Amy Stuart Writes Terrific Domestic Thrillers

I don’t read a lot of domestic thrillers, and I recently excised the genre from my book project because the ones by Canadian authors, both male and female–Linwood Barclay and Shari Lapena may be our best-known international exports in this sub-genre–are almost never set in identifiable Canadian locales. And the whole point of my project is the nexus of place, crime, politics, and gender.

But Canada does have a lengthy and thriving tradition of the domestic thriller, and here I would include some of the work of Margaret Millar and her lesser-known Canadian contemporaries who are now out of print.

And then there’s the celebrated Joy Fielding, whose work has attracted legions of fans. She’s very good at what she does: portraying the way in which a usually affluent, either urban or suburban woman’s life is suddenly suffocating (as her past secrets come back to haunt her) or terrorized (when a beloved child is kidnapped, or–more inventively–an adult claiming to be a lost child returns).

Again, though, Fielding tends to eschew Canadian settings, preferring to set her work in identifiable U.S. locales: “Generally, I set my books in big American cities, some of which I am familiar with, like those in Florida, and others which I learn through maps and occasional visits–like Boston and Chicago. The American landscape seems best for my themes of urban alienation and loss of identity. At the risk of sounding pretentious, I am much more interested in the landscape of the soul.”

Fielding doesn’t address, here, the commercial elephant in the room: the pressure from U.S. publishers to avoid setting thrillers in, say, Sarnia, or Abbotsford.

But she’s on to something, I think, with the “landscape of the soul” comment, because there are specifically American motifs of either urban anomie or small town claustrophobia and gossip in many Canadian-authored domestic thrillers, including the work of Amy Stuart.

Stuart is relatively new to me. I attended her wonderfully helpful session in November on developing a sustainable writing practice, part of the International Writers’ Festival now housed at Victoria U. at the University of Toronto/

I’m nearly finished reading Stuart’s latest novel, A Death at the Party. It’s terrifically fun, with an epigraph from Mrs. Dalloway to get us started, and that’s apt: with the exception of flashbacks and recollections of the past, the whole story takes place over the course of a single day and evening, with most of the plot involving a woman’s preparations for her elaboration and rather anxiety-provoking party.

There are also some intriguing meta aspects, and I have a suspicion about how one of those will be resolved.

The protagonist’s mother is a famous crime writer, while Nadine herself merely teaches crime fiction courses at a local community college. (I feel seen. This is not work that academia tends to prize, but it’s wonderfully satisfying, and our students are brilliant, ambitious, and hardworking; just not as privileged as the ones I’ve taught at fancy research universities.)

Nadine’s life is unravelling, slowly and then all at once. Her teenage daughter, whose best friend is in a coma after an overdose, is remote and secretive; her son’s romantic relationship crosses class boundaries that in Nadine’s tony small town raise some eyebrows. And Nadine is haunted by the anniversary of a momentous death: thirty years before this night, she discovered the body of her beloved aunt. Nadine was ten, and her aunt was only five years older.

Nadine’s mother, Marilyn, doesn’t like to talk about the past, and she seems to be keeping a lot of secrets herself. But she’s the birthday girl, and although she didn’t really want a grand 60th birthday bash, Nadine was determined to throw one for her mother.

This is a twisty, fast-paced, quick read. It’s not deep, but it’s a lot of fun. The characterizations are a bit thin, but that’s the nature of domestic suspense, most of the time (Gone Girl is a rare exception, and that required many morepages).

Amy Stuart’s writer origin story is also quite lovely: she was a high school English teacher who longed to write mystery novels and she just … started to write them. Her description of combining teaching, parenting young sons, and fiction-writing was exhausting just to listen to, and Stuart was admirably clear: don’t try this at home unless you have no other options to carve out a writing life. Now she writes full time.

This year marks my 30th anniversary of teaching, in a sense. My career hasn’t been entirely linear. But 30 years ago this month I taught my first tutorial group on essay writing. And I still love teaching, but I think Stuart makes a very good point: there’s no better time to write than now.