On January 14th I sat down with Linda Wiken, the owner of Ottawa’s Prime Crime Books, for a chat about Cold Dark Matter. Linda has been a journalist, writes crime fiction and for over ten years has run Ottawa’s wonderful mystery store. This is a transcript of our conversation.

Linda: First, I’d like to know where Morgan O’Brien came from. How did she end up being your protagonist and where did all her characteristics come from?

Alex: When I began thinking about writing mysteries, I knew I wanted to work within the sciences, because that’s where I had to do the least amount of extra learning. I knew that I had so much to learn about writing that I’d better pick an area where I was already comfortable.

I’ve always been really interested in the culture of science, and the fact that science is almost completely self monitoring, which leaves it open to abuse. And science fraud is becoming more prevalent because big money is involved. Think about it. If you’re looking for a grant, should you actually run the experiment or just say you did? And if you run the experiment and your results are mediocre, should you report them as is or just knock off the errant data points so your results look a lot stronger than they are? Because the hard, cold reality is, you’re not going to get that grant if your results aren’t strong.

Linda: I’m sure that happens a lot.

Alex: I don't think anyone knows how much it does happen, and that's one of the problems. Morgan came about when I began to think, what if? What if there was a person whose job it was to investigate scientific research?

Linda: So there is nobody that does this now? She’s totally fictional?

Alex: The way she does it is fictional. There are now a couple of places that investigate research fraud (see Links for websites and articles on science fraud) but in these offices the investigators are bureaucrats: they sit at their desks and read papers, or follow up ongoing investigations within the universities. There’s nobody who goes out and kicks butt, which is what Morgan does.

So I began thinking, what if there was a person who actually did this? What kind of background would they need? How would they work? And that’s where Morgan came from, because you’d have to have a background in investigation, but you’d also need a background in science. And to have a background like that, you’d probably have to be a bit of an outsider. You’d also, I think, have to be cynical and very tough.

Linda: Which she definitely is.

Alex: And part of that comes from her background as a woman in science. If you’re going to survive in that system you have to be tough, because it’s not necessarily a nice place to be.

Linda: Is it that it’s cutthroat?

Alex: It’s cutthroat, competitive, and can be very nasty. I mean, you’ll meet some of the nicest people in the world, but as a system, a culture, it’s very macho. So, if you’re going to be in it you have to be able to play hardball. And of course if you’re investigating these people, you really have to be tough.

Linda: What did you want to accomplish using Morgan? Was it to show this closed, self regulating culture?

Alex: I find the world of science absolutely fascinating. Science has a profound effect on our culture and our lives, yet not many people are writing about it, partly because it’s a difficult world to write about unless you’ve actually lived in it, which I have. I made Morgan an investigator of research fraud because that allows me to go anywhere. I’m not restricted to one area of science, which would bore me silly. With her, I get to research and write about all the things that captivate me.

Linda: How are you able to make the science so accessible? With the first book, I must admit, I thought, well, salmon! This doesn’t really interest me, not unless they’re sautéed. But I was drawn into it, and I found it fascinating and understandable. How are you able to do that? Obviously you’re making a conscious effort to have all the facts there, but how do you make it accessible. Is it the writing style? Is it what you decide to leave out? Or do you even know?

Alex: I’m always very clear about the fact that fiction is about people. It’s not about facts, it’s not about theories, and it’s not about issues. It’s about people being propelled, willingly or unwillingly, into difficult and dramatic situations, and what they have to do to survive. Sure, my characters happen to be working in the realm of science, but it’s no different than if they were doing law. A good legal mystery, for example, isn’t about the law, it’s about people, but it’s built within that context. A medical mystery, an emergency room mystery, isn’t about surgery. It’s about people: what they do, and think, and feel.

Science, after all, is a human pursuit, and it carries with it all the same positive things, and the same negative things, as any other human pursuit. There’s passion, there’s ego, there’s power, there’s pursuit of various goals. These are all human things, and people – readers – relate to human things. Also, that’s what personally interests me about science. It’s the human side that intrigues me. Of course, I also spent years as a science writer, so I had to learn how to present science in a simple and accessible way.

Linda: So you learned what information to put in, but also what to leave out?

Alex: Hopefully, yes. It’s a fine line and I still struggle with that. You have to give people enough to make it interesting but without boring their socks off.

Linda: One character that I find fascinating is Sylvia. She’s a very extreme character: her background, her sex change, the cancer. You’ve just given her these two things that propel her in a certain direction.

