The Anne Emery Interview
Interview with Halifax Author of the Much Loved Collins-Burke Mystery Novels
(Editor’s note: this interview originally appeared at “Nova Sociable” and is reproduced here with the kind permission of Ronan O’Driscoll)
Anne Emery is a lawyer and the author of the Collins-Burke mystery series, which has won Crime Writers of Canada Awards of Excellence for Best Novel and Best First Novel. She has also won the Dartmouth Book Award for Fiction and an Independent Publisher Book Awards silver medal. “One of Canada’s finest novelists” (Ottawa Review of Books). She lives in Halifax. Counted Among the Dead (published 2024 by ECW Press) is her 14th novel.
Congratulations on your thirteenth Collins-Burke mystery! Charitable Irish members will particularly appreciate the Irish aspects of the story, such as the ex-pat main character Father Brennan Burke and his ex-IRA father Declan. What are your own connections to Ireland and how important are they to your writing?
My father’s and mother’s families had their origins in Ireland: Emerys from County Fermanagh, Delaneys and Murphys from Co. Wexford, Hannigans from Co. Tipperary and McKelveys from Co. Donegal. The Emery name is of Norman origin, and my Emerys had been in Ireland for centuries. On one of my trips over there, I lucked in with a taxi driver who was able to take me out and show me “the Emery farm.” When I was a child, I didn’t give any thought to all this background. I do remember one time my father mentioning arguments between his parents, or perhaps grandparents, about Eamon DeValera. At the time, I had no idea who he was, and it just went over my head. Now, I’d give anything to know what the argument was about. And who was on which side of it!
I am adopted, so I have twice as many ancestors as most people! My research into my biological family uncovered Callaghans, O’Briens and Maguires among others. County Cork features largely in this history, along with Co. Fermanagh and Tyrone. I have been visiting Ireland for many years now, and have friends over there and greatly enjoy my time with them. Interestingly, my friends there did not know until recently that my own background is Irish. A couple of years ago, a close friend in Dublin, whom I’d known for decades, asked, “And what is your own background?” I answered “Irish” and she said, “Oh, I didn’t know that.” Same thing happened on my most recent visit in November with another pal. We’ve all heard about people who go over there to research their Irish geneaology. I guess I haven’t been guilty of rabbiting on and on about it when I go to Ireland!
The Maguire name inspired my interest in Enniskillen Castle, and that accounts for the only one of my books so far that is not in the Collins-Burke series. The Keening is a stand-alone novel set in the late 1500s, early 1600s. And nearly every line had to be backed up by research. How did the characters get to the castle? How long did it take them to get there? Not to mention all the history. A highly-educated friend of mine said, “By the time you finish this one, you’ll have the equivalent of a PhD.” And he was right. It required much more research than I had done for my master’s degree. I read scores of books and articles, did extensive online research, interviewed or questioned historians, archaeologists, museum curators. And a big part of the story is the old Brehon laws of Ireland. I’m not usually a bus tour person but a few years ago I did take a lovely bus tour to Newgrange. The young tour guide, Martin, made some references to the old laws. So, when the tour was finished, I asked him if he could suggest something I could read or someone I could talk to about them. Martin kind of shuffled his feet and said, “Em, well, my dad . . .” It turns out that his father is Fergus Kelly, who literally wrote the book, or one of the main books, about the Brehon Laws. Fergus Kelly, an expert on the subject, author of A Guide to Early Irish Law. So I have the book, and Fergus was very helpful to me in my research. When the book was launched, my husband and daughter presented me with a certificate: “Congratulations on your PhD in Irish history!”
For more recent legal matters, I can thank our local lawyer Ronan Holland, who practised in Ireland before moving to Halifax. As for the Six Counties, I had lunch with a lawyer at the Linenhall Library café in Belfast, and sought his expertise in the legal system there. He had a funny story, arising out of events that were far from amusing. During the Troubles, his office was damaged by two bombs on different days. His office was not the target; the target was a nearby court building. The windows of the law office were shattered and blown in. So now, if there is a file the lawyers are not keen on, they say “Leave it on the window sill.” While we were there, another solicitor came in, and they began talking about the bombings; the other man referred to “your bomb” to differentiate it from other law offices that were bombed or sustained collateral damage in other attacks. Back in Dublin, I have a friend who’s a retired Garda detective, so he’s been a great help with police procedure and lore.
What is it about your two main characters that has enabled you to write so many novels around their lives?
When I started writing, it was to satisfy my life-long ambition to “write a book” or maybe to “have written a book”, and have it there on the shelf. Ambition achieved. But once I got into it, writing became almost an addiction, something I could not imagine giving up. So, when I was halfway through the first book, Sign of the Cross, I decided I had to write a series. And, luckily, I had given the characters enough of a history I could mine for future books.
My lawyer Monty Collins had enough history and conflict to sustain a series, but this was particularly true of Father Brennan Burke, his father Declan, and their family in Ireland. Decades ago, Declan had to pack up his family – wife and children – and spirit them out of Ireland after a serious misunderstanding between Declan and his fellow Irish Republicans. The long and painful history of Ireland and the occupation of the country by the British is fertile ground for stories involving a “well-known Republican family” as the expression goes.
