A B.C. writer often taken for granted
comes through
with a genre bending novel that subverts our expectations
By SARA DOWSE, Vancouver Sun
William Deverell has made a solid reputation for himself as a thriller writer, both in this country and the one to the immediate South, but such are the vagaries of the writing life that he remains less known than Tom Clancy and John Grisham. For his sake, I hope this will soon be corrected, and this is the book that could do it. But the selfish part of me wishes he'd maintain a lower profile, like a good wine that could lose its kick if it becomes too sought-after or a tropical paradise at risk of being swamped by developers.
And, as it happens, the improbable hero of Deverell's 11th novel maintains an abiding concern for unspoiled natural beauty. Jacques Cardinal, depressive ex-CIA operative and now a kayak-tour operator on the Naranjo River in western Costa Rica, conducts an unending war against squatters and the corrupt San Jose officials and international drug lords who are erecting what amounts to a suburb near his property, complete with church and cottages.
Jacques, otherwise known as Slack, a six-foot-five shambles of a man whose intelligence and strength have stood by him through frequently disabling skirmishes with alcohol and an equally corrosive cynicism, has fought long and bloodily against this incursion. He has one other vice, and that is writing poetry.
Cardinal is to meet his match in the ugly duckling Maggie Schneider, just the kind of norteamericana snowbird he is predisposed to loathe. A writer of romance novels with titles like No Time for Sorrow, she augments her royalties with a "real" job writing advertising copy at a Saskatoon TV station. Desperate to escape Saskatchewan's mid-winter temperatures, she embarks on a two-week Costa Rican vacation that will go on for quite a bit longer and, as romances have it, utterly change her life.
The tension involved in bringing these two marvellous characters together fuels the narrative, but, as one would expect from Deverell, there is gripping adventure, a whole lot of laughs and also some biting political comment.
Some writers just seem to know how to pick their subjects. This can be savvy, luck, a special peephole into the collective unconscious or a combination of the three but whatever it is, Deverell has it in spades. Through a convergence of a number of factors, the guileless Saskatoon romance writer gets tangled up with a gang of terrorists. While this theme might, in other hands, trivialize what has become a profoundly serious subject, Deverell handles it superbly. Central American rather than Middle Eastern, the terrorists in this novel are inspired by the same kind of hatred of North American dominance that ignites the followers of Osama bin Laden. Their leader has bin Laden's reputed charisma.
Whatever the situation is in Costa Rica (where the author regularly winters), what it offers Maggie Schneider is a chance to break out of her genre and write something challenging and serious. Even more tellingly, her Costa Rican adventure gives Slack Cardinal the opportunity to twig to her swan-like worth: He sees that she's "a rare specimen, a caring person, worried about her parents, loyal to her buddy," and so the novel ends on a note of genuine poetry.
The Laughing Falcon is, simply, a wonderful book, though it is not at all simple. There lies Deverell's achievement, and I'm not just talking about his ingenious plotting and masterful style. Deverell has made his mark as a genre writer, and deservedly so. But genres are labels that often serve critics and publishers' marketing branches more than they do readers.
What Deverell does so brilliantly - and totally without pretension - is play with the notion of genre, subverting all our programmed expectations while giving us a truly moving story that satisfies on a number of levels.
This book is somewhat similar to, and every bit as good as, Kate
Grenville's The Idea of Perfection, which recently won the Orange
Prize. But because Grenville is a "serious" writer and Deverell
is considered a writer of thrillers, it probably won't get the same
kind of attention. His fans will welcome the arrival of The Laughing
Falcon, for he's an author who keeps improving his vintage. For
those who have stayed away or failed to take him seriously, this
book should be proof that we have something of a treasure in our
midst.
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Deverell returns to Costa Rica to murder the competition
Ottawa Citizen
William Deverell it seems, has two loves in his life - one an idyllic
island (Pender) in the Gulf Islands off Vancouver Island's east
coast; the other, an equally idyllic Costa Rica. For anyone who
knows Pender, or has driven across it to get the ferry to that 60's
haven, Gabriola, no more need be said. This is the end of the line
for many of Canada's best literary minds.
Deverell, you see, owns one such mind and flexes it mightily in
residences in these two sometimes-bohemian locales. As we now know,
Pender and Costa Rica are both fertile grounds for awakening the
creative juices in this prize-winning Canadian author - and for
blessing Canada with 10 lovely pieces of mystery writing.
Make that 11 now, thanks to the appearance of Deverell's long-awaited, and just published, The Laughing Falcon (McClelland & Stewart; $34.99). Here again, is the career journalist, civil rights lawyer, activist and screen writer, at his keenest with a Christmas story that will have you both snickering and clearing romantic lumps in your throat, not to mention contemplating the occasional sneak peak ahead (just to confirm your suspicions, you understand).
From his first critically acclaimed novel, Needles, Deverell has not looked back. His adventure thrillers are a made-in-Canada success story which have spun off into both television (Street Legal, the CBC TV series) and the big screen with the optioning of film rights for his novel Slander.
With The Laughing Falcon, the Deverell touch continues - romantic misadventure, nail-biting thriller, laugh-out-loud satire. The cast is chaotic: from a somewhat horny romance writer, Maggie Schneider, looking for love and tropical sunshine to tone up her sagging plot, to political opportunist Chuck Walker (and his flirtatious wife), a US. senator with an eye for a nomination for the US. presidency, to a tour guide who needs to come to terms with the world's wilful environmental ways, to a nut who wants simply to lead a revolution against the Costa Rican government. All are in for a rude awakening when they run into Halcon the Laughing Falcon, and his band of revolutionaries.
