Bernadette Calonego's Blog: Eventful - Posts Tagged "murder"

When one of my beta readers (what a word, not my invention) had finished my new crime novel "Murderous Morning", she said that what impressed her most was how I had captured life in a small town. The gossip, the backstabbing, the living-in-each-others-pockets, the intrigues, the pettiness, the jealousies, the hidden conflicts. Of course, that is not all there is, and I am witness to that. I grew up in a village on Lake Lucerne in Switzerland. Our neighbours were a farmer and a nursery. I have fond memories of my childhood in that village. I was not totally sheltered, for which I am thankful, because my days were full of small adventures.
I`m sure that there are intrigues in cities, too, but because a village is more transparent and everybody knows everybody, the conflicts are more out in the open. Even today, I remember a lot of dramas in small town life. And tragedies, too. A girl in my class was raped at age 14, and I was one of the the young pallbearers for babies who were buried in tiny white coffins. In school, I was taught by a Catholic nun who told us girls not to go swimming in the lake (she probably didn`t like our bathing suits).
In "Murderous Morning", the drama is heightened by murder and the fact that the mining town of Whatou Lake in Northern British Columbia is surrounded by wilderness. The people there are facing a whole range of challenges that make life precarious and different. Every year, I spend many months in an isolated village in Northern Newfoundland and I can see how the forces of nature, the weather and the wilderness shape people`s mind sets and reactions.
I like my books not only to be a source of suspense but also a source of knowledge about other cultures and other ways of life. Next time, I will tell you how I am staring down winter in Northern Newfoundland. Maybe the winter and cold will be staring me down...

Our house in northern Newfoundland is small and rather dark. Luckily my fisherman built a room just for me onto the back of the house. A retreat which is bright and airy. It has huge windows on all sides which is not so practical in the strong Newfoundland winds but beauty and comfort come first.
I live now with a roommate in our house. Her name is Calista Gates and she is the detective in my new mystery thriller series. I spend many hours with her, think about her, write about her, put her in place, let her move around, ask her what she wants to do. A very interesting roommate with strong views and a big heart. But she doesn’t always want to be the good cop. She is quite headstrong and wants room to develop new character traits. I’m very fond of her, and so are many readers. Which makes me happy.
I hesitated a long time to write a series with a female detective although I really wanted to. But I knew that my heroine had to be really captivating, likable, irresistible. Only if I was able to create a really convincing strong lead, my series could take off. I took the plunge, and Calista Gates was born. Will she win the hearts of my readers? Now that the series is a success in Germany and the first English translation has been published (title: "Cries from the Cold"), I am happy to see that she conquers the imagination of people.
I am not like Calista, in case you wondered. But we share one experience: culture shock.
I thought it would be interesting to send a big-city detective to a God-forsaken fishing village in Labrador in the middle of a bone-chilling winter. I can relate to the challenges she faces because of my own experiences in Newfoundland.
The dynamics in these insular settlements are very interesting. People live in each other's pockets, however a lot of things are swept under the carpet. They can resurface when it is least expected, and not always in a good way.
So whenever Calista Gates misses Vancouver and her family there, I take her into my bright, airy room at the back of the house and cuddle her. After some loving care, she is ready to take on a new murder case and a another fight for justice. Don`t we just love her?
CRIES FROM THE COLD

Every morning, my neighbour's wife in the tiny fishing community in northern Newfoundland where I spend the summers, dresses up as a Viking woman. She works at Norstead, a cluster of replica buildings of a Viking port. There she tells the many tourists who are flocking to that historic area, about what daily life was in a sod hut about one thousand years ago. She tells them - among other things - that the women went almost blind as they aged because they had to sow clothes and other things in a house that had very little light.
When I first visited that area years ago, before I started coming back every spring, I couldn`t have imagined that one day I would publish a mystery thriller that is set in this location and that in my story, one of the foreigners who visit the Viking site would disappear without a trace. My neighbour's wife who is reenacting a Viking woman is not part of the characters in my book but there are fictional people who work at the Viking Center and there is a local tour tour guide who sees something terrible happen nearby, and there are local vendors who are selling handicraft to the tourists coming from large cruise ships.
My new mystery thriller "Bay of Evil" that is available now on Amazon as e-book and paperback, has crime scenes in places not far from the bay where I live. The locals don`t mind their coves and sheds turned into places of violent acts in fiction because they know what the summer tourists see is beauty and serenity and majestic nature.
A local woman wrote to me on Facebook that she got the first two books of my Detective Calista Gates series as a gift for Christmas and that she can`t wait to read the third one. Now it is here! My crime novels are just a different tale: not a Viking tale but a story about murder and mayhem that is a bit less true than what happened in northern Newfoundland a thousand years ago.
BAY OF EVIL: A gripping mystery thriller
Bernadette Calonego

When I read mystery thrillers, I tend to gravitate towards stories in which long buried family secrets are revealed. I suspect that you have read many of these books, too.
It isn't rare that I find myself in a situation where people disclose their own dark family secrets to me. Maybe because I'm a mystery writer or because I'm a good listener. Sometimes a person says: "You could write a book about it."
But I am reluctant to use such a family secret in my crime novels after somebody has confided in me. These are usually very painful personal tragedies and if feels wrong to exploit them for a book. They might not even be credible in a novel. Reality is sometimes stranger than fiction. It really is. Recently, an acquaintance told me of an episode in her life that impacted her marriage and her family and of course herself in a terrible way. I would never have thought that such an ordeal could have happened to this very nice person.
The mystery writer in me, however, was intrigued by these very unusual events. There was passion involved, betrayal, murder (the murderer was eventually prosecuted), revenge, dispair - and the question how people get over such an experience. It seemed to me that in this case, they were not able to move on.
I'm sure that you have heard of one or more family secrets, too, maybe just hints, maybe an entire revelation. It can be oddly fascinating, but at the same time you want to protect the people involved and you keep the secret forever.
For me, these real life dark secrets are confirmation that mystery thrillers don't always exaggerate and even my vivid imagination is sometimes surpassed by true stories. I think I better leave them untouched. At least for a long while.