Tips and Resources From Your Scott Thornley Book Club Friends:

Scott Thornley has drawn many inspirations from his own life to create his detective, MacNeice, and the fictional town of Dundurn, which is based on Hamilton, Ontario, where he grew up. He notes that many of Dundurn’s places and streets are modeled after real locations in his hometown.

He tells North End Breezes, “Like MacNeice, my wife died of cancer at 42. Before she passed, she was the centre of our family. I remarried, but for years I had nightmares. I began writing them down, so I wouldn’t disturb Shirley, my wife. Shirley read them one day, and said, ‘this is a novel; you need to write it.’ One year later, Erasing Memory, my first novel, was complete. The dreams in that book were the ones I wrote down in the middle of the night, so many years ago.”

Scott takes extra care in developing his characters. “I work hard to flesh out, to paint all of my characters so readers sense that they’re alive. Because, in their odd way, they are alive,” he tells Open Book. “Over the four books, I have paid particular attention in this regard to the villains. I don’t want them being one-dimensional. I want the reader to accept that, at any time, there could be a knock on their door by any one of them.”