Leaving Dublin FAQ

Q: You’re not particularly well known, yet you’ve published a book of memoirs. Why would people be interested in the memoirs of someone they never heard of?

A: It’s all in the storytelling, don’t you know? Nobody had ever heard of Frank McCourt before he published Angela’s Ashes, yet his book became an instant bestseller.

Q: Do you think your book is going to become an instant bestseller?

A: One lives in hope.

Q: What would it take to become a bestseller?

A: A review in The New York Times would help. So would a review in The Globe and Mail. Or the National Post.

Q: How about a review in the Irish Times?

A: That would help too.

Q: But what if the reviews were negative? Wouldn’t that adversely affect sales?

A: Not necessarily. Yann Martel received some stinging reviews for Beatrice & Virgil, yet that didn’t stop him from ascending to the top of the national bestseller lists in Canada. Pierre Berton used to tell young writers, “Don’t read your reviews. Measure them.” The longer the review, said Berton, the better the chance that readers will want to buy the book.

Q: Have you received negative reviews for any of your previous books?

A: Yes, a couple.

Q: And?

A: The best revenge, as one of my publishers once told me, is to forgive your antagonists, live well, and wait for the sales figures to come in.

Q: You’ve changed the working title of your autobiography a few times. Initially it was called Reinventing Myself: Memoirs of a Dublin Rogue. Now it’s called Leaving Dublin: Writing my Way from Ireland to Canada. Why the changes?

A: An editor pointed out that I had not, in fact, reinvented myself after I moved to Canada at age 23. I had simply adapted to new opportunities. My publisher suggested I put the word “writing” in the title to indicate that this is what I do.

Q: But you’ve done other things. You’ve been a professional musician. You’ve been a radio announcer.

A: Yes, I was a writer who played music for a living, and a writer who worked in commercial broadcasting. I’ve been a writer since I was a child, when I made up bedtime stories for my younger brother.

Q: Your publisher, RMB ❘ Rocky Mountain Books, puts out books about outdoor adventure, mountain culture, hiking guides, and so on. Where do you fit into that mix? Are you a climber or a hiker?

A: No, not at all. My publisher, Don Gorman, has broadened the scope of his catalogue considerably in recent years. He also publishes books of travel, biography, history and social justice. A very popular recent title, for example, is John Reilly’s Bad Medicine, about crime and punishment on a First Nations reserve where the author served as a provincial court judge.

Q: What prompted you to write this autobiography, and why did you decide to do it now?

A: Because I can still remember. I hoped that in the process of remembering things and writing them down, I might be able to make sense of my life and give it context.

Q: That sounds like a self-serving rationale for writing book of memoirs.

A: Indeed. A book about oneself is – by definition – an exercise in self-absorption. But an autobiography is also about being rooted in a particular time and place. That makes it an exercise in social history, a subject dear to my heart.

Q: You write about growing up in Ireland during the 1940s and 1950s. Why would readers in Canada, the U.S. and other countries be interested in that?

A: They have read about the Celtic Tiger and how it stopped roaring in recent years. I expect they would also be interested in what things were like in suburban Ireland before the cub was born.

Q: Then you write about coming to Canada at age 23. What makes your immigration story different from any other?

A: The fact that I came here not to find employment or escape from a repressive regime, but to get away from an Irish civil service job that was driving me crazy.

Q: Why couldn’t you have looked for another job in Ireland?

A: Because Ireland was driving me crazy too.

Q: You worked as a singer of Irish folk songs after you got to Canada. Couldn’t you have done that in Ireland?

A: As a matter of fact, I did. But there wasn’t enough money in it to justify giving up my day job. Canada gave me the chance to do it full-time.

Q: Then you worked in radio. What was that all about?

A: I wanted to try something different. I knew the manager of the radio station in Prince George and he opened the door.

Q: During your 30 years in the newspaper business you worked at a number of different jobs: police reporter, theatre critic, staff writer for the Calgary Herald’s Sunday magazine, obituary columnist. Why so many changes?

A: They were all great gigs. I enjoyed the challenges and the rewards of every one.

