How I Got into Crime Writing: Where Lou Allin Goes, Murder Follows
Lou Allin is the author of the Belle Palmer mysteries set in Northern Ontario, ending with Memories are Murder. Now living on Vancouver Island with her border collies and mini-poodle, she is working on a new series where the rainforest meets the sea. On the Surface Die and She Felt No Pain feature RCMP Corporal, Holly Martin, in charge of a small detachment near Victoria. In 2010 Lou will debut That Dog Won’t Hunt, a novella in Orca’s Raven Reads editions for adults with literacy issues. Her website is www.louallin.com and she may be reached at louallin@shaw.ca.
On a purely personal note from this blog owner, sincere congratulations to the Canadians for their outstanding performance in the 2010 Olympics!
At dawn on June 5, 1955, my tenth birthday, my mother shook me from innocent sleep. “Wake up, Louise. Georgia’s been shot.”
In a pedestrian but poignant gesture of hospitality, she sent me on my fat-tired Schwinn bike to the store for a pound of bacon, a special treat. Georgia’s parents would be arriving for breakfast.
Georgia Babcock was a kindergarten teacher at my mother’s school. Leonard, a nurse, was her husband. A suspicious profession for a man in those benighted days, but perhaps he had been a medic in the Korean War. They came for dinner once, had a demure drink each, and gave us an heirloom silver cream-and-sugar set that had been in Leonard’s “old Southern” family.
But Leonard and Georgia were heavy weekend drinkers, and the upcoming visit of her elderly parents from South Carolina sparked fatal violence. Lakewood, Ohio, our “safe and serene” tree-lined suburb of Cleveland, hadn’t had a murder in living memory.
My parents and the school principal hurried downtown to the Terminal Tower, where the train was arriving at ten, Georgia had said. The father had retired from the railroad, and they had free seats, but no sleeping compartment. In the distance stood the old couple, exhausted but hopeful, lost in the echoes of the terminal. “Georgia sent us,” the principal said, and my father took aside the old man and whispered the tragedy. “Let my wife get up the stairs before you tell her,” he asked. “Her heart is weak.”
During breakfast, I stayed in my room reading comics. Everything happened quickly. The pastor of the Babcocks’ Baptist church stepped in and collected enough money to send the heartbroken pair home by plane.
As for the forensics, Leonard had shot his wife, then for some bizarre reason, stabbed her in the same wound with an icepick. He had thrown the pistol on top of his apartment building’s garage, but lacked the heart to flee. Apprehension was immediate.
My mother waited for days to be called as a reluctant character witness, but she ended up knitting a sweater in the anteroom. Plea-bargaining, Leonard was sentenced to life imprisonment in an era when sentences meant business. Either he died in prison or he’s over ninety now.
I couldn’t pick them out of a photo line-up, but I recall Georgia’s soft southern accent. Never real to me, the murder had been filtered through my parents’ experiences. Once my mother told me that Georgia jumped into her car one morning when they carpooled, and said, “Leonard has a gun.” After that, my mother stopped giving her rides. Did she offer Georgia any advice? Spousal abuse was not a dining-room topic. The very fact that the couple had “met in a bar” meant “end of story” for my conservative family. The sugar and creamer traveled with me to Northern Ontario for thirty years and then to Vancouver Island. I have never polished them, but they keep Georgia on my mind.
That summer, I began writing my first novel, THE MYSTERY OF THE SECRET PASSAGEWAY. Lazy even then, I added to it in desultory fashion until I printed “The End” in the blue exam book five years later, my printing turned to cursive. The plot revealed my dream elements. The brother-and-sister (romance, never!) sleuths ride horses to the police department, find no one (because they are all out searching for the an escaped felon) and then commandeer police motorcycles to drive to a “detective agency.” Amateur sleuth was my sub-genre even then. Don’t ask about the illustrations. The boys all look like Fabian. Who? Elvis with a super pompadour.
Murder nipped at my heels. Doing doctoral work on the murdered Christopher Marlowe, I lived in the basement of a rambling four-story frame building on a hillside in Athens, Ohio. I loved that little apartment, roaring brute of a gas furnace below like the maw of hell, dry rot in the bathroom and the claw-footed tub threatening to plummet to the basement. Looking over that Appalachian valley, I could see the lights winking like the view from Mulholland Drive. When I moved to Sudbury in Northern Ontario, not long after, the apartment was the scene of a brutal murder. A man had killed his girlfriend. A friend sent the picture of my front door with crime scene tape.
In the early nineties I turned to crime writing at last and began to make things happen. In MURDER, EH? I set the final scenes over a hundred miles into the bush. My sleuth and her young friend, trapped in the middle of nowhere, had to follow the pole line, the only means of travel in rough country. A set of topographical maps helped me chart every river, stream, and swamp. The map was of Thor Lake, so remote that only the tiny Bud car train stopped there once a week. Not long after the book was finished, the bush camp at Thor Lake became the scene of a murder suicide, despite having no access roads.
My thoughts turned to old boyfriends in MEMORIES ARE MURDER. This time I set the book south of Sudbury in a swampy hellhole called Burwash, site of a former penal colony from which no one could ever escape, not even Steve McQueen. The fall the book came out, the wife of a prominent local gynecologist went missing, her van located in a parking lot, her purse a hundred miles away at an old mine site. Then two rabbit hunters in the spring found her body not five hundred yards off the main highway….at the Burwash turn. I had done it again, and to this date, no one has solved the mystery. Her unfaithful husband had an ironclad alibi. Rumors abound that a cousin from a mountain town in India flew in to do the deed, but the case remains open. It is a testimony to the scarcity of specialists in Sudbury that a friend of mine still had him perform her hysterectomy.
Now on Vancouver Island, looking down my peaceful street of retirees and across the Strait of Juan de Fuca to the Olympic Mountains of Washington State, I’m wondering about my neighbours. Be careful looking for murder. It may find you first.
March 2, 2010
Posted in: Guest Blogs
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2 Responses
If you haven’t read Lou Allin, you are in for a treat. This short piece about how murder has found her demonstrates how well she writes. What are you waiting for? Get one of her books and enjoy.
Great stories, Lou. If you were my neighbour, though, I’d be looking at YOU.
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