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It has the form and texture of a classic crime novel, its antecedents stretching back decades to the golden age of mystery fiction and the heyday of Agatha Christie and her peers.
So naturally we are guaranteed a murder — in this instance a narcissistic, womanizing actor drops dead on opening night in front of a live audience. There are a host of possible suspects, some cunningly placed red herrings, intriguing plot twists — and the kind of narrative thrust that has readers eagerly turning the pages to find out what happens next.
In brief, co-writers Kate Hilton and Elizabeth Renzetti were serving up the traditional ingredients in their debut collaboration, Bury the Lead. However, this witty and delectably crafted whodunit is also a distinctively Canadian yarn, with a thoroughly contemporary feel when it comes to troubling issues of the day, and with Ontario’s hallowed cottage country providing an irresistible setting.
When it came out last year from the House of Anansi’s Spiderline division, the hope that was that it would mark the successful launching of a new series of crime novels starring an intrepid journalist named Cat Conway. That hope was dramatically fulfilled.
“The reception so exceeded our expectations,” says Renzetti, a veteran Toronto journalist. “I couldn’t believe it. We had fantastic reviews. We had people coming up to us from all over the place wanting to know when the next book was coming out.”
While Bury The Lead continues to sell well, interest in its successor, Widows and Orphans, is so intense that pre-orders are now being accepted four months before its scheduled May publication. Meanwhile, the two collaborators are happily at work on Book No. 3.
“I want to underscore this — it’s the most fun I’ve ever had writing,” says Hilton, a best-selling novelist with a parallel career in psychotherapy.
“I’ve been writing a long time but this has been just joyful. And I’m extremely proud of the product which is not exactly mine and not exactly Liz’s — it’s its own thing. Yet it could only have been produced by the two of us being immersed in it together.”
One of the book’s many delights is its celebration of the role that a small-town newspaper — today an embattled institution — plays in the life of a community. “I absolutely adore small-town newspapers,” Renzetti declares. “I’ve been reading them my whole life.”
Hence the name bestowed on this fledgling series: Quill and Packet Mysteries.
Quill and Packet is the local sheet that has given heroine Cat Conway the security she needs as she returns to her hometown of Port Ellis to recover from a succession of crises — her firing from a major metropolitan daily, the collapse of her marriage, her continuing estrangement from her teenage son. Now, in her mid forties, she is back as a small-town reporter on a newspaper that is struggling to survive in an internet-obsessed era. But her journalistic instincts, still sound, are activated by chaos at the town’s summer theatre festival when acclaimed actor Eliot Fraser, a brilliant and artist but loathsome human being, is murdered.
Cat is determined to uncover the truth about this crime, but she is competing with a horde of outside journalists and faces growing threats against her own life as she doggedly pursues her investigation.
“Interestingly, Cat was substantially younger, in her late twenties, when we started writing about her,” Renzetti says. “And we were having trouble with her. She wasn’t coming to life in the way you want to see a character do. But when we aged her up and made her 45, she suddenly had problems we could understand.”
The two writers wanted to deal with a recognizable world in which such issues as feminism and local politics would provide ballast for their fiction.
“I spend half of my week as a psychotherapist and half my week as a crime writer,” Hilton points out. “I’m very interested in how people navigate things like mid-life transition. So it made sense to me that Cat is grappling with problems of identity and legacy. Is she a failure? What does success look like? What does it mean to be a parent? These were questions that Liz and I were kind of actively grappling with in our own lives and work.”
But what triggered their collaboration? Well, it seems the two of them went for a walk in the snow during COVID.
“Kate and I have been friends for about two years,” Renzetti says. “She has a similar sense of humour to mine and I’ve loved her novels. We’d actually tried a non-fiction project together that didn’t go anywhere but had loved the process.”
Then came COVID — “we were dragging our tails a little bit as everybody was” — and the day when they met up for a walk. “We started to talk about how we loved mystery novels and then one of us said — why don’t we write a mystery together? And there was just such an immediate click.”
There was early agreement on the setting and how things would end. Next came preparation of “a pretty elaborate outline” before they went to work. It’s a process the two continue to follow.
“I want to underscore this — it’s the most fun I’ve ever had writing.” – Kate Hilton
“Liz will write a chapter and then I will write a chapter,” Hilton explains. “We go back and forth doing the first draft, but subsequent drafts are more collaborative — we may work on theme or character for example — and by the end it can be hard for us to tell sometimes who wrote the original draft for a particular chapter.”
Always, as well, they seek to honour the classic form of mystery fiction — a fair-play narrative in which clues were provided but not too obviously. And sometimes considerable rewriting may be necessary.
“In one of our early drafts for Bury The Lead, Kate’s husband spotted who the killer was,” Renzetti remembers with a laugh. “So we had to go back, taking out some clues and putting in others.”
There are shades of the Stratford and Shaw Festivals in their debut novel. But Renzetti stresses that she and Hilton were creating “our own fictional theatrical realm” and transporting it to somewhere in cottage country.
“That landscape is very familiar to me,” Hilton says. “The important thing about Port Ellis that it has built in tensions because like so many gentrifying holiday towns, there’s a pressure that comes from these city people who drop in for their holidays and then leave, as opposed to people who live there all year around.”
In the upcoming novel, Widows And Orphans, Hilton and Renzetti take on protest convoys and the anti-vaccination brigade — once again using the traditional mystery form as a platform for addressing vexing social issues.
“That’s vital — we’ll continue doing that in every book,” Renzetti promises. “That’s what’s great about the form. I think it’s a kind of template on which you can project all the anxieties of the age. I think what we’re trying to do is to create a mystery but one that I think becomes more interesting when you bring in the world.”