100 Subscribers!

I guess that's a landmark. It's also a push to write a new post.

I started on Substack last spring. It was a tentative toe in the water, to see if there might be an audience for my fiction, and my other non-churchy writing. My full time work is as a United Church of Canada pastor- but I’ve always believed it was important to have a life, and to exercise the imagination beyond the church walls.

Maybe not that far outside the walls!

I wrote a murder mystery set in a fictional United Church congregtion, with the assistant pastor as a reluctant sleuth. That story was well received, and I felt encouraged to seek the publication of “The Book of Answers”, which was nominated for a Crime Writers of Canada Award of Excellence for an unpublished crime novel, and is under consideration for an award for best first published work. Sales of that book are up around 500, which I guess is another kind of landmark.

I was told early on that independently published books by essentially unknown authors were a hard sell, especially in Canada. I won’t say it’s been easy, but it’s gone far better than I could have imagined.

I post here sometimes about my adventures as an aspiring author, and now publisher, after I took the step of establishing my own imprint, Reluctant Sleuth Press.

I also write occasionally about what I like to read, or listen to, or watch, for fun, and to learn more of the craft of telling crime stories.

I have been on a John Sandford kick lately. I started with his Virgil Flowers novels, then branched out to the adventures of Lucas Davenport, U.S. Marshal, and those of Lucas’ adoptive daughter, Letty Davenport, who is an investigator attached to U.S . Homeland Security.

The Flowers books tend to be more along the lines of a police procedural. Virgil is with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. He often blunders into a new case while looking into a lesser crime, and relies on alliances he makes with civilians who are peripherally involved with the problem he’s been dispatched to resolve. Virgil doesn’t like guns, and often leaves his weapon locked in his truck.

The Lucas Davenport novels are thrillers, plot-driven high-stakes stories that involve chases, gun-fights and conspiracies that cross jurisdictional lines. Lucas Davenport mostly pursues killers, and has no compunctions about using lethal force. The books in his series all have the word “prey” in the title.

The Letty Davenport books grew out of the first two series I mentioned, and I see that character as an interesting amalgam of the cerebral detective, and the unrepentant trigger-puller. Before her adoption, she was a kind of feral child who fended for herself, and accepts the use of violence as a necessary tool of survival. After her adoption she excelled in school, and graduated from an upper-tier American university, Stanford in California, with an economics degree.

I like to have something to watch on the flat screen in our basement exercise space, while I am working out. It helps to have the distraction. I accepted the challenge to do 2000 pushups in the first 23 days of February. (so 100 a day!) I also made a New Year’s Resolution to run 1500 miles on our treadmill. (roughly 30 miles a week)

I started watching Station 19, which is ABC’s answer to Chicago Fire. Essentially a soap opera set in a firehouse. After working my way through ten seasons of Chicago Fire, I’m finding I’m not actually interested in the soap opera aspects of a new firehouse. So I went searching for another cop show.

I stumbled on to Rookie Blue, on Amazon Prime. It was produced from 2010-2015 in Toronto, and was apparently a favourite on ABC. I guess I wasn’t watching much network tv in those years (I still don’t) so I’d never heard of it.

After 1 1/2 episodes of the first season, my preliminary impression is the characters are roughly hewn, and propped up by stereotypes. Maybe that will improve further into the series. I admit that the bar for this sub-genre, an ongoing series about rookie cops, has been set quite high by Blue Lights, the Belfast-based drama from BBC One. (I understand they’re working season 2 !)

I do appreciate that the glimpses Rookie Blue offers of life inside the station house, and the inside of cop cars are more like what I see when I visit police stations and ride in cruisers in my role as a police chaplain.