Ron Base's Blog

Peter Rowe’s Borderline Funny had its world premiere on Apple TV Tuesday night. Part satire, part serious political statement, and part delightful romantic comedy, it is a remarkable piece of low-budget filmmaking from a veteran filmmaker.

At the age of seventy-nine, Peter is something of a Renaissance Man—filmmaker, author, artist, and sailor. Not only has he almost single-handedly produced a commercial movie that has something to say for itself, but in the process he may have created the template for how to produce great-looking films on a shoestring.

Having done well in real estate over the years, Peter was in a position to sidestep the complicated hoops involved in receiving Telefilm financing. “I’m too old to sit around waiting for the gatekeepers to open their purses,” he says.

Instead, Peter put up just over one hundred thousand dollars of his own money. That’s still a minuscule amount to spend making a movie in this day in age. He figures that doing a traditionally produced film in Canada would cost three million dollars. In the U.S., such an independent film would be budgeted at twenty-five million.

How did he do it so inexpensively?

Peter innovated. He deferred any fees he might have collected as writer, producer, and director, not to mention editor, and that saved money, and allowed him to make do with a skeleton crew of eight.  Instead of looking for a name, he discovered two attractive unknowns, Michael Perrotti and Jessica Rosales, wonderful finds whose natural charm and onscreen chemistry helps make the movie so entertaining.

The film was shot in twelve days, an unbelievably short time for a feature. Most of all, Peter, aided by the expertise of his cinematographer, Michael Morrow, made extensive use of artificial intelligence to provide the kind of settings that a low-budget Canadian film otherwise could never imagine let alone afford.

The use of AI also has the added benefit of giving a whimsical look to the movie. You are reminded in a good way of Hollywood productions from the 1930s or 40s that transported audiences to locations around the world without ever leaving a soundstage on a backlot.

A political junkie, particularly since beginning of the Trump era, Peter says he was inspired to start thinking about a film that had something to say after reading about Jasmine Mooney, a Canadian actress arbitrarily incarcerated by ICE in the spring of 2025. Her story evolved into a standup comedian doing anti-Trump jokes who is stopped at the border on his way to a U.S. comedy gig. He ends up imprisoned in El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison, keeping himself alive by keeping the convicts laughing.

The script poured out of him in a rush of inspiration in less than a month. Originally, he thought of casting the Canadian comic Martha Chaves, but ultimately decided on a trained actor, particularly when he found newcomer Michael Perrotti from Toronto. Perrotti gives a leading-man performance, much of it requiring him to deliver comic monologues in the convincing Spanish he had to learn for the movie. (his co-star, Jessica Rosales, is Venezuelan).

It’s one thing to make a film in this country, it is another thing entirely to arrange for anyone to see it. Most Canadian films never receive distribution beyond the limited festival circuit. Borderline Funny is on Apple TV, available to a worldwide audience. That is thanks to Syndicado distributor Greg Rubidge, with whom Peter had worked previously.

What’s more, the film is on Amazon.com as well as Fandango in the U.S. and is available as a YouTube rental, immense exposure for a movie that is defiantly hostile to a president who, to say the least, does not like criticism. (It will also show up on Tubi, Peter’s favourite streamer, and a limited theatrical release is scheduled at Toronto’s Carlton Cinema December 3.)

It is indeed the little movie that grew.

Does the amazing success of Borderline Funny mean Peter is now a wealthy man? Well, it is Canada and so the riches aren’t exactly pouring in, although once he collects the Ontario and Canadian tax credits available for the film, Peter will probably get most of his investment back.

“But the money doesn’t make any difference,” Peter said. “This is my contribution to the resistance.”

Besides, he is already on to his next film. This one is a biopic of the great American singer, actor and activist Paul Robeson. Titled Robeson: All-American/Un-American, it’s an ambitious undertaking requiring sixty-two speaking parts and a budget of $250,000.

This time Peter applied for financing at Telefilm. His application was rejected, and so Peter once again is funding the production himself. He’s already found a singer-actor in London, Cavin Cornwall, who Peter says is the spitting image of Robeson. He plans to begin production in November with a fifteen-day shooting schedule and a slightly expanded crew.

Shooting a feature film about the life an iconic American in little more than two weeks?

Borderline…amazing.

Recently, I was part of the virtual writing workshops sponsored annually by the Eden Mills Writers Festival. My task was to impart what wisdom I’ve managed to gather having written thirty novels, including, most recently five Priscilla Tempest Mysteries. Lots has been written on the subject, but having shared some of my experiences, good and bad, at the Eden Mills Writers workshop, I thought it might be useful to any would-be authors out there to reprint a few of my thoughts. Final observations and opinions…

 7. TOUCHY SUBJECTS

Gender Identification

Once upon a time, popular fiction was dominated by men. That is no longer the case. The male reader has all but vanished. Women account for over eighty-five percent of fiction book sales. Whereas men once dominated bestseller lists, it should come as no surprise, given sales figures, that women have taken over.

All of this is to say that when deciding on the gender for your detective, you would be wise to choose a woman. I love writing about women. My experience is that they are more interesting in life and therefore much more fascinating to write about. Mind you I had a great deal of help and inspiration writing the Priscilla Tempest Mysteries thanks to my collaborator Prudence Emery, a unique character in life who was the inspiration for Priscilla in the novels.

Murder!

