WHOSE STORY IS THIS ANYWAY?

By Vicki Delany

I'm delighted to invite my good friend, fellow festival organizer, and excellent writer Janet Kellough back to Type M. I'm certainly keen to find out what Thaddeus Lewis is getting up to now.

One of the things that is lovely about writing a series is the way the characters evolve as time goes on. In the first book in my Thaddeus Lewis mystery series, On the Head of a Pin, the hero/detective  Lewis is a man in his prime struggling with the unexpected death of his daughter, a loss that propels him headlong into a murder investigation. He is decisive and forthright and resolute, certain in his calling as a saddlebag preacher. But in his pursuit of the killer, he comes to understand that the world is perhaps not quite as black and white as he’d always believed.

As his story progressed through the subsequent books, he loosened up even more. He softened. He began to doubt himself. And the meaner I was to him, the more relatable he became. And I’ve been pretty nasty - I’ve bashed him over the head and broken his arm. I gave him a gimpy knee. I pointed a gun at him a few times. I killed his wife. I humiliated him. I seduced him. (Big existential crisis for a 19^th century minister.)

But with each challenge, his character deepened and I liked him more.

His family grew up around him as the story went on. Relationships subtly shifted. And then friend and foe alike began to wander through the narrative, popping up here and there just when the plot needed them most.

Now, in the seventh book The Untoward Assassin Thaddeus’s granddaughter Martha, who was a toddler in the first book, is nearly an adult and about to embark on a career as a teacher, thanks to the fact that the Provincial Normal School, the teachers’ college of the day, actually accepted female students – a provision virtually unheard of at institutions of higher learning in 1855.

Thaddeus accompanies her to Toronto, and lo and behold, there’s his youngest son Luke, sitting there ready to be called back into the story. But the dynamic between Luke and his father has changed from the earlier books. Luke has gone from being an insecure student with a big secret to a successful physician (he still has a big secret, but he’s not as bothered by it.) He is very worried about his father’s health. Both he and his brothers are worried about what Thaddeus is going to do with himself now that he’s given up preaching. The question “What are we going to do about Thaddeus?” becomes a recurrent refrain as the plot unfolds. Each of the Lewis sons is willing to look after their father if necessary, but each of them will be relieved if one of the others offers first. Thaddeus is no longer the patriarch to whom everyone turns. The old man has become a problem.

But in the way of many children, they’ve underestimated him. He’s still a magnet for trouble and he’s still quite capable of meeting it head on.

When he becomes convinced that someone is trying to kill him. Luke dismisses the notion at first. (Oh no! Is Thaddeus becoming senile?) Martha believes him – but where once she would have believed simply because he’s Thaddeus and for most of her childhood she was a little confused about whether or not he and God were actually the same person - she now weighs the evidence and comes to her own conclusion. Eventually everyone agrees that something is going on and that the would-be assassin must be connected somehow to one of the crimes that Thaddeus previously investigated.

And guess what? There were any number of ready-made suspects lurking in the background just waiting for a reprise. I had my choice of instant villains, already conveniently supplied with motive, their characters established and ready to go.

Any writer of fiction creates a setting through which the characters move, but a series allows the context to shift and grow in surprising ways. Past events impact the storyline in odd ways. Characters can make an appearance in one book and suddenly pop up again several books later. Sometimes they grumble until you let them out. Sometimes they show up and run away with the plot. And sometimes both the setting and the characters change and grow in directions that you couldn’t have conceived of in the beginning.

“But what happens next?” Thaddeus Lewis fans ask. The answer is, “I don’t know. I’m waiting or the characters to tell me.”

Sometimes I’m not sure it’s even me writing this stuff anymore.

Janet Kellough is the author of The Thaddeus Lewis mysteries, the adventures of a 19^th century saddlebag preacher. She has also written two contemporary novels The Palace of the Moon and The Pear Shaped Woman, the speculative fiction work The Bathwater Conspiracy, and the semi-non-fictional Legendary Guide to Prince Edward County. She is also a co-founder of Women Killing It Crime Writers’ Festival, which showcases crime fiction by female authors.

Guest Author Janet Kellough

by Vicki Delany

I am delighted to welcome back my friend and neighbour Janet Kellough to Type M. She's got a fascinating new venture to tell us about. 

A MYSTERIOUS MASH-UP

I became a crime writer by accident - I had a story that just begged to be told as a mystery. I had never written a mystery novel before, so it was with a great deal of trepidation that I first began to write. The result was On the Head of a Pin, the first book in The Thaddeus Lewis Mystery Series. I wasn’t too alarmed when I was asked to take a crack at a second book, because I had discovered a very interesting thing – the basic structure of a mystery plot is a wonderful skeleton to hang almost anything on. (Yes, puns intended.)

