“The Cherub Affair.” This story has a long and unusual pedigree. In 1985, I took a year off teaching and decided it was make or break time as a writer. I had already become interested in crime fiction and attempted one or two novels that I quickly consigned to the basement. I wanted to write about Yorkshire, partly because of nostalgia, partly because I knew it far better than I did my new country, Canada, and partly because I liked the sort of regional English detective story that uses crime and its detection to look at the character and foibles of a particular area of the country.
I had recently finished A Dedicated Man, which was with a publisher, and decided first to write a follow-up, Gallows View. They were eventually published in reverse order. After I had finished Gallows View my “sabbatical” wasn’t quite over, so I began another novel, this time a private eye novel set in Toronto.
I had to travel quite a long way to teach, and on one of those bus journeys I remembered passing every day a small private investigation office above a strip mall. I could see a few dusty cabinets and stacked files through the window as the bus passed by, but I never saw who worked there. That made very fertile ground for the imagination, and so “Jones Investigations” was born, Old Jones being the grizzled old founder who was usually too drunk to investigate but passed on all he knew to his young protégé Colin Lang, an English student with a PhD who couldn’t get a teaching job and didn’t want to drive a taxi.
Around the time I finished the novel, called Beginner’s Luck, I heard that the Inspector Banks series—at least the first two—had been accepted for publication. After that, it seemed, nobody was interested in a private eye novel written by me and set in Toronto, so Beginner’s Luck languished in the bottom drawer of my desk. I occasionally dusted it off, and even had vague ideas for a sequel, but Banks occupied all my time, so nothing ever became of them.
When the Toronto Star asked for a story they could serialize over a week, I thought again of Beginner’s Luck. While writers might dream of turning a short story into a novel, here I was turning a novel into a short story. In the end, it was easier simply to retain the key plot elements and main characters and dump everything else—subplots, minor characters, a lot of background and exposition. I don’t think I even mention the detective’s name in the short story! It was published in seven installments, each one with at least a minor cliff-hanger to heighten anticipation for the next. In a small way, I got to feel a bit like Charles Dickens must have felt writing his works for serialization, though I already knew how my story was going to end. I have inserted an eighth part for this edition, a scene I particularly liked in the novel but wasn’t previously able to use because of length restrictions.