People sometimes ask me where I get the ideas for my series, The ABC Files. This is a stock question for all writers of fiction. The short answer is that I usually get them while I lie awake in bed at 2 or 3 o’clock in the morning. Something in my circadian rhythms wakes me up then, and my mind is sharp. From long experience, I know I won’t easily get back to sleep. So I try to do something useful, and thoughts on writing projects come easily.
I realize that this isn’t a very satisfying answer. A deeper reply would acknowledge that I draw on my own life experiences, and add a dash of imagination. In the middle of the night, the world seems to me to be a dark and dangerous place, with humans usually making things worse. Still, I prefer to avoid apocalypses and gore and try to find a way for kindness and reason to win out.
Hence my books star an intelligent and empathetic former judge. Though there is evil, it is not the evil of serial killers, nor do the murders produce a lot of blood. Crimes are often the result of greed and lust, or come from the actions of corporations or governments.
My work experience has notably helped provide material for my novels. I was fortunate to travel to many parts of the world in my role as an economist at the International Monetary Fund. For instance, I worked on a study of the economic effects of German reunification in the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall. A mission to Bonn and Frankfurt with others from the IMF in the spring of 1990 gave us an inside perspective on the challenges of merging the impoverished East with a larger and thriving West Germany. In that same year, 1990, I also travelled to Moscow and Sochi to discuss macro-economic modelling with Russian economists. The Soviet Union was about to be dissolved, and Russia was starting to move away from central planning toward a private enterprise economy .
While my job did not involve political issues, I was fascinated and appalled by East Germany’s experience with a police state that marched to the Kremlin’s orders. The long shadow cast by the Stasi, the regime’s state security organisation, is a major theme of my novel Memories of Evil. A real-life photo of a young KGB officer, Vladimir Putin, seen with his German counterparts, also plays a role in the novel.
I travelled to Africa a number of times for my work, helping me to imagine a fictional East African country for my novel Evil in Summerland. The plot of the book parallels events in several countries, and Summerland is not an alias for a particular one. The creation of an international organization based in Ottawa to promote African economic development also draws on my work experience, though that institute is also imaginary.
Events reported in the media are also grist for my writing mill. Evil Ever Lives was inspired by the ongoing Jeffrey Epstein saga. I’m not particularly interested in true crime writing, however, so there are no details in my book that replicate events in his life. Rather, I imagined that exploiting young women might rely on an internet scam. And the dramatic ending of my book does not resemble Epstein’s demise.
My hobby of sailing provides material for several ABC Files novels. In Hamish Cameron Investigates, my detective is hired to discover the culprit for sabotage of a competitor in a series of sailboat races. My latest (forthcoming) book, Sufficient Unto the Day, draws heavily on a trip I made down the east coast of the US on my sailboat. Evil Through the Spyglass involves an “outward bound” schooner for at-risk teens and the tragic death of a woman who falls overboard–inspired by the real-life drowning of Laura Gainey. Both it and Evil in Summerland reference places I sailed in the Bahamas.Inspiration for my writing has often come from my research interests. I have closely followed the debate about whether and how to exploit Canada’s fossil fuels. In Ignorance is a Pleasant Evil, environmentalists and oil companies are in conflict in Alberta’s Athabaska oil sands, and murder results. I hope that some of the material in the book will interest readers in deepening their knowledge of the issues.
