Interview: Rick Mofina
Series, Standalones, Settings and Charting a Course For The Future: Rick Mofina on his move to MIRA, what he’s working on now, and how he became a writer
By Sandra Ruttan
Sandra: Your new book is just out, yes?
Rick: It’s launched away in Canada, it’ll be launched in September in the US… It’s been a busy year.
Sandra: There’s a lot of things that go into being an author that people don’t always think about starting out. You’ve got a family, a job, you’re doing all this traveling for promotion. How do you find time to write?
Rick: You do what you can. My family affords me the luxury of time. My wife goes beyond the call of duty. It’s just become part of our routine that I pretty much use most of the weekend. The mornings I’m locked away down here, and during the commute. I’m up very early so I’m making notes very early in the morning and by the time I wake up during the commute I’m making very coherent notes. And those notes are key points that lead to sentences that lead to paragraphs and the writing is done on the weekends.
Or sometimes in the morning if I’m sharp enough and the adrenaline’s going when I’m over the hill in a book. For me, it’s always a process. The foundation has to come. When I know that’s rock solid then I can accelerate things.
Sandra: Does that mean you’re one of those people that doesn’t pre-plot the book?
Rick: I have to. I outline because in my experience publishers buy the outline. They make the deal on the basis of the outline, and it can be anywhere from five pages to fifty pages. It doesn’t mean that you’re going to stick to it to the letter but it gives them a summary and a good idea of what you’re shooting for. So you pretty much have to have the whole book in your mind and an idea of what the characters are going through. That way, when you go to them and pitch it to them it’s an artist’s concept and then you go to town on it. So that helps you and you can take your little outline and stretch it into a detailed plan if you like and things will change. I just let my publisher be aware. There was something I wanted to change and we discussed it and they agreed. Just so they knew for planning purposes.
Sandra: Way back when, I think in one of the interviews I read with you, it said you wrote your first book when you were 18, was it?
Rick: Oh, yeah. That was not… Geez. I had hitchhiked to California and kept a journal and then thought I’d try my hand at my first novel. I wrote about the experience – it was loosely based on my experience – and went the distance, actually finished a dreadful first novel of wanderlust, just at the end of the hippie days. I sort of missed that period.
I went from Belleville Ontario, which is near Toronto, right across to Vancouver and down the coast to San Francisco. I wrote about it. There was no outline and the only person who liked it was my younger brother.
It promptly went in the drawer. It’s around here somewhere. It’s not bad. There’s actual sentences in there.
But the trip itself, and the fact I did the novel, I went alone and it’s a lonely trip and the book is a lonely enterprise.
I did plan the first book that was published and I had lots of time to work on that and then I had ideas for other books. I learned in my experience that outlining was what the publishers wanted. That’s how the other books came. They had to be planned.
Sandra: It always helps if that works for you.
Rick: That’s how the deals are done, in my experience. A multi-book deal without outlines might come for some writers.
Well, the current deal is a two-book deal and the first one was outlined and second one was to be named, but they’ll go forward based on the outline.
Sandra: When you negotiated this deal did you have your idea already for the second book?
Rick: No, but it was thrown open. Maybe I’ve told you Sandra, A Perfect Grave is the last book I’ll be doing with Pinnacle.
Sandra: I was aware of that. You’re moving over to MIRA.
Rick: Yeah, I’m moving to MIRA. Amy Moore-Benson, my agent, did a great job shopping it around. The plan was to write a standalone outline and I wrote two or three possibilities. It took a long time planning them. She had one from me that she felt was fine, perfect, but felt had been done by others so she said we should set that aside and I didn’t feel a fire for that one either. I had another idea, so I did another 50-page outline and it was a little different. She said, “This is the one” and I said, “Are you sure? It can be tricky in spots.” But she said it was the one. So she shopped that one. She took it to publishers and offered them that one and a second book to be named later and MIRA took the outline for the standalone, which I’m now working on. I’m 40% of the way through the first draft.
The second book, they want to be a series book. Now, the second book… I own the license to the Jason Wade series and they loved that series because they auditioned me when they were ready to go on the deal and read The Dying Hour and that was the clincher. They said we could either continue with Jason Wade or launch a whole new series. The decision was made just recently that we’ll launch a new series, so the second book will be the launch of a new reporter series and set Jason Wade aside, and Tom Reed again, who’s still on a long vacation.
Sandra: I was going to ask about that, whether or not this was going to be the end for Jason Wade.
Rick: I would describe it as putting him on the bench for a while, to sit beside Tom for a while. It’s a strong backlist, with five in one series and three in the other. It was really a split decision because marketing people and the editorial staff loved Jason Wade, very established and the perception is that he’s on his way up because he’s been well received, but the idea of something new won out. So I’ll introduce someone new into my fictional news world.
The down side is that I won’t be out in 2008, which makes me nervous, but we dealt with that. The publisher was going to try to bring me out in the latter part of 2008 but they weren’t comfortable with the positioning because their catalogue was pretty much locked up. They said they could do a better job bringing me out in 2009. When they explained it to me I said okay, but I had a concern and we were all talking there, so we talked about narrowing the gap, so we’ll have the standalone and the new series six months later.
In the back of my mind I’m creating this new series and I discussed a little seed of it with Amy and she likes it. It’s not going to be a grand departure. I mean, Jason Wade in many respects was not a grand departure from Tom Reed, they were the same but different. I get readers who still prefer the Tom Reed series to the Jason Wade series and I get other people who say just the opposite.
