By sandy
Last night, thankfully with no rain this time, I headed back down to Harbourfront for another reading at the International Festial of Authors. Like the previous night's reading by Julian Barnes et al, this was held at the Premiere Dance Theatre in order to accommodate the larger crowd there to see Minette Walters, one of Britain's most popular crime fiction writers. Our host, Andrew Kaufman (I don't know of him, and Googling finds mostly the dead comedian of the same name, so I assume that this is the right Andrew Kaufman) pointed out during his introduction that it was a night of criminal minds: all three authors were reading from their crime novels. I don't read a lot of crime novels, but after hearing some of the readings last night, I might decide to give them a go.
First up was Karin Fossum, a Norwegian writer who shunned the lectern and settled herself in one of the armchairs on stage (which I thought were there just for show). She read awkwardly from the English translation of her new book Calling Out For You, her thick accent tussling with some of the words as she read to us about a man visiting India from Norway in search of a bride, but somehow her struggle with the language made the story more riveting as the audience hung on every word. This is the latest installment in her series of crime novels featuring Inspector Konrad Sejer, translated into 16 languages and popular around the world. Like parts of Canada, Norway (the only Nordic country that I have not visited) has winters with long nights, perfect for sitting by the fire and reading a juicy murder story.
Juris Jurjevics was next: an American who was born in Latvia but grew up in New York, fought in Vietnam and founded Soho Press. Jurjevics started with some very funny comments -- he obviously knows how to work a crowd -- then read a chilling (in more ways than one) excerpt from The Trudeau Vector about a scientist in the Arctic killing himself by wandering off and stripping himself naked.
The last reading was by Minette Walters, undoubtedly the big draw for the evening, reading from The Devil's Feather. She gave quite a short reading, just the first chapter of the book, but it set up an interesting premise that made me want to read more: a serial killer who bludgeons women to death travelling around the world and using the chaos of war zones to cover up his murders. The book opens in Sierra Leone, and moves on to Baghdad later in the book. She was then joined on stage by local author Patricia Pearson, who interviewed her, or at least attempted it: Walters needed little prompting to regale us with both information on the book and tales of her past.
Two very interesting stories came out of the conversation between Walters and Pearson: first, that Walters had visited Sierra Leone on the invitation of Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders) after donating the prize money that she received when she won the Golden Dagger award in 1994 for The Scold's Bridle (she kept the dagger). She felt that it was the experience of a lifetime, although she was unable to get insurance coverage from anyone for the visit, and it led directly to her locating her current book there -- the first of her books with an international location. I found this particularly interesting because I have a friend who occasionally heads off for year-long jaunts as an MSF logistician, and just left a few weeks ago for Darfur in Sudan: a place that is likely as dangerous now as Sierra Leone was during Walters' trip.
The other interesting story came out when Pearson commented that Walters' first book, The Ice House, wasn't published until she was 42 years old, giving those of us over 40 a bit of inspiration for new ventures. Every source that I've ever read about Walters -- Wikipedia, publishers' websites, even Walters' own website -- refers to The Ice House as her first book, but in fact she has a dark secret in her past: for eight years when she was working as a sub-editor of romantic fiction at a magazine publisher after her graduation from university, she wrote romance novels under ten different pseudonyms. She entertained us with stories of the severe restrictions on the content of these novels imposed by the publisher (no words with double meanings, requiring one author to write an entire romance novel about tennis players without using the word "balls"), but steadfastly refused to divulge the names of her alter egos.
Comments