Robert Rotenberg’s latest Ari Greene thriller, Stranglehold, is out now. The Indigo Fiction Blog is pleased to share this original post from the author himself.
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The greatest line I’ve ever heard about fiction writing is that it has a great advantage over non-fiction, because fiction can tell the truth.
Sounds odd. But think. You want to know about England in the early 1800s what do you read? Dickens. California during the dust bowl in the 1930s? Steinbeck of course.
Now I’m not saying I’m a Dickens or a Steinbeck, but what I try to do in my novels is to show Toronto as it really is. Now. Today. Not an all-cutesy CBC-type happy multicultural soap opera where everyone is sweet all the time. And not some dark, horrid place where heinous crimes happen every hour.
Just the facts. The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. This is a city in radical transformation. Shedding its adolescent skin, and not really sure what true maturity will bring. Hence the stasis. The indecision. And that key component that makes all great literature: the conflict.
My first novel, Old City Hall, takes the reader to the heart of Toronto’s central criminal courthouse. The place where the real action happens. In my second book, The Guilty Plea, a wealthy third-generation family is crumbling while a brilliant, but unsure woman from small-town Ontario is trying to make her way in the Big Smoke. How much more Toronto can you get?
Last year, Stray Bullets came out. The title evokes to Torontonians the horror of recent years when innocent by-standers have been felled by the increasing gun violence on our city streets.
My new book, Stranglehold, takes place during a hotly contested election for the next mayor of Toronto. It’s a high-stakes campaign. The establishment candidate is being challenged by a rough and tumble upstart, a part-time high school rugby coach whose campaign is all about getting ‘tough on crime.’
In each book I try to tell three stories. Draw a circle in your mind. Then draw a ring around it, and a third ring. The inner circle is the tale of the crime itself. (Just one murder per book. Always at the start, then no more blood and guts. Just brain power.) Ring number two reveals the characters my readers have now come to know, their personal lives and how they intersect with the criminal trial (the inner ring) they all face.
The outside ring is the city. To me Toronto is a character in and of itself. A living, breathing, ever changing player on the wider stage.
I’m thrilled to say that this focus on the city, really drilling down to see what makes it tick and not pretending the setting is in “Nowheresville U.S.A.,” has paid off. The Det. Greene’s Toronto maps on my website is extremely popular. And now America’s National Public Radio (NPR) is coming up to do a story about me and the city I write about. It will air in early June. Hopefully by then you’ll have read Stranglehold. It’s available everywhere in Canada on May 7.
Bet you can’t read just one chapter. Enjoy.
-Robert Rotenberg
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Thanks to our friends at Simon and Schuster Canada for facilitating this blog post, and to Robert Rotenberg for composing it.