So, I’m satisfied with that, that it’s split that way, and I hope when I bring out this new person, whoever he or she may be, that it’ll be more of the same.
Sandra: Really, what you’re saying is that Jason is going on hiatus for a little while, and he could be back and he might not, at this point you don’t know, but this is the second time for you as an author where you’ve had a series come to that point, where it’s like putting the stew on the back burner and you’re going to let it simmer for a while and then you’ll go back and see whether there’s more there. Do you find that a little bit frightening to start off with something new, or is it invigorating?
Rick: It’s both. It’s frightening because you always think you’re going to lose readers, at least that’s what you fear, that they won’t come back and for you as an author you don’t know if you can hit it again. Tom Reed was never meant to be a series character. If Angels Fall, my first book, was a standalone and Cold Fear was supposed to be a standalone behind it. And they became continuing characters and that series didn’t really start until they hit me over the head with it. They wanted those guys back in the second book and I did it, and they said, “Keep them going indefinitely until further notice” and Blood of Others was the real series starter.
With The Dying Hour, that was planned to be a series. The story arc was built in, right from the get go. It was intimidating, thinking was I going to create a character – because I had five books that I thought were fairly well received and I liked those guys and I had planned a sixth one, even a seventh within that series – but they just set them aside and said (to) start something new.
It was daunting. And then it came together and I was taken aback by how well received Jason was, because he was pretty dark and I didn’t know how people would like the whole poor kid thing but it seemed to make him a little more real and people liked that. I made sure the next one wasn’t as dark. I was sort of angry myself when I wrote the first one, and it was a reflection on things. So the second book was not as graphic or gritty or evil, if you will. And the third book, too, I think is more of a psychological suspense. It has a little bit of everything in it, it’s got some procedural, some mystery, thriller aspect to it, a lot of backstory.
To answer the question, each time, as you get going and get to know these people, for me when you start a new guy that’s fine too, because you’re always looking for something fresh, but it’s tough because with series books you may have readers coming to you for the first time, so how you weave in some of the important elements so the story will still satisfy them is tricky. And then when you’re creating someone new in a standalone it’s a tough job because it’s all uncharted territory, so you’ve got a lot of trees to clear to build the road. With a series the road’s been cleared for you, and it’s a little easier in some respects, but I find that if people like you they will go back to your previous work. That’s what people are telling me. If they like you they’ll seek you out and read everything.
Sandra: I think that once you get to a certain point where your name is known enough that people trust the quality of your work as an author.
Rick: And I think this is a great opportunity with MIRA because I think they’re going to take me to a whole different audience as well, through their machinery, and build on what I do have and try to expand on that. They’ve got some plans and it’s exciting, especially when you have a big new wave of enthusiasm behind you.
Sandra: You won’t need to do as much traveling in 2008, so you’ll have more time for writing.
Rick: Well, I am going to travel to the major conferences. I think it’s important to fly your flag and be out there, but I don’t see it as being too different. As you know Sandra it’s great when you have a book to push, but I don’t see them as much as book pushing vehicles as the networking, the socializing and all of that stuff. But if I decide I don’t want to go to a conference, you’re right, there’ll be less pressure to go.
Sandra: It’s hard because it’s fun to go to the conventions and meet everybody and connect, but it can become a lot of traveling.
Rick: Yeah, this was a lot. I made a decision to do as much as I could because I didn’t know what the future held for me, because I knew A Perfect Grave was coming and I didn’t know what was happening with my publisher because I’d fulfilled the contract, and they did want two more. Turned out they wanted two more Jason Wade books, but we were shopping around. There was a lot of interest from a couple of other publishers and when the dust settled the deal that emerged was a two-book deal with MIRA.
Sandra: It’s exciting, though. I was going to ask you if it gets harder or easier the more books you write, but I think you’ve already pretty much nailed that…
Rick: Yeah.
Sandra: So, it does sound like with your new series, when you start it after the standalone, that it’s going to be another journalist.
Rick: They said, “It’s up to you” and they suggested a few things and I suggested a few things and it was quite relaxed. I said there was a whole subgenre with the journalist thing, and they said, “It’s not as big as you think” and they already have a couple of writers doing the journalist thing and there’s no shortage of things coming off their line, but they liked it and said for (me) they can do the ex-reporter thing for marketing. I don’t know how much it really comes into play but marketing liked that.
Sandra: It seems to give readers a sense of realism that’s added in.
Rick: I’m good either way with it. The book comes first. And then if I want to find out about them, if they don’t know a thing about it but it’s a great story, fine. I mean, did Frederick Forsythe have to be a national assassin? No, he didn’t have to be.
Sandra: Well, most of us write about murder and we aren’t killers, so…
Rick: Yeah. First and foremost it’s a good story. Whatever your story is, that’s your calling card. And if the other stuff follows through, fine….
But I was comfortable with the reporter thing, the dynamics of newsrooms and I’m just drawing on my own experiences that that’s a natural for me, and I don’t sweat that out too too much. The third series will be a reporter as well, I’m just going to play around with what his or her experience might be, because they all come from different worlds and different backgrounds.
Sandra: And they all work for different bosses.
Rick: Yeah, and Jason Wade’s certainly not Tom Reed, but in the end the story’s the story and the clock’s always ticking and I like that stuff anyways, so we’ll see how that goes.
