Featuring another fantastic Canadian author, Reed Stirling! Reed and I are both authors with BWL Publishing.
Reed Stirling lives in Cowichan Bay, BC, and writes when not painting landscapes, travelling, or taking coffee at The Drumroaster, a local café where physics and metaphysics clash daily. Before retiring and taking up writing novels, he taught English Literature. Several talented students of his have gone on to become successful award-winning writers.
Literary output:
Shades Of Persephone, published in 2019, is a literary
mystery set in Greece.
Lighting The Lamp, a fictional memoir, was published in March
2020.
Set in Montreal, Séjour Saint-Louis (2021),
dramatizes family conflicts.
The Palimpsest Murders, a European travel mystery, was published in September
2023.
Shorter work has appeared over the years in a variety of publications
including Dis(s)ent, Danforth Review, Fickle
Muses, Fieldstone Review, and Humanist Perspectives.
LINKS:
reedstirling@gmail.com
https://bookswelove.net/stirling-reed/
Reed
Stirling@Facebook
Reed
Stirling@Instagram
Reed
Stirling@LinkedIn
Reed Stirling@ X
How
many hours a day do you write?
When
working on a project, my next novel, for instance, I busy myself at the
keyboard every morning, often for three or four hours. I try to come away from
the desk having achieved at least a workable page. In the evening, I review
what I have written and see to emendations. Frequently what comes of my effort
amounts to no more than a paragraph, a single sentence, or a metaphor that
might work in a context yet to be imagined.
Having coffee out or nursing a beer in a pub can lead to observations that connect to themes I’m developing. I make note of them, adding them to the material for the next day’s effort.
Favourite
childhood book?
Hardy Boys. I also collected Classic Comics
that gave me insight into important works of literature, for example,
Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Caesar’s Conquests.
What
inspired you to write this book?
In response to this question, I will focus
on my latest published novel, The
Palimpsest Murders.
The plot revolves around thirty or so
characters who have embarked on a week-long Boat and Bike excursion. The
storyline begins in Amsterdam, continues in Paris, and ends in Greece. During
this time, two murders happen in real time and other suspicious deaths are
uncovered as part of the backstory. All are reflected in events that echo the
classical past. Significantly the name of the boat is The Iphigenia.
I subtitled
this novel, which is literary in tone, A European Travel Mystery. In some ways
it fits the cozy mystery genre but in no way is it all that cozy because it
necessitates travel, even in the imaginative sense, and a basic familiarity
with characters in Homer’s The Iliad, especially
with the royal murders involved in the aftermath to the Trojan War.
The idea for this novel arose when I took a
one-week Boat & Bike excursion through the Lowlands. All was agreeable
among the thirty guests onboard. Very enjoyable. But why not, my imagination
prompted me, introduce the clash of different personalities in close quarters
and have that lead to inevitable conflict that would result in two murders? Geoff
Canter, a sound editor with a penchant for figuring things out, became
protagonist and narrator.
Most fun in moving the plot along: what songs to have salient characters sing, when the group engages in a karaoke session onboard the Iphigenia, that points them in the direction of either victim or perpetrator. For instance, given his paternal persecution, Boyd Alexander’s rendition of Dylan’s “I Shall Be Released” or Flex’s version of “Mack the Knife” following shortly after his sudden and unexpected arrival.
Five
years from now, where do you see yourself as a writer?
I plan to
see my current WIP, another European Travel Mystery, published. Eros, the Greek
god of love and desire, is my narrator. I think he will prove the most
interesting character of the lot I’m calling into being. He will certainly have
much to say about himself and the individuals he feels impelled to observe,
eavesdrop on, and take shots at with his arrows.
I also see myself continuing to promote my
literary output where best I can, and getting back to the easel, brush in one
hand and glass of Irish whiskey in the other. As far as all that goes, I don’t
see myself living off the proceeds of my novels or my landscapes.
How many unpublished and half-finished books do you have?
I
have one abandoned novel begun in 1970. I eventually came of age! Working on it
taught me much about writing full-length fiction.
I have one unpublished
novel. It proved to be too controversial in content for my publisher. Its
themes are playing out in real time even as I write these words.
Was there a person who encouraged you to write?
I
can’t say any one person encouraged me to write. As a teen in high school, I
wrote poetry, mostly about girls I felt attracted to. I never sent the poems to
the person(s) in question. Imagery! I just didn’t get it.
Later, at university I wrote prose
poems and dedicated them to co-eds that I felt attracted to. Those ersatz lyrical
overtures are still in the box. I had to get outside of the box, get over my
shyness and reticence.
Novelist Joyce Carol Oates oversaw my
MA thesis. She was an inspiration. No poems for her, however, just essays. But
she did lead me into the realm of serious fiction. Subsequently, John Fowles
took hold of my brain with The Magus.
My muse got closer to me and eventually I got a short narrative published. I
was off and running. Over the following years, I’ve had many literary pieces
published in journals and reviews and more recently four novels with BWL Inc.
THE PALIMPSEST MURDERS
Day one:
check-in on the Iphigenia, a Boat
& Bike home for thirty guests of diverse backgrounds on a one-week
excursion through Holland and Belgium. Personalities clash, conflicts arise.
Day seven:
a body is found in canal waters at the stern of the boat. And then a second
body is discovered.
Who among
the cyclists is hateful and motivated enough to kill? Twice. In what ways are
the two murders related? How does the gold death mask of Agamemnon lead to
resolution?
Determining
the truth entails travelling from Amsterdam to Bruges to Paris to the ancient
site of Mycenae in Greece where what’s past is shown to be prologue.
https://books2read.com/The-Palimpsest-Murders
SHADES
OF PERSEPHONE
A literary mystery: the fusion of history, philosophy,
espionage, and romance, the centre of the mystery being the contemporary
identity of mythological Persephone.
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