Dreaming BIG with Joyce Woollcott

HALLIE EPHRON: Joyce Woollcott has big dreams, and why not?

The Belfast-born mystery writer who lives in Canada hit it big with her debut novel, A Nice Place to Die. It won the RWA Daphne du Maurier Award and was short-listed in the Crime Writers of Canada Awards of Excellence and was a Silver Falchion Award finalist at Killer Nashville.

Now she's out with a second novel and even more good news. I'll let her tell it...

                                

Joyce Woollcott: It’s one thing to dream about writing a book, another thing entirely to write two books and have them picked up by a publisher, have strangers read them, and hopefully like them.

My dream came true, and I can now call myself a published author. Although, probably like a lot of new authors I’m a little embarrassed to admit to it when asked. Still, it’s a wonderful thing to have happen and I thought, how amazing, what more could I want?

Well, I admit I did envy those writers whose titles were snapped up by audiobook companies, but I thought, no, no way would I ever get that lucky, imagine having a professional actor read your words––not going to happen.

But it did happen! Both my titles, A NICE PLACE TO DIE and BLOOD RELATIONS were sold to Tantor Audio, a huge audiobook publisher, and now A NICE PLACE TO DIE is out in the world, read by a fabulous LA-based Irish actor, Alan Smyth. BLOOD RELATIONS is coming in the next months. My goodness, how fantastically exciting.

Right then, I actually don’t expect anything else to happen, I’m not James Patterson or Colleen Hoover and I’m not buying a home in the Hamptons or a private yacht anytime soon, but as I said at the beginning, A Girl Can Dream, can’t she?

And, here is my dream—a TV series.

We all want that don’t we? Everyone who has written a mystery I’m sure has fantasized about a movie or tv show. It’s fun to imagine what actors would populate your world.

Now––to be clear, I know this is not going to happen, not a chance, too many fabulous mystery books out there are not on TV, and seriously, how can this be? Dervla McTiernan, Sarah Stewart Taylor, Adrian Mckinty, just to name a few.

Still, it’s fun to pick actors and actresses you would like to play roles in your book.

Since most of you won’t have read my novels, I have just a few main characters to tell you about and who I’d like to cast. My hero/protagonist is Detective Sergeant Ryan McBride––and he’s easy––In more ways than one. Tall, with dark hair and navy eyes. A typical brooding Irishman, as one of my other characters described him.

Let me see… Jamie Dornan? Too obvious? Although, he would be perfect—no? Three years older than Ryan (who was born in 1989). Or another candidate, David Caves, he plays Jack Hodgson in the British crime series Silent Witness. He even, and totally by coincidence, attended the same school as Ryan, Campbell College in Belfast. He is quite a bit older though, ten years. As is handsome Aidan Turner of recent Poldark fame. He was born in 1983. Allowances could be made, seriously.

Ryan’s partner, Billy Lamont, is tall too, and skinny. Light brown curly hair and freckles. A family man to the core. I’d love Domhnall Gleeson to play him, he would be perfect. And Rupert Grint of Harry Potter fame would be fabulous too. Eddie Redmayne would work, yes he’s a little older, but he looks young…so, I’ll pencil him in.

As for Ryan’s boss, Inspector Girvan, I’d have to narrow that one down to either Brendan Gleeson or Liam Cunningham. Obviously Kenneth Branagh would work but he’s probably busy. I’ll pencil him in too, just in case…

Detective Constable Maura Dunn. She’s serious, well organised and once she starts an investigation, she’s all consumed by it, she won’t let go. She’s focussed on the job and when she started in the police she cut her long hair to a no-nonsense bob. Aisling Franciosi seems to fit the bill, and Sarah Greene would do nicely too, she’s a little older but a terrific actress.

My latest book, BLOOD RELATIONS, has a couple of secondary characters I would love to see on screen. Gracie and Doris, two older ladies who get into big trouble and then manage to get out of it again. And Chief Inspector Sheila Howells. She swears like a trooper and is outrageously politically incorrect. My pick for her? Siobhán McSweeney. (The headmistress nun in Derry Girls.)

Do you have favorite books you would love to see as a TV series or movie? How would you cast them?

BLOOD RELATION

Belfast, Northern Ireland: early spring 2017. Retired Chief Inspector Patrick Mullan is found brutally murdered in his bed. Detective Sergeant Ryan McBride and his partner Detective Sergeant Billy Lamont are called to his desolate country home to investigate. In their inquiry, they discover a man whose career with the Police Service of Northern Ireland was overshadowed by violence and corruption. Is the killer someone from Mullan’s past, or his present?

And who hated the man enough to kill him twice?

Is it one of Patrick Mullan’s own family, all of them hiding a history of abuse and lies? Or a vengeful crime boss and his psychopathic new employee? Or could it be a recently released prisoner desperate to protect his family and flee the country? Ryan and Billy once again face a complex investigation with wit and intelligence, all set in Belfast and the richly atmospheric countryside around it.

