Art imitates life in new thriller

Terry Fallis’s latest novel, The Marionette, is what fans of the 65-year-old author might call a return to form.

His previous offering, 2023’s A New Season, was a decidedly melancholy book about grief and loss by the two-time winner (and four-time nominee) of the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour.

“It was tough to write,” says Fallis from his home in Toronto. “I wrote A New Season the middle of the pandemic, and I just didn’t feel like I could write another straight-up comic novel while seeing those who had lost loved ones in the pandemic.”

Published by McClelland & Stewart in October, The Marionette is Fallis’s 10th novel, and sees him return to the world of political satire (with a dash of comic thriller) that kick-started his almost-improbable literary career.

It also sees him return to Winnipeg tonight to launch the book at McNally Robinson Booksellers’ Grant Park location at 7 p.m., where he’ll be joined in conversation by Deborah Bowers.

After stints working for both the Ontario and federal Liberals, Fallis worked in political consultation and communications before co-founding his own firm in 1995.

His first novel, The Best Laid Plans, began as a podcast before Fallis self-published it in book form in 2008. It won the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour, was picked up by McLelland & Stewart, was a CBC Canada Reads winner in 2011 and, in 2014, was made into a six-part CBC TV series.

In The Marionette, Fallis introduces readers to James Norval, a successful thriller writer stranded in Tajikistan while doing research for his next novel featuring hero Hunter Chase.

After Norval is rescued from the country by Canadian embassy operatives, he’s enlisted by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) to help agent Lauren Cooper with the extraction of 14 Canadian nationals working in the gold industry in Mali.

Like Norval, Fallis relishes in getting the details in his books just right — although he didn’t visit Tajikistan or Mali in the run-up to penning The Marionette.

“I’m a big planner in my novels. I have a very sort of rigorous and perhaps unusual writing process that involves spending the first 12 or 14 months just mapping out the story to within an inch of its life and then I write the manuscript in the last couple of months,” he says. “I’m an engineer by academic training and I think that’s the engineering side of me coming through. Uncertainty is the enemy of my writing.”

A relatively recent change in how CSIS can operate helped plant the initial seeds of what would become The Marionette.

“One of the things that prompted me to write this novel was an article I read about a federal judge granting CSIS the right to operate clandestinely in other countries and even to break the laws of those countries if they were in service of Canada and against a threat, tangible or real threat to Canada,” Fallis says. “That’s the kind of authorization that MI6 and the Mossad and CIA have had right from the very beginning, but CSIS never had that.”

In the book’s Mali, Norval navigates an unstable political situation, including a government who has taken over a Canadian gold-mining operation. It’s a scenario seemingly ripped from the headlines — in June, after Fallis had already written The Marionette, the country’s military junta took control of the Loulo-Gounkoto gold mine run by Canadian mining firm Barrick Gold.

“They flew in and stole 35,000 ounces of gold from the mine worth $117 million — they just took it,” he says. “It’s not exactly the same scenario as I wrote about, but it’s pretty close — close enough that I was alarmed by the parallels.”

For Fallis, writing a thriller about a thriller writer was highly entertaining, particularly after his more downbeat A New Season. “I had fun trying to figure out how I was going to make things exciting — where are the high points? Where are we going to bring the reader back a bit?” he says. “Readers who have read more than one of my books know there’s not going to be a ton of blood on the floor or a high body count.”

Fallis is able to cut through the tension with comic asides between characters — including Angus McClintock, star of The Best Laid Plans, The High Road and Operation Angus, who makes a cameo in The Marionette.

“Angus has just been promoted in cabinet to Minister for Public Safety; he’s got CSIS under his ministerial purview. I thought I’d maybe slip him in … as more of a little easter egg for those who had enjoyed the Angus novels,” he says.

Will there be a sequel to The Marionette? The author’s not saying no. “I might do another one; I may welcome James back,” he says. “If I ever wanted to go back to James Norval, I’ve left the door open for that … now that he’s found his feet and has worked with Coop, I’d probably bring her back as well.”

For now, Fallis is enjoying editing his 11th novel from his home office — in 2022 he “retired” from the agency he co-founded to focus on writing full-time.

“I’ve never been happier in my entire life — and that’s from somebody who loved his day job,” he says. “I’m happy to just to come upstairs to the library on the third floor of our house, where I’m surrounded by all my books, and I can just write.”

ben.sigurdson@freepress.mb.ca

@bensigurdson