The Porcupine's Quill

Mystery Stories is inhabited by absence: dead friends, past childhoods and ex-lovers. Others, stunned, are left behind to navigate the pitfalls of memory, while trying to make sense of lives built by people who are no longer there. This collection is an intricate addition to Helwig’s already large canon of rich, thoughtful stories populated by densely real people.

Mystery Stories is inhabited by absence: dead friends, past childhoods and ex-lovers. Others, stunned, are left behind to navigate the pitfalls of memory, while trying to make sense of lives built by people no longer there.

There is the young neighbour of Reuben Sachs, an artist, who shot himself only weeks after painting an image of a hanged man. There is Reverend Graham Lund who wonders about his family’s future after visiting the deathbed of a hundred-years-old woman, a woman who used to be a brazen war reporter. A man, blinded by war, revisits the beauty of Venice in his dreams, and a snowbound criminal named Wicker cares for an old pony and a three-legged dog while remembering his childhood. Men and women, faithful and unfaithful, think on the past in their creep towards mortality.

Each of these stories is a case study in loss and recovery, and Helwig remembers these fictional characters with a reverence and detail ordinarily reserved for family. The stories and the times change, but the mystery explored in each remains the same: What is this life that I have lived, and where have those people gone? Mystery Stories is an intricate addition to Helwig’s already large canon of rich, thoughtful stories populated by densely real people.

Stories in this book have previously been published in Journal of Canadian Fiction, Queen’s Quarterly, Atlantica: Stories from the Maritimes and Newfoundland, 98: Best Canadian Stories, 03: Best Canadian Stories, 05: Best Canadian Stories, and 06: Best Canadian Stories.

Table of contents

1: Young and Old

Missing Notes
Red Barn
Prophecies for April
Adam on the Art of Dying
Wakefulness

2: Domestic Arrangements

The Steps
Stitches in Air
Housebound
An Act of Oblivion

3: Late Hours

Where is He Now?
Flight

Review quote

‘Divided into four sections, the collection shies away from the traditional Canadian short-story genre in both space and time. Stories often switch between past and present, and vary in length from 10 to 60 pages. To Helwig’s credit, the bulk of the stories are technically polished. Most of the stories are also told from a third-person perspective and involve older, divorcee protagonists struggling to piece together parts of their past. Understandably, themes of memory and desire dominate this book. Equally interesting is the fact that Helwig doesn’t shy away from creating female protagonists -- which he does to some success, particularly in Stitches in Air.’

—Thomas Hodd, Telegraph-Journal

Review quote

‘These are not mystery stories in the whodunit sense. What Helwig explores is the mystery of people’s everyday lives -- how speculation about the past haunts us, and whether we can ever know what another person is really like.’

—Dave Williamson, Winnipeg Free Press

Review quote

‘ ‘‘It is a human weakness, remembering,’’ says the narrator of ‘Stitches in Air,’ one of twelve tales in David Helwig’s collection, all of which revolve around the issue of memory. Every character suffers a loss that leaves wounds -- deep cuts that heal poorly, if at all -- and as they struggle to come to grips with how to go on, they must also wrestle with their ghosts, delving into the past to learn what shapes the present, what fates they have managed to escape, and what lessons they can never forget.

‘Helwig was born in 1938 and has written and published numerous pieces of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry since his undergraduate years. A former teacher, he also founded the annual Best Canadian Stories, and his work speaks to the breadth of his knowledge, both of literature and of the human condition. From the man who gets constant phone calls for a doctor he does not know, to the girl who photographs herself in disguises and posts them on her website, the characters in these stories probe the depths of mankind’s loneliness, how much (and sometimes how little) one does in an attempt to lessen the ache.’

—Jessica Henkle, ForeWord Reviews

Previous review quote

‘Helwig is a member of Can Lit’s old guard, one of half-a-dozen writers in this country who can regularly turn out stories that are brilliant, thick with detail, plot twist and resonance, almost casual in their technical mastery.’

—Douglas Glover, Introduction to Best Canadian Stories 05

Previous review quote

‘Helwig knows how to enchant.’

—The Globe and Mail

Previous review quote

‘Veteran Canadian writer David Helwig... is a formidable talent... a pleasure to spend time with.’

—Publishers Weekly

Previous review quote

‘Helwig’s sense of life’s unpredictability/possibility grows more acute with each new book, and perhaps his novellas demonstrate this best. They are finely tuned explorations of flawed but redeemable human existence, intense and tender, buoyed by gentle humour and hope.’

