Memorial Gathering for LOU ALLIN

From Kay Stewart:

Memorial Gathering 

For 

LOU ALLIN 

Sunday, September 14, 2014 

2-4:30 p.m. 

Victoria, BC 

With Lou Allin’s death on July 10, many of us lost a friend. 

CWC also lost a long-time member, award-winning author, and energetic supporter of Canadian crime writing. During her tenure as BC/Yukon VP and membership chair, Lou organized many CWC events and encouraged scores of new and established writers to join. She also gave generously of her time to mentor aspiring authors and to review books for anyone who asked (and some who didn’t). A dedicated conference participant, she never missed a Bloody Words and co-chaired Bloody Words 2011 in Victoria. She will be greatly missed in our community. 

The memorial gathering on September 14 will provide an opportunity to honor Lou as friend and colleague. 

You are invited to email your thoughts, anecdotes, photos, and/or favorite passages from Lou’s books (please include the title!) to kay_stewart@shaw.ca by September 7. These messages will be available for reading during the gathering and will then be collected for presentation to Lou’s partner. 

If you plan to attend, please email Kay Stewart at the above address for further details.

Lou Allin: Murder, Eh?

I was so saddened to learn of the passing of Canadian Mystery author Lou Allin. Lou was funny and witty and generous in her support to the entire mystery community.  She will be missed. This article by Lou Allin appeared in the recent issue of Mystery Readers Journal: Canadian Mysteries.

LOU ALLIN
Murder, Eh? 

North of the 49th, we “don’t get no respect.” Aside from legends like Louise Penny, Giles Blunt, and Linwood Barclay, most crime-writing Canucks fight an uphill battle, a maple-leaf mouse sleeping with a stars-and-stripes elephant.

Knowing this, why in the world in 1995 did I set my books in Northern Ontario? Easy answer. I lived there, and landscape defines the characters.

Blame my late start on Ohio, where I lived from age 3 to 32, the ho-hum urban settings of Cleveland and Columbus, then grad school in Athens and a dismal year in poverty-stricken Portsmouth. No inspiration. I was a bush woman-in-waiting.

Then in 1977 I moved to a natural paradise. Canadians would laugh at that description, because the Nickel Capital around Sudbury was notorious as one gigantic pollution pit. Over a century of ruthless logging, then the discovery of nickel, led to open-air smelting and acid rain. The area had a black-rock moonscape the size of Manhattan. Astronauts trained there.

Just before I arrived, the International Nickel Company (Mother INCO) built the Superstack. Whether it wafted the particulate clouds to North Bay or actually “scrubbed” them remains another mystery, but a thirty-year regreening campaign began in earnest. Business, government, and citizens trundling over that bleak core area the size of Manhattan spread “rye on the rocks,” grass seeds and nutrients along with hardy pines. Lake pH balances were restored, and the area turned green again.

Living forty-five minutes north on a glorious sixty-four-square-mile meteor crater lake with massive oaks and maples and wilderness, I had a different perspective, tramping personal footpaths for the next twenty years. Crown land extended from my cozy cottage for hundreds of kilometres in three directions. With no television, only skis, boots, snowshoes, snowmobiles, and canoes, I learned the landscape fast. I had to. Amoral nature took no prisoners.

I studied birds, beasts, flora and fauna, geology, history, and even bought topo maps for final tweaks. God forbid a stream or hill might be in the wrong place. If only a rail line ran to Thor Lake, so be it.

I judged the winter temperature by inhaling. Icy nostrils said -20C. Coughing meant -30C, and I even saw -45C….NOT including wind chill. The frozen lake was a motion picture, whether highlighting a wolf pack at dawn, or carrying a truck convoy in late March. Ice-hut villages puffing smoke and the rainbow of Northern Lights would have pleased Brueghel.

Tired of reading bad paperback mysteries every weekend, I wrote Northern Winters are Murder in 2000. That was followed by Blackflies are Murder, Bush Poodles are Murder (I got a pup), Murder, Eh?, and appropriately as I left, Memories are Murder. The themes were universal yet Canadian. Mining pollution, residential school abuse, bear hunting and marten trapping. They starred Belle Palmer, a realtor familiar with the outback.