The Thaddeus Lewis books are full of mid-19^th century Canadian history. I know, it’s a topic that makes most people roll their eyes. But hey – throw in a murder or two, have your sympathetic hero solve the puzzle, bring the story to an end in a satisfying manner, and presto chango you can actually get people to read history! I’m not the only one who has realized this. There are whole series built around things like cooking, Christmas, bird-watching, archaeology - subjects that obviously fascinate the writer and that she wants to tell you something about. It’s frequently fascinating stuff, but it’s the need to find out whodunit that keeps you reading.

My latest book The Bathwater Conspiracy is different from anything I’ve written before. It’s speculative fiction, the story set in an imagined “what if” place where it would have been all too easy to just make stuff up. I could have invented alien races, given my protagonist super-powers, created technology that would solve everything in the flash of a computer chip. But I didn’t want to write that. I wanted a story that had its feet planted firmly in a credible scenario. And in the same way that the Thaddeus Lewis books draw their fictional plots from real, documented history, real scientific principles are woven into the plot of The Bathwater Conspiracy.

I figure the best science fiction holds a mirror to present day society, and I had some things I wanted to talk about – things like bioethics, gender, religion  - so for me, it was a no-brainer. I turned again to that wonderful mystery structure that lays out the premise and then invites the reader to consider all plausible explanations within the framework of the setting.

Right up front, there’s a dead body and a puzzle and a cop who wants to know what’s going on. Because the story is set in a mythical future, I can present possibilities that don’t exist in our own world – unusual suspects, unfamiliar settings, unique plot twists. But because it’s a mystery, familiar motives like ambition, lust and jealousy find a very comfortable place in the story. And as long as I keep the plot consistent with the world I’ve created, the mystery structure will spin merrily away, driving the plot forward and offering the astute reader an opportunity to solve the puzzle before the protagonist does.

So should you file The Bathwater Conspiracy under Science Fiction or under Mystery? As much as I dislike the North American habit of labeling books by genre, I have to admit that it’s a complete mash-up – a speculative fiction/mystery/police procedural/post-apocalyptic thriller. But at the very core of it that lovely mystery skeleton holds everything together and keeps you reading until you find out “whodunit”.

Janet Kellough is the author of The Thaddeus Lewis Mystery Series and the stand-alone novels The Palace of the Moon and The Pear Shaped Woman. Her newest novel The Bathwater Conspiracy was released this month by EDGE Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing.

KILLER WOMEN IN PRINCE EDWARD COUNTY

This weekend I'm pleased to welcome my good friend Janet Kellough as our special Type M guest.  Janet is the author of The Thaddeus Lewis Mystery Series. The fifth book in the series, Wishful Seeing was short-listed for the Crime Writers of Canada Arthur Ellis Best Novel Award. The sixth “Thaddeus” book, The Heart Balm Tort was released in July. To learn more about her books, check out her website.

She's a native-born daughter of Prince Edward County, Ontario, where the Thaddeus Lewis books are set, and she's here now to tell us about an exciting new venture she and Vicki Delany are spearheading. 

If you’re a female writer, you’ve probably read the articles and participated in the discussions – about how women’s books aren’t taken as seriously or reviewed as often as male-authored books; about how women are more often published in paperback than in hardcover, which impacts their incomes; about how less frequently they are featured at literary festivals; and how so many female authors have tried to get around the barriers by disguising their pennames that now any author who uses initials is automatically assumed to be female.

I’m a female writer. I get as ticked off by this stuff as anybody else. But anyone who knows me knows that I’m always looking for solutions. What if, I thought, we just go ahead and do our own thing? What if we start a festival that showcases Canadian women crime writers? There’s a niche available – both the Bloody Words Conference and the Scene of the Crime Festival have disappeared, leaving a void that is felt by all crime writers. I could do this. After all, I have a background in small concert production, and writers have got to be easier to herd than fiddlers, don’t they? (We’ll see.) I could do it on my home turf – Prince Edward County Ontario., the country’s newest tourist mecca.

Wisely or not, fellow author Vicki Delany agreed with me, as did the owner of The County’s independent bookstore Books & Co., graphic designer Christine Renaud and foodie Theresa Durning. Macaulay Heritage Park and Picton Library offered their cooperation. And two local wineries, The Grange and Black Prince came aboard as sponsors. The Women Killing It Crime Writers’ Festival was experiencing a remarkably easy birth.

And the writers we contacted were unbelievably enthusiastic and supportive. New York Times bestseller Susanna Kearsley said yes. So did Maureen Jennings of Murdoch Mystery fame. Canadian bestselling authors Barbara Fradkin and R.J. Harlick are coming. Bony Blithe winner Elizabeth J. Duncan will be on hand, as will Melodie Campbell and Nazneen Sheikh. Local author Robin Timmerman is featured. And Mary Jane Maffini, aka Victoria Abbott, agreed not only to participate, but to hold a Saturday morning (Sept. 2) workshop at the library.

