Kevin Bergeron
In a Cat’s Eye is sort of a murder mystery set in a rundown small town American hotel in the late 1960’s. The detective Willy is a not too bright young man who determines to solve the murder of his friend Nancy and recover a figurine missing from her room. He’s assisted by his friend known as The Colonel, an elderly and sometimes mentally confused man who fills the naïve Willy full of stories of espionage and intrigue. Nancy’s cat Mr. Winkley, the only eyewitness to the murder, uncovers a couple of critical clues. The other residents comprise a rogues gallery of eccentric suspects. Willy’s imagination is far better than his intellect, and so he misunderstands a lot of things, such that the reader will probably track down the killer before Willy does. Despite its noir atmosphere, it’s meant to be a fun story with humour. It’s a coming of age story, actually, and doesn’t neatly fit into any genre. I’ve been told it’s “quirky.”
The book has been compared to Curious Incident and Catcher in the Rye, so how does that make you feel?
I think the comparison to Catcher in the Rye might be in the narrative voices. Holden Caulfield tells his story in an informal, conversational voice that is very likable. That readers might find Willy likable, as somebody you’d want to listen to as he tells his story, makes me feel pretty good.
The first time I heard of Curious Incident was when I saw Cat’s Eye compared to it. I got a copy and read it, and similarities between Willy and Curious Incident’s narrator Christopher jumped right out at me, and that made me feel strange. Both characters are emotionally detached young fellows, and think a lot alike, and yet they’re opposites in terms of their intellectual capacities. When I wrote the novel I thought that Willy’s peculiar personality traits stemmed from his intellectual limitations and childhood trauma, but now I don’t know, maybe he has a touch of some sort of autism. I wonder what would happen if the two characters met. I don’t think Christopher would like Willy because Willy is too much of a slob and Christopher is meticulous and has to have everything arranged just so.
Where did your inspiration come from for the book?
When I was young I lived in a small hotel that was not unlike the Morpheum. It’s long gone now, as are most if not all the other residents, who were much older than I. Like many young men, I was always carelessly breaking things and never looked back. Then after I retired from the machinist trade, all these memories returned, of all the people who’d been good to me and I never properly reciprocated, and also memories of a love affair. I suppose that’s why the story developed as a murder mystery, like something died and I’m investigating how and why.
Some of the things in the story actually happened. For instance, one of the characters is an elderly woman who keeps a notebook in which she records every single favour she gives, and every transgression, real or imagined, that she receives. That’s all true, except that in the story it turns out that her notebook contains an important clue. There was a dark side to some of these people, that is a shade less dark in the story, because I didn’t want anything to obscure their good qualities; so the characters are a bit softer than in life.
This is your debut novel, so do you have plans for another?
Willy might be trying to tell me another story, and I imagine him frustrated at my inability to understand, saying something like “I’m trying to tell you! Why don’t you listen to me? Geez, you never listen!” So I’m writing down bits and pieces of things that might become a sequel, but I need to come up with a couple more characters to replace the two that were lost in the first book, one of whom died and the other went to prison for murdering her.
Was novel writing anything like imagined?
I’d written short stories and one novelette during my college years, and I’ve found that a novel is not much different, but you have to relax and listen to your characters more, give them and yourself a longer leash than you do in a story.
What is the process when you write?
For me the ideal is if it starts with a voice, as though some character is talking to me, or a memory of a fragment of a dream, something like that. It could be anything, as long as it’s something that I truly care about. That becomes a seed that sprouts related thoughts. For me it’s all about characters, feelings and ideas. All this stuff somehow gets arranged to form a chronological sequence of events, and it’s still something of a mystery to me how it comes together. I resist the imposition of chronological order in the early stages.
Another thing is that I never set out to be funny, and yet I suppose I hope people find humour in my stories. I’ll be writing a scene and humour is not on my mind at all. I really don’t know at what point I recognize and consciously develop the humour. I don’t know where it comes from or what it means.
I love to talk about the writing process, could go on and on but then I’d never stop.
Who are your favourite authors?
In no particular order, a few who come to mind:
Ernest Hemingway. When I was about eleven years old I talked a librarian into lending me To Have and Have Not. I read that book until the pages fell out, and I never returned it, so I probably owe the library a lot of money in dues by now. I like The Old Man and the Sea even better.
Mark Twain. My mother gave me her copy of Tom Sawyer when I was a boy. I identified with Tom and imagined myself living his adventures. Huckleberry Finn is also a terrific book.
Truman Capote. A Christmas Memory is about as good as a story can be. I can read that story over and over again. Normally I shy away from sentiment, but that story gets to me every time.
F. Scott Fitzgerald. I’ve only discovered his work recently. I wish I had found it when I was young so that my own writing could have been influenced by it.
Which authors would you say have affected your writing style?
With me, the style pretty much emerges from the characters and narrative voice, so it might be different for different stories. The American southern gothic writers Carson McCullers, Flannery O’Connor and Truman Capote probably had the most influence on my writing, which is funny because I’m very much an American northerner, and the two cultures are markedly different. I identified—and still do—with misfit characters and themes relating to social alienation.
I also enjoy noir detective fiction, and Raymond Chandler’s detective Philip Marlowe was an influence in writing Cat’s Eye.
What is next for you?
A sequel is simmering on the back burner, but I don’t know if it will come to anything, or if maybe I’ll work on writing something of a different vein. I’ll be busy for a while telling people about Cat’s Eye, because I think that it’s the one story I was meant to write. I had so much fun writing that one, hate to let it go.