Historical mysteries are always interesting, but even more so when they’re based on events which actually happened. Iona Whishaw‘s Lane Winslow Mysteries tell stories of events in Western Canada after the Second World War, and everything feels real.
When we talked to Iona, she gave long and thoughtful responses, and it was a pleasure just to listen to her talk as she got quite emotional about her family history behind the stories.
We loved talking with Iona at Malice Domestic 36, and the following is an edited transcript of our conversation.
All errors are our own.
CozyMystery.com: How are you doing?
Iona Whishaw: I’m excited because I just got news today that I’m nominated for a Best Traditional Novel by the Canadian Crime Writers, which is very exciting.
CM: That’s great!
IW: I mean, it’s a nomination, but it’s still lovely.
CM: But even a nomination is great?
IW: Oh, you know what, you write it in your little subscript for your things. People aren’t reading closely. They just see nominations, right. That’s how I see it. So yeah, no, I’m thrilled to bits.
Origins
CM: Canada is where you’re originally from?
IW: I was born in Canada. But then at an early age, moved to Mexico and then moved to the US when I was about 13. And I went to high school here and then went to college in Ohio. And then I moved back to Canada.
CM: But your series is mostly set in Canada.
IW: Two are set in England, and one in Tucson, and I’m working on one that’s set in Mexico. But there’s always a link, because there’s the inspector and then there’s his sergeant. And when the inspector has to go away, the sergeant has to pick up the crime work in Canada. So you get to see both stories.
On Writing
CM: How did you start writing?
IW: I knew that I was going to need to be writing after I retired from my job as an educator. So I started writing 400 words every morning, two years before I retired, to make sure I had a writing pattern in place. And right away, on the first day, I was out of the gate.
CM: What’s your writing style?
IW: I’m not a plotter. I’m a pantser. But I think I’m naturally that way. But I also do it because there’s this moment when you’re writing, where it’s just all happening, the words are coming out, they’re going on to the paper. I’m not thinking, it’s just happening. And for me, this late in my life, to be able to be involved in such a profoundly creative experience is really important to me. So that’s why I’ve really enjoyed writing them.
Walking and Thinking
CM: How do you get through when you’re stuck?
IW: Typically, when I’m really facing a wall, I just go out and walk and things’ll just… walking is like magic. You go out, and they just trickle in. You know, the idea is that oh, yeah, of course.
CM: Just from walking?
IW: And I think I’ve read about how it happens. There’s something about moving your physical body, and how that triggers your brain as well at the same time. So yeah.
CM: That’s amazing.
IW: Where it’s really good is if you have a sort of knotty problem, where you’re like, you’ve painted yourself into a bit of a corner and you can’t quite figure out how to get out of it. And you pester your husband and go, Okay, look, I’ve got everybody in, you know, what do I do now? His response to me one time was “uh-oh, pantser on fire”. That was very clever. But he’ll often come up with, well, what about this? Or what about that, right? And so, we walk together, and you know, there’s this moment where I don’t really need his ideas anymore. Like, “Stop. No. I know what I’m doing.”
Disruptions
CM: Does he bother you when writing?
IW: No, not at all. I write first thing in the morning, I’ll make my cup of tea and read the New York Times for a bit, and then I’ll begin writing. And unless something’s on fire, he doesn’t [bother me] at all.
CM: Do you mind disruption when you’re writing?
IW: I don’t even listen to music. I can’t listen to music. Certainly nothing with words, that would be outrageous. But you know, T.E. Lawrence, the famous Lawrence of Arabia, wrote all of Seven Pillars of Wisdom listening to Beethoven. And I tried that early on. I can’t. It talks too much to me. I can’t have that.
CM: No music.
IW: I think if it was the kind of music you get when you go for a spa, it might kind of work, because that’s sort of aimless. You know, it’s not got a concrete rhythm you’re having to pay attention to. There’s not much in the way of a melody that pulls you off. That might work.
Family History
CM: Your mother was your inspiration for the stories?
IW: She was a very accomplished woman, beautiful, tremendous linguist. And I learned very late in her life, like a year before she died, that she had actually done some intelligence work during the war. I was amazed and astonished by that. I always knew that her father was a spy, and worked for MI6 and had since before the First World War. But I also learned recently from people in Latvia that his two brothers also worked for MI6, because my mother and my father both grew up in Latvia as part of a big British community there.
CM: Are the stories from her life?
IW: I was inspired by that. So the stories are still my own almost completely. And I set them in this community where I lived as a very small child. And the whole series opens with her buying this house, which happened to be the house that I lived in as a very small child, in this tiny community full of British immigrants who were growing apples that had been there since you know, 1911 or something like that. But as I go through my books, there’s a lot of things that I knew about my mother that have begun to be included.
Dealing with family history
CM: Her father—your grandfather—wasn’t a very nice person?
