Fans will be happy to hear that John Moss, author of the Quin and Morgan mysteries, is adding a new book, Reluctant Dead (Dundurn) to the popular series. The irresistible Mulder-and-Scully style partnership of Moss' series detectives has mystery fans buzzing.
John Moss talks with Open Book about international adventures, the Toronto Police Service and his upcoming trilogy.
Open Book:
Tell us about your new book, Reluctant Dead.
John Moss:
I like to write about what I know. I like to explore what I don’t. Reluctant Dead gave me the opportunity to do both. Set on Easter Island in the South Pacific, Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic, and in Toronto, especially on a Toronto Island yacht, I got to revisit and share old haunts and favourite destinations. Now, I don’t know much about murder, I don’t like stepping on ants or killing mosquitoes. But I know about human mortality, and with a lifetime of experience to draw from, I know about tragedy, about romance, about deduction, induction, and wit. I know about people in extreme situations. I’ve travelled quite a bit, sometimes to exotic places and sometimes in my own back yard. I’ve never been a cop, I’ve never fired a gun in anger or panic, I’ve never been convicted of a crime. But I’ve watched my fellow humans do many strange things and I’ve taken mental notes. Reluctant Dead is an accumulation of those notes, refined and rewritten and shaped into a mystery which sends chills down my spine as I think about it.
Reluctant Dead is the third novel in a series of mysteries featuring Miranda Quin and David Morgan who are homicide detectives with the Toronto Police Service. In the beginning, I was interested in exploring their complementary relationship while immersed in the intricacies of murder and its resolution in distinctively Canadian settings. Still Waters opens with a corpse floating among prize koi in a Rosedale garden, but extends to Miranda’s childhood hangouts near a village between Kitchener and Cambridge, based on Blair where I grew up. Grave Doubts begins with two bodies caught by death in a lover’s embrace among the ruins of a condemned colonial home in Toronto. It pursues their mystery to a farmhouse near Owen Sound and a deserted church with epic murals on the walls, and eventually resolves in a breathtaking underwater scene in a shipwreck near Tobermoray. I was and remain determined to feature Canada as the context of murder mysteries that can engage the broadest possible readership. For Reluctant Dead, I tried to bring the larger world to Toronto!
The ominous title refers among other things to indigenous peoples who refuse to be erased by encroaching society. Part of Reluctant Dead is set among Inuit who are fiercely independent and determined to prevail in their own land. Morgan goes to Baffin to discover who murdered a woman found on a yacht in Toronto. Miranda travels on her own to Easter Island, where the Polynesians, known as Rapanui, struggle against the rule of Chile, a distant country with whom they have little in common. She finds herself immersed in terror and intrigue, not realizing much of her dangerous engagement has been orchestrated by the owner of the yacht back in Toronto. In the final third of the novel, Morgan’s story and Miranda’s, which are told in alternating episodes, come together and they work to resolve converging crimes with international repercussions. The worlds of the Inuit and the Rapanui are not nearly so far apart as geography might suggest.
OB:
Your series detectives, Miranda Quin and David Morgan, have an intense partnership. What are some of the challenges and opportunities of having two strong main characters rather than the traditional single detective structure?
JM:
From my perspective, the challenges are inseparable from the benefits. Quin and Morgan are fully developed characters. They are more authentic than many people I know. She is deductive, starting from clues and working towards a resolution. He is inductive, he stands back and observes, thinks, and closes in. This sometimes brings them into conflict but they have a deep respect for each other. They might almost be a married couple, except the sexual tension between them is seldom indulged. They’re detective sergeants working in homicide and they’re successful enough they can get away with being mavericks. She’s in her late thirties and he’s in his early forties. He’s divorced. She’s had her share of affairs. What they both have is wit and insatiable curiosity. They are both passionate intellectuals: their minds feed off each other and the very emotions that draw them together keep them apart. They give me a chance to play with language in action, to develop cultural echoes into dramatic themes, to explore human affections against a backdrop of murder. They’re smart and funny. I like hanging around with them.
OB:
Reluctant Dead takes Miranda far from her usual stomping grounds of Toronto and cottage country. What made you decide to expand your setting in this book?
JM:
My wife Bev and I used to raise koi, a species of carp that can command fabulous prices (not ours!). In Still Waters I was able to use personal experience with koi as a context for murder. In Grave Doubts, my own knowledge as a scuba instructor proved invaluable in writing the underwater scenes. For Reluctant Dead, years of backpacking in the Arctic and Bev’s extensive research work on Easter Island allowed me to write with conviction about those places from a Canadian perspective. (See also my book, Enduring Dreams: An Exploration of Arctic Landscape, House of Anansi, 1996, and her book, Inventing ‘Easter Island’, Beverley Haun, University of Toronto Press, 2008). The next novel in the Quin and Morgan series is already complete. Called The Dead Scholar, it draws on my other career, teaching Canadian literature at the University of Ottawa (although none of my colleagues, so far as I know, actually murdered one another).
