Susan Glickman

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You are here: Home » 2015 » July

Archive for month: July, 2015

Safe as Houses now available.

28 Jul 2015 / 0 Comments / in Uncategorized/by Susan Glickman

safe as houses

 

 

Book launch

Wednesday September 9th, 7-9 pm

at TYPE BOOKS, 883 Queen Street West, Toronto

 

From the CBC CANADA WRITES website

19 Jul 2015 / 0 Comments / in The Blog/by Susan Glickman

Susan Glickman: How I Wrote Safe as Houses

http://www.cbc.ca/books/canadawrites/2015/05/susan-glickman-how-i-wrote-safe-as-houses.html

On May 22, 2015 7:05 AM

In most mystery novels, the person who finds the body falls off the radar as soon as the police arrive. But not in Susan Glickman’s Safe as Houses. For her first mystery, Glickman wanted to explore how it would feel for someone to find a dead body in the place they go for their daily dose of tranquillity. 
 
We spoke to Susan Glickman about how she wrote Safe As Houses, from the inspiration of her dog Toby to finding her setting, literally, in her own backyard.
Safe_As_Houses_Glickman.jpg
IMPENDING DOOM
The idea for Safe as Houses came from walking my dog around my neighbourhood. He took off on me in this beautiful enclave in Toronto called Wychwood Park, which has a private tennis court and a beautiful duck pond and is surrounded by elegant Arts and Crafts houses. For some bizarre reason, I thought of my dog finding a dead body in the bushes. This wasn’t prompted by any evil associations with the neighbourhood. It just has to do with my own sense of impending doom and having read too many murder mysteries.
DEADLY PROFESSION
Wychwood Park is a beautiful neighbourhood. You can’t imagine anything more bucolic. There are giant oak trees and naturalized lawns full of bluebells and daffodils. It looks like a little piece of England. The phrase “safe as houses” came into my mind. It’s an old English expression. I thought it had to do with one’s feeling of safety when in a solid structure like a house, but actually it has to do with real estate being the least volatile of investments. When I investigated this saying I decided the dead man had to be a real estate agent.
NEW YORKER
Maxime Bertrand is Liz Ryerson’s sidekick. He is a retired classics professor, originally from Montreal, who is lovingly based on an old friend of mine who I miss very much. He was a retired English professor and my doctoral dissertation supervisor. People who knew Sheldon Zitner might recognize him a bit in Maxime—although Maxime is much less acerbic than my friend, who was a New Yorker and had a very wry sense of humour… It’s not so much him as a character, but it’s the relationship that Maxime has with Liz. They have an almost father/daughter relationship.
toby at desk again.JPG
FOR THE LOVE OF TOBY
One of the things that happens when you write fiction is you get to fill in missing pieces of your own life. I love my neighbourhood, but we don’t have a bookstore. So I made my protagonist, Liz Ryerson, own the store that I wish existed in my neighbourhood… I also made her dog a cross between a border collie and a lab—other than that, he has all the qualities of my own little dog Toby, who’s small and can’t fetch a Frisbee. So I decided if I was going to give myself a bookstore I was also going to give my dog the body he wanted so he could catch a Frisbee.

Pages

  • A Note on Teaching Poetry
  • Angels, Not Polarities
  • Background
  • Dictionnaire des idées reçues
  • Extract from The Violin Lover
  • Found Money
  • Klibansky Award Speech
  • Maiden or Crone
  • My Art
  • My Life with Northrop Frye
  • News
  • Obituary for Zitner
  • On Finding a Copy of Pigeon in the Hospital Bookstore
  • On the Line
  • Other Writing
  • Poem about your laugh
  • Punish your book
  • Sample Page
  • Second Person Impersonal
  • Stuff about me floating around the web
  • Summertime
  • The Better Mother
  • The Tale-Teller Now Available in French!
  • The Violin in History
  • EDITING
  • Poetry
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  • Nonfiction
  • Children’s Books
  • Editing
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Recent Posts

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