a fearful Symmetry
Published in 2010 by Donut Train Publishers
Available in stores at Pages on Kensington, Owl's Nest, and Shelf Life.
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Book number two drew its inspiration from a couple of sources. The first being an incident at a house party thrown to celebrate our return to Calgary after a one-year sabbatical of wanderlust in the Mediterranean. We like party games as a way of breaking the ice and this one entailed affixing the names of the fabulous and famous to the backs of the incoming guests, who then went out into the crush of bodies, asking a series of questions to see if they could guess who they were. Easy names included Mick Jagger, Winston Churchill and Atilla the Hun, harder ones, Ho Chi Min, Alice B Toklas, and Ferdinand Magellan. By ten o’clock there were approximately sixty guests filling the living room, and I was down to my last two names: Rin Tin Tin and Lash Larue. Who should walk in but Danny Sinclair, about my vintage, a landscape gardener and annual poker night participant. Now for the uninitiated, Lash Larue was a late ‘40s early ‘50s western movie hero who favoured a bullwhip for disarming his opponents. He was dressed in black from head to foot and rode a black stallion. What’s not to like. Anyway, I slapped the Lash Larue sticker on Danny’s back and as he disappeared into the maw of the party, I thought to myself, that’s a pretty obscure character. I doubt he’s going to guess that one. Twenty minutes later he returned.
“How’d you do?” I inquired.
“Oh, I solved it alright.”
“How the hell did you do that?” “Well Steve, when I was fifteen, I kind of ran away from home and joined the Royal American Circus when they passed through town. I spent that summer on the road with them, and guess who my trailer mate was…Lash Larue.” After the end of his Hollywood career, Lash joined the circus, performing his riding and bullwhip tricks under the big top. Danny said Larue would regularly beat him for his wages in all night poker games as they toured the prairies.
What were the odds? Talk about your six degrees of separation. Coincidence, how it informs our lives, became a primary theme of the tale that unfolded.
I purposely wrote this one on the lean side, keeping the action front and centre and digression to a bare minimum. I drew on my father’s wartime experience with the Burma Bombers, bailing out over the Indian jungle in the dead of night as a point of departure, setting the story in motion. My various canoeing trips on the broad and fast-flowing watercourses of Alberta and British Columbia respectively, provided the context for the climactic riverine journey, emulating Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’.
As to the book’s cover art, an original by Canadian artist and writer Nick Bantock. I’d been a big fan of his work since ‘Griffin and Sabine’, a lushly illustrated dialogue between an artist and his muse. Speaking of coincidence, right after I finished writing ‘A fearful Symmetry’, I happened upon him in his studio, ‘The Forgetting Room’ on Saltspring Island, where I was vacationing at the time, and asked if he’d be interested in doing a book cover. For a fee of course. He replied that he hadn’t done one for anyone other than himself in twenty years. Subscribing to the old adage, ‘You don’t ask, you don’t get’, I persisted and upon reading my bio, he acquiesced and produced one of his signature multi media pieces, incorporating some of the key elements from the novel: the tiger of course, the samurai sword, the ruined temple, jungle flora, the doomed plane and a dice, posing one of life’s central questions about chance versus certainty.
“How’d you do?” I inquired.
“Oh, I solved it alright.”
“How the hell did you do that?” “Well Steve, when I was fifteen, I kind of ran away from home and joined the Royal American Circus when they passed through town. I spent that summer on the road with them, and guess who my trailer mate was…Lash Larue.” After the end of his Hollywood career, Lash joined the circus, performing his riding and bullwhip tricks under the big top. Danny said Larue would regularly beat him for his wages in all night poker games as they toured the prairies.
What were the odds? Talk about your six degrees of separation. Coincidence, how it informs our lives, became a primary theme of the tale that unfolded.
I purposely wrote this one on the lean side, keeping the action front and centre and digression to a bare minimum. I drew on my father’s wartime experience with the Burma Bombers, bailing out over the Indian jungle in the dead of night as a point of departure, setting the story in motion. My various canoeing trips on the broad and fast-flowing watercourses of Alberta and British Columbia respectively, provided the context for the climactic riverine journey, emulating Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’.
As to the book’s cover art, an original by Canadian artist and writer Nick Bantock. I’d been a big fan of his work since ‘Griffin and Sabine’, a lushly illustrated dialogue between an artist and his muse. Speaking of coincidence, right after I finished writing ‘A fearful Symmetry’, I happened upon him in his studio, ‘The Forgetting Room’ on Saltspring Island, where I was vacationing at the time, and asked if he’d be interested in doing a book cover. For a fee of course. He replied that he hadn’t done one for anyone other than himself in twenty years. Subscribing to the old adage, ‘You don’t ask, you don’t get’, I persisted and upon reading my bio, he acquiesced and produced one of his signature multi media pieces, incorporating some of the key elements from the novel: the tiger of course, the samurai sword, the ruined temple, jungle flora, the doomed plane and a dice, posing one of life’s central questions about chance versus certainty.