Murder tends to be the least talked about subject when it comes to writing mysteries. Can you write a mystery or a thriller without killing someone? Sir Arthur Conan Doyle occasionally allowed Sherlock Holmes to solve a mystery without a dead body, but otherwise, the answer is no. In small English towns where no one ever kills anyone, someone is always getting killed. In Iceland where there is virtually no murder, murder mysteries abound. Why, they even occur with regularity at the Savoy Hotel. The less likely the setting, the more likely murders will occur. I occasionally have a problem with the more murderous aspect of mystery writing. The reality of murder, having covered a few as a young newspaper reporter, is ugly and tragic. The thought of actually taking a human life, sickens me. How could you ever do that? And yet in the world I create, I commit murder all the time. I must admit it’s my least favourite part of writing a mystery—I try to keep the ugly details to a minimum. It’s better for my peace of mind when the murders happen offstage.

Our fascination—obsession?—with murder is everywhere in TV documentaries, non-fiction books, even in the theatre. Shakespeare led the way, of course. He had no hesitation when it came to spilling gallons of blood when it suited his purposes and his audiences of the day loved it—as do audiences today. If you don’t want to kill someone, at least in that world of yours we keep talking about, then you should probably write something else. There are lots of alternatives, but none that are nearly as much fun as solving a murder.

The elephant in the Room

The elephant in the publishing room currently is AI, Artificial Intelligence. American publishers are on edge attempting to come to terms with its use. Book contracts are being cancelled as editors decide that AI has been used.

My feelings about AI?

Well, if you resort to using AI to write your book, then what are you doing writing a book? The pleasure—and the pain—is the writing. Challenging yourself to create something, good or bad, that is uniquely yours. Getting AI to do it for you—what combination of fun and/or agony is that?

However, the AI train has already left the station, whether any of us likes it or not. It’s become unavoidable. For the writer AI can function as a helpful research tool when you need to quickly find out how long it took to take a cab from Waterloo Station to the Royal Albert Hall in 1968 (about 14 minutes). But we all must be very careful when using it.

The Pigeon Hole

My daughter Erin worked for a long time on her first novel about a young, indigenous woman struggling to survive in the Inner City and then returning to her roots at the reserve where she was born. Something like that. Well, intentioned, but it went nowhere. Undaunted, Erin then sat back took a look at the market—at the type of novels she was reading—and decided to write something more commercial. Tell Me My Name fit perfectly into that pigeon hole labelled the domestic thriller. She soon found a publisher. Next year she will publish her second novel, Pitch Dark Night. It’s even better than her first effort. Now, she has a clear eye for where she fits into the publishing world, and she has adopted a formula that seems to work for her brand of domestic thriller: a cottage, a city, a couple in conflict. Oh, yes, and she works to find an irresistible hook that immediately pulls the reader in. Erin’s formula—at least for now.

The point here is not just to extol my daughter’s talent—considerable!—so much as to point out that she is realistic about the marketplace and how she fits into it. I hate to say it, but you are much more likely to find a publisher, if that publisher has a clear idea of where to place you within the realm of genre fiction.

The French publisher of the Priscilla Tempest novels enthusiastically marketed them as cozy British mysteries. Prudence Emery, co-author of the books, and I never thought of the books as cozy mysteries, but there you go. That’s the pigeon hole we have been shoved into. Many of the manuscripts I read are neither fish nor fowl as far as genre is concerned. They are sort of mysteries but what kind?  My advice is not to leave the publisher or the reader wondering where your novel fits in.

8. MANY WAYS TO SKIN THE CAT—OR PUBLISH A NOVEL

When my first novel was published in 1985, Coles was Canada’s major bookseller. They were basically warehouse outlets specializing mostly in discounted remaindered books. There were lots of independent bookstores, but an independent such as the Albert Britnell Book Shop on Yonge Street was the Toronto book store in those days. But if they carried your book at all, it was only a few copies. The staff at Britnell proudly showed me the three copies, spine out, they had of my novel hidden at the back of the stores.

Back then, there were no beautifully designed big box stores, no Internet obviously, and therefore no Amazon. A small cadre of traditional publishers ruled the book industry. If they didn’t like your book, that was it, there were no alternatives. You simply didn’t get published.

Today, that has all changed—very much for the better. Book publishing has become democratized. Authors are no longer reliant on traditional publishers. If publishers are not interested, then you can publish it yourself—independently. Not only is this possible, but it is now entirely accepted, a viable alternative to the old way of doing things.

No matter what you think of the company, Amazon has entirely changed the way things are done in book publishing. While traditional publishers tend to be closed forts that grant access to select few, Amazon has opened its gates. If you have a book—come on in. You are welcome! Amazon will happily publish your book and provide you with the same landing page as a Stephen King or a James Patterson. All you have to do is market your masterpiece—the really tough part, but Amazon will even help with that. The cost? There is no cost.

9. PARTING WORDS OF ADVICE

Get an editor. We all need one. If you have the money, hire someone. There are lots of online choices. Try to avoid friends. They will usually tell you only what you want to hear.

Social Media. Facebook, Instagram at the very least. Create a website for yourself. Free websites are available. Write a blog on Substack. There is no cost and you may even become popular enough that you can monetize your site—although I wouldn’t hold my breath expecting that to happen. Traditional publishers will expect you to play the social media game. Does it help? I’ve scratched my head for years debating with myself whether it does, but I still do it, anyway—and you should too.

Traditional publisher? Or independent? My advice always is to take a shot a finding a traditional publisher. It’s difficult, but you never know, you may have the next Big Thing in book publishing. You won’t know unless you try. Put on your armour, and be prepared for rejection.