I like writing mystery. I like writing about interesting characters in extreme situations. I like re-creating authentic places to make them accessible to the reader, especially when the action is chilling, astonishing, or wholly enthralling. Curious things happen to real people in real places, even in fiction. Especially in fiction. Why disguise those places as ersatz United States, pseudo United Kingdom or fake exotica? It’s too rewarding, engaging with what’s actually there!
OB:
Given the logistic complexities of plotting a mystery, do you prefer to map out your story prior to writing, or does the mystery evolve during your writing process?
JM:
My characters are too much alive in my mind and the plots are too real for me to know what will happen next. I write and discover.
OB:
What was the most challenging part of writing this book?
JM:
Always it’s the rewriting. Like most writers, I love it, I hate it. You have to be ruthless, chopping those beautiful contrived bits that don’t work. You’ve given full range to your imagination in the earliest drafts, but there should be no room for self indulgence in a published work. You rewrite, delete, rewrite, clarify, polish and refine, until the muddiness is gone and the private personality is refined out of existence. A novel is not a mirror facing the writer or a glass to expose the soul. It’s intended as a compelling and intimate experience for people I’ve never met.
OB:
You’ve transitioned to being a full-time writer. How has that shift changed your writing process?
JM:
I’ve been a full-time writer for forty years so there hasn’t really been a transition, except now I create mysteries and write about murder. I used to be paid by the university system, now I’m paid by my readers. I’ve become a much more careful writer. I took my role as a literary critic very seriously, but my commitment was to Canadian literature. My commitment now is to the reader herself. It’s very satisfying, in a different way. The process has altered over the years, as I’ve shifted from writing longhand to composing on a typewriter to being addicted to my Mac laptop. I’ve always believed in the beauty of good prose — my prose now serves a different function. I used to regard what I did as “thinking in public.” Now, I’m trying to engage, enthrall, entertain and provoke new feelings and thoughts.
OB:
You have a significant body of academic work as well; how does your academic background inform your fiction writing?
JM:
My first book, Patterns of Isolation, came out in 1974. Over the next few decades I became increasingly less academic as I explored the critic’s function to extend the reading experience. Rather than becoming more accessible, however, I became less. Eventually, I published a book of short stories, which were really critical essays in disguise. The great writer, Robert Kroetsch, an old friend of mine who tragically died two weeks ago in a car accident, described them on the book cover as “radiant.” His description still thrills me. Unfortunately, the stories were almost impenetrable, except by graduate students in literary theory. Writing mysteries was not to atone, however. It was to redeem. I wanted to prove to myself I could write accessible prose and tell stories that would grip readers, not smother or wow them.
OB:
Has anyone from the Toronto Police Services ever commented on Quin and Morgan? What are your feelings about portraying an existing police department?
JM:
No. I guess the answer to the second question is the same as I feel about portraying characters. Whether they originate in people in the three-dimensional world doesn’t matter. They are real and authentic because they exist on the page (not in spite of existing on the page). If Morgan and Miranda’s Toronto Police Service is a convincing employer for them, that’s all that matters. I’m not writing documentary, I’m creating fiction. But of course if I get it wrong, if it jars in the reader’s mind, even if, especially if, the reader represents the actual police service, then in some respects I’ve failed. Invention only works if it’s believable (you believe in Alice’s wonderland and Dr. Frankenstein’s monster. If you didn’t, the books wouldn’t work.).
OB:
What titles would you recommend to readers who are reluctant to read mystery?
JM:
My own mysteries. That’s certainly what I have hoped for, in the ten thousand hours of writing: to be read and enjoyed by all good readers, including the most reluctant.
OB:
What are you working on now?
JM:
I’m working on a trilogy featuring Harry Lindstrom, a former philosophy professor who in response to family tragedy has become a private investigator. Rather than lecture about ultimate questions, he stuggles to answer them. The first novel, Lindstrom Alone, is set in Toronto and Stockholm, concluding on Gotland in the Baltic Sea. The second, Lindstrom’s Progress, is set in Vienna and Toronto and features a painting by Gustav Klimt. The third, The Lindstrom Paradigm, is … Ah, but it’s a work in progress.
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John Moss is the author of two previous Quin and Morgan Mysteries: Still Waters and Grave Doubts. He has published numerous books, including the non-fiction works Enduring Dreams: An Exploration of Arctic Landscape and Invisible Among the Ruins: Field Notes of a Canadian in Ireland. Moss lives in Peterborough, Ontario. Visit him online at his website.
For more information about Reluctant Dead please visit the Dundurn website.
Buy this book at your local independent bookstore or online at Chapters/Indigo or Amazon.
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