Canada East to West

 

Today I'm delighted to welcome Barbara Fradkin as guest blogger to Murder Is Everywhere. Barbara is a retired child psychologist with a fascination for why we turn bad. She's been writing since she was a child, but didn’t get serious until she discovered crime fiction. In the past two decades or so, she has published at least thirty short stories and fifteen novels, as well as four Rapid Reads short novels. Many of her works have been shortlisted or won Awards of Excellence from Crime Writers of Canada. 

She's probably best known for her gritty, psychological detective series featuring quixotic, exasperating Ottawa Police Inspector Michael Green. Her more recent Amanda Doucette series features a foreign aid worker who battles her own traumatic past to help people in trouble. The fifth in that series, WRECK BAY, has just been released. More info at https://www.barbarafradkin.com. 

Over to you, Barbara.

Thanks, Michael, I’m delighted to be invited. Since the fifth book in my Amanda Doucette series was just released this week, the timing is perfect, and Murder is Everywhere is an apt description of the series itself.

 After writing ten Inspector Green mysteries, all set in Ottawa, I wanted to get out of town. Canada is a huge country that ranges from the Atlantic to the Pacific to the Arctic Oceans, with amazing variety in its geography, history and culture. It’s the second largest country in the world, after Russia, but 90% of its 38 million people live within 150 miles of its southern border with the United States. Although Canada has world-class cities and no shortage of farms and cozy villages, it also has a lot of rugged, untamed wilderness. Jagged coastal cliffs, soaring glacial mountains, rainforests, deserts, and more pristine lakes and islands than anywhere else in the world. I love outdoor adventure and the wild beauty of nature, and because there are already plenty of books set in world-class cities and cozy villages, I decided to showcase wilderness. Canada does wilderness so well!

 What better place to set an adventure mystery-thriller series?

 Amanda Doucette is a passionate, adventurous international aid worker who has returned to Canada to find a new path after a traumatic ordeal on her last posting. Even while recovering, however, she can't turn her back on people in trouble. She’s a powerful, edgy character who rides a lime green motorcycle and owns a Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever, just like mine.

Newfoundland

 She sets up a cross-country series of adventure tours for charity, which gives me the freedom to move her from place to place. For each book, I chose a unique, iconic location that showcased the diversity of the country and its people. I started as far east as I could get, setting the first book on the Great Northern Peninsula of Newfoundland. In FIRE IN THE STARS, which introduces her and sets up the premise of the series, her desperate search for a fellow aid worker tormented by the same trauma leads her deep into the world of tiny outports, rugged seas, and untouched inland forests. All the while dealing with some nasty people smugglers.

Winter camping

The second book, THE TRICKSTER’S LULLABY, takes place in the dead of winter in Quebec’s Laurentian Mountains, part of the ancient Canadian shield, where Amanda braves dangerous blizzards to search for two missing teenage campers under the threat of homegrown Islamic radicalisation. The third, PRISONERS OF HOPE, is set in Georgian Bay, part of the Great lakes and home to over 30,000 islands. As the largest freshwater archipelago in the world, it’s an outdoor paradise of sparkling inlets, pink granite shores, and ferocious storms. In the fourth book, THE ANCIENT DEAD, I leave the lush world of central Canada for the stunning moonscape of Alberta’s badlands, where sun, heat, dust, and drought can be deadly and where dinosaur bones are not the only bones buried beneath the barren, windswept plains.

Georgian Bay

This most recent book, WRECK BAY, completes Amanda’s trek from east to west. After starting on Canada’s most eastern island, I end up on the Pacific shore of Vancouver Island, where bears and cougars prowl amid the towering firs and cedars, and whales and dolphins frolic in the ocean swells. In each region, I learned how the land shaped the people, from the generations of fishers in the close-knit villages of Newfoundland to the proud individualism of the prairies to the adventure-seekers and aging hippies who embraced the unspoiled beauty of the Pacific Rim and the First Nations who have tended it for 10,000 years.

Alberta

Writing these books has been a voyage of discovery for me too. Each book began with research, research and more research. I want a real feel for each place, and not just the geography but the history, culture, and people. I amass books from stores and libraries, comb the internet for details, and mine friends and contacts for information. From this initial research, the germ of an idea takes shape, like the grain of sand in the oyster. While reading for WRECK BAY, for example, I learned about the Vietnam war resisters who flooded Vancouver Island and the hippie communes that sprang up on the west coast over fifty years ago. I discovered one commune had been tucked into a small beach called Wreck Bay. And from those two ideas, the kernel of my story took shape.

Vancouver Island

But reading is never enough to get the feel of a place. I believe you don’t really get that until you visit it, experience its sights, sounds and smells, discover the little details that make it unique and bring it to life on the page. The more vivid the detail, the more the reader feels part of the adventure. With each book, I took at least one trip to the area, usually more than one. I stay in local places and explore. I try to walk in Amanda’s shoes. This is not just passive observation but active engagement. I hiked the coastal cliffs and stubby boreal forests of Newfoundland, I went snowshoeing and winter camping in Quebec (in a tent – there’s dedication to my craft!), I kayaked and hiked in Georgian Bay, and went dinosaur prospecting and trail riding in Alberta. On Vancouver Island I went kayaking, hiking, whale and bear watching, and walked along to beaches with the powerful surf swirling around my feet. I even tracked down the location of the Wreck Bay commune, long since reclaimed by nature.