An agent, yes or no? When I started out, finding an agent was almost impossible. I was fortunate in that I worked at the Toronto Star and nudged against Toronto’s literary world and was able to attract an agent.

 These days, literary agents have an online presence and they will let you know if they are looking for new clients and what kind of material interests them if they are. The same is true of many publishers. A surprising number accept online submissions without an agent. Still, it’s best, to get an agent, if you can. 

Length: The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, still considered the great American novel contains forty-seven thousand words. I often remind myself of that as I continue to fuss over  the number of words in whatever novel I am writing.

The most common advice everyone hands out is, don’t worry about length, just write the best novel that you can. Good advice. However, if you’re just starting out, I would for aim somewhere between sixty-five and eighty-thousand words. My novels average 72-75,000 words. The Secret of the Savoy, which comes out next year, is seventy-three thousand words. I say what everyone says, don’t worry about the length. Even though I always worry about length—and you probably will too.

Hollywood: Ah, yes, we can’t leave without addressing the illusive dream of Hollywood. Every writer, it seems, seeks that holy grail of validation buried somewhere in the Hollywood Hills. I toiled away in that sun-kissed land of hope and dreams for close to six years. I actually managed to do something most people out there never do, I got a movie made. I was very much the exception that makes the rule.

Death at the Savoy, the first novel Pru and I wrote together was quickly optioned by a couple of Hollywood producers. Six books later, nothing has happened. This is the grim reality of hoping and dreaming that your book will be turned into a movie, or, more likely these days, a streaming television series. It can happen, and there is seemingly insatiable appetite for mystery and suspense on streaming services, but even if there is interest it can take five years on average to get your book in front of a camera. Meantime, concentrate on the job at hand, creating the best possible novel that will attract the one audience you desire more than anything—readers!

FINAL THOUGHTS

Bestselling author Harlan Coben has written a book about writing titled Plot Twist: Life, Craft and the Messy First Draft. Coben writes about his life as a writer, dispensing advice along the way for over three hundred pages. However, the book’s best advice is in Chapter Three. He even puts it in bold letters so the reader can’t miss it: “Only writing is writing.” The late British novelist John Braine said it even more succinctly: “A writer is a person who writes.”

At the end of the day, Coben and Braine and everyone who does this professionally repeat the same mantra: writing is writing. You must set aside everything else and write. No excuses. There is no other way. When I started out, banging away on a manual typewriter, writing draft after draft was arduous business—so many strikeouts, so much cutting and pasting and rearranging to the point where your eyes crossed in confusion and producing a clean, showable draft, seemed hopeless.

But now there is writing software—and writing life, well, not perfect but a whole lot easier. Writing is just as hard as it ever was but the mechanics are now so much easier. If you make a mistake now, software like Microsoft Word, easily makes the correction so that you are always working with a clean draft. Your first draft can also serve as an outline. You can easily comeback later and rewrite. The old saw about writing is rewriting? Absolutely true—just a lot easier.

So set your coffee to one side, straighten your shoulders, take a deep breath and plunge into the other world you have created. It’s all there right in front of you, the brightly lit stage is set, get to work directing your characters. You don’t need inspiration, events are unfolding in your mind, perhaps more slowly some days than others, but that’s the nature of the world you have created. It makes no difference, you are there writing…writing…nothing but writing…the only thing that counts…writing…

Recently, I was part of the virtual writing workshops sponsored annually by the Eden Mills Writers Festival. My task was to impart what wisdom I’ve managed to gather having written thirty novels, including, most recently five Priscilla Tempest Mysteries. Lots has been written on the subject, but having shared some of my experiences, good and bad, at the Eden Mills Writers workshop, I thought it might be useful to any would-be authors out there continuing to reprint a few of my thoughts. More to follow…

3. CONFLICT, DAMN YOU!

 Conflict is the essence of mystery novels, of any novels when it comes down to it. Conflict drives the plot, creates the urge in the reader to find out what will happen next. Yet curiously enough, conflict is so often missing in the manuscripts I’m asked to read. The late Sol Stein, a legendary figure in American publishing, an editor and novelist who wrote several excellent books on writing, voiced the same complaint. He wrote: “In the manuscripts that come my way, the fault is seldom too much conflict.” He was continually amazed that he encountered what he called “non adversarial, static events that can change a page-turner into a ho-hummer.”

The last thing we want is a ho-hummer.

You would think novice writers worked overtime to ensure their stories didn’t put themselves to sleep, let alone the poor reader. But that is often not the case. Part of this absence of conflict, I would argue, has to do with the times in which we live. We are not fighting wars, no one cares who you marry, and for most of us the problems of everyday life, paying bills, keeping a job, getting kids through school are certainly important, but not gripping conflicts. But drop a body into that contemporary mix and suddenly you have conflict. All those other problems of modern-day life, become subplots. It’s no wonder even serious literary writers are drawn to the genre.

Conflict works even better if you set your mystery in another more restricted time. In the Priscilla Tempest Mysteries, for example, the conflict is built in on several levels. There is the conflict that arises out of the fact that Priscilla is one of the few women working at the ultra-posh Savoy Hotel in London. What’s more, her boss believes she disrupts the hotel’s carefully orchestrated routines and he doesn’t want her there; a traditional British establishment fights to hold onto its power in a roiling sea of social change; and, oh yeah, a murder occurs that no one wants our plucky heroine to get to the bottom of. There is little difficulty keeping the conflict going in these novels.

