What if Canada Called

, , , and no one answered?

The guest lined up for Canada Calling this month lives in a place that has wonky e-mail service. Right up until last night I’d hoped we could make connections, but we would have had more luck talking to one another with two tin cans and a string. I apologize for the “Watch This Space” blog this morning and promise you her interview later in the year.

In the interest of salvaging a feisty and interesting blog, I went looking for what’s exciting in Canadian mysteries, and, for the first time, came up blank.

We—the members of Crime Writers of Canada—are looking forward to the announcement of the 2009 Arthur Ellis Award nominees next Thursday. It’s a cool idea. CWC chapter members in Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto, and Ottawa invite the public to events with local mystery authors. The AE nominees are announced at those events; much nicer than simply reading them in a press release. But that’s next week and not going to do me a lot of good for this weekend.

So, I decide to go to the CWC site, troll through the members bios and assemble a list of hot new mysteries being published in 2009 by cool Canadian authors. The pickings were slim. Even if I went back to 2008-published books, the ratio of total CWC authors to those with a new book last year was depressing.

All right, probably a lot of people aren’t familiar with the vibrant community of small Canadian presses. I could do an annotated list of to show the diversity of publishing in Canada today. Only I ended up with a lot of asterisks—*Closed—*Closing—*Not sure what’s happening with them.

This morning I feel like the amateur radio operator in H. G. Wells, “War of the Worlds, calling, “CQ, CQ, is anyone out there?” CQ is the general code that radio operators use to ask anyone listening on a given frequency to respond.

All I can say in conclusion is that yes, we are out here, writing away, still sending out those manuscripts, still a strong mystery community in the north. And like everyone else, hoping for better times.

Sharon Wildwind