The tinkle of a distant player piano, a room jammed to the walls with crates and cardboard boxes full of antique memorabilia—lost in this narrow jam of memories, Carly Rouhl just might find herself squeezing out into the world of a long forgotten serial killer. 

I’ve always wanted to write a time portal story—you know: the kind in which a character steps from the present into some era in the past. It’s a well travelled path for writers, but then, what isn’t? Every conceivable plot has been attempted over the centuries, but each author has to try and bring humanity and freshness to the story. 

We group these plot devices into genres for convenience: romance, thriller, fantasy, police procedurals, and so on, and most of us learn that we have a favourite or two.

 All of the Requiem novels deal with the past in one way or another, and yet none of them are simple time travel stories. Instead I use time as a fluid element to enhance the mysteries experienced by Carly Rouhl and Detective Eilert Weiss. 

I’ve often wondered at the different ways historians and literary scholars look at time. I imagine that the historian digs into the past carefully like an archeologist sifting through the dust to glean a fact here and a fact there. At some point the historian must feel compelled to draw conclusions, to project himself into the era, imagining how a situation must have played out. But he does this with trepidation, knowing that he owes it to his readers to respect the line between fact and speculation.

When I think back on my own studies in literature, I realize that the curriculum was chronological; we were shown the early poets and gradually moved through the centuries from Old English to the moderns. It was a very different experience from historical research, so I imagine, because at each stop on our journey through time we were expected to inhabit the mind of a poet. We had to buy into the religiosity of a particular era, and see the way society shaped a singular imagination. We had to allow for the drug-addled fantasies of one man, or the wretched suffering of another. The more we knew about the time in which a poet lived, the better we understood him, but in the end we were there to see the way his life was crystallized into words. Those were the artifacts we were concerned with.

Probably the greatest challenge was reading Anglo-Saxon  poetry in the original and in translation. The very earliest poem in English was Caedmon’s hymn. We only have it because some local scribbled the original Anglo-Saxon words in the margin of a Latin translation. It would have been chanted around a fire with some simple musical accompaniment and it uses an alliterative device that seems foreign to us now: words that alliterate divided into two phrases by a caesura, or pause.

We’re separated from the shepherd Caedmon by many centuries, but we can identify with his sense of wonder when he realized he had the gift of song, and his nervousness about sharing it with others in a public space. The public space for him would probably have been a mead hall: an island of firelight in a terrifying darkness.

In Requiem for Parish, the next in my series of supernatural mysteries, the heroine, Carly Rouhl must make Detective Weiss see that his own case, the deadly “Archer” who prays on the wives and mothers of a local church, is mysteriously linked to a shameful episode in the city’s past. The key is a pretty teenager, angelic but desperate, who seems to be in the thrall of both past and present killers. If Carly can help this lost girl, she can save Weiss from falling victim to a ritual that’s ripping a hole in time itself.

I’m glad I’ve had lots of experience inhabiting the minds of the men and women of earlier times. To write this story I once again had to do a little time travelling, aided by research and old black and white photographs. It was an interesting experience, stepping out on the waterfront trail with Carly, hearing the music drifting over the lake from the old Brant Inn. In reality, the Inn is long gone, of course. Lake Ontario laps against newer breakwaters and echoes to the sound of summer crowds, most of whom have never heard of the most famous bandstand in Canada.