IN THE TRENCH-COAT TRENCHES: IT TOOK A WHILE FOR SLEUTH STORY WRITER TO PURSUE HIS MUSE.

Mike Boone. The Gazette, Friday, September 05, 2008

It’s a subtle and, the author says, inadvertent homage to an educator.

Howard Shrier will read from Buffalo Jump, his debut mystery novel, at the Shaar Hashomayim synagogue on Sunday.

Among the characters in Buffalo Jump is a detective named Jenn Raudsepp. When he studied writing at Concordia University in the late 1970s, Shrier took Enn Raudsepp’s journalism course.

You don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes …

“It’s really just the name,” Shrier said when I phoned him the other day. “My character is very beautiful and in no way resembles Enn.”

My Concordia journalism teacher Enn Raudsepp might have inspired Jenn’s name, but not her looks, he admits.

(“Jenn is a six-foot, Estonian blonde bombshell, a lesbian whose limpid blue eyes melt even the stoniest hearts,” Enn Raudsepp points out in an email. “I’m a 5-foot-10 bald male Estonian with grey-blues eyes that have a hard time melting soft butter.”)

When we spoke by phone this week, Shrier offered fond recollections of writing for The Georgian, where his fellow college paper staffers included René Balcer, who went on to write for Law & Order.

Shrier, 51, grew up in Chomedey and studied journalism and creative writing at Concordia. In September 1979, he was a crime reporter at the Montreal Star.

“I was at Archambault Prison covering a hostage-taking, there all night getting eaten alive by mosquitoes,” Shrier recalled. The next day, as we were getting ready to drive back up there at 4 o’clock, the paper closed down.

Shrier got into theatre, “the one profession that pays less than journalism – and the rejection is to your face.”

He became an actor, worked in New York for a couple years, then returned to Montreal briefly before moving to Toronto in 1984.

Shrier did children’s theatre and musicals before combining his talents as a writer and performer by organizing murder mystery events, starring himself as trench-coated detective Dick Diamond.

“I ran them on trains, boats, hotels and mostly at Casa Loma,” Shrier said. “It was all improv and a lot of fun.”

Shrier liked reading detective fiction. A particular favourite was Ross Macdonald (real name: Kenneth Millar, born in California but raised in Kitchener, Ont.) whose Lew Archer, hardboiled-but-humane private eye, was played by Paul Newman in Harper and The Drowning Pool.

“Writing a crime book,” Shrier said, “was always something I wanted to do.”

But with family responsibilities – he’s married and has two children – it took Shrier a while to pursue his muse.

His pay-the-rent gigs have included freelance writing of staff newsletters, annual reports and the like for the Addiction Research Foundation of Ontario and, playing on the other side of the fence, the province’s Liquor Control Board. “I went to the dark side,” he laughed. “Sadly, there are no staff discounts. But I learned about the better wines in my price range.”

Five years ago, at the cottage he rents on Georgian Bay, a mystery scenario occurred to Shrier: “What if there was a hit man who couldn’t do the job because there was a child involved? As a father, these are the scary things that lurk in my brain. What if he needed a private detective to help him out of this?”

Shrier had attended the famous Robert McKee Story Seminar in the late 1980s. He had learned the importance of developing the arc of a story before tackling characters and dialogue.

“Because I was working full-time, I started to follow his idea,” Shrier said. “For a full year, I did nothing but make notes. Then I started the draft.”

The result is Buffalo Jump, whose hero is detective Jonah Geller.

There are no Gina Gellers teaching at Concordia