Noir hero on the Northern Divide, Ron Corbett's Frank Yakabuski

HALLIE EPHRON: There are few moments in a crime fiction writer's career that can beat having your debut novel nominated for an Edgar Award. When I met Ron Corbett at the Edgar Awards banquet, he was still pinching himself. The book was his debut novel, Ragged Lake, a series novel that introduced Frank Yakabuski based on the Northern Divide, in Canada.

Turned out, the accolade was not a one-off. The sequel, Cape Diamond, received a starred review in Publisher’s Weekly. Kirkus Reviews says Corbett's writing has “ingredients rarely combined – starkly etched natural setting, a gung-ho cop, soulful flashbacks, violent climax – expertly blended and brought to a full roiling boil.”

The third series novel, Mission Road, is being published today. Welcome (back!) to Jungle Red Writers, Ron! Catch us up on how the series is doing.

RON CORBETT: It’s doing well, I would say. Reviews have been great for the first two books. We’ll wait and see for the third. People seem to enjoy the setting of the series, and the characters. They enjoy Frank.

HALLIE: Yes, tell us a little about your protagonist, Frank Yakabuski?

RON: Frank is a police detective on the Northern Divide, which is a real geographic place, but I’ve fictionalized it for the series. There’s no town called Springfield. There’s no criminal gang called the “Shiners.” There used to be a gang like that. They were right out of Gangs of New York, and pretty much ran the city I live in, Ottawa, for a couple years in the 1830s

Frank was in the military for ten years before becoming a cop, and he has a lot of skills. He’s a competent man. He’s also a reflective man. He is patterned, in about every important way, on fishing guides and lumbermen I have met up North. Those men don’t talk much. They think through most problems. They rarely make mistakes.
 
Family always seems important to the men like that. I’m not sure why, but it almost always is. It seems to get more important the further North you go as well. Maybe the tougher it gets to survive, the more important family becomes to you. I don’t know. But Frank is close to his father, and his sister, and they have important roles to play in the series.

HALLIE: Without giving too much awayl how has the series progressed since Ragged Lake?

RON: Readers are much more familiar with the area now, have spent some time traveling around this fictionalized Northern Divide I am trying to create. There’s a lot of movement in the first two books--extended road trips and walks through the bush. Not all that end well.

HALLIE: And your books are pretty far from the 'cozy' end of the spectrum, wouldn't you say?

RON: Yes they are. And I think it’s important that they stay that way. I think a “cozy” mystery with a far North setting would be an odd mix. The far north is suited for Noir. I have heard the Yakabuski series called “country noir,” and that doesn’t bother me.

HALLIE: We've talked a lot in the last few months about the refuge we take in lighter fare. But I think a lot of us can also escape into a well-drawn, hardboiled story with a tough resilient main character who marches to his own drummer. And the setting of this one sounds sublime. (Would love to hear more about what those titles evoke: from Ragged Lake to Mission Road.)

Which makes me think of books, darker tales in which  setting is so key, like our own Julia Spencer-Fleming's Adirondacks and William Kent Krueger's north woods of Wyoming and C. J. Box's  rugged Montana. Where the dark and challenging nature of the landscape sets the tone for the tale.

What books have drawn you in with their dark, rugged settings?