About Me
One of my favourite characters in fiction is Magdala “Nick” Buckley, the seemingly placid protagonist of Agatha Christie’s classic novel, Peril at End House. While leading the detective, Hercule Poirot, on a merry chase, as he tries to detect who would want to kill her, Nick manages to pull off an almost-perfect murder (spoiler alert for a novel published in 1932). There are wheels within wheels in this book, one of Christie’s most intricate and diabolical puzzles, but I’ve read it multiple times and though far-fetched, it holds together.
After many years of working day to day in offices, sometimes in places I loved and sometimes in places I loathed, I decided to double down on a serious attempt to write the type of mystery novel that I’ve always loved to read.
Photo: Meghan Krauss
For me, this means the classic fair-play puzzle, in which murders are motivated by money, by mistaken identity, by a visceral need to stay safe and unseen. It means characters who are intimately connected to each other whether they know it or not, whose relationships are underscored by love, hate, jealousy, fear, obsession, intelligence, foolishness, all the attributes that motivate the most seemingly ordinary among us.
It means no random serial killers, no rapidly switching points of view, and no last-minute revelations that can’t be traced back through the story. I want the reader to be right beside my main character, to know as much as she knows, and nothing more.
In undertaking this project, I’ve discovered that concocting a plot of this sort is both great fun and very difficult. Layer on emotion, dialogue, characters a reader would want to spend more than five minutes with, and writing a novel like this has taken over a good portion of my life. I hope to share it with you, in full, soon.
Beyond this writing project, I have work (mostly public relations), hobbies (outdoorsy stuff like skiing, hiking, canoeing), travel (when I can), reading (I talk about this on my blog), family and friends (very grateful for these). I grew up where the prairies meet the foothills, in Calgary, Canada, and have lived for the past two decades in various Western Canadian outposts. That will likely continue for now.