Ron Corbett, an ice-fishing hut, & a murder on RAGGED LAKE

HALLIE EPHRON: I had the pleasure of meeting Canadian mystery writer Ron Corbett at the Edgar Awards ceremony in NY. His novel, Ragged Lake, was a finalist for Best Paperback Original. It's also up for Crime Writers of Canada award as best debut novel.

At the awards ceremony, Ron looked stunned. Gobsmacked in a good way. Welcoming him to Jungle Red, one of his first blog guest appearances.Ron, congratulations on your award nomination for your novel Ragged Lake. Wow! Talk about hitting it out of the park with your first novel. What was it like, learning that you'd been nominated?

RON CORBETT: It was a complete surprise because I had no idea Ragged Lake had been submitted. My publisher, ECW Press, submitted it and I only found out when the nominees were announced. I was working in my study and received an e-mail from the Mystery Writers of America. At first I thought a friend was pulling a joke. When ECW confirmed the nomination, I was still rather startled. Many of my favourite writers have won an Edgar. I am very aware of the award, and still quite flattered that MWA thought Ragged Lake was worthy of a nomination.

HALLIE: That's the kind of surprise every author hopes for. Why a mystery?

RON: When I was in university I loved James M. Cain and Raymond Chandler (I am of a generation that was taught the opening paragraph to The Postman Always Rings Twice in writing classes.) I discovered John D MacDonald a couple years ago, while vacationing in Florida, and I’m still over the moon about him. A few years ago, I did the same thing after reading my first James Lee Burke novel. So I like mysteries, and crime stories. It’s what I prefer to read. 

HALLIE: A reviewer (http://www.reviewingtheevidence.com/review.html?id=10970) wrote: 

"There is plenty of violence in Corbett's debut, the first in the Frank Yakabuski series, but it is the gorgeous writing that makes the biggest impression. Whether it is describing a howling storm, depicting the way the fire following a meth lab explosion turns the snow to rain, or sharing the quiet sounds a building makes when everyone has gone to sleep, Corbett enthralls with his writing."

 

Now that's a review we'd all love to get. How did you make the transition to lush prose?

RON: As a print journalist, I was awfully lucky in my career. A lot of my background is in magazines, and when I was with newspapers it was as a feature writer or columnist. Which means I didn't write a lot of inverted-pyramid news stories. My non-fiction books(which all started as journalism stories) were often categorized as "creative non-fiction." So the jump to fiction wasn't as big as the jump might seem. Although I do love the fact that no matter what I write, I won't be getting a phone call tomorrow from a politician saying I'd missed the other side of the story.

HALLIE:. Where (in your imagination, in real life?) did you find the cabin and a god-forsaken lawless town in which the story is set?

RON: There really was a cabin, or an ice-fishing hut, actually. I saw it one night when I was near Algonquin Park, working on a story for the Ottawa Citizen. I was walking back to my motel, and suddenly there was this flash of light way out on this lake I was walking beside. It was winter, and the lake was frozen. The light came from an ice-fishing hut. There were two more flashes of light, and then nothing.

In hindsight, it was probably some poor soul who couldn’t get his kerosene lantern lit, but at the time I thought it was the oddest thing. These three flashes of light from inside an ice-fishing hut, and then nothing more -- What had happened? By the time I reached my motel, those three flashes had become shotgun blasts, and something horrific had happened inside that hut.

I wrote some paragraphs that night that are in Ragged Lake.

HALLIE: Tell us about your series detective, Frank Yakabuski--where did he come from? And what inspired you to write his relationship with his father?

RON: Frank Yakabuski went through various incarnations (and various names) before I settled on the character you meet in Ragged Lake. I decided I wanted a character that was competent, skilled, confident about his abilities and his place in the world. I did not want a character riddled with self-doubt or with some dark, back-story that provided the narrative tension of the book. I wanted a character that was like the guides and woodsmen I have met from the Algonquin Highlands and the Northern Divide. “Stand-up” people, is the phrase you would use in those places.

Yakabuski is a common name up there, which is why I chose it, and why I stayed with it (despite suggestions along the way that it be changed. “How would you even pronounce it?” an early editor asked me. The answer, if you’re interested, is, “any way you want. It’s how they do it up there.”)   

Yakabuski’s relationship with his father grew as the story was being written. His role became much larger, and rather crucial in a few places. It seemed to make sense as I was writing the story. It wasn’t part of the original design. The father has an even larger role in the sequel, for the same reasons. Although it wasn’t a goal I set out with, by the time the third book in this series is published, some sort of opinion will be offered on the nature of father-son relationships.

That’s one of the quirky things about writing. Sometimes you’re all set to go in one direction but you end up stumbling off in the other. Drives you mad, but what are you going to do? If you can’t stand getting lost, you probably shouldn’t be doing this.

HALLIE: What's the next book in the series, and when is it coming out?

RON: The title is Cape Diamond and it comes out in early October, 2018. All three titles in this series will have proper place names.
Like I said, I’m crazy about John D MacDonald right now and he put a colour in all the titles to his Travis McGee mystery novels. That led to some pretty strange titles. Don’t know if the conceit works for dozens of books, but I’m hoping it works for three. It’s a tip of the hat to MacDonald, who I encourage everyone to read, if they haven’t done so already. He has a body of work I don’t think any writer will come close to attaining again.

As for the actual story, most of the action takes place in Springfield, this fictional northern city where Yakabuski works as a police detective. In Ragged Lake, with the exception of the diary portion and the epilogue, all the action took place outside of Springfield. In Cape Diamond, the reader finally gets to visit Springfield. Which is a pretty weird city. I’ll leave it at that.    

About Ragged Lake by Ron Corbett
While working one afternoon on the Northern Divide, a young tree-marker makes a grisly discovery: in a squatter’s cabin near an old mill town, a family has been murdered. An army vet coming off a successful turn leading a task force that took down infamous biker criminals, Detective Frank Yakabuski arrives in Ragged Lake, a nearly abandoned village, to solve the family’s murder. But no one is willing to talk. With a winter storm coming, Yakabuski sequesters the locals in a fishing lodge as he investigates the area with his two junior officers. Before long, he is fighting not only to solve the crime but also to stay alive and protect the few innocents left living in the desolate woods. A richly atmospheric mystery with sweeping backdrops, explosive action, and memorable villains, Ragged Lake will keep you guessing — about the violent crime, the nature of family, and secret deeds done long ago on abandoned frontiers.

 HALLIE: Start with an ice fishing cabin and 3 flashes of light... I SO get it!

What's a place  you've passed through and thought, whoa boy, I can imagine a story set right here.