John Brooke lives in Montreal. He is the creator of the Inspector
Aliette Nouvelle series of literary mysteries set in France. The most recent is Stifling Folds of Love. Brooke has won Canada's Journey Prize for his short story "The Finer Points of Apples", and he won a CBC-Quebec short fiction prize for The Death of PJ Barfard.
Tell
us about the genre of your work.
My primary focus these days is a series literary
mysteries featuring a French policewoman called Inspector Aliette Nouvelle.
I’ve just published the third, Stifling
Folds of Love. I am working on the fourth. I’m not sure where the term
‘literary mystery’ comes from. A writer? Or a book marketer? I suppose it’s
meant to separate the ‘thriller’, which is mainly powered by plot and action,
from an approach that moves at a more measured pace and allows for a more
psychologically complex cast of characters. When you think about it, the
Sherlock Holmes stories were literary mysteries; the ‘thriller’ came later, but
the term took over a corner of the bookstore nonetheless. I get worried when someone
pegs my books as thrillers.
Why
did you choose this genre?
I chose this genre because the first story I ever
attempted was a police story. I was working in the film business in Montreal. Writing mystery
novels had never occurred. I happened to notice a brief item in one of the
French language dailies - a wire service story from France: Jacques Mesrine, Public
Enemy Number One, had been tracked down and arrested north of Paris. The cop leading the operation was a
woman. What struck me were two things. One: that France would have such a figure as
a Public Enemy Number One. This was the mid-80’s. I thought Public Enemies had
disappeared into 40’s film lore. I wondered what kind of man filled this
anachronistic role in modern France.
And two: that it was a female cop who’d caught him. I was fascinated by the
idea of an emerging feminine hero tracking down an outmoded ‘macho’ hero, and
taking the hero mantle for herself. Being a former Lit major, I had to notice
the mythic subtext framing that brief news story and it inspired me to write. The
context was police and crime. So without really knowing it, I began to write a
literary mystery: The Voice of Aliette
Nouvelle.
What
are some of your books, stories that have been published?
I have published four books of fiction and a few
short stories. I have been fortunate to win prizes for my two of my short
stories. My books are:
The
Voice of Aliette Nouvelle (ISBN 0-92183365-2) Aliette tracks a former Public Enemy Number One - who
ought to be long gone, but can’t quite disappear into history. Mutual
attraction is a mutual mystery.
All Pure Souls (ISBN 0-921833-80-6) Inspector Nouvelle
uncovers a Goddess cult behind the murder of an up-market Marilyn Monroe ‘lookalike’
prostitute
Stifling Folds of Love (ISBN 978-1-897109-57-1) Celebrity
gossip clouds the inspector’s love life – but the city’s ‘most eligible’ lovers
are dying and it’s her job to find out why.
Last Days of Montreal (ISBN 0-921833-91-1) This a departure
from the Aliette Nouvelle project. The book, based loosely on my own
experiences and feelings, is about life in a small Montreal neighborhood during the politically
difficult times surrounding the 1998 Quebec Referendum on Sovereignty.
All my books are
published by Signature Editions, based in Winnipeg.
They can purchased online in both paper and eBook format… The latest is Stifling Folds of Love, which makes the
Aliette series a trilogy.
How do you come up with the names of
places and characters in your books?
The genesis of a French inspector’s name: Aliette - Borrowed from a little girl
who causes trouble in a Luis Buñuel film, Le Fantôme de la Liberté. (The Ghost of Freedom.) Nouvelle - New, in the feminine. I’ve
been told it’s not a real French name – you wouldn’t find any Nouvelles in a
French phonebook. I’ve never looked. (There are none in the Montreal directory.) But I’m not writing
reality, I’m writing a story. I situated her in a border city on the Rhine, where France shares space with Germany and Switzerland. I
liked the idea of her being on the edge of literal boundaries, and crossing
metaphorical boundaries as she goes about her investigations. The city is never
named.
For the rest of the characters in the series, I have
no method in selecting names. I try to have fun finding French names that sound
good to me. They may be a little corny. They may carry a bit of symbolic weight
- like Aliette does. I hope not it’s too obvious. The best names will make me
laugh – my own private French joke derived from the French side of my life.
Claude Néon. J-P Blismes, Tommi Bonneau, Pearl
Serein, Flossie Orain, Hermenegilde Dupras, Ondine and Georgette Duguay…
In Last Days
of Montreal, ‘Last Days’ is the only known name of the central character. The
sign on the back of his electric wheelchair is both a warning and a prophecy to
a city in danger of losing its unique identity to the crass demands of politics
– and the people who know him simply call him ‘Last Days.’ It seemed a perfect
name for a beer-soaked Don Quixote type travelling through a damaged world.