The standalone is daunting for me because it’s totally new territory for me, and I’m taking my time and doing it really low gear. It’s starting to really chug along now. I’m starting to see where things are merging. It’s going to be really good.
Sandra: Well, that’s good to hear. The beginnings are always, at least for me, nerve-wracking. But it’s interesting talking to you about the journalism because one of the things I was thinking about as I was reading A Perfect Grave was the fact that there’s a strong perception that’s portrayed, especially I guess on TV, about the journalists are always these headline-seekers, they’re willing to do anything to get a story, they’re basically ruthless, almost evil in terms of how they are very stereotypically portrayed. You know, and I know, that that’s not the real world…
Rick: It’s true. I mean, the stereotype usually does emerge from some element of truth somewhere, or perception of it, and I have met people in the reporting world who fit the stereotype, but they were a minority. They were the characters that, even in real life, that would be the fuel for the barroom chats later…
There are elements that are there of the ruthlessness and perceived insensitivity. I think it’s there, but I think what we don’t see a more realistic portrayal of the anguish that goes with it from the real world. That’s not talked about too much and reporters retreat. It’s like cops with gallows humour. You can take those elements and over-dramatize them to the point where they become clichéd characters or you take them and carefully use them to your end to create a fuller picture.
Sandra: That’s actually what I feel you’ve done with Jason Wade. Here you’ve got this guy who actually does have integrity and he is very committed to his job but he doesn’t cross certain lines and that’s cost him in his job because he’s constantly under pressure from his boss. He’s getting yelled at because he doesn’t have a name, and it’s the name that everyone else ran in print and got wrong, but he knew the name of the person who’d been killed and didn’t run it because he didn’t have it confirmed. And this is a guy who, despite the fact that he’s under pressure and despite the fact that he’s at risk of losing his job, he’s still putting his principles ahead of tabloid hack journalism.
Rick: He’s adhering to the basic fundamental age-old tenant of getting it right and basically, a reporter is the face of the paper and how they conduct themselves is a reflection of that large corporate organization. They are the tip of the missile. It’s a lot of pressure, and a lot of their own personality and biases go into it and the competition can be fierce, especially in true competitive markets and most of the major cities, despite media concentration, are still major competitive markets and the pressure is enormous. I worked in the Toronto market and the pressure was unbearable, how not to get beat on a story and you see that in Edmonton, in Calgary… In just about every market you’ll see that.
There’s another side to the story, and it’s what I’m trying to bring to the readers. The reporters… they have families, they are not the insensitive morons that they’re portrayed as, and that takes me back to what led me to write this stuff. The unfair and inaccurate portrayal, even in commercial fiction, of what I did for a living. That’s what led me to choosing crime fiction as something to write about while I was working the night police desk. The stuff was just too good not to use and I was very philosophical about it at the time. I think in my years from what I’d experienced I had a large enough reservoir to draw from, and had heard enough in the tribal reporter camps from my travels to know that a lot of the beefs, a lot of the feelings, a lot of the challenges were pretty much universal. I met people at stand-offs in the US or at executions in the States and in the Middle East and you always shoot the breeze, talk shop when you can and I came to the conclusion that there’s pretty much a universal language from the reporter world so I put it to my own advantage.
Sandra: Do you ever get anybody giving you grief, that they don’t think it’s realistic because of the stereotypes?
Rick: Once or twice, the odd picky reader, but overall I’d say the answer’s no. The only concern I have, as an old-timer now, is to make sure that my people are in a realistic world. I have to remember that when I left we were just using the internet and not using camera phones and berrys and things, and the fact that there’s constant concern about erosion of readership and the actual print format is slowly melting like the ice caps and there’s concern. I mean, as they merge into the online source, that’s the other aspect. I have to make sure that that’s current. So in a way, maybe my guy’s a little romanticized, I’d be the first to say I could be accused of being a little out of date, but my reporter friends don’t take me to task on the minutiae of things. I think readers buy into it or accept it.
Sandra: In this day and age the media will buy photos, video, off of people who just happen to have been there…
Rick: That’s always been the case. There have been a number of historic news iconic photos that were taken by individuals. That’s the thing, it’s the image. News photographers are trained also, when there’s an event, to ask who’s got a camera, to ask, “Can I buy your film? You might have a better image and the professional photographer who has the pride and wants to take the picture for their organization… their primary responsibility with something that’s breaking is to come back with the best image, so if the child with the still camera beside you got the picture and you didn’t, well, your job is to purchase that photo off that child and run it with a photo credit. You’re right, I’m sort of getting off track there.
Sandra: Now, though, remember that hoax about a beheading, a film that was put online? Now, I find myself wondering… I can’t think of any scandal that’s come up just that way that’s hit the media, where they’ve taken something at face value, but in this era of digital photographs, of doctoring photographs, it adds this whole element.
Rick: It’s a great vulnerability, a great risk of being hoodwinked.
Sandra: I think if I was going to write about a reporter again, that would be an interesting thing to play around with.
Rick: Oh, absolutely. Well, that’s the whole thing. I think the reporter subgenre just offers so much. You can go either way with it. It lends itself to so much.
Sandra: I’m just wondering, because you’re writing what mainly gets classified as thrillers, do you think the reporter has a certain advantage over the cop in the sense that with the reporter there always is a constant deadline for the next issue to produce something, whereas with a cop if you get something at twelve or if you get something at one it doesn’t matter quite as much.
