Whenever I give an interview or talk about my two crime novels – Fall From Grace and A Killing Winter – something inevitable happens: I’m asked why I set my novels in Edmonton.
Normally, I give a stock answer, noting that since I was born and live in Edmonton, it would make more sense to set my books here, rather than New York, Los Angeles or even Minneapolis.
The first novel in my crime series, Fall From Grace, opens with a dead body in a field outside the city. This was done for a reason. Edmonton has had its share of dead bodies found in fields, most of them female and many times aboriginal. So I wanted to draw attention to that.
And while the main character, Leo Desroches, does interact with locales familiar to Edmontonians – the Baccarat Casino, the now-demolished Hotel Cecil, the LRT – I made a point not to focus much on specifics. These places, the restaurants, the clubs, the businesses, are subject to change. Like the Hotel Cecil, which was the site of a major scene in A Killing Winter, written (although not published) before it was demolished. Instead, I focused on more durable intangibles of the city – the weather, the light of the sun in various seasons, the history and geography – to give a more solid sense of place.
“What I loved [about Fall From Grace] were the little observations about Edmonton life,” Ted Bishop, the author of Riding with Rilke: Reflections on Motorcycles and Books, a finalist for the 2005 Governor’s General Award, wrote me one day. “The light at the warm end of the spectrum, the houses with the living room in the front and the kitchen at the back – things I’d absorbed by living here all my life, but never really saw till you pointed them out.”
But, to be honest, the question of “Why Edmonton?” comes up more often than a response like that of Bishop. And I’m disappointed in it, especially if it comes from an Edmontonian. It reflects an attitude that our beautiful and dynamic city doesn’t have what it takes to be a setting for a novel, that the people who live here aren’t interesting enough to become characters in books.