The Toronto Public Library’s “eh List” author series is sponsoring these early Fall readings at which I’ll read a bit from Snow Job, and maybe offer a taste of the work-in-progress. Questions and comments and critiques (do not be gentle; I love feedback) will follow.
Wednesday, September 22, 2010, 7 p.m., at the S. Walter Stewart Branch Library, 170 Memorial Park Avenue, near St. Clair E and Coxwell.(Contact Jean Kowalewski at that branch, 416 396-3975.
Thursday, September 23, also at 7 p.m., at the Runnymede Branch, 2178 Bloor West—two blocks east of Runnymede Road. (Contact Brenda Beaton there, 416 393-7697)
Then I’ve agreed to hang around TO seeing friends and seeking inspiration until my appearance at Word on the Street, on Sunday, the 26th, at Queen’s Park. The “Remarkable Reads” Tent, sponsored by McClelland & Stewart and Random House at 11:10 a.m.
Posted by William Deverell on Jul 09, 2010
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To all crime writing fans, yours truly will be local guest of honour at the annual Bloody Words conference and gala, being held in Victoria June 3-5 at the Hotel Grand Pacific in Victoria BC. (Local ghost of honour will be pioneer West Coast eccentric Amor de Cosmos.) Check it out: http://www.bloodywords2011.com/
Posted by William Deverell on Apr 29, 2010
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The Globe’s Margaret Cannon has picked Snow Job as one of the top 11 crime novels world-wide of 2009.
SNOW JOB by William Deverell, McClelland & Stewart
“Smart, beautifully written, and really, really funny satire featuring Arthur Beauchamp, one of Canadian crime fiction’s truly original characters. The best novel by Deverell ever.”
Posted by William Deverell on Dec 11, 2009
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This one from the Halifax Chronicle Herald…
Arthur Beauchamp returns in witty, smart mystery
by Paul Fiander,
Sun. Nov 1
Readers have come to expect a little bit of everything in a William Deverell novel. Snow Job, published earlier this month, is no exception. It has mystery, humour, satire, politics, and espionage. There are discussions of climate change issues and city versus country living, and, above all, the book has a fascinating cast of characters with a plot that hooks readers from the very first page.
Arthur Beauchamp first appeared in Deverell’s The Dance of Shiva, a thriller from the mid-80s. In Snow Job, he has retired and is dividing his time between his goat farm on Garibaldi Island, B.C., and Ottawa, where his partner Margaret Blake serves as the only federally elected member of the Green Party. Beauchamp sincerely wants to stay retired from practising law but new cases beckon, plus he is not entirely content with being referred to as Margaret’s significant other.
When officials from the tiny Asian nation of Bashyistan are killed in a bombing in Ottawa, their leader, dictator Ivor Muckhali Ivanovich, declares war on Canada. In trying to track down the man suspected in the bombing, Beauchamp finds himself in Albania doling out huge sums of money in bribes and risking his life. He is accompanied by a man who is either a super spy or a misguided and confused actor.
Meanwhile, back on Garibaldi Island, the actions of the locals will have most readers chuckling. Readers who recall some of the episodes of a television series from the 70s, The Beachcombers, will see some resemblances to the folk of Garibaldi. Robert Stonewell, Stoney to his friends, seems like a 21st century version of Relic.
Deverell has a unique gift of writing interesting stories while poking fun at current issues surrounding politics, the law and the environment. Let us hope that Arthur Beauchamp never becomes content with retirement.
Posted by William Deverell on Dec 06, 2009
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Globe and Mail, Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Elizabeth May gets elected
Jane Taber
In author William Deverell’s fantasy world, the leader of the Green
Party has a seat in the House of Commons and a man named Huck Finnerty
is prime minister - a jovial, easy-going guy with a sense of humour
and a “devotee of strong drink and junk food.” In an interview
yesterday about his political thriller, Snow Job, Mr. Deverell joked
that he didn’t want to get sued, so he played with the prime
minister’s personality.
The novel, set in Ottawa, is appropriately named. (In fact, Mr.
