Lawyer-turned-novelist Bill Deverell chafes at being called a crime
writer
By REBECCA WIGOD, The Vancouver Sun
Before winging off to Costa Rica for the winter, William Deverell sat down to lunch in Vancouver. All but ignoring the salad on his plate, the lawyer-turned-novelist seemed flattered to hear that our reviewer of his new book thinks people don't give his work the credit it deserves.
"I'm complimented that she regards that as the case," said the author of The Laughing Falcon, 10 previous novels and the true-crime book Fatal Cruise.
"What has happened is I am desperately trying to edge out of the [crime] genre that I have felt imprisoned in. Bookstores, publishers, you name it - they all want to slot you into a genre. It makes it easier, they think, to sell you.
"But I have this terrible resistance to genre. I thought I had escaped from it two books ago, with Trial of Passion, in which there was no murder, no blood. Wouldn't you know? That wins two crime prizes, the Arthur Ellis Award and the Dashiell Hammett Award. They won't let me go."
Deverell divides his time between Pender Island and Costa Rica, a country he first visited at the end of the 1970s and where he and wife Tekla now own a 1.5-hectare property. The Laughing Falcon is the first novel he's set there. "Write what you know," he quipped, repeating a line made famous in creative writing classes.
The book's title refers to the halcon, a Central American bird whose call sounds like raucous laughter. Halcon is also the nickname of the leader of the band of terrorists in the book.
Deverell dedicated The Laughing Falcon to the Sierra
Legal Defence Fund and in it makes a plea for environmental
awareness. In Costa Rica, he and Tekla live near Manuel Antonio
National Park. They get to see armadillos in the wild and hear the
halcon cry, "Wah-wah-wah. Guah-co! Guah-co!" Monkeys steal
any bananas they leave lying around and even chewed up the little
plastic bananas on their string of fruit-themed patio lights.
He's pretty sure the Costa Rican government realizes it has to preserve
the splendour of the country's beaches and jungles if it's to continue
attracting tourist dollars. Still, he is dismayed by the changes
he's seen there. In Falcon, he writes about how this paradisal place
has been "discovered, desecrated, carved up by roads and power
lines." In areas where there once was a single hotel, now there
are 50 or 60.
Still chewing over reviewer Sara Dowse's praise, the 64-year-old writer said that if his craft has improved in any way, it's in his ability to create female characters. "I feel much more confident and comfortable with getting into the minds of women," said Deverell, whose first novel, Needles, appeared in 1979.
"Early on, I was frightened of portraying too many women for fear I would do so shallowly. Finally, I took the plunge with my last book, Slander, which is told from the point of view of a young civil-rights, gender-rights lawyer who is a woman. I just decided, 'l am going to get into this young woman's head and be her.' And I did. She is like me - different sex - as a young civil-rights lawyer."
To double-check that he'd got the character right, Deverell asked Tekla and various other women of his acquaintance to read Slander in manuscript. "Even Peggy Atwood had a look at it," he said. "She e-mailed me, 'I think you've got her right. You haven't made the mistake of sticking a tampon in anyone's ear.'" And at the memory of this faint praise - you can almost hear Atwood saying it with her legendary deadpan delivery - he laughed.
Deverell feels he's done even better with Maggie Schneider, the lead female character in The Laughing Falcon. She's a tall, gawky writer of romance novels who falls for a nefarious Latin charmer almost immediately after flying from Saskatoon to the Costa Rican capital, San Jose. Later, when a fellow tourist hails her as a famous writer, Maggie demurs, saying, "I'm about as famous as a lump of cheese."
To get the character right, and also to be able to spoof the romance genre convincingly, Deverell did some research. He bought a stack of bodice-rippers and "excruciatingly" read them.
In the book, he makes fun of the thriller genre, too. He enjoys being funny in print. ("It's a terrible thing to say in Canada, but I want my readers to enjoy themselves.") Yet he feels there's little room for humour in conventional thrillers.
Bill Deverell spent much of our lunch together bemoaning his unjust imprisonment in thriller category, but he dropped a clue suggesting he's not abjectly miserable there. "I have to admit," he said, "that there are going to be murders in the next book."