Iona Whishaw’s mother was fearless.
Lorna Whishaw was so fearless, in fact, that she “engaged in a bit of intelligence” for the British government while living in South Africa during the Second World War.
“She told me very little about it,” Iona Whishaw told CBC’s North by Northwest host Margaret Gallagher. “You could have knocked me over with a feather when I learned about it.”
Her mother’s life “lightly” inspired Lane Winslow, a young ex-spy from London living in British Columbia’s Kootenays and the heroine of Whishaw’s award-winning mystery series.
Whishaw describes her mother as “extremely beautiful, very brilliant,” and says she spoke several languages, including Russian.
“We had very close Russian friends who had come from Russia … just after the war,” Whishaw said.
She didn’t know about her mother’s intelligence activity until much later in life.
When she did, she says it set her on the path to creating Lane Winslow, who moves to small-town Canada looking for a quieter life after the Second World War.
Whishaw started writing the first Lane Winslow novel, A Killer in King’s Cove, at age 64 after a long career as an educator and social worker. It was published in 2016.
Earlier this year she released the 11th novel in the series, Lightning Strikes The Silence.
B.C. connection
Whishaw’s small hometown in the Kootenays also inspired parts of the series.
“When I was a little girl, I lived up the road from Nelson, just past Balfour about 35 miles or so,” she said. “Lane lives in my home. When I started to write those books, I felt myself living there again in the kind of innocence of my childhood.”
Some characters in the books are inspired by her neighbours from that time, Whishaw said.
“It was such a beautiful little community that I lived in. And I was very happy to pillage much of that community for the stories in my books.”
Historical accuracy
The series takes place at a time when people were recovering from the collective trauma of the Second World War.
Whishaw says she had to do a lot of painstaking research to ensure the dialogue and settings were historically accurate — and much of those details don’t actually make it onto the page.
“You have to balance the idea of learning a ton of stuff and then making sure you don’t put it in the book because people’s eyes will float to the back of their heads immediately,” she said.
“What I want to try to do is understand the period within the context of the history going on and how that would affect the individuals who are just living there.”
Language, she said, can be a tricky thing to get right because she has to stay away from modern idioms.
“Language expands at such a horrendous rate. Something like ‘he’s got his own agenda’ is an incredibly modern thing to say and would never have been said in the 1940s,” she said.
North by Northwest15:46Iona Whishaw on her new book “Lightning Strikes the Silence: A Lane Winslow Mystery”
Vancouver author Iona Whishaw joins us to talk about “Lightning Strikes the Silence: A Lane Winslow Mystery.”