My series was an ongoing love letter to a generous community which had embraced me. The local tourist board sold my books. I had a solid reader base at the college where I taught.

Then I moved to Vancouver Island. Time and place for a new series. Instead of my middle-aged realtor, getting old for life-threatening chases, I chose a young RMCP Sergeant in a small coastal detachment. When I arrived with fifty pages completed, I found out that she couldn’t be a sergeant because the staff was too small. Enter Corporal Holly Martin. Nor could she be officially a detective, but she could look at suspicious or cold cases.

Weary of are Murder titles and a frustrated English PhD, I chose lines from Victorian poems. Tennyson, Browning, and Rossetti:

And on the Surface Die 

She Felt No Pain 

Twilight is not Good for Maidens 

Coming up will be Honour Thy Parents (Clough) and Convergence of the Twain (Hardy).

Thirty-five years past her age, I’m getting used to young Holly, not as sure of herself as worldly-wise, tongue-in-cheek Belle Palmer. Holly lives with her professorial father, who teaches Popular Culture. Norman Martin has a border-collie rescue, a frugal Smart Car and is into dog agility like much of the island. Holly works aside an older woman corporal, a prickly but wise foil, and a young handsome Sikh officer rookie.

I relearned my landscape. 8C is not -40C. Any rare snow on the coast turns to rain. And damp? I’m colder here than in Sudbury, where I had an R 2000 house and long burning oak and maple instead of crummy fir which goes to bed at nine pm. Holly’s house is also only 2X4 instead of 2X6, even though it looks like a Greek villa. Once it had a banana plant, and horticulturists swear that lemons can be grown here.

There are no foxes on the island, nor skunks, nor moose, not even one chipmunk. But lots of deer, bear, elk (farther north), and cougars. Blue herons surf the kelp beds, and bald eagles whistle. River and sea otters run across roads, and barking sea lions camp on the beach, waking us at four a.m.

 But “my” trails are gone. The forest companies own or lease most of the land down south and are intent on fueling the Chinese and Japanese appetites. They’ve closed most mills, shipping raw logs. Loaded trucks pass me on this coastal road, sometimes one every FIVE minutes. When they overturn, it’s pick-up-sticks. At least the companies plant to erect a wind farm on the “Easter Island” hills they’ve despoiled. They are pairing with one of Canada’s greatest First Nations successes, the T’sou-ke tribe, totally solar-powered and a national inspiration.

 What’s new? Banana slugs in three varieties, few if any mosquitoes in the salt air. Douglas fir, Sitka spruce, hemlock, alder, and bigleaf maple have replaced the Boreal hardwoods. Fall’s palate is not as brilliant, but rhodos bloom in March and I see daffodils peeking up Feb. 8.

The land is a banquet with the richest selection of berries on the continent, due to the long growing season and rare frost. Salmonberries, salal, two huckleberry varieties, creeping blackberries, Himalayan blackberries, wild strawberries.

No poison ivy. But invasives like scotch broom, English ivy, and gorse, all brought by homesick Scottish founders. Huge cow parsnips and colourful yellow skunk cabbage begin the parade, followed by edible tubers from the blue camas and chocolate lily. Fungi like chanterelles accompany exotic candysticks and gnome plants.

The sea adds its bounty. Halibut and salmon, each creek marked as “our resource”. Clams, oysters, whelks, shrimp, and octopus. Some seaweed is edible, and the larger bull kelp is made into baskets. Add an abundance of deer and see why our First Nations ate better than most of their eastern relatives.

We’re bound not by distance but by water. Ferries are expensive, a driver and car paying $165 for a round trip to Vancouver. RVs? If you have to ask…. We can see our US neighbours across the Strait of Juan de Fuca, another living water portrait. Behind their shores loom the mighty Olympic Mountains with Little Egypt, a secretive pyramidal peak. The fog toys with us as mounds of whipped cream on one side roll to the other. And freighters, timber ships, oil tankers, and seasonal cruise ships ply the waters. So do the whales, which on a clear day I can see from my bedroom window.

It may rain eternally, but you can “go to the snow,” all twenty feet of it in the hinterland heights. I’ve snowshoed in June to see the avalanche lilies.

