One of Canada's best-known newspaper columnists before he turned novelist, Linwood Barclay is renowned as one of the funniest voices around, in fiction and as a daily read. But with his new book STONE RAIN he's starting to find life is getting darker...
When I first introduced Zack to readers in 2004 in BAD MOVE, he was a fairly comic character, a compendium of anxieties, anal-retentive, a know-it-all, slightly paranoid, and it pains me to tell you who this character’s largely based on. Zack is essentially me, unchecked.
I’m the kind of person who worries about the knives going into the dishwasher points up. You don’t want people slitting their wrists unloading the cutlery rack. I’m the one who frets about the front door being left unlocked, how old those batteries are in the smoke detector, or the purse sitting unwatched in the kiddie seat of the grocery store shopping cart.
But I just worry about these things. Zack acts on these worries, and in BAD MOVE, he does so in ways that backfire rather spectacularly. The law of unintended consequence was surely written with Zack Walker in mind. Everything he does with the intention of making his family more secure has the effect of putting them at greater risk.
For example, if you’re going to teach your wife a lesson about leaving that purse unguarded in a shopping cart by stealing it, it might be a good idea to make sure first you’ve got the right purse.
Zack’s struggles to deal with these anxieties were still a source of humor for me in the follow-up to BAD MOVE, BAD GUYS. And he was certainly ill-equipped to help his father deal with some crazy home-grown terrorist types in the third Zack Walker novel, LONE WOLF. Working as a newspaper feature writer, and cranking out the odd science fiction novel on the side, is not what you’d call adequate training for dealing with a bunch of folks who want to set off a bomb during a parade.
Zack remains a very reluctant hero. He’s no James Bond, no Jack Reacher. And his fearfulness keeps him, I think, a funny, endearing, and believable character. But the situations he encounters, and the things that happen to those around him, get a little nastier with each book.
That progression continues in STONE RAIN, the fourth Zack novel. This book is primarily about Trixie Snelling, whom we met back in BAD MOVE. She was Zack’s neighbor, two doors down, the one Zack thought was an accountant. But numbers are not Trixie’s area of expertise. Tying men down and spanking them is what she knows best. She’s a dominatrix, and how she came to ply her trade in a conservative suburban enclave is what drives STONE RAIN.
It’s not a pretty story. It’s a tale of abuse, sexual assault, gang warfare and murder. And Zack finds himself drawn, against his will and better judgment, into Trixie’s troubles, particularly after she becomes the prime suspect in the death of a small-time reporter whose body is found in her basement dungeon.
Trixie’s on the run, and Zack believes he must find her not only to help clear her name, but rescue his own troubled marriage and get his job back at the Metropolitan newspaper. (Although, since his last demotion, he’s been working in the homes section writing a feature on the history of linoleum, so it’s not the job it used to be.) The last, not insignificant challenge will be to accomplish all this and come out of it alive.
The trick, I suppose, is finding a way to tell a more bleak story like this, and still make it, at times, amusing. For me, the key to that is character.
It’s been my hope that Zack, the members of his fictional family and others close to him, have not been reduced to caricatures. It’s easy, in a comic mystery, to get your characters from Central Casting, but I wanted them to be real people, particularly his wife and two teenage children. (Some readers have expressed concern that the teenagers I write about not only use four-letter words, but use them in front of their parents without fear of reprisal. What can I tell you? This is life as I know it.)
Once your characters feel real, their reactions to what happens around them feels honest. And while there’s a lot of tragedy in honesty, there’s a lot of humor there, too.
I’m enjoying moving Zack into darker territory. It allows me to tell more compelling stories, and it raises the stakes for my protagonist, who is not the least bit comfortable, or suited, to situations involving jeopardy.
This journey, of getting a bit darker with each book, will continue later this year, when my first standalone thriller, NO TIME FOR GOODBYE, is published in the fall. It’s hard to find a lot of laughs in the plight of a 14-year-old girl who wakes up one morning to learn that her mother, father and brother have vanished.
Zack certainly wouldn’t see anything funny in that.
Linwood Barclay, author of four Zack Walker novels and the upcoming NO TIME FOR GOODBYE, is a staff columnist with the Toronto Star and lives with his family near Toronto. STONE RAIN is published May 1 by Bantam Books.
