The 7
th
annual Whistler Readers
and Writers Festival is set to take place Sept. 12-13, 2008. With 15 different
seminars, sessions, workshops and readings available, the biggest challenge for
writers and readers is choosing which sessions to take. Streams on fiction,
non-fiction and magazine writing, as well as memoir and writing from life are
programmed. Guest writers include William Deverell, Mel Hurtig, Wayne Grady, Shaena
Lambert, Leslie Anthony, Candas Jane Dorsey and Sara Leach. For more
information visit
www.theviciouscircle.ca
and
download the festival program. Tickets are available online, starting at $20.
This week, local writer Pam Barnsley discusses crime fiction with author William Deverell. Deverell will be headlining the Saturday night Reading and Discussion, as well as teaching a workshop on Writing the Mystery Novel.
William Deverell: Does Crime Pay?
By Pam Barnsley
What writer hasn’t fantasized about quitting their day job, pounding out a novel, and becoming a best-seller?
For most writers it takes years of ink-stained wretching and day-jobbing, several books and endless rejections. But author William Deverell turned the fantasy into reality when his first book, Needles , won the $50,000 Seal First Novel Award.
Fourteen books and a television series later, Deverell’s works have been translated into 10 languages and sold over a million copies worldwide. Among his many awards he has won Canada’s Arthur Ellis Award twice for best crime novel, for Trial of Passion and April Fool ; and the prestigious Dashiel Hammett Award for Literary Excellence in North American Crime Writing for his novel Trial of Passion — an award also won later by Deverell’s friend Margaret Atwood.
“I always wanted to be a writer but I was afraid to risk it,” Deverell says.
Originally from Regina, he put himself through law school by working as a journalist for several newspapers, including the Vancouver Sun and the Canadian Press in Montreal. After receiving his degree, he succumbed to the lure of the west coast and moved to B.C. He practiced law for 15 years, fell in love with skiing in Whistler, was counsel in over a thousand criminal cases, and served as President of the B.C. Civil Liberties Association. He was one of Canada’s top criminal lawyers. But he still wanted to be a writer.
“I must have defended every pot-head in Vancouver, every down-and-outer.” Deverell developed a reputation as a lawyer who would battle for the underdog. And yet as his reputation in the courtroom grew, he found himself defending not the little guy, but well-bankrolled drug lords.
“Eventually,” he says, “the fun goes out of the practice of law when you're defending those for whom you have little sympathy. And there was always this voice whispering in my ear, ‘When are you going to start writing the Great Canadian Novel?’”
At age 39 he convinced the partners at his Gastown law firm to allow him a year-long writing sabbatical and he retreated to Pender Island (then a summer home, now his permanent home) to write the novel. Instead he suffered through six months of “brutal” writer’s block.
Eventually he decided to write a thriller instead of that Great Canadian novel, and in a blitz of 10 and 12-hour writing days, the words poured out and became Needles . He went on to write The Dance of Shiva, High Crimes, the Laughing Falcon , and others , including A Life on Trial, the non-fiction account of his defence of Robert Frisbee, a man accused of the vicious murder of his 89-year-old employer. Deverell’s novel Street Legal was turned into the popular CBC-TV series.
American publishers have accused Deverell of being “too literary”, (and “too Canadian”!) but he refuses to dumb his writing down. His novels are acclaimed for their literary merits by reviewers, fellow writers and readers. Yet crime fiction in Canada is still dismissed as “genre”.
Asked why this is, Deverell says, “It’s our old colonial mentality, we’re a little embarrassed about ourselves, we’re a little snobbish. In the U.K. they knight their crime writers, in the U.S. they lionize them, study them in the New Yorker. Canada ghetto-izes them.”
The human fascination with murder has been explored in the Greek tragedies, in Shakespeare’s betraying, murderous characters, and in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Deverell’s characters too reveal the fine nuances of human motivation.
His latest novel, Kill All The Judges , set in Vancouver and the fictitious Gulf Island of Garibaldi, is a complex tale full of humour and darkness. It features reluctant lawyer Arthur Beauchamp, whom readers have insisted on seeing again.
Deverell says, “
I think I finally understand why readers find
Arthur so engaging — it’s because of his many frailties, his weaknesses.
He was presented in that earlier novel (
Trial of Passion
) as troubled, self-doubting, driven to
impotence by a vibrant wife whose infidelity rendered him an alcoholic cuckold.
As my neighbourhood bartender once told me, people admire weakness in others if
for no other reason than it makes them feel better about themselves —
especially when the character is a high-ranking member of that powerful and
much-denigrated profession, the law.”
Deverell still
writes long hours, at home on Pender Island, or during winters in Costa Rica.
Asked whether Arthur will be in future novels, Deverell says, “Arthur Beauchamp
still has stories to tell.”
And after his own
adventures in the criminal law courts, so does William Deverell.
William Deverell will be teaching Writing the Mystery Novel on Saturday, Sept. 13 th at 12:30 p.m., and reading that evening at 8 p.m. at Millennium Place. Pam Barnsley and Sara Leach will be teaching Top 10 Tips to Crank Up Your Writing! and the Feedback Blitz. As well, Pam will moderate Meet the Publishers, a lively and informative discussion with four Canadian publishers, which includes an almost-free lunch. To register visit www.theviciouscircle.ca .
