On Location with Kay Stewart

Writing New Territory

The advice to “write about what you know” leads many novelists to set their books in familiar landscapes. Like Elizabeth George, who chose to write a series set in England rather than her native US, I like to explore unfamiliar settings.

Chris Bullock and I began A Deadly Little List, which takes place in Victoria and on Salt Spring Island, when we were living in Edmonton. I began Sitting Lady Sutra, which is set in and around Victoria, when we were living near Nanaimo. The third book in the series, which we’re working on now, will take our characters into new territory--the Peak District in England. Wherever the novels are set, my aim is to render the landscape as vividly as possible.

Here’s a brief passage from Sitting Lady Sutra, in which Parks Interpreter Joan Goodman makes a gruesome discovery during a routine inspection at Sitting Lady Falls:

The path was steep and rocky here, chewed up by the ground crew and not restored. Clutching at bushes when her hiking boots threatened to slip, Joan worked her way close to where the bridge had been. The ground crew had been out the morning after the Labor Day storm, clearing paths. They’d taken off the top twenty feet or so of the fallen Douglas fir, enough to assess the damage. Once the decision to reroute the trail had been made, the splintered bridge had been removed. Only the footings remained on either side of what in the spring was a marshy area rank with skunk cabbage. Now, though the ground was dry underfoot, there was still a strong odor, perhaps of rotting vegetation stirred up by the workers.

The trunk of the fir had been left as a nurse log for new growth. Gazing up the gully towards the exposed rootball, Joan caught a glimpse of something pink. A surveyor’s ribbon, she surmised, left behind by the workers. It was almost hidden in the undergrowth, but still it nagged at her. She scrambled up to remove it.

Not plastic but faded cloth, she realized when she was closer, a strap of some kind. The smell she’d thought was rotting vegetation was much stronger here, a carrion smell. A cougar must have left his kill nearby. Bending down, she grabbed hold and yanked at the strap. It tore, she heard it, but it didn’t come free. She reached through the ferns and salal and felt around. Her fingers encountered a sticky, pulpy mass and then something bony and her stomach heaved.

It’s only an animal crushed when the tree fell, she told herself. Yet she couldn’t quite square that comforting thought with the pink strap that lay torn and soiled among the fallen branches. 

Kay Stewart was co-chair of Bloody Words 2011 and is a past president of Crime Writers of Canada. Sitting Lady Sutra (TouchWood, March 2011) is the second in the Danutia Dranchuk series of mysteries. The first, A Deadly Little List, was co-written by Kay and her husband Chris Bullock, with whom she is working on the third novel. She lives in Victoria, BC.