Q: One of the longest chapters in Leaving Dublin is about an eight-month lockout and strike at the Calgary Herald in 1999-2000. Why did you devote so much space to this topic?

A: Because nobody had told the insider story before. This was an unusual dispute in Canadian labour history in the sense that it wasn’t about wages or vacation allowances. It was about a group of journalists who wanted to be treated with dignity and respect.

Q: Do you think people will take issue with your interpretations of certain events, for example your description of what was happening at the Calgary Herald before the journalists started walking a picket line?

A: Undoubtedly. Everyone has his or her version of a story. This is my version.

Q: What other stories are you writing these days?

A: I’m working on the centennial history of the Calgary Public Library, for publication in the spring of 2012.

Vanity fare

Edmonton novelist Thomas Trofimuk heaps abuse on the self-publishing industry in an article written for a recent edition of WestWord, the Writers Guild of Alberta’s magazine. He does not mince words. “Any idiot can self-publish a book,” he writes. “Most self-published books I’ve read needed editing, revising or at some point needed to be profoundly rejected.”

A self-published Calgary writer, Eleanor King Byers, takes exception to Trofimuk’s remarks, characterizing them as “offensive.” In a letter to the WestWord editor, she suggests that Trofimuk should research the “art” of self-publishing before “throwing out careless comments.” She goes on to talk about the success of her own books, and says that independent Calgary booksellers have “indicated a readiness to carry any future work sight unseen.”

Trofimuk is not moved to issue a retraction. “In my experience, most self-published books are horrifyingly bad,” he repeats. “Self-published books are not subjected to an independent critic that will judge their worth on literary grounds. In short, they do not have to be good. They just have to be funded.”

Which argument is the valid one? Is self-publishing largely the domain of inept hacks with money to spend, or a legitimate literary enterprise that can sometimes produce nuggets?

In fact, there is truth in both arguments. Self-publishing does generate a lot of dross but then so does mainstream publishing. I was a judge for a national literary awards program last year and – of the more than 200 commercially published books I scrutinized – only a handful of titles were worth publishing. Some were superb. Most were, as the English literary critic Victoria Glendinning boldly said about the 2009 Giller Prize entries, “unbelievably dreadful.”

I have also been a judge for competitions in which self-published books were allowed entry, and occasionally have been pleasantly surprised. I have yet to find anything to measure up to the standards of such famous self-published works as The Celestine Prophecy or Mrs. Dalloway, but I have come across the odd self-published author (Terry Fallis is a well-known recent example) who would not look out of place in the catalogue of a major publishing house.

I have not read the work of Eleanor King Byers but I do know that her book Guardians of the Lamp – about the old Calgary General Hospital and its nursing school – sat atop the local bestsellers’ list of the Calgary Herald for many months. That suggests to me it wasn’t just her friends and family and former nursing colleagues who bought this book. Clearly, there are many Calgarians who wanted to read about those dedicated women who ministered to the sick at what was once the largest hospital in the province.

Self-publishing was once considered the basest form of literary endeavour, indulged in by mediocre scribblers who could not get their work commercially published. So desperate were they to see their books in print, they paid vanity presses to publish them. When I worked as a newspaper books editor, I could always tell from a quick glance at the covers which ones were the vanity publications. They were crudely designed with ugly artwork, deeply strange titles (Reusing Old Graves, Bombproof Your Horse) and fonts that looked as if they came out of a children’s printing set.

Nowadays, with the aid of sophisticated cover design software and inexpensive print-on-demand technology, it is possible for self-published authors to put out books that look professionally produced. It’s not just wannabe authors who are availing of this technology. Traditionally published authors like myself are also using it, to bring back old titles when mainstream publishers declare them out of print. These books have already been professionally vetted and edited so they usually are a cut above those manuscripts that have not gone through this gatekeeping process.

I sympathize with Trofimuk when he says he doesn’t want to wade through thousands of “iffy” self-published books when there are “just too many great books out there that I don’t have time to read.” I also sympathize with Byers when she says that self-publishing “does not necessarily indicate rejection by publishing houses.” It can also indicate an author’s desire for more editorial control or a greater share of the royalties. A writer I know who has published several best-selling mountaineering books with commercial trade houses did his latest book as a self-publishing venture because he wanted it out by a certain date and wanted a bigger slice of the profits. He already had an established track record so he had high hopes that his book would do well. I expect it probably will.

