Character Flaws

On Sunday afternoon I had tea with Don and Mildred Kerr. Don is the nice man who as a volunteer board member and editor for NeWest Press called me back in November and left word that The Cardinal Divide would be published. We had never met face to face, so I was thrilled to make tea and serve Jenn’s mom’s famous peanut butter cookies.

We talked about stories. Don is a lover of plays and theatre, history and poetry and the author of some fifteen books. He’s also a founder of NeWest Press. Mildred is a retired social worker who has collected stories one person at a time over her forty years working with people in need of assistance.

No surprise, our conversation circled around to The Cardinal Divide and the second book in the series, The Darkening Archipelago, which Mildred had just read in manuscript form. I mentioned to Don that I’m working on a historical mystery series where the protagonist, a North West Mounted Police officer, suffers from a gun-shot inflicted disability. Don said, “of course he’s disabled. Just like Cole Blackwater.”

Cole is of reasonably able body, but Don quickly pointed out his predilection for fighting and of course, I instantly took his meaning. Cole is injured. We just can’t see it as readily as we might in Durrant Wallace, the one-legged Mounted Policeman.

It’s the flaws in these characters that make them interesting. John Cardinal, in Giles Blunt’s excellent four-book series stole mob money from the lock-up to pay for his daughter’s collage education. Dave Robicheaux in James Lee Burke’s books is a recovering alcoholic who makes a habit of mashing in people’s faces as he bulldozes through New Iberia, Louisiana. Edward X. Delaney in Lawrence Saunder’s The First Deadly Sin finds himself torn between tracking down a serial killer and watching his wife slowly die in the hospital. These challenges, these flaws, these all-too-human challenges make the protagonists interesting. And so long as we as writers don’t trip over the fine line between fascinating and offensive, readers of mystery series tend to pick up the book as much for the characters as the plot.

The reason I recently read Ian Rankin’s Exit Music had nothing to do with the mystery that DI John Rubus had to puzzle out, and everything to do with my curiosity about how Rubus would actually exit the series.

Cole has his flaws. Some are predicable. He drinks. A boxer, he’d rather punch his way out of a corner than get backed into one. He’s a passionate, but somewhat incompetent father. His business is going south, fast. And he’s got dark secrets. Why did he have to leave Ottawa after having such a promising career? And what happened on the family ranch in the Porcupine Hills when he stopped there to visit his parents on his way west?

It was fascinating to sit and talk with Don and Mildred about Cole as if he was a somewhat annoying acquaintance that we can’t quite figure out, but who we always aggravate too at a party. As if he were actually human.

My hope is that the plot of The Cardinal Divide will carry the book, but that Cole will lodge in reader’s imaginations. My hope is that readers will find Cole Blackwater interesting enough that they would want to hoist a jar with him at the Cambie Hotel. My hope is they’ll like him just enough to buy the book, and read the second instalment in the series to find more about what makes Cole human.