IW: She didn’t get along with her father at all. He was quite kind of emotionally cruel to her. And he appears in the book a lot. And I actually learned quite a bit about him recently because I was invited to Latvia to celebrate his life, because he began the Latvian Football Association 100 years ago. So it was kind of exciting. The British ambassador was there, we had a ceremony. So you know, I learned some good things about my grandfather. But there’s a lot of interesting things.
CM: But your mother’s stories are in your books?
IW: My mother rescued this woman who was being beaten by her husband, you know, and so these stories begin to come into my books. You know, she dealt with people breaking into, she lived in France for a while when I was much younger, and she had people breaking into the church where she lived. And she had amazing ways of dealing with people who were attacking her with a knife. When we lived in Mexico, two people tried to kidnap her, and she worked her way around that as well. So there’s lots of stories to draw from.
CM: Did your mother read your books?
IW: No, she died in 1999, so she never got to read them. And I didn’t start writing them till 2014. So my first book came out in 2016. So I don’t know what she’d think about them. You know, it’s interesting.
A Brother’s Experience
CM: Would she think “you’re taking my stories and putting them in someone else’s mouth”?
IW: I’m not sure she would think that. I think she was very anxious not to be seen in a bad light, you know, and she certainly wouldn’t be if she was reading these books. I mean, my brother, who was also brought up by my parents, this is significant: He’s ten years older than me, and was sent away as a small child, because my parents were British and not very skilled at this particular job. My mother was extraordinary, but had terrible parenting herself. I mean, she didn’t have much to draw on. And he wrote me a note saying, You’re being much too nice about our parents. And I said, Well, you know, it’s fiction. I mean, our parents were interesting and wonderful, but sketchy as parents go.
CM: But his experience being different to yours, he would possibly have a different perspective?
IW: Very much so, yeah, because he was born in 1939, just as the war was starting up. He was born in South Africa, where my parents were living at the time. And my mother was already involved in intelligence work there, which I didn’t find out until, as I said, just before she died, and my father was training as a pilot. He became a bomber pilot and moved to England where all of the Canadian and South African and Australian pilots all ended up in England, working out of there. And so they had to find a place for my brother. So he was put with a Dutch farmer and the Boers in South Africa were actually in opposition to the British. So it was a very strange experience for him, I’m sure.
And then he was sent off to school in England. You know, he was eight years old or something. And then my parents moved to Canada, where I was born, and then he was sent back from England on his own. So his whole experience is very, very different from mine. My father had a much more normal family life, to be honest. But my mother’s father was away. He wasn’t kind. Her mother was dead. She was brought up by governesses. You know, she didn’t have too much to draw on, in terms of what we would call parenting today. But one survived.
Her own parenting style
CM: How do you bring that into your own parenting?
IW: It’s a good question. I have one child. And I think the biggest draw for me was when my baby was born, I looked at him and I thought, boy, how could parents be neglectful of something like this, and from then on, I always tell my son, he taught me how to be a parent. I worked my whole life with children, and high school kids and kids on the street, and all of that, right. Even as a principal, I was very, very engaged with the kids in my school and their families and social issues and stuff.
And I always tell him, he’s the one who taught me to care about kids and to understand, you know, how vital that connection is with your kid. So he has two grown boys now, who are my grandchildren, who he’s just been the most miraculous father for. So I feel very good that I was able to kind of move on from what I had, and to appreciate the situation that my mother was brought up in. And, you know, during the war too, they were all engaged elsewhere, really.
History and Inspiration
CM: The people of the time also inspired you.
IW: All of the stories and scenarios, they’re really, a lot of it is based on the history of the area where I live. A really important one was the appearance of the Sudetenland refugees, who are Germans who came from Czechoslovakia during the war. And you know, whereas Canada was kind of being very oppressive to German Canadians, in came all these guys, and they set them up in a horribly difficult place to live. And they just told amazing stories about how they survived up there and what they did. They weren’t farmers, the Canadians all thought “they’re Germans, they must be farmers,” but they weren’t. So they had to figure out how to live in a very inhospitable place.
CM: An interesting time and place.
IW: My next book, which is coming out in a week and a half, deals a little bit with the Japanese internment, which happened all up and down the Pacific coast. And I learned just a week and a half ago from a Japanese writer, based in California, that the Canadian experience was actually much harsher. Which is really interesting, like Canadian-Japanese people weren’t allowed back to the coast until 1949, four years after the war is over. So it’s just been very interesting, you know, to look into all these different histories and use that combination of history and my own mother’s stories or father’s stories. They all go in. I pillage my family.
Canadian History
CM: Apart from your family history, what historical research does it take to write a series set in such a condensed timeframe?
