When Nanaimo author Paulette McCarthy launched her debut novel last month, she was shocked by the response: Her original run of 60 books quickly sold out and her second printing is already running low.
“Still it’s hard to realize that that actually happened, because the interest was just to write the book for me, because I thought that would be a nice thing to do,” McCarthy said.
“It’s amazing that it’s happened. I never expected it. I’m just stunned to say the least.”
McCarthy started writing her book, a murder mystery called The Final Hours of John Doe, in 2014. It was shortly after her father’s funeral and she was left with feeling about “things that were left unsaid, things that you wanted to ask but never got answers to.” She jotted down a couple of lines and by the time she reached her 10th page she knew she had a book on her hands.
The book follows an investigator with an imperfect history who is called to a mysterious death in a snowy field off the Ottawa beltway, bringing her “face to face” with her past.
“It’s trying to find out who is John Doe and how did he come to be in that field and how did this John Doe have a little tiny piece of her past?” McCarthy said.
“Then there’s a race to get it tidied up without revealing what she did. It unfolds from there.”
Although it’s her first novel, McCarthy has been writing for a long time. As a social worker for the B.C. government she would submit reports on children’s living conditions to justify placing them in government care. She was twice told by judges to tone down her writing.
“Those reports had to paint a picture because you couldn’t introduce photographs as evidence. It was all the written word…” she explained.
“Photographs don’t tell you about the smell, photographs don’t tell you that the air was cold, photographs don’t tell you the sadness in the eyes of these kids.”
McCarthy said it was a bit intimidating to show a portion of her book to an editor for the first time.
She said submitting her work felt like offering her baby up for ritual sacrifice. She was dismayed, but motivated, when her pages came back “all marked up.”
“It was all yellow and there was red and there was shaded blue and lines and bubbles everywhere on the thing and I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, this is terrible. I didn’t do very well,'” she said.
“From then on it was just, ‘This thing goes over the finish line, I don’t care how long it takes.’ And now it’s at the finish line.”
WHAT’S ON … Paulette McCarthy appears at Port Place London Drugs on Sept. 15 and 29, Oct. 13 and 24 and Nov. 24 inside the store near customer service from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.
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