And this won’t be some stodgy old literary festival. We’re talking women here. There will be refreshments – of both the sticky and liquid variety. And fun, starting with Friday night (Sept. 1) at The Mysterious Affair “table-hopping” event, where each author has five minutes to tell a table of readers all about her book; Saturday afternoon’s Murder at the Vicarage, an elegant Victorian tea in an historic home featuring the writers of lighter fare (hats and gloves optional); and Saturday evening’s Appointment with Death (and Dessert) with the authors of grittier stories, who will discuss life and death and sex and other fun stuff. We aim to raise the roof.

Will the festival be successful? I’m pretty confident that it will. Will male readers come? Because we need their support too. I hope so. Will it turn into an annual event? Chances are good. Because we’re women. And we know how to kill it.

The Women Killing It Crime Writers’ Festival in Prince Edward County runs September 1^st & 2^nd in Picton, Ontario. For schedule and ticket info visit our Facebook page or go straight to the WKI page at Eventbrite.ca

THE KNOW-IT-ALL WRITER

I am delighted to invite my good friend Janet Kellough to blog for us this week. Now that I am also living in Prince Edward County, I am finding myself drawn into the character and the history of the area through Janet's enthusiasm. And her darn good books. (Who knows when you need to trap a muskrat.)

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The old adage in the world of writing is “write what you know”. I have heard this amended (probably on this blog) to “write what you’d like to know”. [Editor: That might have been me. VD]

It’s good advice and I have done both. I started out as a performance storyteller, spinning tales drawn from the lore of Prince Edward County, Ontario, where I grew up, and where my family has lived for generations. It was, and remains, a rich source of material. (Did you know that the Glenora Ferry was once hijacked and a 19^th century hangman bungled a double execution in Picton? The first was a prank; the second was grisly.) I have also written what I was anxious to find out about. The first novel in my historical series The Thaddeus Lewis Mysteries concerned a saddlebag preacher who stumbled across a serial killer. The bare bones of the story was right there in the preacher’s autobiography, waiting for me to pluck it out, but I was eager to fill in authentic details and bring the story to life. I now know more about Methodist Church history in early Canada than I ever thought possible. (It was complicated, cantankerous and contentious.)

In continuing the series, I discovered a further amendment to the aforementioned writer’s advice: “Write what you never dreamed you’d want to know, but have stumbled across and found fascinating anyway.”

The first two novels in Thaddeus Lewis were set firmly in familiar territory – eastern Ontario in general and Prince Edward County in particular. I fudged the third one a bit - 47 Sorrows began with an old newspaper clipping I ran across that described a peculiar incident in Toronto in 1847 when a wagon overturned and spilled a coffin into the street. It burst open to reveal two corpses inside. Scandalous! And intriguing! This led me to articles about the tragedies experienced by the influx of sick and starving Irish flooding into Canada that year, and to the “fever sheds” that housed them. After all, where better to set a murder than smack dab in the middle of a group of people who are dying anyway? I placed the bulk of the story in Kingston, Ontario, a place I know, but there was an exciting chase that led to Toronto.

The next book, The Burying Ground, led me into completely unfamiliar geographic  territory. The story revolves around The Toronto Strangers’ Burying Ground, a potter’s field which in 1851 was at the corner of Yonge and Bloor Streets. It was in the middle of nowhere back then. Honest. I spent hours poring over old maps. The harbour was different then, and the Don River hadn’t been straightened out yet. And the latest Thaddeus book Wishful Seeing takes place between Cobourg, Ontario and Rice Lake to the north. Oh wondrous intrigues of the early railway boom in Canada!  I knew nothing about it when I began, but now I understand why Cobourg has such an improbably spectacular town hall.

In the meantime, I took a dive into speculative fiction and found myself reading about genetics and the founder effect, as well as the differences between chimpanzees and bonobos. Right now I’m researching stories about sex in early Ontario. And I’m trying to find out what the Royal Shipyards in Deptford, England were like in the 1650s. I know how to trap a muskrat. I can make soap from scratch. I’m familiar with the diagnostic signs of typhoid fever.

I will admit that this kind of obsessive and far-ranging research might be most attractive to the sort of junkhead who watches Jeopardy and wins trivia contests (aka me) but it’s the thing that keeps me plunking words down on the page. Because I still don’t know what it is I want to know. And I may never find out, because I’ve discovered that I want to know everything. About everything. And being a writer gives me the perfect excuse to keep reading about it.