An earlier series, the Sanibel Sunset Detective Mysteries, on the other hand,  take place in a contemporary setting on a barrier island off the west coast of Florida. Our hero is a private detective, Tree Callister. Tree is a former newspaperman who has no experience as a private detective. Everyone thinks he’s crazy to be a detective for starters, and then he is living on a barrier island where, as he keeps being told, nothing ever happens. What’s more, the local cops don’t like him and constantly get in his way. With the conflict already baked into the novels, I then drop a dead body or two around Sanibel just to keep things interesting.

4. LOCATON, LOCATION, LOCATION

As you sit at your keyboard about to enter the world of the mystery you are about to create, where you will set it? Where in the world will your mystery unfold?

Setting!

It’s almost as important as conflict when it comes to writing a mystery. Your setting, as has been pointed out many times, should be a character in your book. After all, you are going to be spending a lot of time there. But where? The tiny English village where nothing happens but murder. New York? Los Angeles, Paris, Rome? Places where murder is all too common, thanks to far-too-many writers using those settings, possibly in order to expense family vacations. Not that I’ve ever done that, of course.

My brother Ric introduced me to Sanibel Island off the west coast of Florida and suggested I set a novel there. I thought, aha, I had found a unique location for a series of private detective mysteries only to discover that it was already inhabited by author Randy Wayne White whose series of Doc Ford mysteries not only were New York Times bestsellers but had even inspired a couple of Doc Ford restaurants in the area. Undaunted, I ploughed ahead. Doc Ford knows everything there is to know about that part of Florida. My character, Tree Callister, a newcomer, knew next to nothing. Tree’s inexperience works as built-in conflict. No one ever thinks he can solve the mystery and stay alive—more conflict—but Tree always fools everyone, even himself.

Similarly, thanks to my co-author and dear friend, Prudence Emery—hmmm, I do rely on others for these settings, don’t I?—I found myself at the iconic Savoy Hotel in London. Pru and I thought that we had come up with a unique setting for our first collaboration, aided by the fact that Pru had actually worked at the Savoy in the late 1960s, during the period in which the novels are set. Not only did we find that lots of books had been written about the hotel, both fiction and non-fiction, but a novel titled Murder at the Savoy was about to be published—the same title as our first book. The title was quickly changed to Death at the Savoy and on we went. Pru’s firsthand experience at the hotel coupled with the 1960s time period in which the novels take place, set the novels apart from the competition—well, that’s what we told ourselves, anyway.

Interestingly—and perhaps there is a lesson here— I found a unique setting for a mystery in my own backyard, Milton, Ontario. I wrote four novels—The Milton Mysteries—based around a town that as far as I can tell no one else has written about. What’s more, Milton is a fascinating place to set a mystery in. It is an intriguing stew of furious growth, influxes of immigrants, a controversial gravel industry hidden behind masses of green foliage, a landscape fraught with environmental issues created by the presence of the Niagara Escarpment with its high cliffs, perfect for pushing someone off of—in fiction, that is.

The point being, you may find your unique setting a few steps from your door. Whatever you decide, make it your own. The novelist John Banville notes that although Raymond Chandler is considered the last word on the mean streets of Los Angeles in the 1930s, “He invented Los Angeles…my Los Angeles is a Los Angeles from inside of my head…” Which is precisely where we should all reside when it comes to creating you novel’s setting. Chandler in fact made up most of the locations he writes about in The Big Sleep, his first Philip Marlowe novel, the novel that made him famous and is considered to this day his masterpiece of hard-boiled detective fiction.

The Savoy Hotel certainly existed in 1968, and Pru did a wonderful job of helping to bring it to life with fascinating details, but ultimately we created our own version of the hotel in that period, much more romantic, much more dangerous than the actual place. In reality, there has been only one murder at the Savoy, in 1923—which I write about in the next novel—but at our Savoy there are two murders in the first novel alone.

5. ACTION IS CHARACTER!

We have established a place, now let’s find out about who will live it.

Your characters!

Action is character, F. Scott Fitzgerald by way of Aristotle by way of every screenwriting book ever written is one way to think of your central character. The actions of your protagonist overcoming hurdle after hurdle, conflict again, in pursuit of—well, it’s usually the killer in these books— brings the character to life. The importance of dialogue in revealing character also comes in here. Remember, in a novel, everything is larger and more dramatic, and this is certainly true of the characters you create. As Sol Stein says, “Readers don’t want to pay money in order to spend twelve hours in the company of someone who is just like their neighbour next door.” That’s also true when it comes to dialogue. No one speaks in a novel the way you do in real life. Dialogue should be full of tension that reveals character and keeps the reader interested.

The novelist Jennifer Egan points out, correctly, that novels are distinctive in that they are the only art form that takes you into the head of a character. Film and theatre can’t do that. This ability is particularly useful in mysteries when it allows the reader into the head of the protagonist as he or she mulls over clues or attempts to deal with the dangers being faced. I use this device more with the Priscilla Tempest mysteries than I have previously, but I do prefer the action-is-character template to keep things moving.  In The Maltese Falcon, a second thought never enters Sam Spade’s head, and it is considered the ground-breaking American mystery. Also, Elmore Leonard relies on his signature dialogue style to drive character and plot.

This discussion of character takes us to the subject of point of view—POV. How are you going to tell the story you are creating? Will you use the omnipotent third person? You are the god manipulating your characters on the end of the strings that you are pulling. Or are you going to tell the story in the first person from the protagonist’s point of view? There is also a third option—tell the story in the third person, but only from your hero’s point of view. I have done this with Priscilla in the last couple of novels. It is constraining at times, but it keeps the focus on her, it allows the reader to accompany her as she gets to the bottom of the mystery.

