HALLIE EPHRON: I'm delighted to welcome back Canadian mystery writer Ron Corbett whose first mystery novel (Ragged Lake) came roaring out of the gate as an Edgar finalist in 2018. In that novel, Ron introduced an unforgettable, crusty protagonist and seasoned cop, Frank Yakabuski.
In what feels (to me) like the blink of an eye, he's out this week with his FOURTH series novel, MUSKIE FALLS.
And I'm thrilled to say that Ron Corbett is here to talk about how Yak came to him and what he's getting up to in the new book.
RON CORBETT: First, thanks for having me on Jungle Red, Hallie. And Frank, I know you like his last name. That’s an important part of the character.
Place has a lot to do with Frank, the character, the reason I think Ragged Lake worked, and it’s all real.
Not far from where I live there’s a town that claims to be the oldest Polish settlement in Canada. I don’t know if anyone has ever bothered to double-check that, but that’s the claim. Not far from that town, there was a Yakabuski hardware store. Passed it every summer as a child, on my way to Algonquin Park. Frank is like a big fishing guide you’d meet up North. Except he’s a cop.
HALLIE: Were you surprised by the amazing reception Ragged Lake received?
RON CORBETT: Well, I thought people would like the story, you always hope that; I thought Frank was a good character, I thought I had a good villain in Tommy Bangles, and the far North, a fictionalized far North, I thought I had a good setting. I think place is important to a story and I think this series has a good sense of place. The Edgar nomination was a nice surprise.
HALLIE: Your new novel is a prequel, written after you've given your main character lots of life experience. What inspired you to turn back time?
RON CORBETT: It’s funny what happened with this book. The original idea was to have a short story about Frank Yakabuski’s first case, a very simple whodunnit locked-room mystery of about 10,000 words. One of the complications in the story would be that all four of my suspects would be tough and ornery and look guilty as hell.
My complication soon became that I quite liked the characters, and 10,000 words became 20,000 words, without any change in the plot. I soon realized I needed more of a story, to justify the extra words.
At around 40,000 words I realized none of this was going to work without a villain. At around 50,000 I realized I was writing a novel.
It was the first time a story grew on me like that, and there were many times I wished it hadn’t. One of the characters’ names, one of the suspects in Muskie Falls, his name is Leon Stoppa and I really do blame much of this on Leon.
I’d be curious to know if some of your readers have had this happen to them. I know there are a lot of writers out there. I don’t know if inspired is the right word for what happened.
HALLIE: The book is being published this week, on pre-order now on Amazon, goes live on Black Friday. Bookstores will just be in Canada.
Ron, you have another series going as well, with Berkley Books. The first book got a starred review in Publishers Weekly, and The New York Times called it a “dynamite debut” that “brims with heart and grit.” Tell us a little about that.
RON CORBETT: Yes. That’s the Danny Barrett series you’re talking about, and that’s been a lot of fun. The first book was called The Sweet Goodbye. The second book comes out in March, it’s called Cape Rage.
Similarities to Frank, a great many, but he’s younger, and he’s rootless. That’s the biggest difference. Barrett is a professional undercover cop, and he travels from case to case, a much darker figure; for Barrett, place will change from book to book.
Barrett isn’t even his real name. We don’t know yet what his real name is. It’s going to be interesting to see how this will change the two characters over time – the one that stays put; the one that doesn’t.
HALLIE: You were a journalist and a broadcaster for many years, how has that shaped you as a crime novelist?
RON CORBETT: If nothing else, it’s given me a few stories to re-tell. A lot of what was in Ragged Lake, it’s old stories.
There really was a street gang in Ottawa in the 1830s called the Shiners. They ruled the city for a few years. I wrote about them when I was a newspaper columnist.
In Cape Rage, the Liz Taylor and Richard Burton story you’re going to read, it’s true.
Being a journalist, if you were lucky enough to have been given the chance to write stories, if you weren’t just doing promotional nonsense, it’s great experience for any novelist.
HALLIE: So I'm still thinking about that 10K word short story that sprouted (bloomed?) into a full length novel. So that's a question for today: Have you ever started writing/creating something short but got seduced into producing something much longer? (For me it more often works in reverse...)
