Guilty

The Stephen Truscott story always fascinated me, even from the time I was a young kid and saw his picture on the front of the Windsor Star weekly magazine. His murder trial has been covered from every angle with one exception - what went through the minds of the jury members? How did it affect them to decide the fate of a fourteen year old boy? Of course it is too late to ask now. So, I fictionalized a single jurist’s reflections and entered the Stratford Rotary Club Short Story Contest, winning a fourth place for ‘Guilty.’

If you’d like to read this ditty, it’s available now as a free ebook. Click here for the EPUB version and here for the free PDF.

On Collingwood Fakeout (a comment emailed to me from Leigh, Lucan’s Librarian.)

“A patron took me aside to rave about Collingwood Fakeout. Each time she thought she’d figured out ‘who dunnit’ she soon realized otherwise. She loved the dialogue… and the main characters, PI Jack Beer and his girlfriend Sheila… Jack for recognizing his own flaws and Sheila for giving as good as she got.”

I’m no artist but for fun, I do watercolours now and then. These two are scenes from Fakeout, the first is of Sheila going for a dip in Georgian Bay and second sees Jack and Sheila coming to grips with tragedy.

How well do your favourite novels translate into movies or TV series? 

Being a mystery buff, I loved the latest ‘Cardinal’ serial based on the detective fiction of Canadian writer, Giles Blunt.  

Going back a few years, Denzel Washington was perfect in his role as Easy
Rawlins in Walter Mosley’s ‘Devil in a Blue Dress.’    

So, the question: do you have any favourite reads that became your favourite
movies… or just as interesting perhaps… that bombed on the big or small screens?

“I don’t like to write. I like having written.” 

This quote has been attributed to Dorothy Parker and to fantasy writer George R.R. Martin as well. My brother thought it was George Plympton.  Maybe they all said it. But who said it first?

The ‘Quote Investigator’ (can you believe there’s such a person/entity/thing?) found that the honour belongs to novelist Frank Norris, who died soon after the turn of the twentieth century. The comment was pulled from a letter discovered in 1915, years after his death. 

Too witty not to borrow it, I guess. But how true was/is it?