For years everyone who wrote about writing a novel, warned about the first person, for reasons I never quite understood. Whatever the former prejudice about the first person, it seems to have disappeared. The first-person narrative has become quite common. Personally, I still prefer the old-fashioned third person narrative; it’s solid and reliable, makes sense if you’re changing the point of view among a number of characters. Also, when it comes to using the present tense or the past tense, call me a traditionalist. For whatever reason, I’m uneasy with the present tense, even as a reader, although it has become exceedingly popular.

6. THERE IS ONLY ONE PLOT

Two pieces of advice about plot I’ve always found useful. The gospel according to the noir novelist Jim Thompson: “There is only one plot: Noting is as it seems. From spy novelist, John Le Carré: The cat on the cat’s mat is not a story. The cat on the dog’s mat is a story.

Stephen King, who, let’s face it, knows something about such matters, says he never writes plot. He writes characters who somehow fold themselves into a story, although he does admit that for his latest novel, a detective mystery, he concentrated more on plot than he usually does. Considering that everyone fights to turn King’s novels and stories into film more than any other contemporary author and given that film by necessity is plot-based, his assertion is somewhat hard to swallow.

I would say this about plot: let it unfold. Enter your world and see what happens. Assuming you are writing a mystery, somewhere along the way, a dead body will show up. That in itself propels the plot forward. When a murder occurs, the novel’s protagonist(s)  must set about solving it.

To me, that’s where the fun of plotting comes in. You are nestled in your other world, a murder has occurred, you have no idea what happens next. I wouldn’t write an outline, let the plot unfold. Don’t worry if you can’t immediately figure out what happens, it will come. The plot will follow you around everywhere; you will think about it as you fall asleep because as you drift off you are back in the world you created. You will dream in that world. It will all work out. The job is to keep yourself entertained, keep twisting that plot around, keep yourself constantly surprised. If you are not bored with what you’re writing, the reader won’t be either.

Having trouble deciding what comes next? Take this advice from Raymond Chandler: “If you don’t know what to do next, have somebody come through the door with a gun.”

 It works! I’ve used it—on more than one occasion. This is the type of novel you are writing, you can get away with it. Be preposterous. Be outlandish. Swing for the fences. It’s a mystery novel. It’s larger than life.

Recently, I was part of the virtual writing workshops sponsored annually by the Eden Mills Writers Festival. My task was to impart what wisdom I’ve managed to gather having written thirty novels, including, most recently five Priscilla Tempest Mysteries. Lots has been written on the subject, but having shared some of my experiences, good and bad, at the Eden Mills Writers workshop, I thought it might be useful to any would-be authors out there to reprint a few of my thoughts, beginning with the first two parts. Others will follow shortly.

It’s six thirty in the morning. Or maybe it’s seven. But it’s early. You have your coffee. You are settling in at the keyboard. Your fingers are moving on the keys, but you are not really at the keyboard. You are being pulled into another world. In my case, this morning, it’s the Savoy Hotel in London in 1968. But you will have another world, it doesn’t matter what it is, it’s yours, you have created it. Unlike real life, you are in control. You are the writer, the director, the cinematographer. You have designed the sets, created the costumes, orchestrated the fate of your characters in this unfolding drama. Now you begin to see that the characters you have created are taking on a life, if not quite on their own, close enough. You know they must encounter drama and conflict, and as soon as you start to move them together, put them at odds, that is exactly what they start to do. There is danger in this world you have created, there is passion and there is mystery, everything heightened and larger than life—the life you would never experience in your real life, but here it is much different. You don’t know what is going to happen next, but you are enthralled you must find out. You must keep moving through this world. You don’t want to miss anything. You don’t want to leave.

Eventually, though, other voices intrude. Your wife wants you to mow the lawn. The kids are home from school. Dinner has to be prepared. The world you have created slips away. For me, it’s the loss of the glamour and excitement of the Savoy, rich people misbehaving, drinks with the legendary playwright Noël Coward in the American Bar, and yes, there is that body in suite 405,  that must be dealt with—but that is for another day. You leave reluctantly, your fingers giving up the keyboard. You are back to reality, a bit depressed at the end of it. Real life will never be able to match the world you have created for yourself…

What I have just described, I would argue, is the essence of the mystery novel—or of any novel. You do not write the mystery, you live through it, recording events as they unfold. You do not write, you imagine, you dream. That is the beauty of what you do, the drug that becomes so addictive you embrace it for a lifetime, like you embrace nothing else. I don’t say to my wife Kathy, I’m going to work. I tell her I’m going to be at the Savoy Hotel in London for a few hours—but not to worry, I’ll be back.

This is the way I escaped as a child, and it is still the way of escape for me. After all the years of writing professionally, I continue to believe that the best place to write is in your imagination. That is, I would argue, the most underrated part of the writing process. Everyone always wants to know what your novel is based on, are you the protagonist in your novel, who are the characters in real life. What no one asks is HOW YOU MADE IT ALL UP. How you dreamed at three o’clock in the morning and came up with the solution to your mystery. John Le Carré who suffered a lifetime of being asked about the reality of what he did as a spy for  British Intelligence, said that we as writers are all frauds, we pretend to know all sorts of things that we don’t know at all—at the end of it, he said, he makes it up.

