Mystery writer counts backward from 12

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This article was published 27/10/2011 (5404 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Mystery readers are a voracious bunch.

Give them a detective and a setting to love, and they’ll devour novel after novel in a series.

One day during the Christmas season about 10 years ago, Winnipeg writer Doug Whiteway was in Whodunit?, the local mystery bookstore. As he and the proprietors discussed the myriad themes used for popular long-running series, it suddenly struck him that the carol The Twelve Days of Christmas could inspire a dozen whodunits.

The successive murders could involve, let’s see: drummers, pipers, lords, ladies, maids, swans, geese, gold rings, calling birds, French hens, turtle doves and a partridge in a pear tree.

“The titles give you a germ for every book,” says the author of four previous mysteries, most recently 2005’s Death in Cold Type.

The result is that Whiteway, a former Winnipeg Free Press reporter who now writes fiction full-time under the pen name C.C. Benison, has a book launch tonight at 8 at McNally Robinson Booksellers for Twelve Drummers Drumming (Doubleday Canada, $25).

The mystery, also being published in the U.S., introduces Father Tom Christmas. He’s a widowed Anglican vicar who takes a posting in the charming English village of Thornford Regis.

At the annual May Fayre, a body turns up inside a Japanese taiko drum, and Father Christmas turns amateur sleuth. Part of the humour-spiced story takes the form of letters penned by his gossipy housekeeper.

Whiteway, 60, has a contract for two more — Eleven Pipers Piping and Ten Lords a’Leaping — and if they’re successful, hopes to unwrap a new Father Christmas mystery every autumn for a dozen years. The series will span four years in the vicar’s life.

The books belong to the popular sub-genre known as “cosy mysteries,” which are generally set within small communities and stay away from gory murder details, graphic violence and sex.

Whiteway, a lifelong mystery reader himself, says he’s comfortable with cosies. “I like the puzzle,” he says. “I don’t really like doing five pages of forensic detail about a dead body.”

The Osborne Village resident is an anglophile who takes research trips to England. “Getting it right is one of my concerns,” he says. His three-mystery series published in the 1990s, including the award-winning Death at Buckingham Palace, had a sleuth who was Queen Elizabeth II’s housemaid.

Whiteway has returned to a British setting partly because the name Father Christmas wouldn’t work in North America. And the lords a’leaping need to be titled. “I need a country that has an aristocracy,” he says.

The template for the fictional setting is the Devon village of Stoke Gabriel, which Whiteway has visited several times. “It’s got a lovely church, a charming pub, a mill pond, thatched cottages — all that sort of Masterpiece Theatre stuff.”

He interviewed the town vicar and even flew to Stoke Gabriel for a January weekend so he could experience a traditional wassail — a blessing of apple trees in an orchard. Look for that as a set piece in one of the novels.

He doesn’t want to be too predictable in how he works in the Christmas carol’s gifts. “My swans, if I get to that point, are actually people. The three French hens are people, too.”

Why the pseudonym C.C. Benison?

“I just wanted a separate identity from all the non-fiction writing I’d done — the newspapers and magazines,” Whiteway says, adding that pen names are a tradition among mystery writers.

His New York editor urged him to pick a surname from one of the first three letters of the alphabet, so his titles would be shelved at eye level in bookstores. The initials C.C. don’t stand for anything.

The editor suggested “Blessing” but Whiteway preferred “Benison,” an archaic word that means benediction or blessing.

It now seems oddly appropriate, he says, for a series about a warm-hearted priest.

 

A review of Twelve Drummers Drumming will run in the Free Press Books section on Saturday.

alison.mayes@freepress.mb.ca