—Canadian Notes and Queries

Author comments

5BUZZDecember

This column is all about me. The occasion? A new book of mine has just recently been published, a collection of short and not-so-short fiction called Mystery Stories.

So you can turn the page now or stay for the ride.

My first short story was published in Canadian Forum, a magazine once well known, now gone, a bit more than fifty years ago. Really. That long. And my only previous collection of short fiction, The Streets of Summer, was published in 1969. It was, of course, a different world then. It was the time when new Canadian publishers, House of Anansi, Coach House Press, Oberon Press, many others, were being founded and were bringing into print a new generation of writers. Margaret Laurence had become well-known, but names like Alice Munro, Margaret Atwood and Michael Ondaatje were brand new. The place to buy books in Toronto was Britnell’s bookstore on Yong Street, Coles, the slightly raffish beginning of a Canadian chain, was further down Yonge. Soon, a few blocks away, Longhouse Books opened, an entire store selling nothing but Canadian books. In Montreal The Double Hook did the same thing. All over the country Canadian books were visible, popular, widely reviewed.

Around that time, with my friend Tom Marshall, I founded the Oberon Press annual collection of stories -- initially New Canadian Stories, soon to become Best Canadian Stories -- but I myself more or less stopped writing short fiction. Two or three stories in the new book come from those days, written in the period just after 1969 collection and before I was led astray by the impulse to write novels. In rereading these quiet stories I find myself face to face with an almost stranger, the different man I was in that other world. It’s an odd experience.

It was only when I moved to PEI in 1996 that I returned to writing short fiction. In between I had lived much of my adult life, published poems and novels and some essays. A few weeks after I moved here and while sitting in the car alone one afternoon, I heard a mysterious voice. Speaking to me? Not exactly. But that voice and the new world of the Island embodied itself in the first short story I’d written for a very long time.

I didn’t abandon novels, but increasingly the novella and the long story seemed to be the shape that my imaginings took on. I became aware that a lot of my new stories involved something enigmatic, and I began shaping a collection to be called Mystery Stories. The more recent ones have tended to be -- in the old theatrical phrase -- louder, faster and funnier.

In 1969, when The Streets of Summer came out it was reviewed in a handful of Canadian newspapers and a number of literary magazines and sold in bookstores like Britnells and the Longhouse. A couple of stories were adapted for broadcast by CBC Television. Now, of course, fewer newspapers review books, and though a few independent bookstores like Charlottetown’s The Bookmark remain, most books are distributed through CHapters/Indigo and the internet retailers.

But Mystery Stories will not be on sale in Indigo. Tim Inkster, the strong-willed, long-suffering publisher at the Porcupine’s Quill, has had serious disagreements with some of the company’s business practices, and he refuses to sell to them. But independent bookstores still exist, and Mystery Stories will be available from what Inkster likes to call ‘the e-tailers’ -- Amazon and the rest.

The bloggers who will serve as some of the book’s main reviewers, were most of them not born when I began publishing fiction. Every year I hear of new writers, some young enough to be my grandchildren, who are developing their skills and demand attention. Mystery Stories is coming to birth in a new universe. If I want to go on writing -- and I do -- my work must seek its audience in the world as it is. And it will.

—David Helwig

Back cover copy

These stories are peopled by revenants, shades of their characters’ remembered lives, lovers who died, friends who betrayed them or whom they betrayed, apparitions in dreams, visions and voices that speak unexpectedly out of the past. The mystery of personality keeps them vividly present even when they are long dead. These are absences that contain lives: an artist, Reuben Sachs, who painted an image of a hanged man and a few weeks later shot himself, leaving an irreparable, indelible impression on the mind of a young neighbour. A blind man, in dreams, relives the beauty of the city of Venice, which he visited many years before but could not see. An independent woman, a boldly adventurous young war reporter, is reduced to an ancient, bedridden body who on her hundredth birthday finds a faint voice to ask a young visitor if he has seen ‘her book’, indicating the record of her life which lies nearby on a table. A man thinks back to the day he, as small boy, hid on a staircase and looked down at a now long vanished fashionable crowd dancing and drinking at a New Year’s celebration in 1950, in an old hotel owned by his parents, in which he will spend his entire childhood and youth.

These are varied and intricate tales told by observers and keepers of the past. The mystery they so sharply catch and elucidate is the essential one, each asking, What am I? What were those others who meant so much to me? What is this life that I have lived?

—Doris Cowan