Rick: They’re definitely different worlds and I’ll tell you what cops told me when I was on the beat. They said, “You have a great freedom.” I said, “What do you mean?”. “If I’m a city police officer or I’m a federal police officer and I’m pursuing my case and I decide I need this or this in another jurisdiction, the further away it is the more complicated it gets for me to pursue my information, where you as a reporter can say, “Hey, I think this guy in Bagdad knows something, I’ll pick up the phone and call him,” and you can do that, you’re expected to do that. You don’t have to answer to anybody for doing that.”
There is a freedom that way, and there’s also, detectives would tell me, “You run something and you truly believe it’s true and your organization believes it’s true and the next day you find out it’s not, you run a correction, oops. Yeah, you may face a lawsuit, depending on what the error is. When we’re building our case, we’ve got to make sure it’s right all the way along because it could be pulled out on us in court and it could affect the prosecution side of things, so we have to build a very very solid house.”
We were more like gypsies, and to them, from their view, journalists didn’t have as much accountability. I would turn it on them and say, “Look, okay, I can call up people from around the world at any time and they can curse at me and hang up. But you can get a subpoena and you can get a court order and you can flash your badge and people are kinda, in a way, more inclined to have to talk to you, and you say, “I want to get that unlisted phone number” and you can get it.”
So we would joust that way, in terms of pursuit of information.
Sandra: You’re blending the best of both worlds by using a cop and a reporter.
Rick: Yeah, and there are times, and you can do this creatively in your fiction. There are times where they’re at odds and there are times they can serve each other’s purposes and it’s a delicate dance. I did this with Sydowski a little bit and Reed a little bit, but I probably did it more in real life. There was a little trade-off here and there. I come across something, they come across something and you work an understanding. “If you go down this street you won’t be sorry Rick” and okay, they never told me but I’d go for a drive down that street… Or I’d have something and say, “We’re going to run this on the front page. If you were me would you lose sleep over it or would you sleep well?” You were just going on that kind of cryptic stuff. You see this in Woodward and Bernstein, in the Nixon books, where they would play that game. “If we’re right be silent for ten seconds.” Just operating, at times, on just a lot of trust that’s being supported by a hair. Talk about stomach in knots when you got up the next morning.
Sandra: Going back over to that vulnerability.
Rick: And I lived that. Police lived that. And there were times I had something that I was not supposed to share and maybe I did and I was trusting a police source and it was a very interesting, dramatic time at times. I’m not saying it was always like that, but there were a lot of moments like that and you put them together tightly and you’ve got yourself a book and for me I can draw on that, I know what it’s like.
Sandra: To switch gears on you, you did an interview for Booked TV and in that you were asked about an influential location and you said that covering true crime in Calgary and the Rockies helped forge your fiction. What exactly is it about Calgary and the Rockies?
Rick: That’s where I cut my teeth on the crime desk, so all my reporter imaginings that you read about were forged with the Calgary Herald. And the Rockies are so beautiful and a lot of stuff took us out there. They weren’t always crime stories directly. Lost hikers, bear attacks, bodies found or so on… For me, almost everything I needed came from my days at the Calgary Herald crime desk… Homicides, abductions, everything. A montage of a lot of stuff. The Herald was a fairly well-off paper and when they wanted to chase a story they wanted their own eyes on something and they’d put you on a plane and off you’d go. I went to Columbine, I went to Texas, I went to California, the Caribbean… The Middle East.
The first stint was night cops, which I did not like at the outset. Time went by and then it was day police. Just a different shift, really. I mean, I knew everybody. And then year after year went by on the night side and I got to know cops on the night desk, because editors would tell me what to do, and other reporters would tell me what to do and I was green as could be. “When it’s quiet, go out and meet the guys, go out on ride-alongs, and I can’t remember how many cars I rode in, went to visit the units. They even arrested me and took me through the process, put me in jail and I’d talk with the homicide guys, the tac team and the Mounties started to open up. They were going through a change as well and it was with some of the senior police desk guys in Calgary and our cousins up north at the Edmonton Journal. We were at a time when the competition between the two markets, between the two papers, was fierce. Between the Sun chain in Edmonton and Calgary and the Herald and Edmonton Journal. Sports was the mainstay of the Sun chain, they were very good at sports, and the other was crime. We were on the broadsheets, the respected community newspapers, and we were invited into your homes whereas the tabs were the pick-up paper that you kept on the trains and at work but you didn’t bring them into your home. I’m exaggerating a bit, but that was the perception.
But they were very good at crime, so we got together with the Journal and decided, “Why don’t we share stories?” and when there’s a major story the crime desk should talk to each other, where there was mutual interest in a story. We started sharing. Then we thought the relationship with the police overall wasn’t the greatest, especially with the Mounties in Alberta, so we formed an unofficial association called the Alberta Crime Reporters Association… We started putting out an invite that we would meet in a hotel in Red Deer. Senior police officials and reporters from our two papers, the Journal and Herald, and we invited some TV, and the Suns were invited too, we put it wide open, and we were surprised when we got acceptance from very senior Mounties.
What we provided was totally off the record, sleeves rolled up, doors closed, everything we do that pisses you off and everything that you do that pisses us off. Nobody else involved, just the reporters and the senior cops. After the first one we had, they loved it, they said it was long overdue. There was a lot of finger-pointing and this and that, but we reaped a lot of goodwill from it, and things happened after that. There were some new directives given. We had understanding. We did it for about three or four years and that worked well for us.