There is a legitimate place in the literary world for self-published books. There always has been. Mark Twain, James Joyce, Anais Nin, Beatrix Potter and a host of other well-known writers all had to self-publish at different points in their careers because they could not find publishers to take on their work. But for every self-published author who turned out to be a literary genius, there were thousands who fell by the wayside. Today, there are millions falling by the wayside, because all it takes to get published now is access to a computer and an account with Blogger. Good luck finding golden needles in that particular haystack.

Like me and follow me

That’s what the social network gurus (and my publisher) say we should do. Have people like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter. So here goes. Click here to like me on Facebook and here to follow me on Twitter. I promise to do the same for you. Really!

Gordon Cope’s A Thames Moment

With the help of Apple’s great software program, iMovie, I have created a video trailer for Gordon Cope’s travel memoir, A Thames Moment. View the video on YouTube and let me know what you think. This is my first attempt at video production. 

Is this book project crap?

UPDATE: There is no update. It is now August 15, more than a month since I wrote my letter to the minister, and he still has not replied.

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I applied to a provincial government agency — twice — to fund my next history book project, and was turned down, twice. Why? First, let me tell you the reason I applied for this money.

You don’t make big money writing history in this country. It is the sport of amateurs. Amateurs, that is, not in the sense being inept but in the sense of loving what you do and not expecting to get rich doing it. There are some exceptions, of course. Pierre Berton was one who made good money from his history writing.  Margaret MacMillan is another. Her books are New York Times bestsellers, translated into  several languages, and the winners of many prizes. But MacMillan doesn’t start earning big money from her books until after they are published, and they take several years to research and write. How does she keep body and soul together in the meantime? Through the support of the various universities with which she is associated. In her published acknowledgments in Paris 1919, for example, she thanks Ryerson University and St. Anthony’s College, Oxford for their help.

I am not a university-based historian. I am a freelancer who relies on government grants to fund my historical research. Otherwise, I simply could not afford to do this work. As enjoyable as it is for me to spend my days conducting interviews and sifting through the valuable historical resources of the Glenbow Library and Archives, I still have to pay the utility bills.

A writer’s work is never done. I propose to devote my full attention to the history book project after I finish the rewrites for my current autobiography-in-progress, scheduled for publication in the fall of 2011. The history book will be a sequel to my 2002 title, Scoundrels and Scallywags, which became a Canadian bestseller and was nominated for a few prizes. As successful as that book has been, however, the total returns from it have been far less than what I would have earned in a month working — say — as an executive assistant to Alberta Culture Minister Lindsay Blackett (pictured above).

Mr. Blackett, you will recall, is the politician who made headlines across the country in June for dismissing much of the film and television projects his government funds as “shit” and “crap.” He didn’t say anything about the book projects his government funds, but you have to wonder about them as well. He obviously likes his constituents to know what’s on his mind because he posts regularly to Facebook and Twitter.

When I began formulating plans for my proposed history book project in the fall of 2009, I applied for funding from this agency that reports to Minister Blackett. I had received funding for the other seven books I have published about the social history and colourful characters of Alberta, so I did not imagine there would be a problem with this application. However, much to my surprise, my funding request was denied. Minister Blackett said in a letter that my research was “unlikely to provide new understanding or add to the knowledge base of Alberta’s history.” I found this explanation a bit hard to take, so I resubmitted my application in February 2010.

In my second application, I referred to the original research I would be conducting to add to our collective knowledge of Alberta history. Again, my request for funding was denied. “The proposed research is still unlikely to result in new knowledge about Alberta’s history,” wrote Minister Blackett.