How
did you develop the character of your protagonist in your books?
You
develop any character by putting them into a situation that requires both
action and self-reflection – the self-knowledge gained as situation unfolds is deeper
‘character’. Writing a detective series provides endless opportunity to explore
trenchant aspects of a central character and those surrounding her. I’ve tried
to build the Aliette Nouvelle stories around underlying themes. As I mentioned,
the theme behind the plot in the first book is the hero’s identity – how a
‘new’ Aliette wrests the hero mantle
from a tired, obsolete man. In the second book it’s Aliette’s spiritual
relationship to the world she lives in: the context is a murder within a goddess
cult; our hero’s sense of what she ‘believes’ is tested as she solves the
crime. In the third book, murders occur within the context of celebrity gossip
and spectacularly public love. Aliette works through it while trying to protect
the naturally private area of her own heart that wants to keep love quiet… So
in all three books you have a hero who faces challenges to essential parts of
her character. We hope she comes out ahead.
What about an
antagonist…is there a unique “bad guy” or a recurring nemesis of any kind?
In the Inspector Aliette Nouvelle series the ‘bad
guys’ change from one story to the next. In each, they represent the force that
challenges a part of Aliette’s character and the values defining it. The
recurring elements in the series are the people she works with. By design, they
are mostly men. Not necessarily ‘bad’ men, but men whose point of view will
usually differ from Aliette’s. In that sense, you could say a ‘man’s world – or
the ‘male perspective’ - is the recurring nemesis this female investigator
comes up against time and again. Which I hope gives Aliette a certain
contemporary universality.
What’s
your favorite thing about your books?
If you are asking what is my favorite thing about my
books as finished products, that’s a hard question because I don’t read them as
a consumer of crime fiction. What’s more, readers I meet often express a
completely different sense of what I’ve written from what I intended. (One good
reason why a writer – or any artist – should just work to please him/herself.) But
to answer your question, I will say my favorite thing is a playful quality,
something that makes my mystery books a bit more like a ‘tale’ and a little
less like a slice of life from the literal world. Even when the context is
tragic, or sometimes violent, that is what I aim for. It’s not ‘absurd’ –
Aliette is a serious woman. It’s just not ‘hard nosed’… Whimsy? A cartoonish
tinge? It’s difficult to define categorically. Whether I succeed or not, only a
reader can tell.
As for the writing process, my favorite thing is the
enjoyment of finishing. There is so much uncertainty in the first stages of
writing a book - first in finding the story line, and then in making it work.
It can get very uncomfortable in terms of confidence and even interest. (How
many times have I heard someone say they abandoned a writing project because
they grew ‘bored’ with it?) It can last a year, or longer. That’s a test of
will and patience, and ultimately imagination - a long slow battle with the
Muse. When I come out the other end feeling I’ve got something solid, the
finishing stage is something to be enjoyed. A book may be three hundred pages
long, but it can still be just as elegant and precise in design and detail as a
sonnet. And the rhythm can feel like a song. Many readers will never even
notice. But creating that final level of quality is highly pleasurable. Something
definitely worth working for.
How
is writing in the genre you write, different than other genre?
The main difference between writing a police series
and ‘one-off’ novels or short stories is the continuity – the world you begin
to create. This both makes you want
to go further and helps you go
further, because one story always opens a door to a possible next, and the
familiarity with the territory and main character makes starting the next
slightly less daunting. Although you can certainly do this with novels and
short stories. Faulkner’s novels unfolding in Yoknapatawpha County.
Runyon’s stories set in the Prohibition era New York City underworld. My book Last Days of Montreal is not quite a
novel; strictly speaking, it is a collection of ‘linked stories’ featuring
recurring characters, albeit in different roles – sometimes central, other
times peripheral. And all those stories are set within the same
well-established cityscape.
Why
and when did you begin writing?
I began writing in my forties. I am sixty now. I
have always worked on the so-called creative side. I was in the film business,
working as an editor, also producing some short films of my own. When I tumbled
across the idea for the first Inspector Aliette Nouvelle story, my first
attempt at that was in fact a film script. I could not sell the finished
script, but I still liked the story so I began to transpose it into a book. I’m
not sure I like the word ‘novelize’ but I suppose that’s what I was attempting.
In any case, I had the story already there in front of me (which helped!) – the
goal was to make it deeper, more psychological, and to turn images (film
scenes) into viable prose. I also began writing short stories about the life
here in Montreal
during the politically crazy years of the Referendum. No one taught me - no
Creative Writing course. It’s interesting how, when you feel the need to
express something, you can find a way.
