In the 1950s, there was a tv show about the lapd called Dragnet. The hero was Sergeant Joe Friday; he was all business, and if a witness (usually female) was embellishing her story he would say, in a monotone, “Just the facts, ma’am. Just the facts.”

  From the outset of Lush Life, Price is in command of his material. He gives readers everything they need to know about the crime and the investigation without embellishment or authorial intrusion. Like the four officers of The Quality of Life Task Force and the score of other police officers in the novel, the reader hears the voices and sees the faces of victims, bystanders, witnesses, the bereaved, and the murderer. Readers have “the facts,” and sometimes the facts are heartbreaking. In the following passage, a father has just identified the body of his murdered son in the police morgue. Note the small but telling detail of “the acoustically tiled walls” specifically designed to swallow grief.

  Marcus stood up, shook the detective’s hand, straightened his shirt and took a step to the door, then wheeled back around and let loose with a single whooping sob that should have been heard all through the building but was swallowed by the acoustically tiled walls: specifically installed, Iacone had once been told, in anticipation of moments such as this.

  Minot’s glossary defines pace as reflecting the readers’ “sense that a story . . . moves rapidly or drags. This is determined by the rate of revelation and the style.” The pace of Lush Life mirrors the pace of the investigation: mind-numbingly slow as the officers encounter dead end upon dead end, heart-stopping in the face of human pain, and pulse-quickening as the facts come together and the truth is revealed.

  The rule about style is that the techniques a writer uses should not be noticeable. All that matters is the end result, the novel your readers are holding. Readers don’t want to know how the magician saws the lady in half; they simply want to marvel at the fact he can.

  Chapter 10

  Creating a Robust Series

  I always enjoy Q&A sessions because they give me a chance to learn what’s in readers’ minds. Some of the questions surprise me. One library patron wondered if I’d brought Joanne Kilbourn’s brisket recipe with me to the reading. (I hadn’t, but I did email the recipe to her when I got back to the hotel.) Brisket aside, three questions always seem to crop up. How long do I plan to continue writing the series? What factors contribute to the longevity of a series? And how do I plan to end the series?

  I’ve known the answer to the first question for a while. From the beginning, the character of Joanne Kilbourn Shreve has been a gift to me as a writer and as a person. Every time I open my laptop the prospect of creating Joanne, her family, her friends, and her life brings me joy. Going on set in Toronto to watch six of my set-in-Saskatchewan novels being magically transformed into made-for-tv movies and travelling across Canada more times than I can count to attend writers’ festivals, where I’m spoiled and have a chance to sit down and talk books with readers and other writers who become friends, have enriched my life immeasurably. Joanne has opened doors to many new worlds for me. I owe her far too much to continue writing the series when it becomes a job rather than a blessing. So the answer to the first question is that the series will end when I can no longer bring my best self to it. I don’t know when that will happen, so I have no answer for the third question.

  I can take a stab, however, at answering the second question. Those of you reading this book because you’re planning to start your first mystery novel might think that talking about long-term success has no relevance for you, but since 1988, when I began writing Deadly Appearances, I’ve stumbled onto some useful truths about strategies that can contribute to a lengthy and robust life for your planned series. I’ll start at the beginning.

  In his 2004 book The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories, Christopher Booker identifies seven basic plots:

  Overcoming the monster (Beowulf, Jaws)

  Rags to riches (Aladdin, Oliver Twist)

  The quest (Odyssey, Watership Down)

  Comedy (Aristophanes, Marx Brothers)

  Tragedy (Oedipus, Macbeth)

  Rebirth (Sleeping Beauty, A Christmas Carol)

  Voyage and return (Peter Rabbit, Brideshead Revisited)

  The plot lines driven by Booker’s list of possibilities will vary dramatically, as will the stories they produce. But whether you choose to write a rags-to-riches story, an account of a quest, an exploration of a rebirth, or a tale of voyage and return, your protagonist will encounter many characters, and each will play a specific role in developing your story’s plot. That said, the function of these characters goes well beyond pushing the story line forward.

