Does a Canadian Setting Hurt Sales of Crime Thrillers?

We are always scanning the horizon for what’s new. Last night, I rediscovered a gem at the bottom of the jewelry box. I found the answer to my question there, too.

A cop once asked me, how can you write crime thrillers without a cop as the central character?

“Easily,” I replied. “A team of crack investigators with all the power and authority of the badge is playing on god mode. I write about underdogs. The police may show up in my fiction, but they’re only batting cleanup after some crazed characters do the interesting things crazed characters do.”

The protagonist of my new release is a former FBI profiler, but he’s got PTSD, a bum hip, and a slippery grip on reality. Dr. Simon Fethullah relies much more on his wits than his gun.

In Where the Night Takes Us, all the action takes place at Dr. Simon Fethullah’s hideaway in Montana. He thought he was safe there. He was mistaken.

The second book in the Fear-Death Series is titled When the Night Finds Us. The novel is in the editorial pipeline. (I’m going over edits and suggestions today.) The story is set in Texas.

How the Night Claims Us is a pile of notes, character descriptions, and plot points at the moment. But what setting will be best for the third in this series?

This is not my first foray into crime fiction.

My backlist includes the four books in the Hit Man Series, The Night Man, Brooklyn in the Mean Time, Vengeance Is Hers, Murders Among Dead Trees, and Sometime Soon, Somewhere Close. (Ahem! See the sales links to the right.) Most are set in the United States.

Initially, When the Night Finds Us was going to be set in Florida. As a proud and thankful Canadian (and a member of the Crime Writers of Canada) I reconsidered. I grew up in Nova Scotia. It’s not an exotic destination to me, but it is unfamiliar or much loved by many. Dad always referred to the Annapolis Valley as “God’s Country” and, though he’d traveled the world, he couldn’t imagine the allure of living anywhere else.

Where the Night Takes Us is set in a fictional, rural area of Montana. When the Night Finds Us is set in Defiant, Texas. (That name sounds redundant, doesn’t it?) Is it time to add an international flavor to my forensic psychiatrist’s investigations? Would a Canadian setting hurt sales with my American readers?

Retrieving the Forgotten: In Praise of the Backlist

To taste that Nova Scotian flavor again, I revisited an anthology I published in 2019. Sometime Soon, Somewhere Close explores the minds and methodologies of some messed-up people. The first story is set in Port George, Nova Scotia. When I was a kid, my parents often drove the few miles up the mountain and to the shore there to take in the sunset over the Bay of Fundy. (Motto: Highest Tides in the World!)

The sunsets were lovely, especially that sumer the dust from Chinese nuclear tests colored the sky. (Not kidding.) We could see the lights of New Brunswick across the waves. It looks closer than it really is, but it would not be an easy swim. It was cooler on the shore, so while descending the South Mountain back down into the Valley’s summer heat, all the car windows would fog up in a flash. The fogged windows hit about the same moment your ears would pop from the change in elevation.

It’s the sort of drive you take with your parents when you’re little, and if you’re good, you might get ice cream in Margaretsville. Later, after you get your driver’s license, you take your girlfriend on those same forays to the Bay of Fundy to see the sunset and wait for the stars to come out.

Revisiting old work can produce a very particular anxiety: Is this how I finally discover a typo previously missed?

However, thankfully, no typos! Rereading that story after all this time was wonderful. And it pulled me into the next short story, and the next, and the next! It wasn’t mere nostalgia. Details I’d forgotten came flooding back. Not to toot my own horn too hard, but damn, that Robert in 2019 turned some good phrases and added clever twists. I’d like to think I’ve only improved, of course, but time and distance from a previously published title added to my appreciation of what I was doing with that book. I’ve had time, and many books since. I was nice to come at it anew.

In short, Somewhere Soon, Somewhere Close holds up.

So, what’s next?

There are logistics to consider, and a few minor adjustments. I think I can get Dr. Simon Fethullah, his driver Paloma, and Simon’s enormous dog, Stephano, up into the Great White North. There are rich settings in Nova Scotia, and I know them well, so why not? My impulse for the change started with an Elbows Up attitude, but the place will serve the story well, too.

But a haunting question chewed at the back of my brain. Most of my readers are US citizens. Will they be interested in a setting outside the United States?

After graduating from journalism school, I got my first training in publishing at the Banff Publishing Workshop decades ago. I remember two lessons from that bootcamp experience:

1. Unless it’s a book about golf or gardening, green covers don’t sell.
2. American readers want American settings (not North American settings).

I’m not sure about #1, but #2 has changed. For those who disagree, maybe I’ll change their minds.

Last weekend I visited a very small but very well-curated bookstore. Scanning the Mystery/Thriller/Suspense sections, it was remarkable how many vicars in Yorkshire are sticking their big noses into murder investigations. Book clubs across the UK are embarrassing Scotland Yard with their amateur sleuthing. The lessons I learned at the Banff School of Fine Arts was a wonderful introduction to publishing (and got me jobs in book publishing the moment I moved to Toronto). But some stale advice has become old tattered hat, ready for the bin.

People want a good, well-written story that keeps them up at night turning pages. I can deliver that, no matter where Dr. Simon Fethullah hunts serial killers.

The pre-order for Where the Night Takes Us is up now, only 99 cents for a limited time.

~ I am Robert Chazz Chute. I write suspenseful novels about evildoers now and at the end of the world. Or is “now” and “the end of the world” redundant?