IW: A lot of it is, you know, you look around you. So when I was growing up, for example, like the book that’s coming out in a week and a half, involves, to some extent, a group called the Sons of Freedom. And they were a Doukhobor group. So Doukhobors were Russians who came to that part of the country, under the auspices of Tolstoy, because they were pacifist in Russia, and they were persecuted. And Tolstoy wanted to get them out to someplace where they could thrive and have their communes and all of the things that they did.
And they started out great guns, but they didn’t want to educate their children with the society at large, they wanted to educate them themselves. They were pacifist, they were vegetarians, they lived on communes. And the British Columbia government soon took care of that, and broke up all the communes and said, You can’t hang on to that much land, and all of that sort of thing. So it became quite a political issue that lasted from the early 40s, right through until I was a kid in the 60s, where they were sabotaging things, and so on. So that’s an example of something that I could draw on.
CM: You include a number of these historical social issues in your stories.
IW: There was an indigenous tribe called the Sinixt who lived there. And they had a territory that was a great big square with the border through it, and Washington was the other side of their territory. And right from the beginning of the 20th century, they were just pushed out by dams and farms and mining and all of that. So they all moved south, but actually, they still have a presence there. And so I met an elder who very kindly walked me through the whole history and was delighted that I would include this in one of my books, Framed in Fire. Because, you know, it’s not a well known group of people.
CM: So much inspiration in the area.
IW: The story of the Sudetenland refugees is unbelievable. And then there were memoirs written by these poor guys who turned up in the Peace River Valley in April with, you know, thick snow and wet soil and bad equipment and all of that, that were just very, very touching to read. There’s the Home Children, which is not so much an American institution, but very much a colonial institution. And these were all children who were scooped off the streets of London and Liverpool and all the big cities, and sent out to the colonies.
So at first you had to be thirteen to get this to happen to you, and you would be sent out. And the idea was, you were going to go onto a farm, clean, fresh air, you would be getting $1 a year or something, you’d be able to buy your own land. The real truth of it, and this was true in New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, Canada, where they were sent, is some kids were lucky like that, a lot of them were abused, they were way too young for the kind of work they were being asked to do. And so there’s a lot of very heart-rending stories, and there’s probably a quarter of a million Canadians now who are descendants of home children. So it’s just very interesting.
Remembering History
CM: It’s important to tell these stories.
IW: So when I’m writing those stories, I’m trying very hard to stay true to the truth. For that, like, I’m making stuff up, and you have to have a plausible kind of story. But at the same time, I want to keep some of those things really, really true. And I’ve had letters from descendants of Home Children, and people from the Sudeten refugee group, saying, you know, it was like reading my father’s memorials, or hearing my grandmother’s stories, you know, so I felt very good.
CM: What a compliment!
IW: Well, it’s the biggest I’ve ever had. Yeah, absolutely. Without a doubt. You know, it still moves me now.
CM: And you’re putting this in while also writing a good story.
IW: So that’s what I tried to do, is to keep really close to the human story, while still having all this other stuff. And of course, you know, they’re quite humorous, and they’re quite witty, and they have a very English sensibility, because both my parents are British, and my family is British. So they’ve been really good fun to write.
Continuing the series
CM: When you started writing, did you ever expect to still be writing eleven books later?
IW: Absolutely not. I didn’t even expect to get through the first book. I self published it, because I thought no one would want to publish some old lady’s books, right. And then it was costly. And it was kind of messy. And I was driving around with books like an Amway salesman. I think the self publishing thing is much, much better now than it was then. But it takes a kind of energy I don’t have also.
CM: But you got on with a traditional publisher.
IW: I wrote the second book, and someone said, you shouldn’t be driving around with books in your car. I’m gonna call a friend who was a publisher, he said. And they must have really enthused because that other publisher called me and said, I’d like to talk to you on the phone. And they were incredibly enthusiastic about the books and bought the first two immediately, as imperfect as they were, and we’ve been going ever since.
CM: Do you have an arc to the stories? Or is it just one after the other?
IW: The big arc people are asking is, is my main character, Elaine Winslow, going to get pregnant? That’s the big question everybody’s asking. And I keep saying she’s only been married a year, give her time. But in 1948, if you got married, you could pretty well expect to get pregnant, you know, unless there was some difficulty. So you know, what happens? I think with someone like me, is you write, write, write, write, write. And then you go, okay, the point is reached where I have to begin to tie up some of these elements, right?
Continuing the Series
CM: How far ahead do you plan to write these books?
IW: I mean, Louise Penny’s written 20 books. I’m only on 11. So I feel like I have time.
CM: So you have no end in sight. You think you’ll just keep it going?
IW: You know, until I feel I’m writing crap. Then yeah, and I’m really hoping that someone tells me, you know, that my publisher will go, Iona, this one is crap.
CM: You just got nominated for an award!
IW: Yeah, no, no, it’s unbelievable.
Lightning Strikes the Silence, the newest book in the Lane Winslow Mysteries, is out now!
Thank you to Iona Whishaw for talking to us!
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