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

I walk a dog named Coco almost everyday, it is not my dog but belongs to a family in the remote fishing village in Northern Newfoundland where I am staying. Coco is shedding her winter fur right now: instead of looking like a lion she resembles more a seal (she is a labrador/husky mix). I wonder if there is an analogy with humans. Am I shedding something, too, now that it is April?
There are still ice floes in the bay and heaps of snow everywhere but luckily I don`t need any crampons and long johns anymore.
When one is shedding something, one must feel lighter, I suppose. I think I'm shedding books (smile). I'm in the process of publishing a German mystery novel and an English title: "Cries from the Cold". The latter is a crime thriller set on the wild coast of Labrador, with RCMP detective Calista Gates as the main character. It is the first book of a series, my first series, by the way. "Cries from the Cold" can be pre-ordered now on Amazon, the paperback will be out in approximately three weeks, the e-book on June 25.
You probably assume that I'm fascinated by cold regions, and you are right. I've never been a person who can stand searing heat. I would probably be a good candidate for a heat stroke in that kind of temperatures. I just spent my first entire winter in Northern Newfoundland but it turned out to be an exceptionally mild winter for this area. I've come to realize that the crucial thing is to dress appropriately. Even a face covering, if necessary.
I've just read the mesmerizing book "Ghost of Everest", about a search expedition in 1999 that found the body of famous climber George Mallory who died in 1924 on the highest mountain on earth. Mallory had none of the modern clothing that today's mountaineers have. Just silk underwear and layers of sweaters made of wool, jackets made of canvas, simple leather boots and a pilot hat for his head. It is hard to imagine how Mallory could venture like this into the Death Zone on Everest. But he did.
I like to be adventurous, too, but with a calculated risk. The heroine of my latest book "Cries from the Cold", Calista Gates, cannot afford that luxury. She is thrown into the brutal Labrador winter without any ropes or guard rails.
Would you like to find out how she was doing?
Three more weeks to go!

My latest author letter starts with this paragraph: " I remember a great short story that I read many years ago. This is a short summary: A murderer escapes a prison and the people in the entire region are in panic because of it. All of a sudden, there is a string of break-ins, and soon dead bodies are found. Victims of the murderer, it seems. There is no trace of the fugitive, however. He remains elusive. Winter comes and goes. As the snow melts, another dead person is found: It is the killer`s body. It turns out that the other murders were committed long after the escaped prisoner had frozen to death. The allegedly oh so innocent people in the area had exploited the situation in order to commit crimes that would be attributed to the murderer. A ingenious story."
Every month, I send out an author letter (for which you can sign up on the homepage of my website www.bernadettecalonego.com) with news that I normally don't share anywhere else. You get more than one glimpse of my life in a tiny fishing village on the northern tip of the island of Newfoundland.
The snow has disappeared now, but I haven't discovered any bodies like in the short story above. They are entirely on the pages of my mystery novels. But on the beaches, there are carcasses of seals that were crushed between the ice pans of the pack ice. Nature is not always benevolent. Nor are the humans.
In this rural, rugged existence of mine in an isolated, mostly COVID-free environment, everything is reduced to the essentials. With so few distractions and stimuli, I can concentrate on my writing - and publishing: My mystery thriller “Cries from the Cold” is almost ready to launch in the paperback version. Publication will be before the end of May. I’m so excited! You can also preorder the e-book that will be out June 25. It is the first case for detective sergeant Calista Gates. A German reader wrote to me: “I like Calista Gates, she is tenacious but very good at handling people and she also has a vulnerable side to her. I hope you keep her as a character in your next book.” I do, and now I have a Calista-Gates series! I hope to have the second book translated soon.
Four days ago, I discovered the first flowers under the snow-free bleached old grass. My life is complete!

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

One of my three brothers will not read my mystery thrillers because they would keep him awake at night. I totally accept this (I have two more brothers who make up for it, they read my mystery thrillers even before they are published). I can get scared, too. Recently I listened to a true crime podcast. In the night, I woke up and was afraid of the dark!
On the other hand, my translator said to me that I should have more dead people in my books (is three bodies not enough?). Translating my novels, he obviously acquired a taste for dark thrills. In my personal life, I`m not always ready for them. When I watch a movie and it gets too violent I close my eyes. I cannot bear it. How much gore and horror can you tolerate, dear reader?
When my mother wanted to tell me stories about ghosts knocking on windows and lost souls wandering through a house at night, I fled. As a child, my imagination was too vivid to enjoy these tales.
Being a crime writer doesn't mean I'm not frightened in the face of danger. But it is almost impossible to predict how we will react in the face of somebody or something threatening us. Maybe we stay calmer than we think. Or people who seem to be strong break down.
I relish in building up suspense and reinforcing the mystery in my books but I don't have fun describing a bloody scene, a mutilated body or torture. Like with romance, the most intensive things that can happen are in our imagination. Once it is described in detail, it can lose its impact.
Does this mean I won`t listen to another true crime podcast anymore? Of course not. The thrill is addictive.