For me, the characters are the most important element of my books. I enjoy writing about their lives and their history. And writing dialogue is especially enjoyable for me. One of the little quirks in my stories is the tendency of some characters to stand up – often in my fictional Christy Burke’s pub in Dublin – stand up with pint in hand, and give a witty recital for their fellow punters in the bar. So I appreciated the starred review of Ruined Abbey in Publishers Weekly, in which the reviewer wrote, “True to the Irish tradition of great storytelling, this is a mesmerizing tale that will keep readers rivetted from the first page to the last.”
Ruined Abbey was, not surprisingly, inspired by the ruined abbeys I have seen in Ireland. It was Selskar Abbey in Wexford that set me on course for that story. Another sighting in Ireland was the direct inspiration for my tenth book, Though the Heavens Fall. I had been in Dublin many a time, and had often passed by the Bridewell Garda Station, a magnificent building in Chancery Street. But one day a few years ago I was looking at the building, at the inscription on the front: “FIAT JVSTITIA RVAT COELVM” Or, in more familiar lettering, “FIAT JUSTITIA RUAT COELUM.” It means LET JUSTICE BE DONE THOUGH THE HEAVENS FALL. I stood there gazing at it, and said to myself: “There’s my next book!” And “I can make the heavens fall.” The inspiration didn’t let me down: the book won the Crime Writers of Canada award for Best Novel.
I have three people who read my manuscripts before I send them to my publisher. For one of my readers, I gave her the Heavens manuscript but deliberately left off the ending. After reading it, she handed it back to me as if she were in mourning, handing me a coffin. She said, “What have you done?” Some people get deeply involved in my main characters and have very strong feelings about what should, or should not, happen to them! Father Brennan Burke, especially, brings out strong feelings in my readers, everything from “Is he based on a real person? I’m a single woman in my forties. Where can I meet him?” To: “He’s not fit to do anything but get down on his knees and scrub the floor of that church!”
One of my favourite moments was when my wonderful editor, Cat London, wrote a note in the margin of one of my manuscripts. She was commenting on something Brennan was expounding on, some subject about which he had considerable expertise. Cat’s note said, “I love it when Brennan brennans.” So I’d say he’s made it big when his name becomes a verb!
I’m a stickler for detail and I notice the little things. When re-reading the manuscript of one of my books set in Ireland, I noticed a very small alteration, which clued me in to the fact that changes had been since I’d last read it. The books go through several stages of editing. So, typically, I read it again and found that one of the last editors had “corrected” my instances of Irish dialect. For example: “I was only after coming in the door.” And “He was at it again and him only out of the Kesh.” The last one would have been changed to read “He was at it again soon after being released from the Kesh prison.” I caught these in time, and the publisher restored the dialect and was good-humoured about it.
Another favourite incident involved another of my characters with an Irish background. Again, this was a comment made in the margin by my editor, in reference to the character’s name. Her note said that she and my publisher felt that the name Mickey Spillane was a bit over the top, and maybe I should change it. Then she corrected herself: when she later arrived at the author’s note at the end of the book, she realized that Mickey Spillane had been a real person, who had controlled the Hell’s Kitchen Irish mob in New York in the 1960s and 70s. Known as the Gentleman Gangster. In an addendum to her note, my editor wrote: “The joke’s on us!” There was also, of course, a crime writer by that name.
Why did you choose to frame the events of the 1917 Halifax explosion from the perspective of 1993 Halifax? Without giving away the story, there is a character whose distant past comes back to haunt him.
I have long had an interest in the Explosion and wanted to work it into one of my novels. As for 1993, the Collins-Burke series begins in 1990 and continues into the middle of the decade. And, of course, many people who remembered the Explosion were still alive then, so it worked out well. The character you allude to in your question has a much closer connection to the events of 1917 than he ever suspected!
The pace of the story is brisk and engaging, alongside a lot of historical background. How do you balance telling a good story alongside presenting the historical world to the reader?
When writing something like this, an author has to refrain from big gobs of information being plunked down on the page for the reader to digest. The history has to be introduced in context, bits at a time, to establish the setting in which the characters live out their lives and tell their stories. We have to understand why they act and feel as they do, without having the experience of being sent back to school to read a textbook for history class!
The combination of Halifax's history and a murder mystery would make for interesting viewing on the screen. Have you ever been approached about making a TV show or a movie?
There was a deal in the making a few years ago, to combine several of the books into a TV series, but the effort came to naught in the end. I’m no expert in television or movie production, so I’m not sure why it went no further. I do know this much: the writer of the novels is not the one who directs what will be portrayed and how! But that had nothing to do with whatever happened to scrap the project. Maybe it will happen someday.
The students at Father Brennan Burke’s choir school have written a two-part play about the Halifax Explosion of 1917. The explosion killed around 2,000 people, injured thousands more, and destroyed a large part of the city. The last thing Brennan expects is a series of threats against his school, and his students, designed to make sure that part two is never performed. Then the body of a young woman is found strangled in Halifax. Lawyer Monty Collins is hired to represent a young man suspected in the killing. But Monty cannot find a motive. Until he, Brennan, and Monty’s little daughter Normie look deeper into the case, and begin to suspect that the death is linked to the Explosion, more than seventy years in the past. There are some comical moments in the story when Normie makes comments about Brennan’s father, Declan Burke, and his IRA history. Her comments are made in the last place where such initials should ever be spoken aloud!
[Interview initially published in December 2024 Charitable Irish Newsletter]
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