Light my Fire

Sandra Ruttan’s latest novel, ‘What Burns Within’ is a scorching tale of arson, kidnap and rape set in the Tri-Cities of British Columbia. The first of a new police procedural series, the novel follows mismatched Mounties Tain, Craig and Ashlyn as they try to solve a string of bizarre crimes amid red tape, hostile colleagues and an unsympathetic public. The book hits US stores in May 2008. Pulp Pusher sent Damien Seaman to speak to Sandra.

DAMIEN SEAMAN: Why is ‘What Burns Within’ full of unpleasant female characters?

SANDRA RUTTAN: I didn’t really think about it to that extreme. Maybe you picked up on that because you’re a man. Part of it could be that I have a lot more friends who are guys than women. When I was assaulted as a teenager it was by a group of girls around my age.

There is this image of the fairer sex touted around, with the implied question ‘how can girls commit such vicious crimes?’ In Nova Scotia recently one girl was beaten by a couple of others so badly she had to run for help. With apparently no provocation. In British Columbia a girl was beaten to death by other girls. Women can be nasty!

I don’t find the character of Ashlyn unpleasant, though. In reality I think she’s very balanced and a strong, likable character. When it comes to Lori, I also think that there are some women in male-dominated professions who feel they are going to be discriminated against and so take things into their own hands.

Women feel that pressure. We’re charged more than men for products like shampoos, and even in Canada women are still paid less for doing the same job. On the other side, how many men do you see working in daycare, or even as teachers? We like to think we don’t have a sexist bone in our bodies but we all do.

And then as a woman I’m not pro affirmative action for the fire department. I don’t care if it’s a man or a woman. I care that they – and my (now) ex-husband – have the very best person backing them up. If that means it’s a man then so be it.

DS: The book’s characters discuss issues such as rape and affirmative action. Did you use this as a way of working through some of your beliefs in your fiction?

SR: Your own perspectives are going to colour what you write. A lot of women have it emblazoned on the brain that they’re not good enough to do something. I wanted to take karate lessons as a kid but my mother said that was something for boys. If I had gone on to join the fire department or police force then you could have thrown the blame right onto my mother.

Society pressures us in ways we often don’t realise; people are constantly told that they can’t do things. I’m not saying it’s right, but the seed gets sown early. When I was a teacher working with young children parents asked me the most amazing things. In one case, the parents asked if they should force their left-handed child to learn to write right-handed by breaking his arm and putting it in a cast. Makes you realise most people still believe it’s better to fit in than challenge the norm.

I also think people in the police and fire departments are well aware of the issues they have to deal with; naturally they’re going to talk about them a lot. Many women fire fighters who are exceptionally skilled at the job put pressure on themselves to be better, to keep on proving themselves all the time.

DS: Besides the police and fire departments, the book has a lot to say about social institutions such as social services, girl guides and the church. Was this intentional?

SR: It’s hard to say on everything; you don’t realise you’re doing it until you’ve done it. Using the church group was more deliberate, as the youth pastor is automatically a suspect because he’s male. Writing about the church you bring in aspects of forgiveness. I had a church background – and have since left, by the way. But I saw cases of pastors accused of sexual impropriety. The accusations destroyed their careers. Something like that can devastate a life.

DS: Which church were you part of?

SR: I was part of the Brethren Assembly, the Closed Brethren, in which women had to wear headscarves and remain silent. They don’t believe in church buildings – ‘Jesus is in our hearts, not in any single building’. But the point is I chose to go. I was raised atheist and needed stability during my teen years, so I rebelled into the church.

My mother and her sisters got pregnant to leave home. There was no way I was going to do that, go into an unhealthy marriage or become a single mom. I’d seen and experienced the outcome of that.

The Brethren had a clear set of rules. There was something comforting in that – no shades of grey. I can really understand how people end up in cults, particularly people from abusive backgrounds. But, in the end, that’s how the real world is – shades of grey.

DS: Is there a piece of you in every character you write?

SR: I don’t know that I’d see myself in every character. Looking at Lori… I could relate to her and her growing sense of desperation. I can see myself in that.

As for Mrs Brennan, there are parts of her that are like a lot of women I knew growing up. But for me as a child my father wasn’t around much. This factors into how the male characters are portrayed. Mr Brennan is clueless, unable to process or deal with events in the novel. Men have a conditioned thing so they’re supposed to be protectors. It’s easy for them to get sidetracked with blame. For him, not the full-time parent, it’s all just one big, surreal shock when his daughter goes missing. A lot of men process things differently – quietly.

DS: Why do so many people in Canada and elsewhere distrust their local police?

SR: I suppose in the past 100 years we began to distrust authority, hierarchy, the establishment. It even goes back to when Luther nailed his thesis to the church door saying that he wasn’t going to blindly trust the church. And we’ve gone on from there. The advent of TV and the internet gives us more access to international media than ever before.