Bernadette Calonego My crime thrillers are always set in places that I know personally. The detective Calista Gates series for instance takes place in the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador. Some of you might know that every year I live several months in a tiny fishing community in northern Newfoundland. Detective Calista Gates is the police chief in St. Anthony, a town about half an hour from the village where I`m staying.
For my next crime novel, I have set my eyes on a very remote but stunning northern region between Labrador and the province of Québec. I love remote areas in the North: I was in the Arctic twice and also in the Northwest Territories and the Yukon. But this time, I really have to get creative to be able to travel to my desired destination. There is a tourist lodge that offers accommodation and exploratory trips with seaplanes and hiking guides. But like everything that is far up in the Great North, it is expensive. Very expensive. A seven-day trip (two days for getting there) would cost me around 16000 Canadian dollars or 12000 U.S. dollars. How many books do I have to sell to make that kind of money? I know that there are really great novels written by authors who had never been in the location they wrote about - but you could never tell because the book is that good.
I`m torn between using my life savings to make the trip of my dreams in order to write the book that I want. Or maybe I just stay put and do a lot of research and let my fantasy go wild. In my new mystery thriller "Bay of Evil" (out on January 20, 2023), part of the action takes place in the Torngat Mountains in Labrador, another area that I would have loved to visit but it is very expensive, too. Luckily, Covid 19 made the decision for me: the destination was closed. I was allowed to use the experiences of a couple who trekked through the area a few years ago. It worked splendidly for my mystery thriller.
Isn`t reading to live on borrowed life? When we read about far-away places that are unattainable, don`t we go there in our imagination and they become very real?
Hey, maybe I make a lot of money with my new book and then I pack my bags and just go North! I will let you know, one way or the other. A Dark Chill

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

Why are many of us (me included) so fascinated by small town crime? I mean, there is a lot more crime in urban areas and a city makes an intriguing background for detectives and criminals alike. But somehow I tend to gravitate toward small towns with dark secrets (just recently I read "Outback", a crime thriller by Patricia Wolf that is set in a really small town in Australia).
Maybe somehow crime is more visible in small towns and rural areas? Or is it the fact that on the surface everything seems so peaceful and friendly but when one digs deeper, one finds all kinds of hidden dark secrets. From my experience, I can say that there are some heinous crimes committed in rural areas. You would think that because everybody knows everybody, the perpetrators are caught quickly. This is not necessarily the case. Because people depend on each other, they don't want to be the ones who are talking to the police. Or they fear making enemies in an area they cannot move away from. During the summer and fall, I live in a tiny fishing community of 46 people in Newfoundland. One of my neighbours has installed surveillance cameras because he and his family don't feel safe - although only relatives of his live on his street.
There can be lots of drama in the smallest of places and sometimes it boils over. This is fodder for my mystery thrillers. By the way, I didn`t use to lock my house door in the past. But after some events, I have changed my mind.

If one, like me, lives close to the locations that appear in my crime novels, there is sometimes a strange overlap of reality and fiction.
If you have read my series, you know that my main character, Detective Sergeant Calista Gates, lives in St. Anthony, Newfoundland, in a house on a large, overgrown, former campsite. When I drove past it recently, the police were there and the ambulance drove past me. Later I learned that a woman had turned onto the main road from the entrance to the campsite and had overlooked an oncoming car.
She barely survived the collision. I saw a badly damaged pickup truck in the ditch. As soon as I recovered from the shock, I thought of Calista: I have to warn her to be careful when she turns from her property onto the road. Only after a few seconds did I remember that Calista doesn't live there in real life. That's how close you can be to the people you invent for a book.
Serious accidents always scare me. Recently, a fisherman's entire arm was ripped out when he operated a hydraulic winch for shrimp on a ship and the arm became entangled in a cable. The man was rescued by the Newfoundland Coast Guard, but the helicopter had to make a stopover in Gander so they could give the man blood transfusions. He almost bled to death during the transport. Life is dangerous, and not only in crime novels.
Bernadette Calonego

Our snowmobile broke down a few days ago and it needs to be repaired. The parts - if we can buy them - will cost around 3000 Canadian dollars. We hope to find used parts but it is uncertain. A new snowmobile can cost up to 30000 Canadian dollars, more than a decent car. One cannot really live without a snowmobile in northern Newfoundland in winter. My fisherman needs to go over the barrens to cut down trees for firewood. There are places that cannot be reached on the road when there is lots of snow. We will have to make a big decision how to proceed.
Sometimes people ask me if the costs of living are way higher in remote places in Canada's North than for instance in Vancouver. My usual answer is: "It depends." I don't find food much more expensive in our isolated area than in Vancouver (the Arctic is a different story). But in my tiny Newfoundland village, there is no supermarket chain like Costco within reach. (There is no IKEA store either on the entire island of Newfoundland.) On the other hand, I am not tempted to buy the latest fashion or exquisite furniture for our modest fisherman's house. I own a second-hand car with a battered windshield because the salty air and the salt on the roads in winter make a vehicle rust out in no time.
There is no opportunity to splurge on entertainment in winter: I pay ten dollars to participate in a competitive card game or bingo. The last concert I went to was several years ago (very few concerts come to our depopulated area). During the Iceberg Festival, I went to Trivia Night in the local pub which I really enjoyed (I even won a t-shirt!).
With Netflix, it is not so bad not to have a movie theatre in town - nor a book store. I do appreciate Amazon for book deliveries.
When I started to spend time in remote northern Newfoundland, I worried that I would be bored and not stimulated enough. It turned out that I am busier than ever. Writing mystery thrillers, but also meeting people, going on hikes, trying new handicrafts, training a dog, helping a cat rescue group as a volunteer, zooming with friends. And hey, if push comes to shove - the temptations of New York and Vancouver are just two flights away!

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.