Deverell, who is from the balmy Gulf Islands, researched his novel two
winters ago when a snowfall record was nearly set.) Mr. Deverell had
lots of access to the inner sanctum as Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s
communications staff took him around. And in his Author’s Note, he
thanks Carolyn Stewart Olsen, who was in the PMO, for arranging visits
around Parliament Hill. She was recently appointed to the Senate.
“What seems not interesting at first glance is the thought of a
political novel set in Canada,” said Mr. Deverell, who was in Ottawa
this week and attended Monday’s raucous Question Period. “Political
thriller is sort of an oxymoron, right? But not so. I think there’s
probably more fun and foolishness and adventure on Parliament Hill
than there is in the Senate in Washington or the Parliament of
England. We tend to downplay ourselves.”
Mr. Deverell, who is also a lawyer, is a wannabe politician, having
run three times for the NDP - all unsuccessfully. He says “thank God”
he never won as he would not have become an author. “I would be a
backstabbing politician.”
His novel features his usual protaganist, Arthur Beauchamp, a retired
lawyer and courtroom star, whose wife is the Green Party leader,
Margaret Blake. All sorts of shenanigans and scandals, political and
domestic, ensue. The author, meanwhile, is a great friend, supporter
and fan of Green Party Leader Elizabeth May.
And the fictional character, Ms. Blake, represents a riding in B.C.’s
Gulf Islands, which takes in the real seat Ms. May is seeking in the
next election. Ms. May, who received an early manuscript of the book
around the same time as she was considering running in the
Saanich-Gulf Islands riding, was thrilled. “I said, ‘this is great’,
Bill already has me elected!”
Posted by William Deverell on Dec 06, 2009
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Wondering what prompted me to write a political novel? Wondering if I had any political experience of my own? Wondering if anyone aided me in my political researches? Read this missing Author’s Note:
AUTHOR’S NOTE
At the risk of shaking readers’ confidence in my sanity, let me make confession: I was once an ambitious (though inept) politician. As a young lawyer running for the New Democrats, I’d made two disastrous tries for Parliament and one for the BC legislature, in Vancouver Centre, ultimately proving myself so hapless at hustling votes that I was punished by losing a nomination — by a single vote — for the succeeding election. Without me to drag down the ticket, the NDP went on to win handily and formed a government.
I quit politics, morose with shattered ambition, disenchanted with what the fifteenth Governor-General of Canada, John Buchan, called “the greatest and the most honourable adventure.” (Fact check: he was a fiction writer, his fortés espionage and horror.)
In sublime irony, that one-vote loss freed me to pursue a different dream, long held. Had I achieved office, I might never have written anything more entertaining than a sitting member’s cynical memoir of frustration, compromise, and lost ideals.
So Snow Job is a tribute to Buchan’s great (if not so honourable) adventure, from an incurable political junkie. To the snide, a Canadian political thriller may seem oxymoronic, but I’ll wager there’s more vibrancy and intrigue and fun and foolishness on Parliament Hill than in Washington’s Congress of millionaires or in Britain’s bloated Parliament.
Many thanks are due. At the beginning of this exercise, I hashed around thoughts and plots with Brian Brett, the Saltspring Island poet, artist, raconteur, and renegade, and I thank him for his off-the-wall, outside-the-box genius. Garry Dudley, master mechanic, provided monkey-wrenching expertise and Catherine Mori corrected my Latin.
Doug Small, Global’s former bureau chief in Ottawa, unwisely exchanged houses with me for a month, requiring him to tough it out on BC’s temperate Gulf Islands while I enjoyed the capital’s bracing cold and its second-heaviest snowfall in history. He also vetted this novel at an early and critical stage and, as a life member of the Parliamentary Press Gallery, helped smooth my way into its confines.
Heather Bradley, director of communications for the House Speaker, got me in the door, so to speak. Terry Guillon, chief of the press gallery, and Normand Gagnon, its technicien principal en multimédia, took over, guiding me everywhere I sought to go, even MPs’ routes of escape from the press.
