In the novelist’s A Lonesome Place for Murder, Washington State police chief Ethan Brand tackles the suspicious death of a former friend on the U.S.-Canada border.
In addition to the Ethan Brand novels, you write a series featuring Vancouver PI Dave Wakeland under your real name, Sam Wiebe. How does writing Brand differ from writing Wakeland?
Brand is a little bit idealized or aspirational. He’s not somebody who gets thrashed in every book, he’s much more of a cool ’70s kind of character, like Clint Eastwood, Burt Reynolds, or Gene Hackman. Unlike the Wakelands, these books are in the third person, and I like that Brand isn’t telling the story himself; it allows for a little bit more heroic energy. He’s not bragging about what he’s done or getting into the complexities of why he’s acted the way he did, we just get to see him solve a mystery.
This is the second book in the series. How has Brand grown since the first entry?
The first book is about his first day as police chief, and somebody trying to kill him, so it starts with a bang. This one starts with more of a slow burn, where Brand stumbles on a body in what turns out to be a smuggling tunnel. And because he has this potential relationship to the victim, solving the case means going into his own personal history. I wanted to make it a deeper experience that challenged him in a different way.
Talk about the Pacific Northwest setting.
I wanted to set the series in the part of America that I was the most familiar with, which is the northern border. It’s also a chance to write a small-town mystery, a subgenre I love. One thing that this particular book came out of was the history of smuggling in the Pacific Northwest. It began with rum-running in prohibition days, and now that marijuana is legal, there are tunnels and networks that have been set up, which felt like a rich vein for a mystery.
What draws you to writing about criminal investigators?
Both Brand and Wakeland want to know the answer to something so badly that they’re willing to pay high prices and suffer great consequences to get those answers. In this book, Brand has to dig up fraught, painful memories—and possibly engage with a relationship he thought he’d left in the past—to solve the case. That interested me.
You’ve said your fiction is influenced by Scottish crime writer Josephine Tey, whom most people might not associate with your work. What about her inspires you?
Tey was a terrific prose writer. I just love the way that she put sentences together, and her book The Daughter of Time is such a fascinating take on the mystery story where the main character is not investigating a current crime but a historical one. The way she found something new to do with the mystery novel, just like Agatha Christie, is endlessly impressive to me.
