell us if you wrote the novella Clouded Vision specifically for the Quick Reads campaign, or was it something that you already had kicking around in a drawer? And will Clouded Vision ever reach readers outside of the UK?

LB: I wrote that specifically for Quick Reads; it wasn't tucked away anywhere. The book was made available in North America as an e-book, and late next year there will be a longer version of it for my UK readers. It’s already written.

AK: I enjoyed Clouded Vision, in part because it brought back one of your more unusual characters from No Time for Goodbye, the psychic Keisha Ceylon. Was it fun for you to revisit a previous character this way?

LB: It was, and there’s going to be even more fun along that line. I’m pretty sure the next book I write will be a sequel to No Time for Goodbye.

AK: I saw that you were involved with Margaret Atwood’s library campaign. So are Canadian libraries under as much pressure as those in America and the UK? And what are your thoughts about what’s happening to the book world, thanks to the economy and the march of e-books?

LB: Toronto’s new mayor is looking for ways to save money, and as is often the case, politicians turn to culture first when trying to save a dollar. And there’s very much a sense that this particular administration does not put a high value on the services that libraries provide. If you were trying to find the mayor, hanging out in a library would not be the first place you’d look.

Publishing is very much in a state of transition, and I don’t think anyone really knows where we’re going to be in five years. But I don’t think there’s any debate about whether people are reading or not. They are, and that’s good. What’s up for debate is what format they’re going to embrace.

AK: Are you still doing any journalism these days for the Toronto Star?

LB: No. I did do a piece for The Huffington Post last week, but writing and promoting books fills most of my time.

AK: I see that some of your earlier non-fiction work is been released in e-book form. Can you tell us a little about those works?

LB: I wrote a memoir back in 2000 called Last Resort. It’s the story of my coming of age at a resort my parents owned in the Kawartha Lakes region of Ontario, Canada. It was a pretty singular kind of experience I had there, especially considering that my father died when I was 16 and I essentially took over running the family business. The book was out of print, but we got the rights back so we could make it available as an e-book.

AK: After the release of Harlan Coben’s Tell Know One, it took a few years before Orion started re-publishing his Myron Bolitar novels. So will we ever see your Zack Walker novels re-issued?

LB: Orion has acquired all four Zack Walker novels and will be bringing them out. Just when, I’m not sure. They’re terrific books, but very different in tone than what I’m currently known for in the UK.

AK: What exciting works have passed over your reading table recently?

LB: I just read The Cut, the new George Pelecanos novel, and loved it. And I had a chance to read an advance copy of Defending Jacob, by William Landay, which will be out in the new year. It’s fantastic.

AK: You credit the Lew Archer novels by Ross Macdonald with having a major influence on the young Linwood Barclay. I know we have discussed his work before, but for younger readers, could you tell us how you finally met your “mentor” and what his work means to the crime-fiction genre?

LB: Macdonald, whose real name was Kenneth Millar, was considered in the 1960s and ’70s the heir to the crime-writing throne, coming along after Hammett and Chandler. I’m not certain people feel that way now, as his novels are not as well remembered as those by Hammett and Chandler. But he was a wonderful writer who expanded the scope of what a crime novel could do.

I became a fan of his work while in high school, and in university I wrote him, care of his publisher, to say I was doing a thesis on the evolution of the iconic private-eye figure in American literature. Macdonald’s creation, Lew Archer, figured largely in the essay. Millar wrote back, suggesting some critical works written about him. And then I did the unforgivable thing of writing back and asking whether I could send him the novel I’d written. (I had written a few by this time.) A generous man, he said sure, read the book, and wrote back with some very kind, and very helpful comments.

That was the beginning of a long correspondence, which culminated in a dinner with Kenneth Millar when he came to Canada, shortly before his final novel, The Blue Hammer, was published [in 1976]. I gave him a tour of Trent University, then dined with him and his wife, Margaret Millar, who was also a mystery novelist of considerable note. I was 21, having dinner with my idol, and to this day I can’t believe it happened. But I have my copy of his novel Sleeping Beauty, in which he wrote: “May 1, 1976. For Linwood, who will, I hope, someday outwrite me. Sincerely, Kenneth Millar (Ross Macdonald).” Millar passed away in 1983. (Tom Nolan has written an excellent, comprehensive biography of Macdonald that I can’t recommend highly enough.)

AK: Finally, tell us a little about 360, your next book.

LB: No. I’m not telling you a thing, except that it will blow your socks off. [Laughing]