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LITERARY LOCATION: Sagebrush Theatre, 1300 9th Avenue, Kamloops
Known far more for cattle than cantos, Kamloops can nonetheless boast to giving rise to two authors in one household, at 463 Greenstone Drive, where historian and children's book author Joan Weir raised her son Ian Weir to become a prolific screenwriter, playwright and internationally successful novelist. Kamloops also serves as the production base for the Western Canada Theatre which produced several of Ian Weir's earlier plays on the renovated site of the Kamloops Secondary School Auditorium where Weir first "fell totally in love with drama" as a student in the early 1970s.
ENTRY: Born in North Carolina, Ian Weir grew up in Kamloops where he once told his piano teacher that he hoped to become a writer. She replied, "Yes, that's a nice hobby. But what do you want to do for a living?" Weir persevered and became the writer and executive producer of the CBC mini-series Dragon Boys, for which he received the Canadian Screenwriters' Award for Best Movie of the Week/Mini-Series. In addition to serving as creator and executive producer of the CBC one-hour drama series Arctic Air, Weir was creator and executive producer of Edgemont, and a writer for more than two dozen series, ranging from ReBoot to Flashpoint. The prolific Langley-based screenwriter has also written stage plays (such as The Island of Bliss, Bloody Business and The Idler), nine radio plays and three young adult novels.
Ian Weir's first novel Daniel O'Thunder (2009), was nominated for the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, the Canadian Authors Association's Award for Fiction, the Commonwealth Writers' Prize Best First Book Award and the Amazon.ca Annual First Novel Award.
Daniel O'Thunder is set in the 1850s and was promoted as "a rollicking, comic and ultimately haunting tale of fist-fighting, faith, and fine madness." Interweaving the voices of several narrators, it tells the story of Danny O'Thunder, a troubled but immensely charismatic prize-fighting evangelist who challenges the devil to meet him in the ring. The book opens in London - inhabiting the world of the theatre, the criminal underworld and the realities of bare-knuckle prize-fighting - then shifts to North America, where O'Thunder meets his ultimate opponent in the desert of the British Columbia Interior. Weir describes it as "kind of a rollicking dark Dickensian metaphysical comedy."
Set in London in 1816, Ian Weir's second novel, Will Starling (Goose Lane, 2014), was one of ten Canadian-authored books longlisted for the 2016 Dublin International Literary Award.
Having spent five years assisting a military surgeon during the Napoleonic Wars, nineteen-year-old foundling and would-be surgeon Will Starling returns to London to help his mentor start a medical practice in the rough Cripplegate area. It's an era when surgeons and anatomists rely on body snatchers to obtain human cadavers.
When a grave robbery goes awry, brash Will is led to suspect London's foremost surgeon, Dioysus Atherton, could be conducting scientific experiments on the living. That's the gist of Will Starling (Goose Lane, 2014).
The origins of Will Starling can be traced to a summer evening at the Weir's family cottage at Shuswap Lake in the late Sixties when Ian Weir was about twelve. When a neighbour's son rode his mini-bike at considerable speed into a barbed wire fence, he was carried like a battlefield casualty to the Weir's front porch where Weir's father, a surgeon, was reading. Dr. Weir proceeded to calmly unfold himself from his lounge-chair, retrieve his battered black medical bag, and stitch up the young patient who was shrieking on the picnic table.
"I'm pretty sure the idea for Will Starling began to germinate right then and there," says Weir, a screenwriter who has won two Geminis and four Leos, "as my brothers and I looked on agog and my mother--the novelist and historian, Joan Weir--tried gamely to channel Florence Nightingale.
"It took me a good while to figure this out, of course. But 40-plus years later, midway through researching and writing a literary gothic thriller set amongst the surgeons and grave-robbers in London in 1816--the very summer that Mary Shelley began writing Frankenstein--it finally dawned. The novel is at heart a wistful tribute to my Dad, who passed away seven years ago."
Weir is quick to add that a year later Astley Cooper would make medical history in London by successfully repairing a ruptured aortic aneurism (the patient lived for eleven hours). Maybe that'll be in book three.
Meanwhile none of the surgeons in the novel is intended to serve as a direct portrait of Dr. Weir-certainly not the golden and appalling Dionysus Atherton-but Weir notes there is a certain dour, squat and redoubtable Scottish surgeon who happens to share his paternal grandmother's maiden surname.
"Although there was nothing dour about my Dad," he says, "and nothing remotely squat about him either, he was wonderfully redoubtable."