Now having said that imagination is your most powerful tool, there are a few rules of the road, tricks of the trade that I have found useful over the years and which you may find helpful.

Let’s start where you might not expect…at the movies.

2. THE DUMBEST GUY IN THE ROOM: LESSONS LEARNED

For years I struggled to write screenplays for producers in Toronto, Los Angeles, Paris, Rome, and Montreal. For a writer it was a very uneasy and unsatisfying process. Writing novels, you are ultimately in control. Writing screenplays you are not in control at all. I was always the dumbest guy in the room. Everyone else knew exactly what was wrong with the script, except the writer—me.

However, I did come away from those experiences with some great stories and a few valuable lessons that have helped me in the creation of my mystery novels.

Since time immemorial, drama has relied on the three-act structure in order to tell a story. This particularly true in movies. Even today, most films use that tried and true three-act structure. We have become so emersed in film that many commercial novels in fact read like screenplays. A simple formula I find helpful: In act one, you put the hero up a tree. In act two you throw rocks at him. In act three you bring the hero down from the tree. As I say, simple, but effective, and I find it endlessly useful for constructing a novel.

In film, every scene must drive the plot forward. The same is true in a novel. Each chapter should move the plot forward. If it doesn’t, cut it. You can argue about this, site instances where it isn’t true, but in the name of keeping the reader gripped—a major ambition for anyone writing a mystery novel or thriller—it is a good rule to keep in mind, particularly if you are just starting out.

John Braine is a British novelist best known for Room at the Top which was turned into one of the iconic films of the British starring Laurence Harvey and Simone Signoret. Braine is forgotten today but he was very popular and he wrote one of the best books about writing a novel called—Writing A Novel. “Always write as if the action of your novel were taking place before your eyes on a brightly lit stage…it is the most important of my working rules.”

One of mine too—and it places in to the scene setting in that world you are going to be entering when you write a novel.

When I was a teenager in a small Eastern Ontario town, I avidly read the After Four section of the Toronto Telegram. It was a weekly pull-out section for us youths, youths being all the rage at the time.

I paid particular attention to a cartoonist by the name of Andy Donato. He drew a weekly cartoon about a teenager named Flunko.

At the time, my ambition was to become a cartoonist. I thought if this guy Donato could get away with Flunko, then there was hope for me. Well, I never became a cartoonist, but  I did manage to become a friend of Andy’s. The news of his death today at the age of eighty-nine shortly after leaving the Toronto Sun where he had worked since the paper started up in 1971, was devastating to everyone who knew and adored him.

Andy was one of the first people I met when I came to the Sunday Sun in 1973. By that time I was an admirer not only of Andy’s draughtsmanship—unique, and I think underrated—but also of the sly, gentle humour he displayed daily. I never particularly agreed with his right-of-centre sensibility but  you could not deny the cleverness with which he skewered the politicians of the day.

He was among the last of great Canadian cartoonists: Roy Peterson at the Vancouver Sun, Duncan Macpherson at the Toronto Star, Terry Mosher known as Aislin, at the Montreal Gazette. I never knew Peterson other than to admire his work. MacPherson was a brilliant artist but a drunken son-of-a-bitch. Mosher, from the few times I met him, is a shaggy, delightful iconoclast, still, thankfully, drawing wonderful cartoons. Andy, with his ready smile, was sunshine brightening any room he entered, hiding his great talent under a veneer of unpretentious amiability. Impossible not to love him.

Over the years I knew Andy, we always kidded about Flunko—it was his greatest achievement I used to remind him. It had all been  downhill ever since. Andy loved the fact that anyone even remembered those early defining days at the Telegram.

But now, sadly, Flunko is no more, and the sunshine that Andy Donato brought to all of us, is gone.

Dolly Parton’s legendary cleavage loomed below me as I bent over her, fumbling to attach a clip-on microphone. Seated on a love seat in her suite at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in 1984, Dolly was highly amused by my efforts.

“Come on,” she said, her eyes twinkling mischievously, “you can stick your hand down there, go ahead.”

All these years later, I am able to report that I did not stick my hand down Dolly Parton’s cleavage. But I did have a lot of fun interviewing her. She was a combination of flirtatious Barbie Doll sex symbol and serious businesswoman, gimlet-eyed about Hollywood and determined not to as she said, “put up with bullshit from anyone.”

The night before we talked,, she had attended the  world premiere of Rhinestone, the first movie she had done in two years. She posed for photographs with Joan Collins (who was not in the movie) signing autographs and asking everyone she met, “How’d y’all like the picture?” The critics present, who’d had to sit through the excruciating comedy that co-starred Sylvester Stallone, ran for the Hollywood Hills when that question came up.

At the time, curiously enough, Dolly saw Rhinestone as redemptive after the unhappiness she experienced making The Best Little Whore House in Texas with Burt Reynolds. After that, she doubted she would make more movies but she came back to make Rhinestone because she thought it a good project, and, she added with her usual honesty, “I needed the money.”

She never had any doubts that she would become a movie star. “No, I expected it,” she said forthrightly. “But it pleases me. I always had such big high hopes. I had been offered lots of movies before, but I didn’t want ’em. And then when 9 to 5  came, I thought, This feels right, this is the smart thing to do because if it’s a great success, I can take a lot of credit for it. If it’s a big failure I can blame it all on Jane Fonda.” Her giggle was delightful as she added, “She’s a big star.”

“But I like being a movie star,” she continued. “I like the end product, the doors that it can open, and the money that one can make. But it’s slow and a little bit boring waitin’ around and waitin’ around.”