So I was part of that and we were known to most of the police organization. That also helped my staying on the crime desk. They said, “Whenever you want to leave you can, you can do whatever you want, we don’t think people should stay on the desk too long” so then I became a senior crime features reporter. I’d had enough of the scanners in my ears. You had to live and die by the scanners. That’s why they’re so much of a prominent feature in my books, because I know that in newsrooms, I believe they still are the lifeblood of the organizations for the most part. The OJ Simpson chase was from a police scanner. How much bigger do you get than that?
I grew up with them. They’re a second language, you’ve got to learn the code. But after a while they drove me crazy.
Sandra: I live with an emergency services radio on broadcast.
Rick: You know what I’m talking about.
Sandra: Well, you grew up in Belleville, and I was going to talk to you about that, but I went to Loyalist College in Belleville, and even when I was in college for journalism, I remember there was a murder and it happened in proximity to where a number of journalism students happened to live and here you are, it’s a college paper, they got their asses kicked for not going over there and covering it. What you’re talking about is the reality that people live with, until you’ve lived in that world you don’t really understand.
Rick: Well as a student at the Star they put you in what they call the torture chamber, and Tom Reed, that radio room in the San Francisco Star actually was the Toronto Star’s torture chamber and they had so many scanners going constantly, they had a plexiglass thing on the floor like you do for some offices so your roller chair could really move around and you were locked in there and basically, they put you in there and said, “You miss anything, you’re fired.” You can bet the Toronto Star does not miss a thing and they’re listening to everything. The Globe to a lesser degree. You better not be turning on the TV and watching it unless you see a Star reporter being interviewed at the scene because he was there first. It was just hammered into you that you do not get beat. It was unacceptable.
In Calgary, I take pride in that I developed the tape system, where guys would be listening to these scanners, but they’d get the trail end or a crosstalk call and they would miss something. “What was that? Either two police officers are going for lunch or they’ve gone missing.” And they don’t like you calling up every time you’ve missed something. They get tired of you calling and they might not answer, so I said, “Why don’t we just run a tape recorder beside the radios and just rewind?” So the top city editor allowed the budget of buying tape recorder after tape recorder because every two or three months they’d just burn out. We’d just run them non-stop. Get a one-hour tape and just flip the tape, and set the counter. “What was that? Oh, he just spilled coffee on his pants, he didn’t get shot, he’s screaming because he got burned.”
Sandra: Those are the kind of things that could end up being evidence later, the exact time that a call came in.
Rick: I know it’s a little different now, some news organizations, because of the e-mails, so I am coming back to the point where I may have sort of aged-out myself from it, but I think I’m still relatively reflective of things. I suppose if I really wanted to I could do a week on a desk just to reacquaint myself with things, but I don’t know.
Sandra: Well, this is one of the things… I mean, by the time that a book comes out to some degree it is already outdated. You write a book, you hand it in, it’s usually a gap of anywhere from six months to a year and things are changing so fast right now. A couple years back I listened to a guy who’d worked at the Calgary Sun, John Gradon, talk about his years in journalism, and he was talking about the old days. When he cut his teeth it was in Glasgow and he was talking about phoning in your stories. You go from one thing to another thing. Now you wouldn’t be phoning in your stories, you’d be text messaging them in. Things are going to change and in some ways it’s impossible for books to keep up with that. So as long as it seems contemporary…
Rick: Yeah. As long as it’s representative, that’s what I’m aiming for. I’ll step back from that because I’m trying not to make that the story so much unless there’s an element that I need for whatever device, but it’s the person pursing the story, them as a character and what they’re going through, so when I do have to insert technical stuff for how they get a story I try to make sure I get it right or have some excuse. I remember a few years ago the computers went down at the Star and they said, “Bring out the typewriters,” they had to go digging out typewriters.
Sandra: Oh my gosh. Can you imagine the average person now?
Rick: Yeah, but if I had to, then one day that’s going to happen. I can remember filing in longhand and dictating over the phone, and there are computer glitches. It’s not the end of the world. If you can get to a phone that’s basically it, like John, phoning in the story, writing it down on hotel stationary, the old-fashioned way, three sentences to a page. Saves you a lot of rewriting. Shuffle it all around. I faxed in a 1500 word story once because the computer just would not work. My hand was awfully sore. I printed it. The whole thing had to be in block letters so they could read it.
Sandra: That would hurt to do.
Rick: It was painful.
Sandra: Now, going over to the fact that you grew up in Belleville, Belleville is an interesting place because the one thing I remember about going to college there was they talked about how they had built… Did you ever go out to Loyalist?
Rick: Not a lot. I took a night course there. I don’t think I could even name all the buildings.
Sandra: In the main building they had built in what was technically then the back a big entry area, and it was really nice. Glass doors that looked out to the field behind. The journalism instructors told us that at the time they had been building they had expected the city to grow out so they actually expected those to be the front doors.
Rick: And it didn’t quite happen that way.
Sandra: It hadn’t happened, not even when I was there. What I remember thinking, and this might also have been the fact it was Ontario in the recession, was Belleville is kind of the city that isn’t, because it’s between Peterborough and Kingston and Queen’s University and Sir Sandford Fleming College are so much better known and the one thing that seems to take people to Belleville is the photojournalism program, because they’ve got the major one in the country, but beyond that Belleville is sort of this netherworld tucked in there, and not a lot of people go to Belleville or know about it.