We have become a culture that questions authority. And scrutiny, honesty, transparency – these are important to keep people honest. But it also breeds distrust. The average person has little real tangible exposure to authority – they have no reason to, other than getting a speeding ticket – and yet on TV or in books we see the storyline of the corrupt or lazy cop again and again.

To be honest, this is something I wanted to play with – particularly setting the work in Canada. There’s a perception that Canadians are nice and that the RCMP [Royal Canadian Mounted Police] are all Dudley-Do-Rights. But we’ve had huge scandals in the RCMP. That hasn’t lessoned my respect for them at all, though. For the once or twice things go wrong, there are hundreds of times they’re done properly. If you’re human you can make mistakes.

DS: Your work seems to focus on children as victims. Do you think crime readers are now so jaded that using children in peril is one of the few ways to grab readers’ attention?

SR: I know a number of people who will not read ‘What Burns Within’ because it contains violence against children. And I prefer to think of the novel as being about unhealthy attitudes to sex rather than about violence against children. But I think we have so much crime that sometimes it does take something more shocking to make people pay attention. We do take protection of children more seriously.

I hope the book will make the reader start to think on some level. I don’t want to overplay the violence but I also don’t want to understate the seriousness of the crime. I think there are a lot of issues people don’t think about when it comes to child safety, and children end up dead. Sometimes the right support systems are unfortunately lacking.

People have to stop avoiding what makes them uncomfortable. We’ll never improve things if we don’t question them.

DS: Why are you drawn to the police procedural as a form?

SR: When it comes to crime fiction I’m a bit of a realist and I need to find the storylines believable. I also like to believe people are out there seeking to uphold the law, to step up and get justice. We all have our superhero fantasies and in crime fiction I like the idea there are cops out there dedicated to the job. I grew up in the same town for years with kids in my class whose fathers were police officers, and I respect that. And because I enjoy reading procedurals it makes sense I would be drawn to writing them.

DS: Talking of superheroes, how do you square realism with a protagonist like Ian Rankin’s Rebus whose constant struggle against authority and alcoholism has turned him into an indestructible, unrealistic character?

SR: Well, any police procedural runs the risk of going down that route. It’s inherent in the form. And I think Rebus is popular with so many women because most of them want to fix him. The first Rebus novel I read was ‘The Falls’ and in that I was drawn to the spiritual side of the character, when he wonders if there’s a God. Can he have faith when he sees all the suffering in the world?

But I think that is one of the risks – Rebus has become almost superhuman. In reality we all know he would have been kicked to the kerb a long time ago! I hope I don’t get into trouble for saying that.

DS: How real can or should any crime novel be?

SR: How real it should be I’ll leave to the discretion of authors. Some want to entertain or be comedic and there’s value in that. I like to believe that the people in the book I write could live next door. Stereotypes and clichés don’t ring as true and at a certain level it’s not really possible to believe in them. There has to be depth to a character so you can imagine what that person is feeling.

Books can also work as therapy, safe places to go to address things in your life. They can remove the sense of being alone in the world. I have a friend who as a child was abused and locked in a basement by her mother. She went with me to a reading with Mark Billingham of his book ‘Buried’, which has a scene with a kid being locked in a basement. My friend enjoyed the reading because she saw that somebody could imagine and understand what it was like to go through what she went through. People want to relate to their fiction, and that can be a very healing thing.

It’s all about what you want to do as an author. I want to entertain as well as touch on important themes and topics. There’s also a difference between accuracy and believability that people often overlook in terms of fiction. Sometimes you can tell somebody how something is done and they won’t believe it.

DS: What research do you do for your own novels?

SR: It depends what I’m writing about. ‘What Burns Within’ was a bit easier because I lived with a firefighter and trained arson investigator! That’s where the idea came from. Kevin had been called out one night at 2am and I was lying in bed with a disturbing awareness of how his responsibility with the fire department had changed my life.

Because the book is set in another city to where I live now, I had to check whether the fire department uses pagers or radios – for that I had to look at every city in the Greater Vancouver Area. Also police responsibility – some of the cities have the RCMP while some have their own police departments. That adds in a whole bunch of jurisdictional issues.

DS: What can we expect from the sequel, ‘The Frailty of Flesh’, due out in autumn 2008?

SR: As far as I’m concerned there’s no point doing a series unless you get to know the characters better. In ‘Frailty’ you get to know more about Tain and Craig’s backgrounds. With Ashlyn it’s more current.

I’m more nervous about this book because it’s more personal territory. I cried writing it, so I shudder to think how people are likely to respond. If that emotion carries through it should be something readers feel on quite a deep level.

‘Frailty’ is darker, a more devastating book. But then the books that hurt are the ones that linger longest.

DAMIEN SEAMAN, one-time political reporter, editor, security guard, factory worker and supermarket management trainee, has lived in London, Brussels, Benghazi and Nottingham, 2007's UK murder capital. He currently lives in Berlin. More of his crime fiction has featured in Noir Originals and Spinetingler Magazine. He finds emails a pleasant distraction if youve got time on your hands: damien.seaman@web.de

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