  Booker makes a significant point:

  However many characters may appear in a story, its real concern is with just one: its hero or heroine. It is he with whose fate we identify, as we see him gradually developing towards that state of self-realization which marks the end of the story. Ultimately it is in relation to this central figure that all other characters in a story take on their significance. What each of the other characters represents is really only some aspect of the inner state of the hero or heroine themselves.

  Amen!

  If, heaven forfend, I were forced to write a master’s thesis on my novels, I would title it “Gail Bowen’s Joanne Kilbourn Novels: An Ordinary Woman’s Journey to Self-Realization and the Beginning of Wisdom.” That snore-inducing title would not land me a lucrative job in my publisher’s sales and marketing division, but as a writer who reads and answers every piece of mail I receive I know that readers come to my books because Joanne is someone with whom they would like to have coffee. They want to know what’s happening in her life, and they want to know how what is happening is affecting her.

  Strategy 1

  I’m going to begin by discussing a handful of characters who have a profound effect on Joanne’s growing understanding and acceptance of the woman she is. I’m not a literary theorist, but as I said I have—more by good luck than by good planning—come up with a couple of strategies that will get your series off to a strong start and allow it to flourish. This tactic will require some serious thought at the beginning, but it will pay regular and rewarding dividends. Here is the first strategy: as early as possible, introduce some secondary characters who have intriguing back stories of their own and whose connections with your protagonist will endure and evolve throughout your novels.

  Howard Dowhanuik is introduced on the second page of my first novel, Deadly Appearances. Writing the beginning of a novel is difficult. Writing the beginning of a first novel is straight-out terrifying. The writer must introduce the reader to the world of the novel and its characters. Because I use a first-person narrator/protagonist, I had to give readers enough information about Joanne’s past and present to engage them and convince them to trust Joanne as the narrator.

  In other words, I had to ease a substantial amount of expository material into the narrative. The word exposition comes from Latin, and its literal meaning is “a showing forth.” You “show forth” enough background information to allow your readers to make sense of the story you are about to tell. Finding a balance between too many facts and too few facts is tough, but as you navigate that narrow channel remember the cardinal rule of writing: show, don’t tell.

  On page 2 of Deadly Appearances, Joanne tells us that Howard had been the premier of her province for eleven years, the leader of the official opposition for seven years, and her friend for all that time and more. The time is the present, but the setting is an old-fashioned political picnic with softball games, a chicken barbecue, a fiddler, and of course speeches. The purpose of the picnic is to celebrate the victory of Andy Boychuk, the new leader of Joanne and Howard’s political party, and to salve the wounds of the men and women he defeated in the nomination race. By page 11, Andy has been murdered, but we have learned enough from the casual conversation of long-time friends Howard and Joanne to know where we are, the nature of their relationship, who the people around them are, and who might have wanted Andy dead.

  Initially Howard is a tool with which I introduced expository material unobtrusively. Later in Deadly Appearances he helps readers to understand the dynamics among the men and women in Andy’s life. Perhaps more importantly, Howard helps readers to understand some of the forces that have shaped Joanne’s character. Through Howard we learn that, as an idealistic political science graduate, Joanne fell in love with an ambitious young lawyer who promised her that their marriage would be one of equals, of “twin stars” who would illuminate some of the world’s darkness. Howard has been part of the Kilbourns’ lives from the beginning of their marriage, and he has watched while Joanne’s husband, Ian, became a political star destined for great things and while Joanne became the stargazer, raising children and being a dutiful political wife. Howard’s perspective on the changing nature of the Kilbourn marriage provides readers with valuable insights into many of the novels ahead.

  In A Colder Kind of Death, Kevin Tarpley, the man who, six years earlier, brutally killed Ian Kilbourn in a seemingly senseless act on the Trans-Canada Highway, is himself murdered. Days before his death, Tarpley sends Joanne a cryptic letter implying that Ian’s death was not random and that the true motive for the murder can be found in the private lives of Ian’s political colleagues. As Joanne delves into the tangled relationships among Ian and the men and women whom both he and she believed were their friends, Howard—premier during that period—serves as her confidant and informant. Again his role, in addition to supporting Joanne, is to give readers the information they need to understand the plot.