As with all Deverell novels, the beauty lies in the detail, the
lush description and the plots. There are few mystery writers who
could carry such an outrageous cast in such far-flung Central American
locations. Deverell, some might suggest, is getting away with murder
here - murdering the competition, that is. You can visit the accused
on his Web site: www.deverell.com. Tell him the warden sent you.
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A BUNGLE IN THE JUNGLE
William Deverell gives his lawyers a rest and has some fun in Costa
Rica
By JACK BATTEN, Toronto Star
To non-writers, William Deverell looks and acts like the popular image of a novelist. He's big, handsome and confident, Hemingwayesque without the neuroses. His lifestyle sounds glamorous and writer-like: British Columbia's Gulf Islands in the summer, Costa Rica in the winter. He even has a good answer to the inevitable non-writer's question: "But what is your real job?" Criminal lawyer, Deverell can answer. And an accomplished one. to judge from Fatal Cruise, his absorbing 1991 account of a murder trial in which he conducted the defence (the case was mysterious, intricate and hopeless, resulting in a conviction for Deverell's client but a pat on the back from the judge - "a superlative job" - for Deverell himself).
Deverell's career got off to a high-profile start in 1974 with Needles, a book that won the now-defunct Seat Award for first novels. The prize was worth $50,000, though the sum was misleading since the fifty grand covered advance, royalties and other payments
Needles had a number of qualities that most of Deverell's subsequent novels have also exhibited. A zippy, fluid pace is one; a vivid touch with characters, especially villains, is another. And Needles, like many of the other novels, depended on Deverell's skill at evoking authentic-sounding courtroom drama without bogging down in the technical stuff or exaggerating the trial pyrotechnics.
The new Deverell novel, The Laughing Falcon, represents a shift in intent and subject matter. No courtrooms turn up in the story, and the lawyerly content is confined to a couple of characters who happen to have legal training and to a small joke built around a leading 1930's torts case concerning the plaintiff - who was shocked into litigation by the discovery of a mouse in his bottle of ginger beer. What Deverell has got into with The Laughing Falcon, as the mouse and ginger beer might hint, is the spoof business.
The novel suggests in approach the Florida school of crime fiction. the sort of books written these days by Carl Hiassen, Tim Dorsey and a handful of other Floridians. As with the novels of these writers, The Laughing Falcon has plenty of crime - mostly kidnappings and scams - together with a serious message about the wasting of the environment. But also like the Floridians, Deverell dresses tip the mystery and the message with laughs and satire.
In particular Deverell structures his novel to do sendups of two specific literary genres: the romance in the Harlequin tradition and the adventure novel, which occupies the territory linking Rider Haggard to Ian Fleming. It happens that the heroine of Deverell's book is writing one of the former while the hero is working on one of the latter, and in the process, both characters become mixed up in their real lives in the sort of adventures they're creating in their imaginations.
The heroine is Maggie of Saskatoon. She works at a local TV station. On the side she turns out paperback novels bearing such titles as When Love Triumphs and No Time For Sorrow. She's tall and skinny, "built like a high jumper," wears glasses and is comely without them. She is also "abnormally well adjusted, upbeat, adventurous," not to mention naive and klutzy. She bird-watches, champions environmental causes and is headed for a holiday in Costa Rica - where she expects to find material for her next romance novel and maybe some of the real stuff for herself
The hero, a guy who sports the name Slack, is already in Costa Rica. He's 48 (which gives him a couple of decades on Maggie) and has a background of much contradiction. He was a hippy-style American lefty who got blackmailed by the CIA into taking on dicey-undercover jobs in the Middle East. When he flamed out of the spy life, he was put to pasture in Costa Rica, where he conducts kayak tours, boozes, works on his adventure novel and grouses about the depredations visited on Costa Rica's wilderness. (Deverell works a fresh variation on the distribution of blame for environmental crimes; the usual suspects i.e. American multinationals, are laying waste to the Central American jungles, but the charming local peasants are also doing their bit to trash the landscape.)
With the central characters established as an idiosyncratic pair, the plot kicks in with a kidnapping. The kidnappee is the bold and dishy wife of a right-wing U.S. senator who is vacationing in Costa Rica but mounting a run for the presidency back home. The kidnappers are Costa Rican rebels who resent the U.S. presence in their country. The word "terrorist" gets tossed around to describe, the kidnappers, but the descriptive has of course taken on a new meaning since Sept. 11 and anyway, the Costa Rican guys are about as terrifying as the Seven Dwarfs.
Maggie happens to get kidnapped along with the senator's wife. Slack is hired to sleuth out the kidnappers' whereabouts and the game is on. This particular game happens to be, in crime fiction terms, the one in which each of the book's characters, with the exception of hero and heroine, turn out to occupy roles that are the exact opposite of what they seemed to be on first introduction. Deverell is right at home with the notion balancing comedy with the thrills, kidding around with genres - Maggie's romance novel versus Slack's adventure tale - to a degree that adds flavour without getting in the way of the plot at hand.
It's not deep stuff - it's not intended to be - but The Laughing
Falcon displays the craftsmanship and plot spins of an inventive
storyteller successfully trying on a new approach to his work.
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