I lived in Montreal for over 25 years. Between the biker wars, clashes between police and First Nations militants, and business-as-usual with the Mafia and their kind, local newspapers never lacked material for crime stories. Crime was so fascinating that for a period there were a number of tabloids, Allo Police and others, that provided details the major dailies wouldn’t divulge.
Montreal is a vibrant North American city with a European ambiance. The downtown area is thoroughly modern, and dense with restaurants, boutiques, dance clubs and strip clubs. Nearby is Vieux Montreal, the old port with its 17th century architecture and financial district. In the East End are the factories, docks, teamsters and bikers. Montreal North and the area around Jean-Talon market is Mafia turf. West of downtown lies English-speaking Westmount and Notre-Dame-de-Grace, where an Irish crew called The West End Gang imported billions worth of cocaine in the 80s.
Aside from the West End Gang, NDG was a great place to live. But within a week of my moving into the ‘hood, someone entered a restaurant on the next block, shot a guy in a booth and exited through the kitchen, ditching his gun in a pot of stew. A settling of accounts, the papers said. But ever since then, when I thought of murder, I thought of that restaurant on my street. This wasn’t a crime once removed by newspaper account; this was a place I walked by every day. Proximity and familiarity gave its reality a greater weight.
Indeed, every novel must stand on at least three legs: plot, character and setting. Since people cannot act in a void, every writer must stake out his territory: this is where the action is. At the least, this gives him some firm ground to stand on. At best, the city itself becomes a character in the novel.
I’ve set two of my crime novels in Montreal, against the advice of well-meaning fellow writers who suggested I might enjoy a larger audience if I set my book in an American city. That might be true, but I was less interested in the audience than my heroes, and I knew they belonged in Montreal.
Harm’s Way is a hard-boiled mystery thriller. Lee Harms, a former homicide cop turned private eye, is divorced, a part-time dad to an adolescent daughter, and his on-and-off girlfriend is an astrologer. When he accepts a case to find a rich man’s wayward daughter, his search spans the city: Westmount mansions, downtown massage parlors, dance clubs on the Main, artists’ studios, gritty East End walkups. Following Harms’ quest, the reader gets a running tour of Montreal by day and night. Eventually he widens his search to Laval and a drug dealer’s mansion on the river, where he finds the object of his search…
When Harm’s Way was first published many years ago, a number of reviews at the time expressed disappointment that I hadn’t adequately captured the spirit of Montreal. Undertaking a total rewrite a few years back, I revisited several locales, absorbed their atmosphere, and fed it back into the re-released novel. Seems like it paid off. Many subsequent reviews remarked on how well I portrayed the various facets of the city.
Harm’s Way was set in summertime Montreal, when the sticky heat can ignite passions, road rage and homicide. But as musician Gilles Vigneault once said about Quebec, “L’hiver, c’est mon pays.” It’s as plain as the ice on your windshield six months of the year: My country is winter.
Al-Quebeca is a police procedural mystery thriller that takes place in the depths of a bitter Montreal winter. Like the country itself, Sophie Gillette suffers from Seasonal Affective Disorder, except not just in winter. She’s a homicide detective, smart and tough and on the fast track to somewhere, but she’s been hurt along the way. Her alcoholic father died years ago in a car accident, her only brother recently killed in combat during the drawdown of Canadian forces from Afghanistan. Assigned to investigate a snowstorm hit-and-run, she has no idea it will lead to a terrorist cell in the final stages of a three-pronged attack on politicians, people and vital infrastructure.
As with the new-and-improved Harm’s Way, I’ve also received some great reviews of Al-Quebeca, specifically regarding my portrayal of Montreal and how much it contributes to illuminating my character and her story. In my mind, the two were so inextricably woven, it was impossible to think of Gillette facing her demons anywhere else but Montreal.
And in the end, that’s a big part of what it’s all about. Whereas both plots and characters are usually completely fabricated, the setting is often the most realistic and down-to-earth element in a novel. Indeed, the more intimately we know our place, the better we can portray it, whether all dressed to up to hit the clubs on Saturday night, or nursing a hangover on Sunday morning.
Je t’aime, Montreal!
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