Even though by 2018, Ian Weir had won two Geminis, four Leos, a Jessie and a Writers Guild of Canada Screenwriting Award, there was time for a third adult novel, this one dubbed a deadpan revisionist Western. In The Death and Life of Strother Purcell (Goose Lane, 2018) we follow lawman Strother Purcell into the mountains of B.C. in 1876 as he tracks his outlaw half-brother. He resurfaces some sixteen years later in a San Francisco jail cell. Just as an opportunistic journalist came along and inflated the reputation of Jesse James with tales of biographical hokum, a ne'er-do-well scribe named Barrington Weaver proceeds to make hay with Purcell's life story of obsession, lost love, treachery and revenge. The journalist only requires his protagonist to produce a bang-up ending.
[Ian Weir's mother Joan Weir received an honorary doctorate from the University of the Cariboo in 2004. Born in Calgary, Alberta, on April 21, 1928 as Joan Sherman, she was the youngest child of Archbishop L. Ralph Sherman, Bishop of Calgary (1927-1943). After attending University of Manitoba, she wrote and produced children's programming in Winnipeg (1948-1954), married a surgeon, moved to B.C. and hosted a children's television series for CFJC in Kamloops (1973-1976). She subsequently wrote more than twenty books, including several important B.C. history titles.]
BOOKS:
The Video Kid Rides Again (Scholastic, 1991)
Daniel O'Thunder (Douglas & McIntyre, 2009) $22.95 978-1-55365-564-0
Will Starling (Goose Lane, 2014) $29.95 9780864926470
The Death and Life of Strother Purcell (Goose Lane, 2018) $22.95 978-1773100296
[BCBW 2018] "Fiction"
REVIEW
The Death and Life of Strother Purcell
by Ian Weir
Goose Lane Editions
$22.95 / 9781773100296
Reviewed by Valerie Green
*
Whether or not early British Columbia can, in reality, be lumped into a western American formula is for the professional historian to decide.
Meanwhile, if you are a fan of the stereotypical old Wild West with all its elements of blood, sweat, guts, and gunfights—where a man’s life is of little value and revenge is all-important—Ian Weir’s The Death and Life of Strother Purcell is definitely for you.
Weir, a widely experienced screenwriter, brings the reader into the late 1800s with amazing detail. His expressive text, both dialogue and prose, is both realistic and faultless. And, despite the occasional bloodthirsty violence, Weir’s humour shines through in the dialogue.
The story begins in the winter of 1876 when three Americans from the Deep South stop by a roadhouse near Hell’s Gate, a few miles from Yale, along the old Cariboo Wagon road in the Fraser Canyon. What happens there over the next few days sets the stage for a long, twisted, involved story of hate, revenge, love, and tragedy.
When I first began this story, I wasn’t quite sure if this tale was non-fiction or fiction. Was Weir describing real characters from the Wild West? His characters seemed so authentic that I felt they must surely have lived and died in those days.
A freight wagon on the Cariboo Road in the Fraser Canyon, by Edward Roper, circa 1887. Winkworth Collection, Library and Archives Canada
The story of Strother and his stepbrother Elijah (known as Lige) is told in an ingenious style through the eyes of many different people. And therein lies the beauty of this work because, as we know, everyone tends to see the past differently. For this reason, the reader is left to wonder what exactly is the truth?
Yale Branch, Barnard’s Express, circa 1867, at the start of the Cariboo Road. Frederick Dally photo. Uno Langmann Collection, UBC
One of the narrators, Barrington Weaver, is a journalist looking for a good story to help make himself famous. His first idea is to write a book about Wyatt Earp but his encounter with Earp and his wife (an amusing episode) comes to nothing. Once he discovers that the legendary Strother Purcell is still alive, and did not perish in a snowstorm sixteen years earlier as he was purported to have done, Weaver becomes hell bent on writing his story.
The Death and Life of Strother Purcell is not told chronologically but flips back and forth from that first scene in 1876 to sixteen years later, when the supposedly deceased legendary lawman Strother Purcell re-appears in a San Francisco jail under another name and as a completely different person. He is now a one-eyed, derelict, homeless man.
So what happened in the years between?
The genius of this well-crafted story is that what happened in those years is told through those numerous written accounts from different people. Perhaps this might prove to be confusing to the reader, which it certainly is on occasion, but it also shows how legends are born and exaggerated upon through the years. What is the real truth?
The only problem for Weaver as a storyteller is that he needs an exceptional conclusion to bring together Strother Purcell with his estranged step-brother. So should Strother Purcell be portrayed as a legendary lawman, or should he be depicted as the one-eyed radical he later became? And was his stepbrother truly an unspeakable murderer?
Even the Prologue is extraordinary. It reads as if the actual editor of this book is talking about the manuscript he just received from Ian Weir, the author; but instead it is really all part of the story. It’s a very creative and unusual way to begin a story.
The only problem a reader might encounter is trying to keep track of the myriad of characters, some of whom change their names throughout the story. The time period switches from the 1870s to the 1890s with alacrity, and then goes back even further to the years between 1848 and 1850. I found myself constantly back-tracking to confirm who was who.