With this exotic atmosphere, we should be in the best-selling ranks like the Scandinavians. Take this Icelandic book selection:

“Before going downstairs he telephoned Sigurdur Oli and told him to go with Elinborg to Hafnarfjordur to take Gudlaugur's for questioning.”

You are NOT in Kananaskis anymore, Dorothy. If you think that’s hard to read, you should have heard me pronouncing those names even after consulting with a scholar in Reykjavik. Boiling smoked lamb for holidays. Crawfish Parties. Icelandic details keep the pages turning.

We are not the USA North. We have our own personality and our own plastic money and shiny bi-metal coins and motto: Peace, Order, and Good Government. Two out of three isn’t bad.

Let’s tell the world and use more multicultural names like Etienne, Pierre, Telesphore, Chirakumar, Jorma, Cholmondley, Colin, Siobhan, and Wilfred.

How about places like Dildo, Quispamsis, Ecum Secum, St. Louis de Ha Ha, Buzwah, Wawa, Pickle Lake, Medicine Hat, Moose Jaw, Climax, and Spuzzum?

Platter up our foods: poutine, cod tongue, jellied moose nose, scrunchins, candied salmon.

And while we might not have many handguns, what about bug spray, Bobex deer repellent, Inuit sculptures, and chainsaws?

There might even be a birchbark scroll with a Papal plot involving the Jesuits.

Canada is as criminous as any other country. We have to stop being so gol-darned polite about it.

LOU ALLIN: R.I.P.

Such sad news. Canadian mystery writer Lou Allin lost her battle with pancreatic cancer this week. She was 69.

Born in Toronto, Canada, Lou Allin grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, where her film-booker father relocated. She received a PhD in English Renaissance Literature for her study of the murdered spy, Christopher Marlowe. With jobs scarce in the US, she returned to Canada, finding herself 250 miles north of Toronto in Sudbury, the Nickel Capital. At Cambrian College as a professor of English, she taught boring but occasionally useful courses to students of business and criminal justice.

With a cottage on a gigantic meteor-crater lake as her inspiration, she began her Belle Palmer series, featuring a realtor and her German shepherd, Freya: Northern Winters Are Murder, Blackflies Are Murder, Bush Poodles Are Murder, Murder, Eh? and Memories Are Murder.

Lou has retired to Canada’s Caribbean, Vancouver Island, and lives with Friday the mini-poodle and Zia and Zodie the border collies in Sooke BC, overlooking the Strait of Juan de Fuca where the rain forest meets the sea and banana slugs frolic. Continued attacks on the forests by the timber companies have filled in where the mining industry in Northern Ontario left off. The environment is under siege across the country.

Her new series stars RCMP Corporal Holly Martin. And on the Surface Die begins with a drowning near the village of Fossil Bay. She Felt No Pain explores the death of a homeless man. Twilight is not Good for Maidens finds the island beaches stalked by a serial rapist and killer.

A Little Learning is a Murderous Thing, an academic mystery set in the Michigan Upper Peninsula, stars Professor Maddie Temple and Nikon, a GSD pup. Another standalone, Man Corn Murders, takes place in the red-rock country of Utah in the Escalante-Grand Staircase National Monument. The cover art of native pictographs on a sunlit alcove wall won a Covey Award.

Lou’s interest in literacy causes won her a contract with Orca books for That Dog Won’t Hunt, a novella designed to appeal to adults who are reluctant readers. The main characters are a young drifter cowboy, a sixty-year-old alcoholic widow, a 1970 Mustang Mach One, and Bucky, an ancient golden retriever. The second entry, Contingency Plan, concerns a storybook romance that turns into a nightmare.

Lou contributed to the two most recent issues of Mystery Readers Journal: Canadian Mysteries and Extreme Weather. I will be posting those articles on Mystery Fanfare this weekend.

Cool Canadian Crime: Lou Allin

Today David Cole continues his Cool Canadian Crime interviews. Today: Lou Allin

Previously, David interviewed Louise Penny, Barbara Fradkin, Mary Jane Maffini, Thomas Rendell Curran, Gail Bowen, Garry Ryan, RJHarlick, Anthony Bidulka, and Rick Mofina. This group of authors were chosen by David to represent a variety of mystery genres, styles, and historical periods. More to come.

