Publisher Pressure to Put Mysteries in America

An exchange of comments on my review of No Time to Say Goodbye by Linwood Barclay and a subsequent comment by blogger, Maxine Clarke, regretted the author’s decision to set all of his mysteries in the United States when he is a Canadian writer.

The comments prompted me to think of a couple of examples of the pressures put on Canadian authors to set series outside Canada.

At the book launch this past spring of his new Russell Quant mystery, Dos Equis, Anthony Bidulka said it would have been much easier for him to have moved Quant out of Saskatoon and even Canada. Publishers are reluctant to have mystery series set in Canada, let alone outside big city Canada.

David Rotenberg in his first book of the Junction Chronicles, The Placebo Effect, has a Canadian hero. In a post on Q and A with David my first question was:

1.) Why a Canadian action hero in a book that bounces between Canada and the United States? My reading experience would generally have the hero an American if the series was even partially placed in the United States.

Having the lead character as a Canadian allows a perspective on America that often Americans don’t have. I lived in the United States for many years. My wife is a Puerto Rican American. Both of my kids are dual citizens. One lives in the States; the other has the knee jerk hatred of America that is pretty common here.

Our relationship with the elephant down there is pretty darned important for us to understand past the knee jerk stuff. Hence, start in Toronto and work south. I was born and raised in Toronto, although I left for 15 years I’ve been back for 22, and this is the first I’ve been able to write about Toronto. Although, to be honest, it’s more about the Junction than Toronto.

Your insight is true, and there are times that publishers want to push for American Heroes. Decker’s an outsider, we as Canadians are outsiders to the world’s most powerful entity, crumbling as it may be.

I like, even prefer, mysteries set outside the major cities of the world. I expect it is because I reside in a community of 6,000 people far from a huge city.

None of the mysteries of Saskatchewan which are at the core of my blog are set in a big city since there are only 1,000,000 people in the whole province.

Still, when an author with as many books to his credit as Rotenberg notes the pressure to set books in the United States it is very much an issue for new authors of Canada.

I hope that the great success of Canadian authors such as Louise Penny with the Inspector Gamache series focused on the mythical village of Three Pines in the Eastern Townships will allow 21^st century authors to place their characters where they speak to the authors. Still I doubt there will be a change. L.R. Wright won an Edgar in 1986 for her Karl Alberg mystery, The Suspect, set on B.C.’s Sunshine Coast in the village of Sechelt. The pressure put on Anthony Bidulka and David Rotenberg noted above took place long after Wright’s triumph. I wonder if Miss Marple would ever have been published if Agatha Christie had lived in Saskatchewan and wrote about one of the villages of my province.