Death and His Brother follows a group of musicians, an inspector, and his reporter wife who discover that no one is manning their train, and it is a race to stop the runaway train. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?

When I was a boy, we lived in a house on the edge of a small town. We were surrounded by meadows and beyond those, fields of corn and barley. Beyond that, there was a railway line. On it, three times a day on round trips, ran a Buddliner coach – a single-carriage commuter train – with no locomotive. Self-propelled. It travelled about eighty miles on each round trip, with a small two-person crew. It ran between Stratford, Ontario – the home of the Stratford Shakespeare Festival – and a town on the shores of Lake Huron.

Theatre, music, train travel, water.

I think the train, the theatre, and the lake have been rolling around together in my head for a long time. That little Buddliner didn’t have the look or romance of a big passenger train, but it must have taken interesting people to places that some of them really wanted to visit.

A year ago, I happened upon a poem, “The Clattering Train,” in which a sleeping two-man railway crew could not prevent a fatal accident. Not a great poem, but it was based on a real accident in England in the 1890s. The image of a sleeping crew brought to mind the two-person Buddliner. And so, a mystery began to take shape.

Why were they asleep?

I found the interaction between the characters that meet on the train to be one of the highlights of your book. What was your approach to writing the interactions between characters?

I was an actor for years and a director and playwright. Handling dialogue becomes second nature after a while, but it’s a learned skill. It’s all about exploring.

Each character enters a scene – whether on stage or in a book – from somewhere. They are in a state of mind; they already are someone, whether we know them or not. The important thing in developing sound interactions between and amongst characters is staying true to who they are.

That’s not to say my characters can’t surprise me. They do all the time.

As a director, I used to advise actors who were having a hard time incorporating a particular line into their performance that they needed to go back and rethink their characterization.

The line that has been so difficult is almost always important – it usually represents something in the character that you’ve overlooked.

The same thing happens when I write conversations in my novels. Characters often say things I do not expect them to say. When it happens, I have to rethink the character. Who are they really? What is it that they really want out of the conversation? The characters are sometimes more articulate than I am.

I go back and revise what I’ve written to reflect these new dimensions of a character. When people are talking, they are exploring each other. Learning, telling, hiding, showing off.

But here’s the really important thing: it’s not who says what that makes dialogue work. It’s how the next person reacts. And that’s always down to the same thing. Who’s listening?

What were some themes that were important for you to explore in this book?

Kindness and generosity, especially in the face of difficulty.

Listening – and there’s no better example of that than a jazz player.

The pain of the outsider and how it’s so often hidden and hard to reach.

Humour in the bleak moments. Humour is a shared gift; it’s how we all get through things together.

Will there be another Urquhart & MacDonald mystery in the future? If so, what can your fans expect in the next installment?

Absolutely.

I plan on at least one new Urquhart & MacDonald mystery each year, maybe two – along with a new historical adventure novel in my General Torrance Series.

The next book, The Price of Peril, will be the seventh in the Urquhart and MacDonald series. This book will concentrate more on the women in the community, four in particular: Sandy Urquhart, Connie Del Barba, Florrie MacDonald, and an old friend of Sandy’s we haven’t met before – an aviator raising money to fund a dangerous flight that has never before been accomplished, neither by man nor woman.

It will be set in Cape Breton, as always. It’s an island of determined folk with a lively appreciation of life’s absurdities. That’s how they get through a life that’s not always easy. But here’s the thing — they also have a long history of invention and daring, including up in the skies.

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