Strong sense of Manitoba’s Interlake’s chilly landscapes in new crime novel

Raye Anderson’s crime novel And We Shall Have Snow – the first in her Roxanne Calloway Mystery series – is set in the Manitoba Interlake area, one of the winteriest of locations in a wintery land. “I’ve always liked winter,” says Manitoba-based Anderson.

And much of the business of the novel engages with various aspects of winter – frigid temperatures, frozen lakes, and snow.

Picture an isolated, snow-covered dump. The ideal place to conceal a murdered body? A body in pieces? Somebody thought so.

The village dump is where the remains of the beautiful but not always beloved Stella Magnusson are found. A local girl, Stella was the creator of an annual music festival, an event that brought a little money and a little grief to the town.

Corporal Calloway and her team begin an official investigation. Sasha, Margo, Phyllis, Panda, Annie, and Roberta, members of a local book group, launch their own investigation. Sometimes the edges of the two endeavours rub up against each other, sometimes they overlap. It’s a small town, and that’s how small towns work.

Anderson was born in Scotland, and she moved to Manitoba’s Interlake in 2007.

She has a strong background in theatre, having managed theatre schools in Calgary, Ottawa, and Winnipeg, and she has written scripts with students, historical plays for Parks Canada, and an award-winning video script.

When she moved to the Interlake, she got involved in drawing and painting, but missed writing.

“I started doing writing exercises to get going again, with a friend, and one week the assignment was to write something in a style that we liked to read. I like to read murder mysteries, so I thought I’d try that,” she explains.

The result was the first chapter of And We Shall Have Snow. “I knew right away that it was going to be a book. Over the next seven months I wrote a chapter a week. It felt like the book was writing itself. It was a complete surprise – a good surprise.”

Anderson writes with a combination of knowing and not knowing.

“I make the story up as I go along. I need to know exactly where the story will take place, who dies first, and where the body is found in order to start, but that’s all,” she says. “I am currently writing the final chapters of Book 2, and I still don’t know what will happen to one of the characters. I won’t know for sure until I write it.”

That love of the genre will take her places.

“I love crime fiction,” Anderson says. “I think it’s underrated as a literary form. I learn so much about life in different countries from reading crime novels.”

And readers will learn a lot about the Interlake and human nature from Anderson.

“I hope to capture a strong sense of place in my stories. I’m curious as to how people behave under stress (it’s that drama background),” she says, “and I like the juxtaposition of a place that looks beautiful but is also dangerous.”