How to query a Canadian crime novel
I’m now at the point of the writer’s journey where I look back at what I’ve made, and think: it’s time to get serious. But querying agents is such a bizarre feeling. It is especially weird because I have spent my career in advertising and PR, so I have won and lost many pitches over the years.
But it is SO MUCH harder for my to pitch my own writing than it is for me to pitch someone else’s. I’ve been mulling this over because I want to know WHY!!! And let me tell you: I have basically come full circle in my logic because I have essentially justified why PR exists in the first place.
It is so impossibly difficult to synthesize my own creative work because it is so much bigger in my head. I need someone else to do it. I need a professional.
I can’t erase what I know about the novel. Or what’s coming next. Bluntly put: I know too much.
How I solved my query problem
My process has been to reverse engineer my brain to allow me to pitch my own writing. To do that, I needed an alter ego for the novel. Not me, someone else. A pen name. A new identity. Enter ChatGPT. I asked for a gender neutral author name, something haunting and cryptic, and also available as a social media handle on instagram and threads.
I started asking my new alter ego a few questions:
- Do I focus on the detective’s journey where she has left Edinburgh to pursue a big career change but finds nothing about failure and regret?
- Do I talk about the haunting and liminal setting which is unique to the story?
- Or do I bring up the political and societal issues operating in the narrative?
- What about the multiple suspects, the true crime podcast, her best friend, or the obnoxious work colleague threatening her job?
Narrowing down the plot was a challenge. I had to focus the pitch (for my alter ego) so agents would understand the concept, the genre, the stakes, and the vibes. They needed to know where the story fits in the book market.
Believe it or not, the trick worked. I tricked myself into thinking someone else wrote my own novel.
A too big novel
One of the added challenges is that I am also using this novel as my PhD thesis. Thus, I have woven multiple layers of story-within-a-story so that the reader is getting a Michelin star 10-course meal with intricate elements dotted everywhere. It’s a big novel with a digestible word count, just like those tiny portions you get at a fine dining restaurant. Small, but flavourful. I pack a punch.
The novel is a story, but it’s also a commentary on police inaction and a toxic culture which reflects the harms of policing in Canada. I chose not to glorify the detective-as-hero. In fact, the critical element of my PhD thesis is a reflexive exercise on how I’m evolving the concept of a detective protagonist (and addressing the ‘hero’ problem) and how creative writers can build liminal spaces and create nebulous settings.
Reinventing what’s been done
I am also re-imagining what the police procedural can be. I’ve chosen to take the elements of crime writing from the golden age (think Sherlock Holmes) into the anti-racist age. That means confronting all the horrific shit police have been doing, including abusing their power and killing innocent people.
Black authors like Chester Himes have been writing about systemic racism in policing since the 1950s, and putting the victim’s perspective as a central element of the novel. But as far as I can tell, white authors are not doing the work to examine the same system from within, and I haven’t found examples of crime novels dismantling internalized prejudices of anti-blackness, or anti-Indigneous sentiments.
One thing I’ve experienced in the query trenches is disquieting feedback from UK agents. They have praised my novel and my writing, but so far, they are uncomfortable representing the issue-based criminal element. When it comes to discussions on race, “white discomfort” is nothing new, but it seems white nationalism is still swept under the rug in the UK. Whereas in Canada and the US, it’s parading and wailing around in the streets.
Querying is a task
All of this is to say that querying this type of novel is a task and this part of the writing journey isn’t for the weak. And the reality is, the agent who believes in this novel will also have to believe in me.
I’m also struggling with being extremely patient as I know it’s better to wait for a great agent than to go with whoever randomly comes my way. I need to have standards but sometimes it is very difficult turning down offers. I already declined representation back in 2018 for my YA novel, and now that I have recently re-read that manuscript, I am very glad I didn’t pursue it. My YA novel is pretty good, but it isn’t great. It isn’t earth-shattering. I still think it deserves a home on a bookshelf, or in an e-reader, but it’s not my debut novel. It’s destined for another alter ego somewhere out there.
And so I keep on writing
Here are some of the new novels/projects coming down the pipeline:
- A university student accepts money transfers from a killer in her class. 💰Contemporary psychological thriller where Scream meets Venmo.
- After a divorce, a 30-something woman gives her dream of being a Michelin-star chef another shot. But when a former flame opens a restaurant down the street, everything changes. A foodie-romance where The Bear meets The Notebook. (currently this is written as a film script)
- A model disappears in Greece after an online date, and her high-powered friends go on a mission to find her – but they uncover a dark secret instead. Dark comedy/thriller. It’s My Sister the Serial Killer meets Sex and The City.