This time, I  decided I would not take the rejection lying down. I wrote a letter to the minister spelling out exactly how my research WILL result in new knowledge about Alberta’s history. Here are two examples:

In  my chapter on Winnifred Eaton Reeve, a hugely successful romance novelist of the early 20th century, I will use material obtained exclusively from her grandson. How did I get this material? By travelling from Calgary to Toronto and conducting an extensive interview with him. The government did not pay for this trip; I did. The material I obtained will add to our collective knowledge of Alberta history, because no other historian has focussed on the years Reeve spent as a leading figure in Calgary theatrical and writing circles.

Similarly, in the case of the Peace River vaudeville pioneer, Hal Sisson, I have done a number of interviews with his daughter to fill in the many gaps in his story. I was drawn to his story initially when he published his own obituary in the Victoria Times Colonist. He did so, I discovered, because he simply didn’t trust the media to get his story right. His daughter helped me correct  the misinformation about him that had been published in newspapers prior to his death.

There are many other examples, but you get the picture. Each interview will bring forth new information about the subject that will add to our collective knowledge of Alberta history. It disturbs me greatly, therefore, to be told that my funding applications are being rejected because some unidentified government appointees reporting to Mr. Blackett have told him my project will have no value as a contribution to Alberta history. I will prove them wrong, of course, when the book is published, three or four years from now. In the meantime, I find myself wondering if the minister’s much-publicized remarks about “shit” and “crap” have been interpreted by his minions as a directive to stop giving money to people who have proven they can popularize Alberta history and put it on the Canadian bestsellers list?

I wrote my letter to Minister Blackett on July 10. I am still awaiting the courtesy of a reply.

Where I write

If they ask me, I will do it, of course, especially if they want me to do it for money. If the editors of a magazine or newspaper want me to write a piece about the place where I work, I will be happy to comply: it’s what used to be the master bedroom of  a smallish two-bedroom condo, which I quickly claimed for myself when I discovered it was the largest upstairs room in the house. I didn’t want to work in the basement, because that smacked of being sentenced to life in a dungeon. I moved up my desk, my computer, and my books before my wife had an opportunity to object, and now here I sit, happily scribbling away, only vaguely aware of the unremitting sounds of hammering and sawing that mark the ongoing transformation of my Calgary inner-city neighbourhood from a sleepy community of Second World War bungalows into a trendy habitat for people who make a lot more money than freelance writers.

OK, so that’s where I write, but why would anyone want to know all this? I ask the question when I look at today’s edition of The Globe and Mail, and see that  George Fetherling works in a “miniscule” home office adjoining a larger room in his house filled with books. Any surprise there? Not to me. All writers fill up their available flat surfaces with books. Sure, we can Google like anyone else, but we also like to dig through the stacks in our home libraries to reconnect with old friends. So that’s where I left that book of modern Irish short stories with that wonderful preface by Anthony Burgess: “Any man, whatever his nationality, has a right to admire and to propagandize for Irish literature, but it helps if he possesses Irish blood or a mad capacity for empathizing with Ireland …” What a wonderful way with words that Englishman had.

As a writer, and a reader, I am interested to know about the books George Fetherling  keeps around him for inspiration and pleasure. They would not necessarily be my choices, but then why should they? The books that inform George’s writing are different from the books that influence me, and that’s only as it should be. We write very different kinds of books. His latest is a novel about Walt Whitman. Mine is an autobiography-in-progress.

But is the reading public really interested in where we work? Is this something that engages the attention of Globe and Mail subscribers? I can understand why a publication such as Write, the magazine of The Writers’ Union of Canada, or WestWord, the magazine of the Writers Guild of Alberta, regularly features pieces from writers describing the places where we work. We all want to know what works best for our colleagues. Does a nice view out the window help or hinder the creative process? For me, I prefer to keep the blinds drawn.  No distractions, I say. Others seem to be stimulated by the sights of trees, flowers, passing elk, or great bodies of water. I like a window but it has to be screened. To each our own.

I haven’t seen any comments yet on George’s piece. I’m a bit surprised by that, because I felt sure there would be at least a few readers out there — aside from his fellow writers — who would like to know a bit about his reading habits. But I didn’t think they would want to know about the room itself; this “place of sun and silence” where he does his reading and writing. Their interest, surely, would be in the end results, not in how they were achieved.

