Manziuk and Ryan
Shortly after Shaded Light came, out, I had the opportunity to write an article about writing the book for the Mystery Reader.
It took a few tries to get down on paper what I wanted to say. It was almost as though I first had to get permission from Paul Manziuk and Jacqueline Ryan.…
“What exactly are you going to tell them about us?” Jacquie asks, her piercing dark eyes riveted on mine.
I shrink back a little on the loveseat where I have been eating brownies and drinking tea.
“She’ll tell them the facts,” Manziuk drawls from his recliner as he casts aside the front page of today’s newspaper and searches for the sports pages. “What else would you expect?”
I open my mouth, but Jacquie is before me. “Facts? You mean our ages and stuff like that? So I become a 28-year-old Jamaican-born female, five nine, 140 pounds, with dark brown skin and short black curly hair. And you’re a 47-year-old Caucasian male of Ukrainian ancestry, born in Canada, height six five, weight 235 pounds, dark brown hair. That might describe us for a wanted bulletin, but–”
Manziuk opens the sports pages. “I expect she’ll tell them how she first thought of us way back in 1982, but didn’t actually get us into print until 2000. And how we more or less leapt full-blown into her mind once she decided she wanted a male and female so we’d be able to talk and argue and all that.”
Jacquie’s voice is scornful. “We’ve heard that stuff hundreds of times. And how she isn’t Ukrainian or black, but she is a woman.”
Keeping his eyes on the paper, Manziuk says, “She pretty well had to be a woman or a man.”
“True. And she knows a lot of people, so she got ideas from them. And then there’s all the research she does.”
“Must be nice to devour all those books and call it research.” Manziuk is looking for something in the paper.
Jacquie crosses her arms in front of her chest. “But none of that tells beans about who we are.”
“Don’t you think she knows that?” Manziuk finds the baseball scores. He takes a sip of coffee and prepares to read them. “I don’t think you have anything to worry about.”
Jacquie jumps up and begins pacing. I pull my feet in so she doesn’t trip over me.
“I’m not worried,” she says. “It’s just–oh, you have no idea!”
Manziuk sighs before setting down the paper and looking up at his partner. “What are you talking about now?”
“You just keep plodding away, oblivious to everything. You’ve never had to fight for anything, never had to scheme and plot and scratch to get what you wanted.”
Manziuk frowns. “I don’t see–”
“Look at you!” Her voice changes, becoming sing-songy and high-pitched. “Fresh out of high school, you decide to become a policeman. So you apply and they accept you. You breeze through the training and next thing you know you’re on the force, starting at the bottom, but ready to work your way up. Then you marry your high school sweetheart, and the two of you buy a little house and start a family. And you get promotions and your family grows, and now here you are, Detective-Inspector, happily married, with three great kids, the oldest working on a doctorate in ancient history at Oxford, no less.” She has to stop to take a breath before blurting out, “Your whole life is perfect! And you just take it for granted. It makes me so–so–”
“Angry?” Manziuk suggests.
She bares her teeth. “What really gets me is that you don’t even know how easy you’ve had it. You don’t even–”
“My life hasn’t been all that easy,” he says quietly, his deep, calm voice quenching hers like water quenches a fire. “You only know what you see; not every detail. You don’t know what it was like to grow up as the son of Ukrainian refugees. Or why I decided to become a cop in the first place. Or how Loretta and I struggled, especially when the kids were young and my hours were so long and stressful–how much she sacrificed to keep us together and to keep the kids safe and happy. You have no idea how many times I’ve wanted to quit, or how many times I’ve been tempted to go outside the lines…. There’s a lot you don’t know.”
For a moment she is subdued. But only for a moment. “Still, you have no idea how hard it is to be black. And female. Ever since I can remember, I’ve had to fight my way up every rung of the ladder. Always having to be perfect, to prove myself–”
Manziuk holds up his hand, palm forward like a traffic cop. “I know. You’ve mentioned it once or twice before. But look at you! You have a degree in criminology. You’ve paid your dues. You have a bright future in homicide. You’ve done it!”
“Yeah,” she says, an edge to her voice. “Ironic, huh? The police force gets told it has to hire more women and more minorities. And look! I’m both!” She stops pacing to stare him in the eye. “So I’m where I am both in spite of the fact that I’m a black woman and because of it. But where do you think I’d be if it wasn’t for that mandate?” She throws her hands out, palms up. “And when do you think the day will come that I no longer have to prove to you guys that I actually deserve to be here?”
Quietly, his eyes unflinching, Manziuk says, “I suppose that will be the same day you stop feeling you have to prove it to yourself.”
She takes an involuntary step backward.
I am ready to intervene, but they don’t need me.