Lou Allin sings two anthems: born in Toronto, Canada, but raised in Ohio. Her father followed the film business to Cleveland in 1948. His profession explains her passion for classic films and debt to Ted Turner.

A Ph.D. in English Renaissance literature proved to be more of a hobby than a career with 1975 signaling the end of two decades of university hirings as demographics shifted. Discovering that she retained Canadian citizenship, Lou headed north, farther north than she had believed people live, deep into the Boreal forest of Ontario, where men are men and moose take precautions.

For the past twenty-five years, Lou has taught a variety of communications courses at Cambrian College, basic grammar to report writing to Canlit to public squeaking. She lives on her own meteor crater lake, canoes and snowmobiles, hikes and snowshoes in the Crown land preserves around her home. When the blackflies tap her out, she travels to the Four Corners area in the US and visits another Anasazi ruin.

DC: Go back to the days you spent writing what would become your first published novel. Did you think it was good? Did you think it would be published? In daydreaming moments, did you cast the movie?

LA: Even though I had published poetry and short stories (The National Enquirer paid twenty-five US bucks for four lines about toothpaste), writing a longer work didn't occur to me until I spent a few six-month winters in a cottage on a gigantic lake in Northern Ontario. With no television, reading seemed a good option. At the local library, crime fiction was plentiful, and after finishing a hundred, I said, "I can write as badly as this!"

When Northern Winters are Murder was finished in 1995, it took me five years to find a publisher. For awhile I had a well-meaning English agent (Anne Perry's), who couldn't find a British press who would accept Canadian authors. As for the cast, I was thinking Margot Kidder in her Superman days. By the I had found Toronto's RendezVous Press, I had two more books finished.

DC: How does your training as an English teacher help or hinder your fiction writing?

LA: Contrary to what people believe, English teachers make dubious crime-fiction writers. Everytime they want to break a rule, they have to bend their own fingers. Fragments, for example. Nothing wrong with them. And conversation becomes stilted with pronouns: "It's I" or "It's me" or "This is she" to answer a phone. Also we tend to fall in love with our prose, and that's a fatal flaw. Was it Orwell who said that good writing should never call attention to itself?

DC: Which do you prefer to write: stand-alones or series books?

LA: They both have attractions. With a series, characters become more familiar as the list continues. Avoiding formulas and finding fresh plots becomes the challenge. Beginning a second series is like coming home and finding a new house with a strange family at the dinner table. Everyone seems to know you, but you have no idea who they are.

I've published two standalones, each written before the series saw publication. A Little Learning is a Murderous Thing is an academic mystery. The copper-mining heritage of the Michigan Upper Peninsula reminded me of the Nickel Capital, Sudbury, where my Belle Palmer series is set. Using a university allowed me to revisit the sarcastic banter and petty broils of an English department. Some of the problems at Cambrian College, where I taught, are thinly disguised. Since the book was a hardcover, though, I knew the very colleagues I lampooned would be too cheap to buy it.

The American Southwest became the scene for Man Corn Murders. Thanks to several Four Corners trips, I used what I had learned about the Anasazi and Fremont tribes and their controversial experience with cannibalism. Playing with new characters can be liberating, but the retired aunt dominated the plot until I sprained her ankle and let her niece out to play.

Another influence is the dogs in my life, who channel me to include them in my plots. Freya, a late German shepherd, appears in the first series. Her replacement, Nikon, is in the Michigan book as a puppy. Then comes Bush Poodles are Murder with Friday, my mini. The lively Shogun, a border collie rescue, appears in And on the Surface Die. Oddly enough, the least realistic dog is Tut in Man Corn Murders. I never had a Nova Scotia duck toller, and it shows.

A series is like a partner. The standalone is a one-night date. What a perfect world to enjoy both.

DC: I've always been impressed by the sense of place in your books. Can you tell us a little about how you go about absorbing and recreating Sudbury and now Vancouver Island?