In these books, setting is not a mere backdrop but a character. It drives the story and interacts with the characters. I hope the reader feels caught up in the place just as the characters are, and that in the end, I have taken them on a new and exciting journey that’s as much fun for them as it was for me.

 What’s next? I don’t know, but I am eyeing the vast Canadian north. Perhaps the greatest wilderness of all.

 

 

Barbara Fradkin - Getting down in the dirt

Barbara Fradkin

Barbara Fradkin is a retired psychologist and multiple award-winning Canadian mystery writer with an affinity for the dark side. Her gritty, psychological novels have been nominated four times for the Crime Writers of Canada Award of Excellence for Best Novel (formerly Arthur Ellis) and have won the award twice. 

Not only do Barbara's books revolve around intriguing mysteries, but they give the reader a wonderful sense of the Canadian wilderness. I had the pleasure of meeting her a few years ago at a book convention, and have enjoyed several of her books since then, including the first of her new series Fire in the Stars. The Amanda Doucette novels have even more sense of place because... Well, I'll let Barbara tell you more about that herself.

A big thank you to Michael for offering me the chance to talk about my latest work. After writing ten Inspector Green mysteries set in Ottawa, where I live, I was getting restless for adventure. I was itching to explore new horizons and get to know new characters, so I developed the Amanda Doucette series. Amanda is a passionate, adventurous, thirty-something foreign aid worker who has come home to Canada to recover from a traumatic attack in Africa, but her impulse to help people and fix the world always seems to lead her into trouble. She can be single-minded, even reckless, and rushes in where angels fear to tread.

There are currently four books in this series, with a fifth in the works, and murder is, quite literally, everywhere. Canada has a reputation as a law-abiding but bland backwater full of bears, earnest people, and vast swaths of snow. Far from it! Stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific to the Arctic Oceans, it’s so big that even Canadians have little idea of its varied, stunning landscape, let alone the colourful cultures that landscape has spawned.

Kayaking on Georgian Bay

I decided to explore this diversity by taking Amanda on a cross-country charity tour and setting each book in a unique, iconic wilderness location. The first in the series, Fire in the Stars, takes place amid the rugged cliffs and remote fishing villages of Newfoundland and the second in the snowy mountains of Quebec’s Laurentians. From there I move west to the pink granite islands of Georgian Bay in the Great Lakes, and The Ancient Dead, hot off the press last month, is set in the badlands of Alberta’s renowned dinosaur country.

Winter camping in the Cloche mountains

Naturally, in the interests of art and authenticity, I have to travel to see them. No amount of internet research and imagination can bring a setting or scene to life as vividly as getting down into the grit and dust of a place and walking in the shoes of the characters. With all five senses attuned, you notice sounds and sights you might never have imagined. The roar and hiss of the surf, the feel of the hot, dry wind tugging at your hair, the crisp squeak of snowshoes tramping across an open lake. Or the sweltering heat inside a tent when it’s -30 degrees Celsius outside.

Walking the cliffs of Newfoundland

So for each book, I spent several weeks in the area, sometimes more than once, and tried to do all the activities and visit all the places that might show up in the book. I walked Newfoundland’s ocean cliffs, hiked through the swampy spruce forests, and took a whale-watching boat. I endured a wilderness winter camping trip so I would know how it felt to slog through the cold and sleep on pine boughs in a tent. I rented a kayak in Georgian Bay to explore the deceptively beautiful but dangerous island channels. In Alberta, I rode horseback through the remote coulees in search of the perfect place to bury bones. 

Searching for bones in the remote badlands

Point Riche lighthouse 

Throughout this, I took thousands of photos, some of which I have included here, took notes, and recorded my impressions. Everywhere I travelled, I tried to learn not only about the landscape but also about the people, their history, and their culture. In Newfoundland I prowled the docks to pester shrimp fishers and fish plant workers, and I tapped my toe at a classic Newfoundland kitchen party. I attended local theatre, visited museums, and eavesdropped on conversations in local haunts. In Alberta, I visited local museums wherever I went, walked the open range, went on dinosaur prospecting tours, spoke to a local Indigenous elder in Milk River, and quizzed my Alberta friends and family.

Talking to a hoodoo in the Alberta badlands

Because Amanda is a foreign aid worker who’d worked to confront inequity and injustice overseas, she is quick to plunge in when she encounters similar problems in Canada. So running through each book is an underlying global human rights theme with a uniquely Canadian twist. In the Newfoundland story, the theme is Syrian refugees being smuggled by boat across the North Atlantic. In the Quebec book, I explore the homegrown radicalization of Quebec youth. The exploitation of domestic foreign workers is the perfect theme for the wealthy mansions tucked away on the remote islands of Georgian Bay, and echoes of the “me too” movement can be heard in the secrets of The Ancient Dead.

Meeting moose in Newfoundland

I am currently just beginning to research and write the fifth Amanda book, set on the outer coast of Vancouver Island. The pandemic is messing up my travel plans to this spectacular part of the country, but I hope that by this summer the vaccine will have made sufficient inroads that I will be able to go. Photographs and books will not be enough; I need to stand in the surf, hike the ancient forests, and kayak through the islands that dot the coast. I may even take a surfing lesson.

Researching this series has been a thrill and an adventure worth it all on its own, and I hope that by sharing these unique glimpses of Canada, I take the reader on a journey of discovery as well. And make them yearn for more.

You can learn more about Barbara and her work at: 

https://www.barbarafradkin.com

https://www.facebook.com/bfradkin/

@BarbaraFradkin