Senator Carolyn Olsen, who was Mr. Harper’s press secretary at the time of my researches, was exceptionally generous in arranging visits to the PMO Centre Block, including the Prime Minister’s parliamentary office, the so-called round room, and the cabinet room. The tour was amiably hosted by Jacques Fauteux, then deputy director of communications, who has also since graduated from the PMO.
Jack Layton and his press secretary, Karl Bélanger, toured me through the Opposition Lobby, then after sharing mugs of fair trade coffee, through the NDP’s Parliamentary office and several befittingly cluttered private members’ offices.
Elizabeth May joined me for a chat in the Charles Lynch Theatre after one of her typically peppy appearances, and we shared memories of our convergence over the logging of Clayoquot Sound (12,000 protesters, 850 arrests, and at least one provincial NDP membership ripped up, by this author.)
Lieutenant-Commander Kris Phillips at National Defence, Pacific Region, went beyond the call of duty in organizing a team effort to vet military data and jargon.
Ann Ireland and Tekla Deverell laboured mercilessly over the manuscript. Not least but last, my tireless and exacting editor at M&S, Dinah Forbes, has damn well earned a raise.
William Deverell
Posted by William Deverell on Dec 06, 2009
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http://www.reviewingtheevidence.com/review.html?id=8264
SNOW JOB
by William Deverell
McClelland & Stewart, October 2009
408 pages
$32.99 CAD
ISBN: 0771027222
Buy from Amazon.com
Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada
Arthur Beauchamp, never quite retired lawyer and reluctant resident of Ottawa, is dragged to some very odd places in the company of some very dubious people in this send-up of current Canadian federal politics.
Nothing would make Arthur Beauchamp happier than to be left in peace on temperate (and fictional) Garibaldi Island off the coast of British Columbia to tend his goats in a manner befitting a Roman statesman, now retired. Happily for us, events simply will not permit him to make a dignified withdrawal into private life (or occasionally much dignity at all).
Arthur’s wife Margaret, the leader of the Green Party, has been returned as its sole sitting member of Parliament. A loyal husband, Arthur goes with her to Ottawa, a city he loathes not only for its politics but also for its climate. Though he remains proud and supportive, it does not take much to tempt Arthur out of retirement - he may fancy himself content to linger in the background, holding Margaret’s coat, but in fact, bobbing obscurely in her wake suits him not at all.
The Conservative party is in power, as it is at the moment, led by Huck Finnerty, who drinks far more than is good either for him or the country. He presides over a cabinet comprised largely of men promoted far beyond their competence and one woman, who is competent but excluded from all serious decisions. It is a cabinet exquisitely attuned to the needs of the Alberta oil industry and to the overriding necessity of remaining in power as long as possible. So when a carload of diplomats from the nation of Bhashyistan is spectacularly blown up on its way to the Ottawa airport and the leader of that republic, affectionately known as Mad Igor, arrests some Canadian oil company executives who are in his country to deal for oil leases, Huck and his cabinet go into bibulous overdrive. When, subsequently, Mad Igor declares war on Canada, the testosterone level in the cabinet room breaks all levels. As you may well imagine, things do not go well from there on out.
For reasons impossible to explain briefly (or perhaps at all), Arthur is catapulted into the middle of this mess. In a gloriously loopy plot and accompanied by a dubious spy from the Canadian intelligence agency CSIS, Arthur travels back and forth between Ottawa and Garibaldi, finally winding up in, of all places, Albania, where he takes comfort in the fact that it is warmer than Ottawa in December.
This is a book no Canadian political junkie should miss. It is riotously funny and pitiless in its send-up of the inadequacies of a government devoted primarily to retaining power for its own sake. Deverell wisely avoids lampooning individuals, but the current Canadian Conservative government is not spared. Though the Liberals largely escape comment as they are largely absent from the scene, the party that comes off best in all this is the Green Party, led in the book by Arthur’s wife and perhaps modelled on the actual present leader of the party, Elizabeth May, who has contributed a suitably appreciative blurb for the book jacket.
