My first addictive taste of seeing my name in a newspaper occurred early, when my siblings and I visited our grandparents in a tiny village in Nova Scotia. We were anonymous specks back home in Toronto, but in the Annapolis Valley our summer visits merited mention in the local paper. Like the royal family, only with bell bottoms and unbrushed hair.
Everything about the local paper fascinated me: The Jack and Jill wedding fundraisers, the ads for tractors and heifers, the caber toss distances for the local Highland Games. When it came to crime, though, a prim veil descended. The pretty doors were all shut tight, repelling curious eyes. One night my great-aunt chased her husband around the house, a shotgun pointed at his back. The RCMP came, quietly took the shotgun away. It certainly never made the paper.
Wouldn’t you want to imagine your way into those silences? I did.
I’d been a journalist for decades, working for the very newspaper you’re reading, when I met my friend Kate Hilton for a lockdown walk in the park. Deepest pandemic; both of us with our brains broken. I love Kate as a person and a writer. Her novels, such as Better Luck Next Time and The Hole in the Middle, are wise and hilarious and humane.
Bury the Lead, by Kate Hilton and Elizabeth Renzetti.Supplied
We talked about how much we both loved reading mysteries. Then we looked at each other – in my memory an actual bright light went off, but that’s probably a lockdown-induced hallucination. We could write a mystery together! A mystery that was funny and sardonic, but also tackled a serious topic – in this case, the aftermath of sexual assault. That’s how Cat Conway, the heroine of our first mystery, Bury the Lead, was born.
Cat is a journalist, fired from her high-profile job and forced to flee Toronto, as she puts it, with the smell of burning bridges in her hair. She ends up in Port Ellis, the cottage town of her childhood, working for the ailing local newspaper, the Quill & Packet. When a famous actor is murdered on opening night at the Port Ellis Playhouse, Cat finds herself drawn into the investigation, pulled deeper with every story she writes.
I’d worked with other journalists on projects, but never another novelist. Kate and I started with character sketches and a synopsis, then produced a detailed outline of the book. Our puzzlers grew sore, as Dr. Seuss might say, as we lobbed possible twists back and forth. We wrote alternating chapters in the first draft, a process I found so eerily smooth that during the second draft I had trouble remembering which were mine to begin with. If I was left with one unanswered mystery, it was this: Why don’t more authors write as a team?
I found myself the latest in a long line of journalists who have written mysteries or thrillers about their craft. Val McDermid, Chris Hammer, Stieg Larsson, Lilian Jackson Braun, Laura Lippman, Linwood Barclay, Gillian Flynn, the list goes on. Are we cliches? Wildly self-obsessed? Or is it because we understand that journalism offers a skeleton key to all those closed doors that intrigued me in childhood? A journalist may be underpaid and precariously employed, especially these days, but she also is also invited to places normally hidden from public view: backstage at the theatre, the front parlour in the grieving family’s house.
Those crossed boundaries, and the secrets coaxed within them, provide the central tension for a mystery. But they also allow the author to explore the moral ambiguities of our profession. “Reporters are like vampires,” thinks Gillian Flynn’s damaged reporter, Camille Preaker, as she weasels her way into a distraught woman’s home by asking for a glass of water in the novel Sharp Objects. “They can’t come into your home without your invitation, but once they’re there you won’t get them out till they’ve sucked you dry.”
I’ve never subscribed to Janet Malcolm’s famous observation that every journalist is a morally indefensible conman, but I do recognize the complexities of the work, the treacherous ground that we tiptoe over. Kate and I gave Cat Conway some of those dilemmas to explore: Just how hard should she push her sources? What does she owe to the town that’s given her safe harbour when her life has fallen apart?
Port Ellis, a rapidly gentrifying cottage town, is as important as any other character in Bury the Lead. If I’ve learned anything from a lifetime of reading mysteries, it’s the significance of setting. As a reader I lost myself in Raymond Chandler’s Bay City, James Lee Burke’s Louisiana, Louise Penny’s Three Pines, and the desolate, fire-choked Australian town where journalist Martin Scarsden is sent to find a story – and rediscover his conscience – in Chris Hammer’s Scrublands. Martin, despondent and traumatized, offers a wonderfully ambivalent view of the journalist’s life, from the “proforma herograms from management” when a story’s gone well to the gut-punching anxiety when it hasn’t.
When McDermid set a mystery series in a Glasgow newsroom in the 1970s, she gave us not just an indelible heroine, the tough- and sweet-talking Allie Burns, but also a place so real you can almost smell it. Not that you’d want to, because the aroma would be 99 per cent whiskey and bacon butties and testosterone. McDermid, who was a reporter in Glasgow herself, remembers that when she started at the Daily Record in 1977 women were not allowed to work the night shift – or wear trousers.
McDermid is interested in the tensions, mainly religious, that pulled Glasgow and the newsroom apart. Tension, of course, is the pulsing heart of a mystery. It’s the meat that feeds the beast of story. When we were writing Bury the Lead, we wanted to explore some of this – the strain between enablers and victims, and between the haves and have-nots in a town drunk on development. (Here I have to admit a debt to my late friend and colleague Val Ross, who used the phrase “mugs ‘n things” to describe any kitschy store in a tourist town. One of the old-fashioned shops that clings to life in Port Ellis is called Mugs ‘n Things. I don’t think Val would mind. She knew that all writers are magpies at heart, stealing shiny things.)
Possibly the greatest tension in Bury the Lead exists between the town of Port Ellis and its venerable, struggling newspaper. It’s a love-hate relationship to rival Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor’s, only with fewer jewels and less lurid headlines. When Cat first returns to Port Ellis, she’s mortified to be working for a community newspaper. It’s only as she realizes its importance to the town that she throws herself into her job. She might not have been able to stop a murder, but she might be able to prevent the death of the Quill & Packet.
It’s fertile territory, the push and pull between a journalist, her precarious employment and those who guard the town’s secrets. When I read Linwood Barclay’s thriller Never Look Away, I felt a familiar ache for his protagonist, a reporter at the Promise Falls Standard – a newspaper with its reputation and staff slowly eroded away, that no longer lives up to its name. Unless we’re talking about standards of cost-cutting.
There’s a clue in the name Quill & Packet, for those of you who love small-town newspapers as much as Kate and I do. It’s a nod to one of the wonderful old Canadian institutions that didn’t survive the corporate scythe, a fate facing far too many community newspapers. “Didn’t survive” is a euphemism, anathema to journalists. It was killed, in the language of mystery novels, though the reason is no mystery: greed of the owners and indifference of audience. Too many of these wonderful community resources are gone now, living only in our memories. And in the realm of make-believe.
Bury the Lead, by Kate Hilton and Elizabeth Renzetti, is published on March 5 by House of Anansi Press.