She was well aware of the downside of stardom. “You gotta be on guard all the time because they will cut your throat if you let ‘em. But they ain’t gettin’ that close to me.”

I couldn’t help thinking at the time that, unlike so many others, I had gotten pretty darned close to Dolly Parton. Hearing of her death at the age of eighty, I thought fondly of that afternoon with her on a love seat at the Beverly Wilshire.

And that moment when…well, never mind.

The young guy I spoke to while pumping gas wanted to know what I was up to for the weekend. “I’m on my way to Niagara Falls to see Jerry Seinfeld,” I said.

“You mean the artist?” replied the young guy.

“No, he’s a comedian,” I answered.

The Uber driver taking us to Fallsview Casino thought Jerry was a singer doing a concert.

“No, he’s a comedian,” I informed him.

The five thousand people in the vast OLG Theatre at the Fallsview Casino Friday night certainly know him. Seinfeld, the situation comedy that Jerry co-created (with Larry David) and starred in for nine seasons, became a television phenomenon that turned Jerry into a TV superstar and remains hugely popular in reruns to this day.

As soon as Jerry, nattily attired in a dark suit and tie, bounced on stage, his audience started laughing.  Jerry kept everyone in that helpless state for the next hour.

You would not necessarily describe Jerry as angry at the world, although it occasionally seemed that way. More accurate to report that he was in fine  grumpy form about the minor inconveniences of life in general. He would prefer to be left alone and not have to talk to anyone. Talking to people is boring, he explained, yet he feels compelled to act as though he is interested when he is not.

When a woman cried out that she loved Jerry, he looked pleased. “I love you too,” he called back. “This is the perfect relationship. I love you. You love me. And we will never meet.”

Jerry does not like cellphones. He does not like streaming television. He mindlessly watches streaming shows although, like the rest of us, he never can remember what they are about—one more episode to go, one person left to kill. Then something else starts the process all over again.

He does not dislike AI. It sort of pleases him. For centuries all dumb people had to worry about was I. Now A has been invented for to do the thinking for dumb people.

He has been married for twenty-six years. His wife is the shark always moving forward. He is the dolphin leaping mindlessly out of the water. From the moment Jerry married, he learned to never under any circumstances ask  a question. When he sees something new in the house, he does not ask where it came from. It’s there now. That’s all he needs to know. When something disappears, he does not ask where it went. What’s the use? It’s gone.

He does not like to go anywhere. But when his wife tells him where to go, he goes. Even though he doesn’t like being there.

Cities grow and expand. Towering buildings are constructed filled with people and more people. Yet despite all these people, nobody ever builds a new cemetery. Where do they put all those people once they are no longer here?

Coffee saves Jerry from a miserably mundane life. He wakes up each morning dreading the day. With a cup of coffee, he is able to endure whatever is thrown at him. He hates tea, warm water with honey added, he snarls. All those names for various flavors of tea? They sound like the names of hookers in a bayou brothel.

At the end of the hour Jerry said he had to leave. The  audience strenuously objected. He said he had to go to the bathroom. That led to a rant about bathroom stalls. Why are they stalls? Why are their walls not built to the floor?

Good question to send us all home with.

On the way back to our hotel, the Uber driver asked if we’d had a good evening. I said my wife, Kathy, and I had just seen Jerry Seinfeld. We had never laughed so hard.

The Uber driver wanted to know who Jerry Seinfeld was.

Not to drop names (heh-heh) but many years ago I met the American playwright Arthur Miller whose seminal work, Death of a Salesman has been revived this summer at the Stratford Festival.

I also wrote and co-produced a thriller titled First Degree where I got to know Tom McCamus, who plays Willy Loman in the Stratford production, and who co-starred in the film with Rob Lowe.

When Arthur Miller walked into the room, you knew immediately why Marilyn Monroe would fall in love and marry him. He was tall and slim and quietly charismatic. The photos of him with Marilyn did him no justice at all.

When Tom McCamus walked into the room to audition for First Degree, you knew immediately there was something very special about him as an actor. Rob Lowe may have been the film’s star, but the best performance, by far, was given by Tom. He even got away with delivering the most cringe-worthy line in the movie. I didn’t write it, the director added it. In a scene where Tom and Rob are conducting an investigation, Tom was called upon to turn to Rob and say: “I’m reading your mail.” I still think about that line and groan every time.

All these years and hundreds of days and nights in a theatre, not to mention spending time with Arthur Miller, I had never seen Death of a Salesman. Finally, Kathy and I attended a sold-out Sunday matinee at the Avon theatre. What a revelation!

Not only is it a fine production, but Tom as the aging, failing Brooklyn salesman riding on a smile and a shoeshine, delivers one of the most powerful performances I have ever seen on a stage. This is Tom’s nineteenth season at Stratford. I have seen him in different plays at Stratford and at the Shaw Festival, always excellent, but never have I seen him inhabit a role the way he inhabits Willy.

It is staggering to watch him slowly disintegrating before our eyes. Attention must be paid: This is a great Canadian actor working at the very top of his game. If Tom were anywhere else in the world, he would be a celebrated international star. Instead, he toils magnificently and mostly anonymously in Stratford. On that stage that afternoon, he was a star of the brightest magnitude— unforgettable.

I stumbled out of the Avon and did what you do in the 21st century to honour a splendid actor in a play first produced in 1949—I bought the Death of a Salesman T-shirt. Arthur Miller is probably rolling in his grave, but I am proudly wearing Tom McCamus on my chest.