“How dare you!” she asks. “How dare you?”
“When was the last time you did something crazy just because you wanted to?” he presses.
She continues to look him steadily in the eyes. After a long moment, she says, “I don’t remember.”
“Maybe it’s time you let yourself be a person and not only a black female cop.”
She shakes her head. “You don’t know what it’s like.”
“No, and I never will. No more than you’ll know what it’s really like to be me. But I do know that all of us human beings, whatever our race or sex, need certain basic things. We all need time to relax and have fun.”
She looks at the carpet. “I’m not sure I know how.”
“You need to get a life. Get away from your family, for starters.
“What’s wrong with my family?”
“Now don’t say you’ve never complained about them!”
Jacquie smiles, but her voice, when she speaks, is tinged with sadness. “We live together because we all need each other, I guess. After my father was killed, my grandmother moved in with us. And then later, after Mom married that horrible man, my grandmother and I lived with my aunt for several years. During that time, my uncle died of cancer. Then, when Mom finally left that man, we all moved in together for–well, for healing, I guess. There’s strength in unity.”
“But surely you could get a place of your own now. Then you wouldn’t have them watching and analyzing your every move.”
Jacquie smiles again. “I’m kind of used to them.”
“But don’t you think one sight of them would scare away any man who might be interested in you?”
“It’s obvious you think so.”
He says nothing.
“The truth is, I don’t need any help scaring off men. I seem to do a great job all by myself.”
“If you could just relax a little more, let down a few barriers….”
She tosses her head back and looks at him, her lips curled. “That’s assuming I want to attract a man, which I’m not so sure I do. Look at the loser my Mom found. And you should talk to my cousin Precious about some of the jerks she’s gone out with!” She takes a deep breath. “Maybe someday I’ll meet somebody I want to get to know, but right now, I’m doing fine, thank you.” She looks at him almost tenderly. “You have no idea how lucky you are.”
He clears his throat. “Perhaps not.”
She walks to the window and looks out. “So did your baseball team win yesterday?”
“I think so.”
“Better read your paper while you have the chance. I found a textbook on the childhood personalities of serial killers that I want to skim through.”
“You’re no longer worried about that article she’s supposed to write? The one about us.”
“Huh? Oh, that.” Jacquie takes a quick, oblique glance at me. “No, I guess not. After all, her mind dreamed us up in the first place: she should know how to tell people about us.”
Manziuk crosses his ankles as he spreads the paper out on his knees. “What I thought,” he mumbles as he begins to read.
The article I wrote for The Mystery Reader
The Partnership of Creator and Created
One of the ironies of being a writer is that at some point reality becomes blurred concerning which people you know are breathing three-dimensional humans and which are two-dimensional beings existing only in your mind.
Due to my long association with them, I frequently forget that Paul Manziuk and Jacquie Ryan fit into the latter category. Although Paul and Jacquie first print life in Shaded Light (my first mystery novel which was published by St Kitts press in 2000), they have been alive in my mind for more than 19 years–longer than my youngest son has been with me.
The day after Christmas, 1982, I was reading a mystery from the library. I tossed it on the floor and complained aloud. My lips eventually formed those oft-quoted words, "I could write a better book than this."
My ever-helpful husband, who happened to be reading the newspaper in the same room, looked over at me and said, "So, why don't you?"
Why not, indeed? I grew up reading mysteries. The first and probably most influential were the Trixie Beldon books. As I grew older, my grandmother introduced me to Erle Stanley Gardner. I eventually found John Creasy and Agatha Christie in our library, and soon the mystery world opened up before me.
As for writing, I was hooked on being a writer from the day I discovered the power of getting attention through mere words. I can still remember reading my story about “Alice in Vitaminland” on Parents’ Day at my school and loving the attention I received.
As time passed, however, my need to earn a living pulled me into a career as a high school English teacher. With little time for my own writing, I did come up with some very creative assignments and tests. Then I detoured into raising a family, community and church work, and eventually homeschooling my kids. Now and then I wrote a little bit, but never much.
But that Christmas, something within me said, “Now.”
Dreaming up a plot wasn't difficult. For years, I had been noting locations I thought would be appropriate for hiding a body–like rounding a beautifully manicured tree in a serene Japanese garden and thinking, “What a perfect spot to notice two feet sticking out!”
I knew the storyline would be similar to that of the traditional British puzzle of Agatha Christie and Georgette Heyer because that is the kind of book I most enjoy. I also knew I would use police detectives for my series characters. I couldn’t imagine myself ever being a PI or an amateur detective, never mind coming up with a plausible plot for one. Besides, I wanted to focus on what I felt would be my strength–characterization.