Rick: I call it a pee stop on the 401. Going from Toronto to Montreal, you’ve got to pee, do it in Belleville.
Sandra: There you go. I’m not offending you.
Rick: No. It’s a sleepy little town, and not too much happens there and maybe Black Diamond Cheese is.
Sandra: Well, in this day and age you’ve got the Wilkinson’s.
Rick: The Wilkinson’s, yeah, and proximity to Napanee.
Sandra: Yes.
Rick: And you’d have to go back to the 50s and the World Champion Belleville McFarlane’s Hockey Team but there aren’t too many people who remember that and those that do are all in Belleville.
Sandra: This leads to this theory I’ve got, that a lot of writers seem to be born out of smaller, quieter communities. Maybe it’s because we’re always imagining what’s going on somewhere else?
Rick: My wife and I bought our first house on Burton Street in Belleville. A block and a half behind us was Susanna Moody’s house. The Canadian literary roughing it in the bush. I would walk over there and go, “What was she complaining about? It’s not that far down to the river.” I know I was walking on paved sidewalks and she had to walk through trees and I think she was afraid of bears and stuff but it’s not that far to the river. Roughing it in the bush. Well, it’s Belleville. And Farley Mowatt claimed he was conceived in a canoe just off the shores of Belleville.
Sandra: Oh really!
Rick: So there’s our literary claims, right there.
Sandra: It’s kind of hard for me to conceive of people talking about Belleville being in the bush when I grew up in Gravenhurst.
Rick: Yeah. Well, I forget what era, was it 1830s or so? There was really not much going on there. I think Dickens rolled by in a steamer, kind of glanced at it.
You’re right, it was a small town, and for me it was my town and it was my mother who actually listened to a police scanner. I have to think back. It wasn’t an active police scanner, and she’d have it on and just liked to know what was going on in town. And maybe once a day you’d hear, “I’m going for lunch.”
Having stories read to me in grade school sort of got the imagination going and I was the only boy in my grade nine typing class because something told me I’d better take typing, I was going to need it, and it was kind of a girly thing to do. I remember other guys asked, “What are you doing?” and I thought I was going to need it. They had these old Olympian manuals... The teacher didn’t care that I was the only boy, I think she kind of liked it, so I learned to type and then I wrote short stories as a kid and I sent them out to magazines. I’d ride my bicycle down to the Reading and Greeting shop in downtown Belleville, which was beside the Reddick’s bakery and you could smell the baking bread and stuff, and the guy that owned it would allow me to stand there and he had this great collections of magazines and books and there was a magazine called The Writer and it was like angels singing. I couldn’t afford to buy it, so I stood there and read it, how to market your story and I’d read this thing and study it and take out my little notepad and write down addresses, type up my stories and lick the stamps and mail them off and I actually typed them at high school. I’d go in after class and use the typewriters there, all by myself, typing away, and mailing them off.
Then one day, you know I’d had rejection after rejection and I was just a kid, fourteen or fifteen, and one day a cheque came from New Jersey. For $60 US dollars and my dad was a construction worker and I showed it to him and he was just floored. “What’d you do?” I said, “You’ve got to cash it for me Dad.” I didn’t even have a bank account.
That was quite a moment. I think a few years later for my birthday I got the Writer’s Market. My mom gave it to me. It was a lifelong thing.
Sandra: You were pretty much born to be a writer.
Rick: I guess. I was always writing something. I liked writing little stories. I guess there’s sort of a hope attached to them, when you send them out. I liked the process. Here’s a little story, and I’d type it and make sure it’s all clean and didn’t show it to anybody and followed the format like in my magazines and they had great little “how to” articles. I learned so much. How to write the query letter. How to sell to this market, how to sell to that market. Maybe I wasn’t being that successful, but I was learning from them and I enjoyed it.
The idea of writing a book had never occurred to me, just stories. I was cutting my teeth, learning that part of the business. I think it was that first bit of success, knowing that it can be done, that got me going. I said, “All I’ve got to do is write something a hundred times longer and they’ll probably give me a hundred times more money” and my dad said, “Whatever” but my mom gave me the ribbons for my typewriter and I’d just type away.
Sandra: Well, there are far worse things you could have been doing.
Rick: Yeah. It took a while, after high school, and then university and putting it all together, and I look back and laugh at the memory of it. I had a big sack of all the early stories and all the early letters in my closet and I’d just started dating Barbara, who is my wife now, and I remember I got frustrated one day and I said, “I’m taking this sack and I’m throwing it out” and she said, ”I don’t think you should.” I said, “I know what I’m doing, it’s garbage.” She said, “You’re going to regret it one day,” and I think I do. There was a lot of good stuff in there and personal notes from legendary people that are long gone and I threw it away in frustration. Those were old days, I laugh at them now.
Sandra: We all go through those days. So let me ask you something controversial. How come you’re not setting books in Canada?
Rick: Well, I had intended that, to set my books in Canada. My first book was actually drafted to be set in Canada. It was my intention, at the time I had made up my mind, I felt I was a writer and I wanted to shape what I was doing into something worthwhile. It came to the point where it was going to be crime fiction, and I was a reporter. I was grappling with supernatural stuff, because I like that too.