Regardless, Weir manages to build the tension and somehow hold your attention to the final scene. At the beginning and at the end of the story, he writes:
They were passing into myth before the snow had commenced to fall in earnest on that bleak midwinter afternoon, blurring the hard distinction of this world. So it is not possible with confidence to say where certainties begin and end. There were three of them; this much at least is beyond dispute….
*
Valerie Green has published more than twenty books, most recently Dunmora: The Story of a Heritage Manor House on Vancouver Island (Hancock House, 2017). Her soon-to-be-released debut novel Providence begins a family saga set in early B.C.
***
The Death and Life of Strother Purcell by Ian Weir (Goose Lane Editions $22.95)
Review by Valerie Green
Whether or not early British Columbia can, in reality, be lumped into a western American formula is for the professional historian to decide.
Meanwhile, if you are a fan of the stereotypical old Wild West with all its elements of blood, sweat, guts, and gunfights—where a man’s life is of little value and revenge is all-important—Ian Weir’s The Death and Life of Strother Purcell is definitely for you.
Weir, a widely experienced screenwriter, brings the reader into the late 1800s with amazing detail. His expressive text, both dialogue and prose, is both realistic and faultless. And, despite the occasional bloodthirsty violence, Weir’s humour shines through in the dialogue.
The story begins in the winter of 1876 when three Americans from the Deep South stop by a roadhouse near Hell’s Gate, a few miles from Yale, along the old Cariboo Wagon road in the Fraser Canyon. What happens there over the next few days sets the stage for a long, twisted, involved story of hate, revenge, love, and tragedy.
When I first began this story, I wasn’t quite sure if this tale was non-fiction or fiction. Was Weir describing real characters from the Wild West? His characters seemed so authentic that I felt they must surely have lived and died in those days.
The story of Strother and his stepbrother Elijah (known as Lige) is told in an ingenious style through the eyes of many different people. And therein lies the beauty of this work because, as we know, everyone tends to see the past differently. For this reason, the reader is left to wonder what exactly is the truth?
One of the narrators, Barrington Weaver, is a journalist looking for a good story to help make himself famous. His first idea is to write a book about Wyatt Earp but his encounter with Earp and his wife (an amusing episode) comes to nothing. Once he discovers that the legendary Strother Purcell is still alive, and did not perish in a snowstorm sixteen years earlier as he was purported to have done, Weaver becomes hell bent on writing his story.
The Death and Life of Strother Purcell is not told chronologically but flips back and forth from that first scene in 1876 to sixteen years later, when the supposedly deceased legendary lawman Strother Purcell re-appears in a San Francisco jail under another name and as a completely different person. He is now a one-eyed, derelict, homeless man.
So, what happened in the years between?
The genius of this well-crafted story is that what happened in those years is told through numerous written accounts from different people. Perhaps this might prove to be confusing to the reader, which it certainly is on occasion, but it also shows how legends are born and exaggerated through the years. What is the real truth?
The only problem for Weir as a storyteller is that he needs an exceptional conclusion to bring together Strother Purcell with his estranged step-brother. So should Strother Purcell be portrayed as a legendary lawman, or should he be depicted as the one-eyed radical he later became? And was his stepbrother truly an unspeakable murderer?
Even the prologue is extraordinary. It reads as if the actual editor of this book is talking about the manuscript he just received from Ian Weir, the author; but instead it is really all part of the story. It’s a very creative and unusual way to begin a story.
The only problem a reader might encounter is trying to keep track of the myriad of characters, some of whom change their names throughout the story. The time period switches from the 1870s to the 1890s with alacrity, and then goes back even further to the years between 1848 and 1850. I found myself constantly back-tracking to confirm who was who.
Regardless, Weir manages to build the tension and hold your attention to the final scene. At the beginning and at the end of the story, he writes:
“They were passing into myth before the snow had commenced to fall in earnest on that bleak midwinter afternoon, blurring the hard distinction of this world. So it is not possible with confidence to say where certainties begin and end. There were three of them; this much at least is beyond dispute….”
Ian Weir’s previous novels are Daniel O’Thunder (D&M, 2009) and Will Starling (Goose Lane, 2014). 9781773100296
Valerie Green has published more than twenty books, most recently Dunmora: The Story of a Heritage Manor House on Vancouver Island (Hancock House, 2017). Her soon-to-be-released debut novel Providence (Sandra Jonas Publishing) begins a family saga set in 19th century B.C.
[BCBW 2019]
Known far more for cattle than cantos, Kamloops can nonetheless boast to giving rise to two authors in one household, at 463 Greenstone Drive, where historian and children's book author Joan Weir raised her son Ian Weir to become a prolific screenwriter, playwright and internationally successful novelist. Kamloops also serves as the production base for the Western Canada Theatre which produced several of Ian Weir's earlier plays on the renovated site of the Kamloops Secondary School Auditorium where Weir first "fell totally in love with drama" as a student in the early 1970s.