The one thing we do all need, most writers would agree, is an isolated place where we can be alone with our thoughts. But I look at some of those places, and I can’t say many of them would help my writing. Harry Bruce describes a few of them in his book, Page Fright: Foibles and Fetishes of Famous Writers. Raymond Carver, for example, says he did his best writing in his car, on a pad propped on his knee. David Bergen, the Winnipeg novelist, did the same. Where did they spread out their pages? Across the dashboard? Along the back seat? No thanks. I’ll settle for the big brown wooden desk I bought for a pittance when the Calgary Herald moved from downtown to its current location near the intersection of Deerfoot and Memorial.

William S. Burroughs, Maya Angelou and Susan Sontag did their writing in hotel rooms, ordering up room service whenever they got hungry. That would appeal to me, but I don’t think any granting agencies in Canada would fund such extravagances. Erskine Caldwell wrote on night boats between Boston and New York, thinking “the rhythm of the water might help my sentence structure a little.” A nice, romantic idea but, again, where did he spread out his research? Or, more to the point, where would I spread out my research. A nonfiction writer always has to be surrounded by research. If you don’t have the fixings, you can’t make the meal.

My book-lined upstairs office provides me with the perfect space for thinking and writing. If I want to shut out the world, I close the door and draw the blinds. It’s my most compelling reason, as I have often said, for never wanting to go back and work in a crowded newspaper office again. But it’s not the only place where I write. I write everywhere, in the shower, on the bus, in the supermarket produce department, and at my Tai Chai class. Writers are always writing, in our heads when not putting pen to paper. I almost never take the music  iPod with me when I go for a walk, because it would interrupt my writing. I wrote the first part of his blog post in my office, on my computer, with a copy of Harry Bruce’s book close at hand. I wrote this last bit, in my head, during a casual morning stroll around the neighbourhood. So there you have it; that’s where I write. But I don’t expect anyone, apart from fellow writers to be really interested in this.

Ian Brown at the Banff Centre

Taking a break from his current cross-Canada, eating-in-strange-places (including a nudist resort) routine, author Ian Brown told a sold-out audience of 120 at the Rolston Recital Hall, that the four elements of a good nonfiction story — after you have satisfied the five journalistic Ws (who, where, what, why, when?) and the H(ow) — are the scenes you create, the dialogue you capture, the details you provide, and the point(s) of view expressed by the principal character(s). He said his toughest challenge writing his latest book, The Boy in the Moon, was his inability to give voice to the main character –his mentally disabled son–who cannot speak and who cannot communicate anything beyond what he is feeling right now. Like any small child, Brown’s son laughs when he is happy and cries when he is frustrated or suffering physical pain, but he has no way of indicating how he feels about what happened yesterday, or what might happen tomorrow.

What does this thirteen-year-old boy, Walker,  know and remember? From what they can tell, maybe little more than who his parents are, who his nanny and group-home caregivers are, and what they bring into his day-to-day life. He is like a beloved domestic pet who knows who provides the food, shelter and daily exercise, and the rules they expect to be obeyed: where to sleep, when to sit, where to poop, and where not to piss. Walker remembers the same things, except that there are fewer rules. His parents and caregivers try to enter his world and grant him the freedom to be himself, not bring him into their world and expect him to conform.

What does Walker remember from times gone by? Hard to say. He had a close friend in the group home who died some months ago, but he may have forgotten him by now. Does he have regrets? Probably not. With the mind of a two-year-old (in the body of a seven-year-old occupied by a thirteen-year-old), Walker has no way of judging the rightness or wrongness of his actions. His parents don’t judge or discipline him. Neither do his caregivers. They just allow him to be. He will never grow to adulthood in the mental sense, so no point in trying to teach him adult behaviours.

Brown said it took him 10 years to write the book, and for the longest time he never believed anyone would want to read it. He wrote it mainly for himself, trying to come to grips with the mystery of his son; a mystery he knew he would never solve.  He did not think many people would want to buy the book, because books about severely disabled people are usually downers; because his son is one of only about 150 people in the world born with this rare genetic mutation; and because a story of illness without a miracle cure –without a happy ending –is bound to leave readers feeling unfulfilled. Even his mother had doubts about the project. “Why don’t you write a successful potboiler?” she said.