What I was seeing on the crime desk, in my preliminary study of Canadian crime fiction, was not being reflected. I said, “It’s time for the next generation to take over. I’ve had it with Canadian police officers sounding like Brits on Canadian streets.” That’s not a shot at anyone in particular.
Or parlour room Canadian mysteries being played out in contemporary times when I’m dealing with families who’ve had loved ones murdered, and it’s happening across the country. This whole perception that Canada’s this quaint little pastoral community without cursing… it sure as heck isn’t. I wasn’t trying to emulate the US, I was trying to reflect what I saw, and thought it was time to take it to the next evolutionary step, so as an aspiring crime fiction writer, that was my intention, that I will be proudly Canadian and I will write my story and it will be a true story in terms that it will be honest to my experience. IF ANGELS FALL was going to be set in Toronto, even though I was a Calgary Herald reporter I contacted Metro back then and got a ride-along, spent a day with them and the climax was going to be set in the Thousand Islands, so I wrote letters and got a ride-along with the Canadian coast guard and told the boys on the boat what my plot was and they helped me, in the end, make my bad guy even better. They started showing me things. It was great.
Halfway through the book I had self doubt, I couldn’t finish the book, and though a long story there was a friend who was getting a book published, a true crime book. She had contacts in New York and one night I opened up and told her. I didn’t tell anyone I was writing crime fiction, not in the newsroom, nobody knew, just my wife and family and when I had to contact officials.
This friend said, “Why don’t I take what you’ve written to this person I know in New York and they’ll just give you a free assessment of it. They’ll just tell you if you’re right or wrong. I said sure. I went off to San Francisco to cover something, and the word got back that this person in NYC looked at it and said I should finish and I was on the right track, and called me and talked to me. Exchanged a letter or two. Very very nice, encouraging. The person’s name was Bill Thompson and it turned out to be the Bill Thompson that Stephen King mentions in the beginning of THE SHINING, the one who got CARRIE going, that Bill Thompson.
He said, “Is your goal to get published?” I said yeah, and keep in mind he’s just giving me advice, and he said, “I’ll make a suggestion. I think you should consider relocating it to the US because it’s hard enough for an unknown American writer to get published in the US, if your goal is to get published and reach the widest audience, I apologize for American egocentricity, but Americans love to read about American settings and things.” He thought my book lent itself to Mary Higgins Clark country, New England or some place like that. He said it was just a thought.
I said, “Okay, thank you.” I was just thrilled that he liked what I’d written and he gave it an assessment and it was after the fact that I discovered he was who he was and I was walking on air.
Having just come back from San Francisco, and having befriended a homicide detective there, I got thinking, “Hmm, I love that city.” I’d been there in my hitchhiking days, just been there as a crime reporter, so I chose to relocate the book to San Francisco. I asked the detective in California if he would read it for technical accuracy. I turned my back on that dream to be true-blue Canadian myself, no house set a condition upon me, no agent, no editor. Just me, to finish the book.
And then when it was finished I sought an agent and got one and she sold it to Pinnacle. And Pinnacle, at the time, I don’t even think knew I was Canadian.
I was thrilled to be published and I tried, but it was more of a delicate step, to set the next book in Alberta. Mountains are mountains. They said, “Well… we’d kind of like you to move a little south” and I said, “Okay, Montana,” and they said, “Oh great,” so it was set in Montana. That’s about the extent that I pushed it.
Then in BLOOD OF OTHERS I had a couple of chapters that were up in Canada, and brought the storyline back to the US, and they were good with that.
Then when they wanted me to create a new character in Jason Wade, they proposed a Northwest locale, Portland or Seattle, and said I could use Canadian threads. Keep the story in the US but they encouraged me to come more and more into Canada. With EVERY FEAR there’s a nod to Canada in terms of back story, and in A PERFECT GRAVE I took that trip into Alberta just for me. That’s really me waving at the Herald.
With the next book, it’s going to be international. This is a long answer to your question, but it was really me, and I guess the reason… I’m still torn. I’d still like to do something in Canada only, but there’s this fear.
You hear a lot of exceptions to the rule. Louise (Penny) is using and Giles to an extent, great writing aside, but they are fulfilling the stereotypical view the world has of Canada and if you write that way and you do it well, you get a thumbs up because people really think Canada’s always cold, or nothing but quaint villages, no one really is murdered in Canada and if they are they’re all shocked because, “You don’t own guns there, right? You just want to lay around and smoke pot and hug everybody regardless of gender and all of that, right?” And when you see beautiful writing that reinforces that stereotype, I’m exaggerating a bit, but that’s the kind of writing we expect out of Canada in crime fiction.
If you write something that tends to be a little more violent, you’re just American wannabes, because that doesn’t happen. Pickton aside, Montreal Massacre aside –“
Sandra: Paul Bernardo aside.
Rick: People say, “But this doesn’t happen in Canada.” Stop that. “This doesn’t happen in Scotland,” they said after Dunblane, and it happens, period, wherever we are. We have murders up in the north in isolated communities, we’re human beings, Cain and Abel, and I almost said to Elmore Leonard, “Well, we don’t really get murders, those cemeteries we have out there are all pretend, they don’t exist. We don’t feel any pain because we’re Canadian. We don’t suffer any violence because we’re Canadian.” Enough of that.
So, you have the perception that if you’re writing an urban, gritty type story, that you’re emulating other places that fulfill that stereotype. Los Angeles. I got off a plane and no gangster shot me. It’s New York and I didn’t get mugged. You can flip it.
