Ian Ferguson won the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour for Village of the Small Houses and is the co-author, with his brother, Will, of How to Be a Canadian. A writer and creative director in the film and television industry, he lives in Victoria.
Will Ferguson is a three-time winner of the Leacock Medal for Humour. His novels include his debut,HappinessTM, 419, which won the Scotiabank Giller Prize; and The Finder. With his brother, Ian, he is the author of the mega-bestseller How to Be a Canadian. He lives in Calgary.
In the Ferguson brother’s new co-written novel, I Only Read Murder, a once-beloved television sleuth, Miranda Abbott, finds herself far from Hollywood and witness to a murder during a small-town theatre production—and is convinced it’s up to her to solve the case.
Interviewed by Yvonne Blomer
Yvonne Blomer (YB): I Only Read Murder is a layered, humorous mystery, where the main character, Miranda Abbott, the once famous star of the hit TV show Pastor Fran Investigates becomes embroiled in mystery upon mystery play until there is a murder. How did you come up with the idea to write this mystery?
Will Ferguson (WF): It began as a covid project. We were locked down, bored out of our gourds and unable to travel, Ian in Victoria and myself in Calgary. We wanted a project we could do mainly over the phone. Ian has worked in theatre and film and had this funny idea for a mystery – and of a main character–an actor, Nick Abbott, who played “Pastor Fred” on a cheesy TV detective show years before and didn’t realize he was no longer famous.
Ian Ferguson (IF): The germ of the idea for the character may have come from meeting former TV stars touring regional theatre, still cashing in on their one (sometimes fleeting) moment of fame.
YB: Can you each speak about how you came to co-write I Only Read Murder? How did you decide who would write what or did you write the whole thing together? Share your process, please. (Plotters or Pantsers?)
WF: A cozy mystery has to be plotted out. You can’t wing something as complex and intricately interwoven as a mystery. That said, we first sketched out the full story in very broad strokes, plus the funny bits, the relationships between the characters, the various twists and turns, and then broke it into three acts. From there we put together a beat outline–sixty or so scenes, and thirty chapters–and bounced that back and forth via email, filling in gaps, topping up jokes, challenging each other with weird clues and red herrings. And no, we didn’t use a shared google doc. Neither one of us knows how to do that.
IF: We’re happy that readers are responding to the humour, but also that there is a well-constructed mystery at the heart of the book.
YB: As a long-time Victoria resident, I recognized the Empress Hotel as the Duchess Hotel in the novel. The now renovated Bengal Lounge as well. Are other familiar towns woven into your made-up town of Happy Rock? Can you talk about decisions around the setting and what influenced you, such as setting it across the border?
WF: We didn’t want readers trying to line up real places with Happy Rock, saying “Wait a minute, that isn’t true.” So, we traced the coast on a map until we found the most obscure location we could use. There really is a remote bay called Tillamook, though the town is completely fictional.
IF: But at the same time, it is, of course, very much inspired by Victoria.
YB: Your acknowledgements say that none of the characters is based on any actors Ian knows, but Miranda has a real Schitt’s Creek/ Moira Rose vibe. Are their people the characters could be based on?
WF: A former actress on the far side of fame is not new, is very much an archetypal figure, reaching back to Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard (1950). Plus, the main character was originally male, and it was his wife who ran the small-town mystery bookstore. So, no, it wasn’t inspired by Moira Rose–though we take that comparison as a compliment.
YB: I am just pondering your change from a male main character to Miranda and wanted to ask about that. With that change, you brought in the spin-off but also a lot of sexism in the film industry, and a lot of interest from men in the community. Not to mention the character Bea who loves the TV drama Pastor Fran. At what point did you make the change to Miranda? What brought it on?
WF: That happened early on, after we’d worked out the basic plot of the mystery, but before we started the first draft. Something about a washed-up male actor didn’t resonate the way we wanted. It didn’t seem as poignant. Likewise, having the wife own a bookstore seemed less interesting.
Ian called me up and said, “We have to flip it! Let’s make the wife the star of a cheesy 80’s detective show and her husband the owner of I Only Read Murder Bookstore. After that, it really came alive, allowed us to talk about all sorts of wider elements in Hollywood and the cruel nature of fame.
YB: Though the book is pure entertainment, particularly all the references to 1980s TV mystery dramas, and spinoffs and action figures, it has a variety of characters and quirky and complex rules based on the town, which has a long history. You’ve also made the characters diverse, including Indigenous characters, South Asian, high school students and a pregnant female cop. You’ve also really played with stereotypical characters, such as Bea and the police officer Ned. Can you talk a little bit about those decisions and if there were any challenges to creating any of the characters?
WF: Happy Rock is an idyllic place, far removed from tiresome politics. That’s part of the appeal. Everyone is an oddball, everyone is eccentric, and everyone gets along. Even when they grumble at each other it’s done affectionately and based on their individual quirks more than anything else. Which is why the character of Annette is so insidious. She undermines this. She is the serpent in the Garden, almost cancerous, eating away at the good-natured, take-everyone-on-their-own-terms nature of the town. We were also very aware that we were writing a classic “cozy mystery,” so we played off of those tropes as well, with characters like Ned.
IF: Often the small-town police officer in a cozy mystery is presented as a bit of a bumbler. We wanted Ned Buckley to be a good investigator, the same way we wanted Miranda Abbott, despite her faults, to be a good performer.
YB: For each of you, what is your favourite part of the book, without giving too much away? What was the best part of the process?
WF: I like Miranda’s arc as she becomes more–but not completely–self-aware, seeing her own worst aspects reflected in Annette. The moment, at the very end of the book, when she says “friends” instead of “the cast,” is significant, I think. She is a very lonely character when we first meet her. In Happy Rock, she finds a home.
IF: I like the ending, when the murderer is revealed. It’s surprising and unexpected, but completely earned and logical.