But still Brown persisted, because he believed his son’s life had meaning, and he wanted to learn about that. What was the value of a life like Walker’s; a life “lived in the twilight and often in pain”? Brown filled his notebooks with the observed details of his son’s life from babyhood onward, the scourges of diaper rash, the autistic-style behavioural traits, the cocktails of prescription drugs with names sounding like those of Russian cosmonauts, the struggles with severe constipation followed by spectacular bathroom explosions, the highs, the lows, the joys, the sorrows. He talked to geneticists and medical experts of all stripes, made contact with parents around the world who had children with the same condition, and put all that he learned down on paper. Brown characterizes himself as a reporter, constantly asking questions, constantly seeking answers, and usually finding out along the way that there many more questions still to be asked if one is somehow going to get to the truth. He was not interested in giving some kind of objective meaning to Walker’s life; he was not interested in imposing his view of life upon the life of his disabled son; he simply wanted to understand. What goes on in that mysterious place, in that place most of us would classify as a damaged mind?

The result of Brown’s 10-year quest is an acclaimed book that has already won what Banff’s literary arts maven Steven Ross Smith describes as the Triple Crown of Canadian nonfiction awards: the BC National Award for Canadian Nonfiction, the 2010 Charles Taylor Prize, and the Trillium Book Award.

“You have invented a new business model for nonfiction writing in this country,” quipped Walrus magazine editor John Macfarlane, who joined Brown for an on-stage conversation after the author’s one-hour talk. “You don’t sell a zillion copies, you just win prizes.”

“Ah, yes,” laughed Brown. “But it’s not sustainable.”

iBooks Canada

The Canadian iBookstore was launched on Canada Day, which seems fitting, but where are the Canadian authors? Sure, you can find the ghost-written biographies of Theo Fleury and Rick Hillier, and a book of recycled columns by Globe and Mail columnist Margaret Wente. But where are our big writers? Where is Margaret Atwood? Where is Alice Munro? Where is Yann Martel?

Yes, you will find Lawrence Hill represented by two titles here. But neither of them is his best-selling The Book of Negroes.  And you can find seven titles by Malcolm Gladwell. But he seems more American than Canadian these days, given that he has been living and working in the States since the early 1980s and is published most frequently in The New Yorker.

The problem, it seems, is that Canadian publishers, for whatever reason, have yet to strike a deal with Apple to have their digital titles available through iBooks. In the meantime, the American publishers are making hay because they now have their titles in the Canadian iBookstore as well as the American iBookstore, and goodness knows where else. There’s something wrong with this picture.

Where are the iBooks?

We’ve had the iPad in Canada for more than two weeks. The main selling feature, the one that tempted me to buy early, was the promise of a digital bookstore that would give Amazon’s Kindle a run for its money. Yet, I see nothing in the iBookstore but public-domain publications similar to those already available from Project Gutenberg. Project Gutenberg, in fact, has a considerably larger selection of volumes than iBooks Canada, which currently has little more than a handful of classics of world literature. The only contemporary title in iBooks Canada, as you might expect, is the iPad User Guide. I presume the problem here is that Apple released the iPad in Canada before striking a deal with Canadian publishers to make digital copies of their books available to Canadian readers. Let’s hope today’s appointment of Chris Jackson as manager of iBookstore Canada serves to quickly change this situation. As things stand, the iPad gives me nothing more than what I already have on my MacBook Air–the many thousands of apps notwithstanding–aside from a slightly longer battery time.

John Bishop Ballem, 1925-2010

In Canadian legal circles, John Ballem was recognized as a respected oil and gas lawyer who wrote crime novels in his spare time. But Ballem considered his writing much more than a sideline. “If I didn’t write, I wouldn’t be a contented person,” he said. He was as proud of his nomination for the 1997 Arthur Ellis Award for Excellence in Crime Writing as he was of his 2009 Distinguished Service Award for Legal Scholarship from the Canadian Bar Association.