Sandra: Don’t they sell ‘Gangster Shooting’ signs? We have ‘Wildlife Crossing’ signs…
Rick: I think we’re all guilty of our stereotypes in that way. And I’m not throwing or heaping criticism on anybody because I think a good story, it doesn’t matter. Tell a good story and that’s fine, but you want to be free to write what you want to write about, but I am torn because I know I had set out to do what I wanted to do and what would have happened? I don’t know. Would I have been able to be published?
Sandra: It’s hard to say.
Rick: I meet Canadian writer friends from all sides of the coin and they’re published now and they’re writing true Canadian stories, they’re true to their roots, but they can’t cross over into the US, they can’t get picked up, maybe have smaller publishers. They said, “Well, you’re doing it right and I’m told the next book, I have to set it in the US” and then you hear others who are true to the Canadian locale, getting picked up and sold everywhere.” I think there are exceptions to every rule.
Sandra: Times have changed somewhat, and it goes back to what we were saying earlier, about the internet and access to information and everything being out there. People, I think, are a little more aware now, and perceptions have changed. I certainly know that when I was trying to find an agent first time around the Americans told me to look for somebody in Canada and the Canadians were, “Well, this is dark.” They didn’t want to go anywhere near it. So, I was forced to put the first book in the States. And then the criticism that came up in reviews was, “I don’t know why this person felt the need to put their book in the States, they should have set it in Canada.” You can’t win.
Rick: No, you can’t win. My stuff is mass market, pulpy stuff, for want of a better term, and in the early days people would say, “Read your book, loved it, then I found out you’re Canadian.” And those were Canadian readers. It was always that way. And maybe one out of twenty-five would sort of shyly, respectfully say, “You ever think about setting a book in Canada?” It would come out. From American readers, nothing about where I was from. Just, “Read you book, it was great.”
But in the back of my mind I always came back to the original plan. Because it’s my back yard and I knew my stuff and I wanted to have my detectives going to a Flames game. I wanted Mounties. I wanted people to understand Mounties a little bit more.
Sandra: And right now, the media around the Mounties-
Rick: I know! They need a win and they’re putting the puck in their own net so many times, it’s pretty bad. If you’ve got a Mountie character emerging, I don’t know. And they’re protected. Everyone knows how they protected their image with Disney. That all emerged because the Mountie image was being besmirched. They moved to get parliament to protect their image and you had to get permission to use the image in any commercial venture. If they approve they get ten or fifteen percent and that money goes to help kids fight drugs.
So when it came to books I asked them, he said literary license you can have a Mountie character, like Mike Slade does in his books. But you can’t put the Mountie badge on the cover. The LAPD, NYPD, FBI you name it, but with RCMP they get a cut.
Sandra: I don’t know how they could do that, if the book was published in a different country, though.
Rick: Yeah, so you could have a Mountie character and that’s fine. They’re doing a pretty good job themselves of besmirching their own image, but you’d have to say to your publisher they can’t have red serge on the cover or anything.
Sandra: The Mounties I worked with were really good, read over scenes and phoned me up and told me what I got wrong and they’re good.
Rick: What made me want to be true to my Canadian roots in my books was the rapport I had with police and there was a new generation of Mounties coming up at the time. The old Mountie tradition, as far as media went, was to say nothing. May times what had happened, I was coming into the period where there were joint forces operations with the Calgary police or Edmonton police, and they all worked hard and were all on the team but when it came time for media attention, since the Mounties were told not to talk, it suddenly became a Calgary city operation. The Mounties tended to be forgotten because the senior administration said, “Don’t talk” and the younger guys were getting ticked off because pride of work and all of that, and slowly a new media relations policy emerged where they became more open and less of the ‘behind-closed-doors’ and more ‘let’s correct our problems here’ was part of that evolution. We started getting more access and the younger guys were sharp, wonderful guys, and it was great.
So I felt I’d maybe do a Mountie book, and stake out Alberta as my turf, like Hillerman did, and there’s the Native aspect. I spent a year in Brooks, and I got caught up in the prairie lore and the pioneer stuff and that’s Mountie turf and the mountains are Mountie turf. I was talking to people and I was told there would be interest in Germany, at least in terms of the Native lore stuff. That was a thought. It never came to be.
Sandra: Well, it still might.
Rick: Well, I’m not there. I thought the time would have been when I was there, with the guys. Most of them have retired and moved on. They’ve offered to help me out but we’ll see.
Sandra: Now, before we run out of time here, going back to that interview you did for Booked TV, here’s a fun one. You said that if you weren’t a writer you’d like to be a member of the E Street Band or back-up singer for Meatloaf.
Rick: Yeah, well Meatloaf during the good period.
Sandra: Are you actually capable of being a singer or musician?
Rick: No. It’s a fantasy.
Sandra: So it’s pure fantasy?
Rick: Yeah. There’s nothing like the energy you see at those concerts. It’s pure joy and fun. A party on the stage.
About the Interviewer:
Sandra Ruttan's novel, WHAT BURNS WITHIN, will be released by Dorchester in
May 2008, to be followed by THE FRAILTY OF FLESH November 2008. Ken Bruen declared her work "totally mesmerizing" while Clive Cussler concluded, "Ruttan has a spellbinding style." She is also an editor with Spinetingler Magazine. For more information, visit her website at www.sandraruttan.com