When I first drove to northern Ontario in 1977, I didn't know that I had arrived at the nadir of Sudbury's history as an ecological disaster theme park deconstructed over a century by the mining industry. Forests had been ravaged to rebuild Chicago after the great fire. The remaining wood had been burned to fuel open-pit ore smelting. With no groundcover, soil ran off the hills and acid rain scoured the rocks. Astronauts had come to its blackened moonscape to train (or so the rumour went). At that critical point, the Superstack had just been constructed, supposedly to clean 95% of the air, and a program of regreening had begun. Thousands of people of all ages from business, education, and the community in general began a program to plant over twenty million trees in the next three decades and re-green the hills with "rye on the rocks." So successful was this initiative, that the city received an award from the Earth Summit in Rio. A wasteland the size of New York City had disappeared. Last time I passed on a bus from Ottawa, I didn't recognize the place.

As for Vancouver Island, the primary product was timber and now tourists. From the air, it's apparent that the island has been logged several times, with only the most remote trees surviving from ancient days. Unsatisfied by this destruction, the timber companies want to turn their clearcuts to real estate and reap the profits. Joni Mitchell was right about the tree museum. Old-growth cutting should be banned. Some of these Douglas firs are three hundred feet tall and over a thousand years old.

DC: If you could go back to the beginning and change anything about Belle Palmer, what would you change?

LA: Long-term plans for my character didn't figure. I was trying to write a book, like having a baby, not worrying about where it was going to college and whom it might marry. Before long I realized that to be realistic, the character had to age. Even dicing with seasons, winter, summer, winter, fall, Belle was heading for her later forties. With the kind of action I enjoy plotting, I was asking a lot. That's why five books seemed enough, ending with Memories are Murder. She's in a parallel dimension along with her father and Freya. And her taxes for lakefront will never increase.

Holly Martin in And on the Surface Die is a mere thirty two, an RCMP corporal ready to roll. I'm just getting to know her, and I must accept her youth and lack of experience. Belle has fifteen years on Holly and sees the world differently.

DC: You wash up on a desert island. Which books would you wish to find awaiting you?

LA: Recently I faced a ten-thousand-dollar move across country and strait from Sudbury to Vancouver Island. A dollar a pound. What novels did I take? My first edition Thirty Nine Steps along with three other Buchan novels and all of Nevada Barr. These books I knew I would keep re-reading. I was ruthless, but I flinched at Dickens and brought Great Expectations, the best crime novel of the last millenium along with Robertson Davies' Fifth Business, the Canadian equivalent.

DC: As a writer, what have you not done yet that you'd like a chance to do?

LA: I'd love to write a historical. Victoria appeals to me, late nineteenth century through to World War One. Emily Carr would make a natural sleuth. For a change, I might use the first person. On the other hand, thrillers make big bucks. Woman in jeopardy fleeing with a child with health problems could be a sale. All I need is the location. Pacific Northwest or Ohio, where I grew up?

DC: Do you think Canadian crime writers face different odds from their US or British counterparts?

LA: I'll try not to whine. The biggest problem Canadian crime writers face (except for those with big publishers) is that north of the border we have only ten percent the number of readers down south. Also there is a very unreasonable prejudice by agents and publishers against novels set here, Louise Penny and Giles Blunt aside. They insist that readers would prefer not to read about a Canadian setting. If the voices on dorothyl, an on-line mystery group of over 3000, are to be believed along with the audience of every Canadians panel I've served on, this is an unfortunate myth. Gallic shrug. What's the solution?

DC: Biggest compliment?

LA: Vancouver Island replaces long snowy winters with long rainy winters, so often the outlook is bleak. Then a piece of mail from a reader comes along and revives me. The most touching compliment I received was from a blind lady, who "reads" the books on CD. She said that the settings were so real that she could see the scene. That made me grin from ear to ear.

DC: What advice would you give unpublished authors?

LA: Write like hell. Start early. Start late. But start.

Get an opinion from another author, not a relative or friend. The mystery community is very generous with its mentoring.

If you want to make more than chicken feed, get an agent, a reliable one listed in directories or better yet, recommended by a successful author friend.

If you just want to be published, study the markets and send to the few places which take books over the transom. Poisoned Pen Press. Five Star Gale. Smaller presses in the US and Canada.

Don 't stop writing. If the first one is published, the second better be lined up like the next train in the station.