Alex: When I was in university I met somebody who was going through a sex change while taking degree in the hard sciences. I watched what they went through, and found the reactions of the people around me very upsetting. Nobody is comfortable with transsexuals. The straight community isn’t, but neither is the gay community. And the feminist community didn’t want anything to do with her because she was still, according to them, ‘a man’, so transsexuals don’t fit anywhere. But they’re just people, like you and me, trying to struggle through their daily lives.

I also got sick of seeing every transsexual in movies and books portrayed as a drag queen in a gay bar, which is so far from the truth. There are transexaul scientists, mathematicians, architects, ministers. They run the gambit, just like the rest of us do.

Linda: It’s interesting because Sylvia has the soft touch that Morgan lacks. She’s obviously very tough to have gone through what she has, but she still has a soft side.

Alex: I think that’s particularly evident in the first book, Dead Water Creek, and it wasn’t until I’d finished the book that I understood who Sylvia really was. In Dead Water Creek, Sylvia is the moral center of the book. She’s the only person in the story who has self knowledge, who truly knows who she is. Everyone else is flailing around.

I guess that’s what intrigues me about transsexuality. Can you imagine deciding that you have to completely change your sex? That the body you were born in is the wrong one? To arrive at that decision, you’d have to reassess both yourself and everything around you, and that requires incredible strength. I don’t think you can come out the other side without profound self-knowledge.

So in a way, Sylvia is as hard as nails because she knows precisely who she is and what she believes. She’s unmovable in that sense. But that self knowledge also gives her a humanity, a tolerance for others, that Morgan completely lacks. I mean, you really want to kick Morgan in the butt sometimes.

Linda: She’s certainly not very forgiving.

Alex: And that’s because Morgan is so driven. She won’t let anyone get in her way.

Linda: You told me that the new book, Cold Dark Matter, is based on three true stories. Why these three stories? What interested you about them, and why did you decide to combine them into one story?

Alex: The first story was one about a young physicist who disappeared in the 1960s, and in a way I had to write about that story to get rid of it. To get it out of my mind.

I was told this story in 1980, in France of all places, sitting on a grassy knoll drinking red wine. I was with another foreign student, a young woman from Saskatchewan, and she told me this very disturbing story about her uncle who disappeared during the Cold War. He was an archetypical physicist. He had no interest in socializing. His only love was the lab, where he spent almost 24 hours a day. When he finished his doctorate at the University of Saskatchewan he was offered a job at a very prestigious American university. He went there and he stayed about six months, and then he was offered another job at another prestigious American university. And so on. All short term jobs at well-known American universities. The family did keep in touch with him through letters and phone calls, so they always knew his whereabouts. Then he just disappeared. When the family tried to trace him they were told that he’d taken another job, but the last university didn’t know where, so they contacted all the previous institutions he’d been with. They said they’d never heard of him, and they’d never had anybody by that name working there, but the family knew he’d been at these places. They had the letters and phone records.

I think what disturbed me most was thinking about the family, desperately trying to trace this young man. They went to Foreign Affairs, but they wouldn’t help. They went to the RCMP. They wouldn’t help. You begin to realize that somebody was interested in this young man not being found.

So this story just kind of stayed in my brain and festered, as these stories do.

Linda: And to this day, was he ever found?

Alex: That I can’t tell you, but this story was told to me around 1980, and the disappearance happened in the ‘60s. According to my friend the family had never stopped searching, and this was twenty years later and nothing had turned up.

Later on in my career as a science writer, I started working with astronomers, and began reading references to astronomers going to the dark side. That referred to astronomers going from academic research into top-secret military research. During the Cold War in particular, people would disappear when they went to the dark side. That’s what would happen. They’d never be seen or heard from again.

Linda: So there was a natural tie in?

Alex: Definitely, because astronomers are physicists. They're astrophysicists. So there was a real tie-in. Then I spoke to an astronomer friend about this. He’s a bit older than me, so he was in graduate school at a US in the 1960s. I asked him if all this stuff about the dark side was for real. I mean, it sounds pretty hokey, doesn’t it?

We were in a little cafe and my friend leaned forward and lowered his voice and he said: “Not only is it true, if you had anything to hide, particularly if you were gay, then you were a target. You were blackmailed into going to the dark side.”

Linda: And no one would ever know, would they. You’d just disappear.

Alex: And your records, just like in the book, were expunged. You disappeared, and nobody asked any questions, and if they did, they were convinced not to.

Linda: Very creepy. We don’t think about this happening in the western world.

Alex: And that’s why this is so interesting, isn’t it? It did happen, and it still does happen. During the Cold War, the United States, and particularly the head of the CIA, was absolutely paranoiac about Canada. He was obsessed with the possibility of security leaks coming from Canada, and he was particularly worried about Canadian scientists, because our scientists worked closely with their American counterparts, so had access to U.S. military and nuclear secrets. But just to be clear, their fear was justified. The Eastern Block was very active in Ottawa trying to recruit scientists, and there were some very famous spy cases at the National Research Council and elsewhere, people caught passing secrets, so it’s easy to laugh at it now, but then it was all very real. As real to them as terrorism is to us today.