What
is your writing schedule?
I try to adhere to a Protestant-work-ethic
nine-to-five writing schedule (seven-to-four is more accurate) with time off in
the afternoon for exercise and maybe a run. Perhaps a bit more work in the
evening if the energy is good. I rarely work on Saturday. I work a little but
not much on Sunday, just enough to get me ready to go again on Monday. If I
receive a contract for some corporate writing or translation, that gets
priority - bread and butter is a necessity. Over the course of a year the
portioning of free writing time to business writing time is pretty even, and I
manage to move my fiction projects forward according to plan.
What projects are you working on now, or plan
for the future?
I am currently working on a fourth Inspector Aliette Nouvelle
mystery, which, all things being equal, will be published next autumn. And I am
planning a fifth. I have a novel about fatherhood built around a golf game that
I keep trying to perfect. And I have anti-war story I’m working on. But for now
I am focused on giving Aliette the market presence that a five-book series (I
hope) will bring.
What
kind of advice or tips to you have for someone who wants to write (especially mystery)?
To would-be writers in general I say: learn to enjoy
it for itself. The market may or may not find you (or like you!), but you and
your stories may have to co-exist for a long time. Even the people closest to
your life won’t care much about your writing, beyond polite words. So
understand what you’re getting into and find a way to love it, quietly but strongly,
and over the long term… For anybody contemplating writing a mystery, my advice
would be to keep it close to home. That may sound strange coming from an Anglo
boy from Toronto
whose detective is a woman in France.
But even if your setting is Mars, all mysteries are mainly about the cop, not
the crime, not the bad guy; and you the writer are the soul of the cop – it all
goes through your sensibility, your values, your take on the things occurring
in the world. So start from there. Though you may revere the tough voice of
Philip Marlowe or Harry Bosch’s edgy discomfort or the neurotic strength of
Harry Hole, they belong to someone else. Your cop is you.
Are
there any other comments, advice or tips that you would give to beginning
writers?
Two things: Take a hint from film and TV – if you
can’t see the story for all the prose, try writing it out as a series of present-tense
‘scenes’. Dialogue. One or two sentences laying out setting and action. This
may help you get the story down from A to Z. Then you can go back to perfecting
the art of prose. And: Be a mimic. We all start by copying someone else –
typically, someone we admire. Go for it. Mimic the voice and style of the
writer you admire most - it will help you get inside your story. But there
comes a point when you have to say ‘thanks, old friend’ and let your own voice
take over. That can be a bit scary, but it has to happen. You have to be aware
that it’s happening, and let it.
What
do you do when you are not writing?
I play hockey in Jarry Park,
ten minutes from my house, on ice skates in winter, roller blades in summer.
I’m sixty and I love it, but I know I am getting close to my body’s limit. I
also enjoy golf when I visit my parents in Ontario, and riding my bike through the
valleys of the St. Chinian wine district in the Midi
region of France
when we visit Annie’s family. I do my tai-chi, jog and otherwise try to stay
fit - I believe it helps when you’re sitting in front of that empty
page/screen. Our life in this part of Montreal
is such that can we walk almost everywhere we need to go. Or ride our bikes. I
read. I listen to music. I know it’s futile, but I root for the Toronto Maple
Leafs.
What
“Made It” moments have you experienced in life?
To be honest, I’m not sure what a ‘Made It’ moment
is any more – if I ever knew. I used to think it was finding out I’d won a
literary prize, which has happened more than once – but that was false signal.
Real ‘Made It’ moments happen when I’m running in the park and one tiny
sentence appears in my head that knits an idea together perfectly. I remember
that happening when I was writing the story that won the big literary prize
that was supposed to change my life…When my first novel was published and I
received my box of ‘author’s copies’ and took one out and held it in my hands,
I wept, very privately. But even that was not a ‘Made It’ moment. As with my
prize-winning short story, the moment happened long before the box of finished
books arrived… I was trying to write that first book but I needed something more
solid to use as a resource. Annie, the French woman I live with, only had a
vague idea what I was up to. (It’s the language difference – especially in the
early stages.) Still, it was Annie who happened to go into a used book store in
rue St. Hubert and come home with a copy of
the out-of-print memoir that became both the central motif and primary source
of research for my first mystery. Receiving that
book from the woman I love on a Saturday afternoon was a ‘Made It’ moment, but
I had no idea. I don’t think we ever really do.
Where we live in Portland, the flowers are gorgeous
starting in April with the tulips. Portland. I love the flowering trees here
and the beautiful flowers since we lived in the desert for 40 years and the
flowering season was very short. We have a forest behind our townhouse and it
is just lovely.
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