  Howard appears again in the seventh Joanne Kilbourn novel, Burying Ariel, when he attempts to heal the breach between him and his son, Charlie, by being there for him as he grieves the death of his wife. The rift between Howard and Charlie began because, as premier during Charlie’s childhood and adolescence, Howard was an absentee father. Charlie’s bitterness at their estrangement is at the heart of the tenth Joanne Kilbourn novel.

  In The Endless Knot, Howard, always the rock in Joanne’s life, is disintegrating. Retired, reclusive, and in his opinion redundant, the former premier is drinking heavily. When an attractive journalist convinces him to talk about his relationship with Charlie for a book she is writing about the troubled adult offspring of famous parents, Howard obliges. Charlie is livid about the book and his father’s betrayal. When the journalist is murdered, Howard and Charlie are both suspects. This time it’s Joanne’s turn to be the rock.

  In 12 Rose Street, Howard is once again sober and solid. When Joanne discovers that Ian had an affair with her best friend that lasted from the time Joanne’s first child was born to Ian’s death, she is devastated. As premier of the province when Ian was attorney general, Howard was close to both Ian and Jill Oziowy, Ian’s senior staff member and the woman with whom he had the ongoing affair. Howard tells Joanne that Ian believed she was stronger and more gifted than he was and that he needed to have a woman who worshipped him in his life. Howard also convinces Joanne that she must forgive Jill or be burdened with anger for the rest of her life. Once again, as a character, Howard plays a role in the development of the plot and illuminates a facet of Joanne’s history and character that adds to our understanding of the experiences that have shaped my protagonist.

  One final note: Howard Dowhanuik is not finished yet. I have big plans for him in the nineteenth Joanne Kilbourn novel.

  The secondary characters Sally Love, Nina Love, and Desmond Love all appear on the first page of Murder at the Mendel, my second novel. Each character casts a long shadow over Joanne’s life in the sixteen plus novels to follow.

  Murder at the Mendel opens with fifteen-year-old Joanne walking in on a macabre scene at the family cottage of her best friend, Sally. Only seconds before Joanne appears, Izaak Levin, a leading New York art critic staying with the Loves, has discovered Sally’s parents, still in their places at the dining table but in extremis. Desmond is dead; Nina’s breath is a rattle, and thirteen-year-old Sally is lying on the floor. She has vomited; she is pale, and her breathing is laboured.

  Joanne runs next door to get her father, a physician and Desmond’s best friend from boyhood. Devastated but professional, Douglas Ellard tells Joanne and Izaak that Desmond is dead but that Nina and Sally are clinging to life.

  The obvious explanation for the tragedy is heartbreaking. At the beginning of summer, Desmond, a brilliant visual artist, suffered a stroke that paralyzed the right side of his body, stilling the hand with which he made art. Unable to face a life he saw as unsupportable and leave behind his wife and the daughter he adored, he put a deadly substance in the martinis prepared for Nina and him and in the soft drink Sally always enjoyed before dinner with her parents.

  After that prologue, Murder at the Mendel picks up thirty-two years later, on the night of the winter solstice. Joanne Kilbourn, now a professor of political science and widowed mother of three, is walking to the Mendel Gallery for the opening of a celebration of the art of Sally Love. Sally, an artist as infamous as she is famous, will be at the opening, as will her mother, Nina. The complex and tangled relationships—past and present—of the three women drive the rest of the novel and determine the direction of Joanne’s life.

  The Sally Love opening at the Mendel is one of the first scenes in the Shaftesbury Films made-for-tv movie Love and Murder, starring, among others, Claire Bloom. The Mendel Gallery of the book’s title is in Saskatoon, and the marketing department at Shaftesbury decided the title should be changed to make the movie more accessible to international audiences. (Fine with me. I receive a small but tidy yearly sum from the enlightened countries that send royalties to the primary writer of a work that has been adapted for film.)

