John McFetridge books include a trilogy of novels set 1970s Montreal featuring a young police constable named Édouard “Eddie” Dougherty: Black Rock (2014), A Little More Free (2015), and One or the Other.From McFetridge's Q&A with J. Kingston Pierce for Kirkus Reviews:
Not only is your series’ Montreal locale fairly distinctive, but so is the fact that you’ve set these books in the 1970s. Why did you choose that era?Visit John McFetridge's website.
When I started to research what became Black Rock, I wasn’t sure what it was going to be. I was 10 years old in 1970 during the October Crisis, as we call it. Two men were kidnapped, one of them just a few miles from my house and he was killed. The army was called out and the streets were full of soldiers. I thought about writing a young adult novel. I thought the situation would have some resonance with what’s going on today. But as I got deeper into the research I found a small news article about the police asking for the public’s help with the investigations into three murders—all young women and all killed by the same man. I was really struck by how little attention was paid to these murders while the October Crisis was going on, and I started to think that a crime novel, a police procedural, might be the best way to tell the story.
What was life in Montreal like back in the ’70s? And how has that city changed—or not changed—over the last four decades?
Montreal has changed a lot. The most obvious way it’s changed is that...[read on]
The Page 69 Test: Black Rock.
--Marshal Zeringue