Local mystery and crime writers recently celebrated 20 years of the Capital Crime Writers Association.
Ottawa may seem like a sleepy government town, but all kinds of terrible things can happen here with a bit of imagination.
“Ottawa’s a great place to set mysteries,” says Mary Jane Maffini, a local crime writer whose Camilla MacPhee detective series is popular across Canada. “Physically, there are all these great places to kill people.”
Even though the capital makes a great setting for a story, there isn’t much money in mystery writing.
The city boasts more than a dozen published and award-winning crime writers, but very few can afford to quit their day jobs.
This is one reason why the Capital Crime Writers Association decided to dedicate part of its 20th anniversary celebrations this year to promoting Ottawa’s mystery authors.
The Canadian mystery market is relatively small, explains Ken Gibson, the president of the Capital Crime Writers Association. He says Canadian writers have to compete with those from the U.S. and Britain.
“The publication runs [in Canada] aren’t particularly large,” Gibson says. If an author sells 5,000 copies of their book, then that’s considered very good. And that’s if a writer manages to find a publisher in the first place.
“A lot of publishers will only take books from people that are already in their stable,” Gibson says.
He adds that publishers are cutting their publicity budgets, so Ottawa writers often have to be self-promoters.
Even well-established authors like Maffini, who writes full time and has book contracts in Canada and the U.S., can’t rely on her publisher alone to market her novels.
Writers set up websites, chat with fans in online forums and even pay their way to conferences to get their novels out there. “It’s tough but it’s doable,” Maffini says.
For Canadian crime writers, breaking into the American market is important.
“You’re always trying to connect out beyond Canada because the U.S. has 10 times the readership,” says Barbara Fradkin, another local author whose Inspector Green series sells well in Canada (the protagonist is an Ottawa police detective).
She says she’s now working on a series set in the United States to appeal to readers south of the border.
And unlike Canadian literary fiction, which enjoys a high profile in the public eye, crime writing is often seen as CanLit’s poor cousin.
“Mysteries are the bastard stepchild in the Canadian canon,” Maffini says. Even though people consume more mysteries than other genres, Maffini points out, mystery writing, along with science fiction and romance, doesn’t receive the same kind of enthusiastic support as other genres.
“I think there are a lot of closet mystery readers in the world,” says Linda Wiken, owner of Prime Crime bookstore on Bank Street. She says a lot of people don’t like to admit they read detective novels.
A lot of these mysterious readers could be in Ottawa. Wiken says that in the past few years local mystery writers like Maffini, Fradkin and Rick Mofina have become a lot more popular.
“People like reading about the place they live,” Wiken says. Prime Crime’s October bestseller list included three books by Ottawa authors, including Fradkin’s latest novel, This Thing of Darkness, which opens with a murder in the Byward Market.
“I was combating the myth that Ottawa’s nothing but boring civil servants and that nothing exciting happens,” Fradkin says of her choice to set mysteries in the national capital.
“I’ve had bodies in just about every part of the city,” she laughs, citing Lowertown, Rockliffe, Hog’s Back Falls, the University of Ottawa library, and even the parking lot of the Ottawa Civic Hospital.
Wiken says there are readers out there who will read good writing regardless of the genre. They just need to give mysteries a chance. “And what’s wrong with a little escapism?” Wiken asks. “We all need some.”