Writers Read: Vicki Delany

Tuesday, January 9, 2024

Vicki Delany

Vicki Delany is one of Canada’s most prolific and varied crime writers and a national bestseller in the U.S. She has written more than forty books:

clever cozies to Gothic thrillers to gritty police procedurals, to historical fiction and novellas for adult literacy. She is currently writing four cozy mystery series: the Tea by the Sea mysteries for Kensington, the Sherlock Holmes Bookshop series for Crooked Lane Books, the Catskill Resort mysteries for Penguin Random House, and the Lighthouse Library series (as Eva Gates) for Crooked Lane.

Delany is a past president of the Crime Writers of Canada and co-founder and organizer of the Women Killing It Crime Writing Festival. Her work has been nominated for the Derringer, the Bony Blithe, the Ontario Library Association Golden Oak, and the Arthur Ellis Awards. She is the recipient of the 2019 Derrick Murdoch Award for contributions to Canadian crime writing. Delany lives in Prince Edward County, Ontario.

Her newest novel in the Sherlock Holmes Bookshop series is The Sign of Four Spirits.

Recently I asked the author about what she was reading. Delany's reply:

I don’t often read historical novels, but in preparing this list I realized that all three of the books I’ve recently read are historical. You can take from that whatever you like.

I loved The Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twang Eng so much, I went to Malaysia. That was his second book and his third came out recently. The House of Doors didn’t have the emotional impact on me that the earlier book did, but I enjoyed it very much. It’s set in Penang, in Malaysia, in 1910 and in 1921. An upper-class Englishwoman (so called in those colonial times even though she’d never even been to England) encounters Sun Yat Sen in 1910 and tells the story to W. Somerset Maugham in 1921. Perhaps what I like most about the author’s writing is his incomparable sense of time and place. Everywhere I went on that trip to Malaysia I was reminded of his books.

The Four Dead Wives of Captain John Clapp by Janet Kellough, a historian and good writer friend of mine. The John Clapp of the title is a real historical figure and an ancestor of Janet, living in England, and then in Carolina and New York in the 17th century. History briefly mentions that Captain Clapp had four wives who pre-deceased him. As is usual, little is said about the four wives, and Janet set out to discover what she could about them. This book is a mix of facts she learned and what she considered possible. Meaning it is fiction, but as historically accurate as it can be. There isn’t much of a plot, but the glimpse into the lives of ordinary middle-class women of the times is fascinating.

The Quincunx by Charles Palliser. I was invited to be on Kristopher Zgorski podcast, “We Are What We Read” to discuss a book I would recommend. I chose one of my absolute favourites, An Instance of the Fingerpost by Iain Pears. Kris mentioned that The Quincunx is often compared to An Instance so I immediately bought it. I was severely disappointed. The book is well written, no doubt about that, and the plot interesting but my goodness it’s long. Far, far, far too long at maybe (at a guess) 250,000 words. And massively overcomplicated. But ultimately, it didn’t have the great mystery at the heart of it as An Instance of the Fingerpost did, nor the different perspectives on a set of events which is what captivated me about Iain Pears book. After slogging through all that, the ending kinda… dropped away. Read An Instance of the Fingerpost instead.