Readers unfamiliar with Canadian politics may not find this book as utterly delightful as I do, but they should find a lot here to entertain all the same. Arthur Beauchamp is quick to provide a Latin tag when the occasion permits. As his beloved Horace had it, ridentem dicere verum quid vetat, or, more or less, “nothing forbids a laughing man from telling the truth.” And, since we are left with a tantalizing final paragraph, we can hope that he will return soon to speak more truth and make us laugh.
Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, November 2009
Posted by William Deverell on May 21, 2008
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The exciting news of today is that your book is listed as NUMBER 2 on the Maclean’s Bestsellers List for Fiction.
Congratulations!!
Adria Iwasutiak, Publicist
McClelland & Stewart
For the latest reviews:
Vancouver Sun
Hamilton Spectator
North Shore News
Reviewing The Evidence
http://www.thestar.com/article/416056
Globe and Mail
PART ONE
The Life of Brian
Neither fish, flesh, nor good red herring.
John Heywood, 1546
— Chapter 1 — The Madness of Gilbert Gilbert
There was no dispute about the facts. A hundred-pound weakling with the redundant name of Gilbert F. Gilbert had stepped into a crowded Vancouver courtroom and aimed a small-calibre revolver at Chief Justice Wilbur Kroop. A policeman leaped from the witness stand, and as he tackled Gilbert the gun fired. The officer stopped the bullet with his heart.
All these facts were admitted by the defence at Gilbert Gilbert’s murder trial in January, 2007. It was conceded too that the accused—forty-five, single, friendless—was a senior court clerk. Thus he had easy access to the courtroom from Kroop’s chambers, where he’d been hiding.
The Badger, they called Kroop, and not just because of his squat, broad body but his claws. The defence portrayed him as a notorious bully who had taunted and shamed Gilbert, who made a fool of him in open court and sent him off in tears, who drove him to the precipice of madness and made him jump.
The defence argued that in his delusional state the accused had convinced himself Kroop was a former Nazi death camp commandant whom Gilbert had been ordered by God to eliminate. “God’s will be done!” he shouted at his jailers, at the many doctors who examined him.
His counsel was Brian Pomeroy, of the feisty criminal law firm of Pomeroy, Macarthur, Brovak and Sage, and he was assisted by young Wentworth Chance, who did most of the work, burying himself in the law, interviewing specialists in post-traumatic disorder, schizophrenia. In comparison, the Crown’s witnesses in rebuttal were a mediocre lot.
With Chance doing the heavy lifting, Pomeroy played to the jury, raising objections and cross-examining with his typical dry, manic wit. A celebrated neurotic, he’d won celebrated trials, most notably the recent defence of the assassin (alleged) of the president of Bhashyistan. But his life was in turmoil—he was drinking hard, tupping his secretary, and his marriage was heading for meltdown. Unable to face Caroline’s cold silences and searing looks, he had taken to sleeping in the office on weekday nights.
In overcoming these handicaps, it helped that Pomeroy had drawn a dispassionate prosecutor and a judge with whom he used to smoke dope. The jury seemed interested and sympathetic—all except the sneering foreman, Harrison, a retired major from the Patricia Light Infantry, a former combat training instructor. He would look at Pomeroy with a disdainful curl of smile, as if to say: You lawyers will defend anybody, won’t you, even a hypersensitive worm like Gilbert.
Neither judge or prosecutor interfered when Pomeroy portrayed Kroop, who was on the eve of retirement at seventy-four, as a sadistic mountebank. However, the Chief Justice was spared the ignominy of having to testify, and thus spared the whip of cross-examination.
Meanwhile, Gilbert had got himself together while in custody, was functioning again, restored to his old rabbit-like persona but with total amnesia for the events of the previous June. Physically, however, he was deteriorating, stressed, complaining of dizzy spells, heart palpitations.
Pomeroy wondered what it would be like to take a holiday from reality. Was psychosis truly a haven from unbearable oppression, as the psychiatrists testified? Might it even be fun? Like tripping out on LSD. He’d tried nervous breakdowns a couple of times, but they weren’t fun. More like tripping out on fumes from paint cans.