  But I digress. Back to the Loves. Shaftesbury hired a visual artist to create all of the Sally Love paintings that appear in the film. We have one of them in our sunroom. The painting is large, two metres by one metre, and it’s a portrait of Sally, Nina, Izaak, and Joanne in an informal gathering at the beach. The ceo of Shaftesbury chose the painting sent to me. It isn’t the selection I would have made, but over the years I have come to value it because the artist obviously understood the women and positioned them perfectly to suggest their temperaments and the tensions among them. The gorgeous, bikini-wearing Sally stands confidently at the centre of the canvas; Izaak, thirty years her senior, is clearly smitten with her; Nina, a beautiful narcissist who loathes her daughter, stands with her back to Sally and Izaak, and her face is studiously impassive; Joanne, in a modest, two-piece bathing suit, stands some distance from the other figures, her hand self-consciously attempting to cover her bare midriff as she watches Sally and Izaak. Joanne’s positioning on the canvas is significant. Her head is turned away from us, and we get only a glimpse of her profile.

  Throughout the novels, Joanne is primarily an observer who reveals only glimpses of herself. As a first-person narrator, she is our eyes and ears, and we are privy to her reactions to the people and the events that take place in her world. I’ve been writing Joanne for thirty years. The average length of the novels is about 310 pages, and there are eighteen of them, so I’ve had 5,580 pages in which to discover my protagonist.

  I still think I don’t really know her. As a character, Joanne is elusive. Warm and welcoming as she is, she always seems to be withholding a part of herself, and I think this is why, as a writer, I keep coming back to her. In every novel, Joanne reveals a facet of herself that surprises me, and I always sense there is more to discover.

  I have tried, unsuccessfully, to track down the original source of the following paraphrase. In a successful mystery series, the plot of each novel must be fully resolved, but the inner longings that drive the protagonist must remain unfulfilled. The protagonist’s continued search for what matters most to her or him will continue to engage readers eager to see if the protagonist’s dream will be realized. I think the message is clear: as a writer, you must keep alive the fire that drives your protagonist.

  In Murder at the Mendel, Joanne tells Mieka, her nineteen-year-old daughter, that the day Desmond Love died was the day everything “went wrong.” The collateral damage from his death affects Joanne for the rest of her life. The Loves are the closest thing to a family she has. Rejected by her mother, Joanne was in boarding school from the time she was six. She was one of the children teachers describe as “orphans with families”—children whose wealthy parents pay other people to raise their offspring because they don’t want them around.

  Her only family life comes when Joanne spends summers at the cottage with her grandmother Ellard and her father joins them for the month of August. During those summers, the Loves become her family. Sally is her best friend, Desmond is invariably kind, and Nina is the closest Joanne ever comes to having a mother.

  Thirty-two years elapse before the truth emerges about what actually occurred at the Loves’ cottage on the September day that opens Murder at the Mendel. When Joanne learns that it was Nina, unwilling to be forever burdened by an invalid husband and a daughter she loathed, who poisoned her family, it’s too late. Sally has died believing that the father she loved attempted to kill her, and both Sally and Joanne have been scarred by the estrangement that began when Nina sent Sally to New York to live with Izaak immediately after Desmond’s death.

  Nina ostensibly offers Joanne sanctuary and unconditional love throughout her formative years. By the time Joanne learns that Nina is a coldly manipulative narcissist who has destroyed the letters Sally and Joanne sent to each other during the years after Desmond’s death, the damage has been done. Joanne has suffered another painful rejection, and Sally has become a woman who sees relationships as trade-offs. She tells Joanne that becoming Izaak’s lover when she was thirteen was a fair exchange: “I painted and we went to galleries and we fucked, and that was my school of the arts. . . . Not a bad preparation when you get right down to it, I guess.” The loose ends of the plot of Murder at the Mendel are neatly tied, but the thumbprints left on Joanne’s heart by those summers at the lake linger.