So what I needed were my own personal police people–the ones who would carry the series.
It seemed to me that for a long series, two people offer much more license for discussion and arguments and all that good stuff. Even Perry Mason had Della Street. I have long felt that one of the weaknesses of a long-running series with a single point-of-view character is coming up with new and interesting side-issues. Having two main characters from uniquely different backgrounds would increase the options exponentially.
But which characters?
Although I was raised in isolated small towns in western Canada, for the past twenty years I have been a citizen of the most culturally diverse city in the world–Toronto. A patchwork quilt of culture and language, abundance and poverty, politeness and menace, neon colors and monochromatic haze–the good, the bad, and all the in-between–Toronto has become one of the lenses through which I see life.
The characters that came to me, fully formed and, in my mind at least, alive and kicking, are perfectly suited to the city that is Toronto.
Paul Manziuk. Well, he isn’t kicking exactly. But breathing. Moving slowly, every action pertinent. Thinking, eyes half-closed, expression mummy-like. A big man at six foot five, Paul is certainly modeled on several large men who have intimidated me in the past. But he isn’t any of them. He is uniquely himself.
Paul is 47, a homicide detective with a wife, Loretta, and three children aged 17 to 24. His parents emigrated to Canada from the Ukraine right after World War II and he was born and brought up in Toronto. His parents were fiercely independent blue-collar people with a strong work ethic and a desire to make their new home better than the old.
Unlike many of today’s series cops, Paul isn’t going through a divorce or mid-life crisis. He is married to the only person he ever wanted to marry, and he knows that her sacrifices have held their family together and helped their children live complete lives. He knows that Loretta could carry on without him if she had to, because in her own way she is every bit as strong as he is–perhaps stronger. He is proud beyond words of his eldest son’s recent opportunity to study for his Ph.D. in ancient history at Oxford University, of his daughter’s desire to teach high school, and of his 17-year-old son’s intention to develop computer programs for use in the police force.
Paul is in many ways a pragmatic realist; yet somewhere deep inside, at the very core of his being, there dwells an idealist who dreams of a day when evil will be defeated and justice will prevail. So he goes about his daily job of sorting killers out from the rest of society so that the majority of us might be free to follow our dreams. He strives always to produce, not simply an acceptable solution, but the right solution. He detests incompetence and lack of diligence.
Paul’s foil is Jacqueline Ryan, a 28-year-old policewoman who lives with her mother, grandmother, aunt and cousin. An immigrant from Jamaica, Jacquie’s university-educated father drove a taxi in Toronto until he was killed during a botched robbery. Her mother later married a Caucasian man who became abusive. Jacquie got a lot of support from her grandmother and aunt, and now the five women live together as a new/old kind of family–three generations of women providing a foundation that offers security and laughter amid constant turmoil and tug-of-war.
Jacquie has no man in her life. Since she was a child, she has intimidated the opposite sex by her brains, her athletic prowess, and her drive. A few men have shown interest, but none has reached even first base. Part of the problem, of course, is the hurt she has buried deep inside as a result of first her father’s death and then her stepfather’s abusiveness. She has yet to meet a man who interests her enough to entice her to let her guard down. Besides, she has no time for romantic games. She has too much to prove in the real world.
The Toronto police force has a mandate to promote more women and more minorities. Jacquie and Paul both know she has been promoted to homicide primarily because she is a black woman and therefore meets both parts of the mandate. However, Jacquie doesn’t hesitate to grasp the opportunity with both hands. She is determined to prove not only that she deserves the promotion but also that she can be as good as any cop–even Manziuk
Jacquie is a spark plug–prone to jumping in where angels wouldn't go. As she and Paul appeared in my mind, I could see them arguing with each other, her making up in energy what she lacks in size, him feeling if she would just calm down and listen more, it would all work out in a more orderly manner. They have a unique relationship–in some ways father-daughter, in other ways mentor and novice, occasionally flame and tinder, and now and then just two tired cops who both want to find the truth.
In my mind, as in my books and stories, they are equals. Parts of a whole. Just as I believe men and women are equal, yet at the same time different, and both needed. Incomplete without the other, whether in a marriage relationship or a business relationship.
And incomplete, of course, without me.
It’s a strange feeling to think that these people I have known so well for so many years have no existence except in my mind and in the pages of my stories. To me, they are so real. So alive. So vital and energetic and caring. They have so much to learn, especially about each other. And they will learn, if I choose to let them.
It’s scary, but also sad, to realize that Paul and Jacquie will only be known by others if I plug in my computer, take hold of my keyboard, and write them into life. Without Paul and Jacquie in my world, I am incomplete. Without me, they don’t even exist.