The prosecutor’s summing-up was a concise, no-nonsense plea in which she urged her case for conviction but conceded that Wilbur Kroop had stretched the bounds of civility toward his beleaguered clerk. Kroop, during all this, was in his chambers on the next floor up, pretending lack of interest but in a tight-lipped, vengeance-seeking fury.
On the eve of his final address, Pomeroy was relaxing over a couple of drinks at the office—he felt he had it in the bag—when he got a distressing call from the oldest of his three adopted kids, fifteen-year-old Gabriela (“We miss you, Daddy, please love Mom, please come home”). The agony, the sleepless night, would have felled many lesser men, but Pomeroy gutted it out in a ninety-minute jury speech, covering all bases, thanks to Wentworth Chance’s forensic aide-memoir. Trauma-induced psychosis. Delusional ideation. Confabulation. Almost too much to take in one gulp.
At one point, however, he began to cry, and because he’d been going on about the tyrannies perpetrated by Wilbur Kroop on his client, the jury mistakenly believed he was crying for Gilbert Gilbert.
The jury went out on January 11 and stayed out for five increasingly tense days. They came back twice, sought clarifications, strain on every face, cold determination on the foreman’s. Pomeroy feared that the wuss-despising major was winning the war in that barren, locked room. The lesser of his worries was that he would miss the start of Regina versus Morgan and Twenty-one Others, a marathon drug conspiracy trial set for January 17.
But one day before that, the jury finally trooped in after dinner, weary but ready. The clerk rose: “Mr. Foreman, what is your verdict? Do you find the accused guilty or do you find the accused not guilty by reason of insanity?”
Major Harrison stood at attention and hissed, “Guilty, by God.”
A stunned silence, while the other jurors looked at each other in confusion, finally remonstrating. “Excuse me, Major, but…” “No, no, we agreed…”
The judge asked if there was a problem.
Major Harrison did a quick shake of his head, as if coming out of a fog. “No, sir, I’m sorry, sir. Not guilty.”
“And are you unanimous?” asked the judge.
“Yes, sir.” Through gritted teeth.
Not many in this crowded court were focussing on Gilbert Gilbert during this, but when the major misfired with his faulty verdict Gilbert sat back as if punched in the face. Pomeroy turned to see him turning white, struggling to his feet, gasping and clutching his chest, and finally keeling over. He died almost instantly.
The fates had allowed Wilbur Kroop to exact revenge, but little did anyone suspect that more judges were about to be targeted…
As Brian reread that ghastly paragraph, he felt a Pavlovian shock, the kind administered to a rat making a wrong turn in the maze. Since he’d installed Horace Widgeon’s program in his hard drive—Secrets of the Whodunit, $59.98, Version OS X—he’d been getting these little jolts, not painful but persistent. The sensible part of him believed there was a short-circuit somewhere in his ugly, glowing, purple eMac. The delusional part of him believed Widgeon was pressing a zap-Pomeroy button on a supercomputer in his cottage in the Cotswolds.
Yes, Brian had mocked the legendary creator of the Inspector Grodgins series, his mentor from afar. In the section titled, “The Author as Soothsayer,” Widgeon instructs: Do not predict! I find myself forever in despair that so many beginners subscribe to the ‘little-did-he-know’ school of composition. Let this historic and holy injunction be your guiding light: “Just the facts, ma’am.”
Was Brian dealing in facts? Or was he making them up? Did he have any idea what the facts were? One obvious fact was that he was having the mother of all nervous breakdowns. (His shrink suspected it had gone beyond breakdown; she had a complex handle for it: Stress Disorder, Disorganized Type with Delusional Ideation. Ideas such as: I can make a living being a writer. And its corollary. I won‘t have to practise law anymore.)
