In Conversation: Giles Blunt

Giles Blunt is the Toronto-based writer of 12 books, including six crime novels featuring John Cardinal and Lise Delorme.

Winner of the British Crime Writers’ Association’s Silver Dagger and the Crime Writers of Canada’s Arthur Ellis Award, Blunt’s work has also twice been nominated for International Dublin Literary Award. The Cardinal books were also adapted into a television series that aired in 100 countries.

His latest book is the literary historical novel Bad Juliet (Dundurn Press). Set in a world struggling with tuberculosis outbreaks, embroiled in the First World War, it tells the story of Paul and his obsessive love for Sarah.

Blunt will be appearing on Thin Air’s MainStage on Sept. 26 with Kate Cayley, Zilla Jones and Liann Zhang. David Bergen, who is hosting the event, will ask the four writers to talk about their relationships with unreliable narrators.

Free Press: What do you want people to know about Bad Juliet?

Giles Blunt: Bad Juliet is set a 100 years ago in a tuberculosis sanitarium, where Paul Gascoyne, a young poet/novelist, falls in love with a patient named Sarah, who is a survivor of the sinking of the Lusitania. If he is ever to attain real love, he has to learn a lot more about truly listening to people. And if the enigmatic Sarah is ever to be truly loved by anyone, she will have to be ruthlessly honest, no matter how painful it may be. This book is about their journeys, both separate and individual.

FP: What books were important to you while you were writing Bad Juliet? Who/what are your influences?

GB: Thomas Hardy was much on my mind. He wrote so beautifully about people struggling to understand themselves, people who make terrible mistakes and have to overcome them. He was also an eloquent voice about the predicament of women in Victorian society, and I suspect my portrait of Sarah owes much to him.

FP: Since the last John Cardinal mystery came out in 2012, you’ve published a collection of poetry and two literary historical novels that have also been described as psychological thrillers. What’s the through line for you between these books?

GB: Crime novels are extremely demanding on the score of suspense. The challenge I face now is still to tell a highly engaging story, without making suspense per se the top priority. I think the key to that is the deployment of intriguing characters in difficult situations that illuminate them in much the same way we get to know real people. When characters really ring true, it’s pretty hard to tear yourself away.

FP: What drew you to the 1910s, to the sinking of the Lusitania by German U-boats in 1915, to a community of tuberculosis sanatoriums? What does that period have to teach audiences, who have the recent experience of the COVID-19 pandemic and the wars in Gaza and Ukraine to draw on?

GB: I started writing this book well before COVID hit, though of course one couldn’t miss the resonances between the two pandemics. I was drawn to Saranac Lake partly owing to its phenomenal beauty, but also because its history is one of Americans at their best, coming together to bring about and nurture a common good. That being said, this is not a medical book. There really was a female patient who was a Lusitania survivor and it was probably that fact above all that led me to decided to write this novel.

FP: Both this book and 2015’s The Hesitation Cut are examinations of obsessive love. What draws you to this type of story?

GB: Obsessive love can’t help but be interesting because it looks so much like real love — love that occurs between two people who see each other as they really are and bring out the best in each other. But an obsession is an uncontrollable fixation not on the other person, but on some unrealistic idea about that person, as if they are a miraculous cure for some unknown wound within yourself.

FP: Tell me how you approached writing about sex in a novel set 100 years ago?

GB: I didn’t know sex was going to be such a big part of it when I started, but as the story got going it became clear that many of today’s issues — around consent, say, or “believe the women” — were very much alive back then. The challenge was to keep the characters, both male and female, sympathetic while also keeping their attitudes true for the era. I didn’t want to cheat by making people unrealistically modern. I didn’t set out to be echoing our present-day issues; they were just there.

FP: What are you reading right now? What are you writing right now?

GB: I’m reading House of Meetings by Martin Amis, a novel about the Soviet gulag, and Erik Larson’s Demon of Unrest, a non-fiction account of the lead-up to the American Civil War.

Ariel Gordon’s latest book, the epistolary novel Blood Letters (Great Plains Press), is co-authored with GMB Chomichuk.