Attention, after all, must be paid.

Inside the ancient confines of Victoria University on the University of Toronto campus this past weekend, over fifty authors gathered at MOTIVE, Crime and Mystery Festival, to investigate the mystery of writing mysteries.

I was invited to attend. My author-daughter Erin Ruddy came along to hold my hand and to let readers know about her latest thriller, Pitch Dark Night, to be published next year.

Bright and early Sunday morning, I was onstage with acclaimed author Sujata Massey whose novels are set in 1920s India. She was in town with her fifth book in her Perveen Mistry series, The Star from Calcutta.

My job was to sound very interesting talking about the fifth book in my Priscilla Tempest series, Midnight at the Savoy, set at the iconic London hotel in the late 1960s. We were overseen by our delightful inquisitor, Wendy O’Brien.

To my surprise, the Alumni Hall was packed. Sujata was articulate and insightful; I babbled away as best I could. Wendy ably kept us both on track and the hour flew by.

Afterwards, we managed to convince a few readers to buy our books. I kept looking at Sujata out of the corner of my eye. I can’t say for sure, but I think she sold more books than I did.

I must say it was somewhat daunting to be in a confined space with so many who really do care who murdered Roger Ackroyd. Everyone I encountered and listened to over the two days I attended, struck an optimistic note about what they do.

Everyone on the various panels was celebrated—no bad mystery writers at MOTIVE! The producers, Zain Ahmed and Hani Yakan, were everywhere making sure we all felt very important and well cared for. They succeeded admirably. My wife, Kathy, had to take me aside and tell me to settle down. I was important she said, but not that important.

The shortcomings of publishers, meagre book sales, the impossibility of earning a living at what we all love to do, were not subjects for discussion, at least not as far as I could see.

The AI controversy currently roiling publishing circles was not talked about at all during the sessions I attended. When I briefly brought AI up Sunday morning, there was suddenly a noticeable tension in the hall.

What did I take away from a weekend of mystery writers talking? The sort of hard-boiled mystery I grew up with, the pulp fiction tough-guy private detectives created by the likes of Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammet, and Mickey Spillane have disappeared down the mean streets they once dominated.

The protagonists who inhabit today’s mystery novels are female, including Priscilla Tempest, the plucky heroine of my Savoy series. This is hardly surprising since most of the mystery readers—and this is true of fiction in general—are women. I know there were men present at the festival, I was one of them, after all, but, again not surprising, women dominated.

I was happy to slip briefly among them. Wondering who murdered Roger Ackroyd.

Sort of.

In Saint-Tropez one evening recently a large crowd gathered in the square next to the Gendarmerie Nationale, a former Gendarme headquarters now a museum devoted to French cinema, to celebrate the seventieth anniversary of And God Created Woman.

If you are not familiar with it, this is the 1956 film that not only put on the international map Saint- Tropez, until then a Mediterranean fishing village, but it also created the international phenomenon that is Brigitte Bardot.

Seventy years later, Bardot is everywhere in Saint-Tropez. She lived here until her death in December 2025 at the age of ninety-one. The elderly Bardot, the hard-right conservative, anti-Muslim animal activist, is not mentioned. Instead, BB, the youthful symbol of the sexual revolution is celebrated everywhere—in shop windows, on magazine covers, posters, photos, fashionable T-shirts and handbags.

She is a Venus in gold curled on a half-shall in front of the Gendarmerie, created by the Italian comic book artist Milo Manara with a nod to Botticelli. A new exhibition devoted to her and And God Created Woman, recounts how the young screenwriter Roger Vadim came to direct his first film with his twenty-two-year-old wife as its star.

Vadim based his screenplay on a news item about a woman who was the mistress of three different brothers and ended up killing one of them. The woman became the seductive Juliette, a free-spirited girl in Saint-Tropez who lives and loves and plays with the affections of three brothers and a suave older millionaire played by the German-Austrian actor, Curd Jergens.

Movie-making life imitated art when Bardot fell in love with one of the brothers, played by Jean-Louis Trintignant. Their affair effectively ended her marriage to Vadim. The film, shot in widescreen and color, unusual for a French film of the time, became a worldwide success and overnight turned Bardot into the symbol of freedom and sexuality she never escaped.

The exhibit argues that And God Created Woman was the precursor to what became in the 1960s the French Nouvelle Vague or New Wave of cinema. It opened the way for such auteurs as Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut. None of Vadim’s other films had the same impact as his first. Seen today it is embarrassingly amateurish. For those reasons it is difficult to regard Vadim as one of the fathers of modern French cinema. One cannot simply say he is all but forgotten—he is plain forgotten.

Bardot never left France and had no interest in Hollywood. An enduring icon known around the world, the eternal BB, yet ironically most people have never seen any of the forty-seven movies she made before retiring in 1973.

She is buried with her parents and grandparents at Cimetière Marin de Saint Tropez, bordering the Mediterranean. Her grave is not hard to find. It overflows with flowers and photographs as well as stuffed toy seals in memory of her campaign to end the slaughter of seal pups in Northern Newfoundland. She receives a constant flow of visitors.

Not far away is the man who made her famous. Roger Vadim died in 2000 at the age of seventy-two. All five of his wives, including Bardot and Jane Fonda, attended his funeral.

You eventually find him by accident after a long search. A few stones adorn the top of his burial vault. A single word is etched in gold lettering: Vadim.

There are no visitors.