Writing What You Know, a guest blog by J. Woollcott

Julia Spencer-Fleming: Should you write what you know? That may be the most loaded question among writers, after "to self-publish or not?" On the one hand, of course not - we portray murderers, after all, and I'm pretty certain most of us haven't ever done someone in. Stephen King isn't a vampire or a telekinetic high-schooler, but he certainly hit the ball out of the park with Salem's Lot  and Carrie. 

On the other hand, there are places and characters and stories that can only be told by an author who knows. And there is a certain magic that comes when an author returns to their home, or their profession, and it causes their fiction to rise above the ordinary. That's just the case for Joyce Woollcott, who was far from both her present home in Ontario and her birthplace when she felt that magic calling her. The result? Her debut, A NICE PLACE TO DIE, the start of a new Irish procedural series. She's here today to tell us how it happened - and how you can go home again.

How I came to write what I know, sort of …

My husband and I were enjoying a Mediterranean cruise. As the ship sailed out of Valencia late one evening, with the lights in the harbour twinkling behind us, I realized that a lot of the fun we’d had was due in large part to the company we’d kept: my cousins and their wives from Northern Ireland. Not a raucous bunch, but they were funny and we had laughed our way through the holiday.

 

 

 

I had just recently decided to retire. I wanted to travel and paint and I wanted to write. I had completed a series of paintings of birds and flowers and they had been well received. I had also finished a manuscript, a mystery about a kidnapped child. I set it in Mexico City, Veracruz, and New York.

Some of Joyce's paintings

 

 I had enjoyed writing that story about a New York City Detective on stress leave going to Mexico to help solve a kidnapping. I’ve been to New York a few times but never to Mexico City or Veracruz. I’d done a lot of research for it, looked up settings online, but never lived there. Now here I was with group of friends and family, one of whom had been a policeman, and he had lots of stories to tell. That old write what you know line came to mind. Why not, I thought, write about the country where I was born?

 

It had been many years since I lived in Northern Ireland, and when I started on my first DS Ryan McBride book, I decided to set it in 2016. I didn’t have to incorporate Covid, but it did mean I couldn’t travel home even if I wanted to. Once again, research would have to be online. Writing the story, working on plot in the DS McBride manuscript, was fundamentally the same as my first book. But I still had to look up much of the detail. New streets, buildings, places I had never been to.

 

 

 

 

Setting and dialogue, however, came easily. I remembered the particular way people spoke. Yes, there’s death and various other crimes in A Nice Place to Die, but there’s humour, too, because that’s what people are like back home. Funny. One of the most important discoveries to me was my vivid memory of landscape and countryside. The descriptions came easily because I’d been there, I could feel it. Walking in damp fields with birds wheeling above, and rain showers coming out of nowhere on sunny days.

 

 

I don’t for a moment believe you should only write what you know. Yes, it helps, but I write about a detective who is male and I’m neither. I think it’s more important to write what you love to read. As I get older I seem to have drifted toward specific kinds of mysteries. I enjoy police procedurals and the careful, painstaking unravelling of the crime. I tend to gravitate towards UK-based stories. I love the setting to be overcast and gloomy. And don’t we all enjoy brooding, angst-ridden protagonists?

 

 

Do you have favorite locations or seasons? City or countryside? The dark and rainy Edinburgh of Inspector Rebus or the gritty Dublin of Tana French? Dark Nordic thrillers or lighter reads like the Kinsey Millhone series from Sue Grafton, set in the warm and sunny fictionalized town of Santa Teresa, California? Do you have a special kind of mystery you love to read?

It was A NICE PLACE TO DIE...

The body of a young woman is found by a river outside Belfast and Detective Sergeant Ryan McBride makes a heart-wrenching discovery at the scene, a discovery he chooses to hide even though it could cost him the investigation – and his career.

The victim was a loner but well-liked. Why would someone want to harm her? And is her murder connected to a rapist who’s stalking the local pubs? As Ryan untangles a web of deception and lies, his suspects die one by one, leading him to a dangerous family secret and a murderer who will stop at nothing to keep it.

And still he harbors his secret ...

J. Woollcott is a graduate of the Humber School for Writers and BCAD, University of Ulster. Her first mystery, Abducted, was long-listed in the Canadian Arthur Ellis Awards in 2019. Her second book, A Nice Place to Die, won the RWA Unpublished Mystery/Suspense Daphne du Maurier Award in 2019 in New York. A Nice Place to Die was also long-listed in the Arthur Ellis Awards for 2020 and short-listed in the Crime Writers of Canada Awards of Excellence in 2021. She is working on part two of the Ryan McBride Belfast Murder Series, Blood Relations, due out in August 2023.

She is a member of Crime Writers of Canada, Sisters in Crime, International Thriller Writers,  and the Suncoast Writer’s Guild. You can find out more on her website, and follow her on Twitter as @JoyceWoollcott.