He published his first novel, The Devil’s Lighter, in 1973 at age 48. Set in the Alberta oil patch, it took its colourful title from the expression used by rig workers to describe the phenomenon of a rogue well gushing out of control and then bursting into flames. The book sold so well that Ballem published several more oil patch thrillers in the same vein, all portraying what a Calgary Herald writer called “a world of wild parties, brawls, steamy sex, beautiful women, gritty roughnecks, and wheeler-dealers.”

Ballem knew the landscape well. As a Calgary corporate lawyer specializing in freehold energy leases, he acted for just about every big name in the oil patch, including Imperial Oil, Gulf Canada, Shell Oil, and a host of others. He long represented the Canadian Petroleum Association, the official voice of big oil, and he knew all the star players who shaped the oil patch following the 1947 Leduc discovery that marked the start of the modern industry. These included such larger-than-life characters as Frank McMahon of Pacific Petroleums, Bobby Brown of Home Oil, and “Smiling” Jack Gallagher of Dome Petroleum.

Ballem took up writing after his amateur career as a show jumper was ended by a fall. “I wasn’t bouncing so well,” he noted wryly. He produced a series of travel documentaries set in Africa, and soon decided he could write as well as the scriptwriters. That led him to writing fiction. “It became a sort of parlour game in Calgary to match my characters with real people,” he said.

By 1991, Ballem had published nine novels. Each sold more than 13,000 copies. One, The Judas Conspiracy, sold more than 50,000. His prodigious output prompted a series of questions from Calgary Herald books columnist Ken McGoogan, now a bestselling author in his own right. What made Ballem write, and write so hard, and produce so much, while still maintaining a busy career as a lawyer? “Obviously, you don’t NEED to write novels,” said McGoogan. Ballem begged to differ. “There’s pleasure in creating something that will last,” he said. McGoogan acknowledged that the lasting value of three Ballem novels in particular was in their depiction of the growing years of the Alberta oil industry “from the halcyon 1950s through the tumultuous 1980s.” Later combined with a fourth novel, they were reissued by Cormorant in 2005 as The Oil Patch Quartet.

Ballem lived in Calgary from 1954 onward. Before that, he served as a fighter pilot in the Royal Navy Fleet Air Arm during the Second World War, and lectured for two years at the University of British Columbia’s law school. Born in New Glasgow, Nova Scotia, he inherited a love of literature and the arts from his father, a surgeon and classics scholar, and from his mother, a nurse, violinist and painter. He earned an arts degree from Dalhousie University in 1946, followed by law degrees from Dalhousie and Harvard. When he received an offer to join the Imperial Oil law department in 1952, Ballem jumped at the chance to “get out of academe and into the mainstream.” Two years later, Imperial transferred him to Calgary.

Ballem spent four years with Imperial and six with Westcoast Transmission before starting his own law firm in partnership with future Alberta premier Peter Lougheed. Eleven years later, in 1973, he published both the novel that launched his career as a fiction writer, and a legal text, The Oil and Gas Lease in Canada, that is now into its fourth edition and regarded as a classic of its kind. Widely used and cited, it serves as what a Herald business writer called “a guide through the intricate world of land deals that allow the petroleum industry to keep ticking.”

As well as writing novels and legal documents, Ballem published two volumes of poetry, several short stories, and numerous newspaper articles about his travels to such places as Dubai, Easter Island, the North Pole and the South Pole, which he reached in January 2009. His last article, for the CanWest newspapers, was about his 2009 journey to Antarctica to see where Sir Ernest Shackleton had embarked on his transcontinental expedition in 1914. “There were many epic voyages in the heroic age of polar exploration in the early 20th century,” wrote Ballem. “A few may have equalled, but none surpassed Shackleton’s Trans-Antarctica Expedition.”

Ballem died on January 9, 2010, three weeks before he would have celebrated his 85th birthday. At the time, according to The Globe and Mail, he was correcting the final proofs of his 14th novel, Murder on the Bow, due for publication this spring. His interests were “multitudinous,” his wife Grace told the Globe. “But his main love was the law.”