Second Cromarty Crime weekend visit for writer now all the way from Canada
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Crime writer Jonathan Whitelaw takes a slightly longer route to this year’s Cromarty Crime & Thrillers weekend – all the way from Canada! Guests at the event include Lin Anderson, Shona Maclean, Mark Billingham in conversation with Neil Lancaster, plus Inverness crime writers Margaret Kirk and Helen Forbes. Below, Jonathan talks about his return after last year’s debut.
Q This time last year was your first Cromarty crime weekend – and you had just finished your journalism job. Been missing it?
A There are huge parts of it. In my departing words I said some of my best memories were in the newsroom and some of my absolute worst memories were … in the newsroom – and sometimes they were only about 10 minutes’ apart! I’ve always felt it was a calling – and the highs can be dizzying!
Q This year you come to us with a new book – and from Canada?
A The original plan was that The Village Hall Vendetta would have been out this week and Cromarty was going to be an unofficial kick-off of that. But my publisher Harper North took the decision to move it back two weeks. But I was always going to do Cromarty because I was made to feel very welcome last year by the organisers and the attendees. And I’d never been that far north before. We knew last year we were moving to Canada. But where we are now is a city called Grand Prairie, four-and-a-half hours’ drive north of Edmonton. And Grand Prairie is on the same latitude as Glasgow. So I may be in Canada now, but I’m no further north than I was when I’m in Cromarty, just a bit further to the left!
Q What took you there and have you coped with the winter?
A My wife is a doctor so her job has taken us there for the last 11 months. And though it is very, very different, it is also very similar in lots of respects. We’ve successfully navigated our first Canadian winter. Barring a week before Christmas which was -40, the average temperature over the last three to five months has been -20 or -25. Oddly, it’s not that cold. I know that sounds ridiculous but because we are in the middle of the prairie it is pretty much a grass desert, so the air is very dry.
There are two strange quirks we have noticed about that: I’m forever shocking myself off the door handles. And also our finger and toenails grow faster! But genuinely the -40 was the first time I’ve felt cold since we’ve been here, that is proper dangerous cold.
I was back to the UK in March for a festival in Whitley Bay and I got off the train at Newcastle and, I kid you not, I was frozen to the spot, though it was only -4. It was the cold wind from the north. But I was being rinsed the whole weekend on social media for being an absolute fraud! And quite right too, I was just being a diva.
Q Why is the genre of cosy crime fiction for you?
A It’s a label I’m very proud to have. For me ‘cosy’ is usually just the way you tell the story. There is still usually a murder, though one of the staples that makes it what it is, is you never usually see the murder.
Q Your ‘detectives’ are son-in-law Jason and his mother-in-law Amita...
A I love characters who don’t get on with each other. That mother in law and son in law relationship is not historically one of roses and sunshine and definitely not in my character Jason’s case with his mother-in-law Amita. But I didn’t want their relationship to be cliched and to fill it with Les Dawson-syle mother-in-law jokes! With cosy crime, a murder has still happened but you don’t see the knife going in. That is still the mantra I use when I sit down to write. There are statistics that show cosy crime take an upward trend in times of national crisis because it is a wonderful escape.
Jonathan speaks at 2.30pm on Saturday. More info: cromartyartstrust.org.uk/crime-and-thrillers or phone 01381 600 354. Saturday and Sunday both have varied events. Email: info@cromartyartstrust.org.uk
