IFOA Noir: Author Q & A with Anne Emery

Anne Emery is the author of
Children in the Morning.

Globe and Mail: Your two main characters Father Brennan Burke, a choirmaster, and Monty Collins, a bluesman, are torn between the spiritual and the sensual. On your
website, you include a track listing of the songs that inspired you while you wrote each book. How important do you think music is to building aesthetic in this genre?

Anne Emery: I know some writers make extensive use of music in their books, whether it is in this genre or another. Music is a significant element in the crime fiction of Peter Robinson, for instance. For me, it is vitally important. I don’t think the novels would have been written if not for the influence of music. The first book came out of long walks with my MP3 player (and earlier technology . . . ). Music produces a sort of heightened sensibility that gives rise to the creative process. But more particularly, music has occasionally inspired a character, a scene, or even, in the case of
Children in the Morning, the title and central theme of the story. That book, the latest in the series, was born out of lyrics from three songs: Leonard Cohen’s
Suzanne, and Bob Dylan’s
A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall and
It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue.

The following quotation, attributed to Beethoven, provides a succinct answer to your question: “Music is the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life.”

Globe and Mail: If you were to recommend one crime fiction, mystery or noir novel, what would it be and why?

Anne Emery: I would choose
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, John le Carré’s great novel of espionage during the Cold War. It is a spy novel and a great mystery story as well. Some lines of dialogue are imprinted on my mind for all time. The characters are brilliant and unforgettable; the reader is completely immersed in the world of British intelligence and its public school/Cambridge-educated spooks. Not only does the novel present a clash between one brilliant spy and his opponent; it presents a clash of two great, opposing world views. Le Carré’s Cold War novels personify the phrase “moral ambiguity.”

Globe and Mail: Murder, mystery and mayhem. Is there a fourth element that you’d attribute to your own unique voice as a writer?

Anne Emery: Character. This is the alpha and the omega for me. I strive to create recurring characters with distinctive voices, strengths and weaknesses, people the reader will care about, whether the reader wishes them well or ill! I have had very strong reactions to a couple of my main characters, ranging from love and approbation to disapproval and loathing. That’s all fine with me – better than indifference! One reader/friend once asked about a book in the works and said she was wondering what my characters were up to, because they had become part of her social scene. That’s a compliment I won’t soon forget.

If I may add a fifth element, I also like my characters to express a bit of the sly wit that is characteristic of some of us in the Maritimes!