Linda: So, the fruit machine. How real is that?

Alex: It’s a true story, although again, I have greatly manipulated the facts in the service of fiction. The RCMP and the Department of Defense did try and create a ‘homosexual detector’. It was top secret and hidden from the Prime Minister’s office, and it did fail in part because no one would volunteer to help test the thing. So those broad lines are all true.

The story of the Fruit Machine, just like the story of the young physicist, was another one of those stories that kind of stayed with me and festered. And I do feel like that piece of history has been treated in a very inhumane way. When I read accounts of what happened, the victims of this purge, who were mostly gay man, are really treated with very little humanity in the historical accounts. Nobody seems to actually consider what these people felt, what happened to their lives, what they went through. I was just talking to an Ottawa man the other day in his seventies, and he told me that his partner of 50 years and his best friend were both pulled in by the RCMP for questioning in this period, and he spoke about just how frightening it was. There were several suicides and some people just disappeared. But you read accounts of it and they're written almost as if what happened was inconsequential, or worse, the fault of these men. What I tried to touch on was the tenor of the time and how it affected some of the people who lived through it.

Linda: In a way that reflects the human side of it, you mean.

Alex: That’s right. I don’t think I understood why I wrote the book until after I’d finished it, but now I see that there are very real questions from back then that still need answers today. Where do you draw the line between security and rights? How do you determine who is dangerous and who is not? And to whom do you give the power to make these decisions?

Linda: But do you think that really applies to these days? I mean, these days the kinds of indiscretions that you talk about in the book are unimportant. Nobody cares. Can people still be manipulated in this way?

Alex: I did quite a bit of reading into modern espionage before writing the book, and I have to say yes to that question. People are still concerned about how they’re perceived by the world around them, and these kinds of indiscretions can still ruin marriages and careers. As Gunnar McNabb tells Morgan at a certain point in the book, everybody has a weak point, it’s just a question of finding it. Everybody has something that can be used against them. That’s almost a direct quote from a non-fiction book written by a modern-day secret service agent whose job it was to ‘recruit’ informants. We all have secrets. We all want to protect the people we love.

Linda: How did you find researching these issues? You’ve got a lot of background information. Is that all fiction?

Alex: Cold Dark Matter is most definitely a work of fiction. I’ve taken real things that are based on research and incorporated them into the story, but even the real things have been changed and manipulated to create a story.

Linda: What about Hawaii and the telescopes? Is that real? Have you ever been there?

Alex: That’s quite real. There will probably be astronomers who are quite put-out by the descriptions, because the placement of certain things, for example, has been changed in the service of fiction, but I have been to Mauna Kea, I’ve been to Hale Pohaku and some of the observatories on the summit, and I can say without any hesitation that it is one of the most incredible places I’ve ever seen. The descriptions of the desolation, the altitude, the frigid cold, are all true.

Linda: The title. Where did you come up with that? It feels like it works on many levels.

Alex: There are two types of dark matter: hot dark matter and cold dark matter. Obviously, everything about this book is cold and dark, but it’s more than that. Dark matter makes up a huge percentage of the universe and because of this it controls a lot of what happens in the universe – how the universe evolves. But we can’t even see it. We only see it by how it affects the other things around it. In this book, there are powerful hidden forces that ultimately control everything that happens, but they’re unseen. We only see them through the affect they have on everything else around them.

Linda: So you’re talking here about the physical, the astrophysical, the emotional, the whole thing.

Alex: Yes.

Linda: So, what does the future hold for Morgan?

Alex: I’d certainly love to write another Morgan book, but right now I’m working on a completely different book, not part of the series.

Linda: Maybe it’s good to have a change just for a little while.

Alex: I think so, but I certainly wouldn’t need a lot of encouragement to write another Morgan book. I absolutely love writing them. They’re a lot of fun.

Linda: I’ve obviously read it and I would recommend it. All the information is fascinating, and also the Ottawa setting is captured really well. Along with Hawaii, it’s not hard to take. What would you say if somebody asked you why they should read it?

Alex: I would tell them that I think this book will take them somewhere they’ve never been before. For me, that’s what I want in the fiction I read, and I’m not talking about setting. It can be into a character’s mind, or into a situation, into a period of history, whatever, but that’s what I demand of my fiction. It has to take me somewhere that I’d never been before, and I think this book will do that for most people.

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