His collapse had been kindled by the pressure of work, the Gilbert Gilbert homicide, then the endless hell of Regina versus Reuben (Ruby) Morgan and Twenty-one Others—a conspiracy involving one ton of cocaine, eight hundred hours of wiretap, twenty-two traffickers, thirteen quarrelsome lawyers, and Justice Darrel Naught, an insufferable fat fascist who wouldn’t know a reasonable doubt if it perched on his nose. Each evening after court, Brian and his cronies shared woes, and he would often arrive home late—if he came home at all—smelling of pot and booze. Defensive and snappish, moody and uncommunicative, he had driven Caroline to file for divorce, and this time the grounds weren’t adultery but cruelty. And this time she meant it.
He’d moved to a West End apartment but abandoned it after finding his twenty-fifth-floor balcony suicidedly risky. Now he was in an artist’s garret, or its pathetic facsimile: a third-floor room in a third-rate hotel, the Ritz, in Chinatown on the cusp of skid road. No one knew he was hiding here, not even his partners. Not even his secretary. Delete. He didn’t have a secretary. Roseanne quit last month.
So here he was, armed with Miriam-Webster and Roget and Fowler and Widgeon and a wheezing computer and a Full Monty breakdown, pouring another tequila, lighting another cigarette, staring gloomily out a dust-clouded window overlooking Main and Keefer, where the shops were closing for the evening and the grifters and hookers taking over the streets. He thought of slipping out to one of the takeout joints, the Beautiful Sunrise Restaurant, the Good Cheer Noodle House. Or maybe the Lucky Penny Pizza, for a change. These places depressed him. Everything depressed him. Especially his day job, the defence of Morgan and Twenty-one Others.
He was sick of law, sick of the whole system, he had broken under its pressure. Dr. Epstein had put him on tricyclics and told him to find some diversion, some favourite craft. Thus was born Kill All the Judges. Chapter One, The Vengeful Nerd, introducing Gilbert Gilbert as tragic farceur, and starring the author, the celebrated neurotic Brian Pomeroy, dazzling readers with his typical dry, manic wit.
He’ll show Caroline. Such a literary snob, the academically hubristic Professor Pomeroy and her highfaluting graduate courses. Lit 403: Thackeray, Trollope and Brontë, The English Novel in the Age of Vanity. And now she was published, she’d somehow persuaded a small press to put out her collected stories. He’d seen himself in some of them, the fucked-up boyfriend or husband. How dare she win a Best First Fiction Award for that?
He fully expects Judges to sell more than her paltry two thousand copies of Sour Memories. How might he pitch it to publishers? A memoir dressed up as fiction? Fiction disguised as memoir? Creative true-crime? Creative untrue crime? A touch of Conrad? I am able to write of these events only as I recollect them, and memory ever dims with age. Truth, fiction, outright lies, who cares anymore? Creative non-fiction, that’s the general rubric, and that’s what he’s into, the hottest trend in literature, it gets you into the book pages, the literary blogs, the Oprah Winfrey show. Eat your heart out, Caroline.
Yes, Judges will represent the cutting edge of creative non-fiction, stropped to razor sharpness. In the meantime, let’s just call this lumpy stew of facts and fibs a mystery…
But was the Gilbert case merely an arrogant sidebar? The great Pomeroy! Poster boy of the Bhashyistan Democratic Revolutionary Front, victorious defender of assassins and addled court clerks. He could hear Widgeon grumbling: where was the meat of this story, the main dish, does not the title promise a serving of dead judges?
Please forgive the delay in the kitchen…
Posted by William Deverell on May 09, 2008
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Vanessa Farquharson, National Post
West Coast author William Deverell has won the 2006 Arthur Ellis Award for crime writing, for April Fool (McClelland & Stewart), in the best novel category. Crime Writers of Canada presented the awards, honouring the best in Canadian crime writing, last night in Toronto. Louise Penny, a former CBC reporter, won the best first novel prize for Still Life (McArthur & Company). Other award recipients included: Rick Mofina for best short story for Lightning Rider; Rebecca Godfrey for Under the Bridge: The True Story of the Murder of Reena Virk in non-fiction; Vicki Grant for Quid Pro Quo in the best juvenile category; and Gerald Galarneau’s Motel Riviera for best crime writing in French.
© National Post 2006
Posted by William Deverell on Jun 06, 2006
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