ENTRY: Born in North Carolina, Ian Weir grew up in Kamloops where he once told his piano teacher that he hoped to become a writer. She replied, "Yes, that's a nice hobby. But what do you want to do for a living?" Weir persevered and became the writer and executive producer of the CBC mini-series Dragon Boys, for which he received the Canadian Screenwriters' Award for Best Movie of the Week/Mini-Series. In addition to serving as creator and executive producer of the CBC one-hour drama series Arctic Air, Weir was creator and executive producer of Edgemont, and a writer for more than two dozen series, ranging from ReBoot to Flashpoint. The prolific Langley-based screenwriter has also written stage plays (such as The Island of Bliss, Bloody Business and The Idler), nine radio plays and three young adult novels.
Ian Weir's first novel Daniel O'Thunder (2009), was nominated for the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, the Canadian Authors Association's Award for Fiction, the Commonwealth Writers' Prize Best First Book Award and the Amazon.ca Annual First Novel Award.
Daniel O'Thunder is set in the 1850s and was promoted as "a rollicking, comic and ultimately haunting tale of fist-fighting, faith, and fine madness." Interweaving the voices of several narrators, it tells the story of Danny O'Thunder, a troubled but immensely charismatic prize-fighting evangelist who challenges the devil to meet him in the ring. The book opens in London - inhabiting the world of the theatre, the criminal underworld and the realities of bare-knuckle prize-fighting - then shifts to North America, where O'Thunder meets his ultimate opponent in the desert of the British Columbia Interior. Weir describes it as "kind of a rollicking dark Dickensian metaphysical comedy."
Set in London in 1816, Ian Weir's second novel, Will Starling (Goose Lane, 2014), was one of ten Canadian-authored books longlisted for the 2016 Dublin International Literary Award.
Having spent five years assisting a military surgeon during the Napoleonic Wars, nineteen-year-old foundling and would-be surgeon Will Starling returns to London to help his mentor start a medical practice in the rough Cripplegate area. It's an era when surgeons and anatomists rely on body snatchers to obtain human cadavers.
When a grave robbery goes awry, brash Will is led to suspect London's foremost surgeon, Dioysus Atherton, could be conducting scientific experiments on the living. That's the gist of Will Starling (Goose Lane, 2014).
The origins of Will Starling can be traced to a summer evening at the Weir's family cottage at Shuswap Lake in the late Sixties when Ian Weir was about twelve. When a neighbour's son rode his mini-bike at considerable speed into a barbed wire fence, he was carried like a battlefield casualty to the Weir's front porch where Weir's father, a surgeon, was reading. Dr. Weir proceeded to calmly unfold himself from his lounge-chair, retrieve his battered black medical bag, and stitch up the young patient who was shrieking on the picnic table.
"I'm pretty sure the idea for Will Starling began to germinate right then and there," says Weir, a screenwriter who has won two Geminis and four Leos, "as my brothers and I looked on agog and my mother--the novelist and historian, Joan Weir--tried gamely to channel Florence Nightingale.
"It took me a good while to figure this out, of course. But 40-plus years later, midway through researching and writing a literary gothic thriller set amongst the surgeons and grave-robbers in London in 1816--the very summer that Mary Shelley began writing Frankenstein--it finally dawned. The novel is at heart a wistful tribute to my Dad, who passed away seven years ago."
Weir is quick to add that a year later Astley Cooper would make medical history in London by successfully repairing a ruptured aortic aneurism (the patient lived for eleven hours). Maybe that'll be in book three.
Meanwhile none of the surgeons in the novel is intended to serve as a direct portrait of Dr. Weir-certainly not the golden and appalling Dionysus Atherton-but Weir notes there is a certain dour, squat and redoubtable Scottish surgeon who happens to share his paternal grandmother's maiden surname.
"Although there was nothing dour about my Dad," he says, "and nothing remotely squat about him either, he was wonderfully redoubtable."
Even though by 2018, Ian Weir had won two Geminis, four Leos, a Jessie and a Writers Guild of Canada Screenwriting Award, there was time for a third adult novel, this one dubbed a deadpan revisionist Western. In The Death and Life of Strother Purcell (Goose Lane, 2018) we follow lawman Strother Purcell into the mountains of B.C. in 1876 as he tracks his outlaw half-brother. He resurfaces some sixteen years later in a San Francisco jail cell. Just as an opportunistic journalist came along and inflated the reputation of Jesse James with tales of biographical hokum, a ne'er-do-well scribe named Barrington Weaver proceeds to make hay with Purcell's life story of obsession, lost love, treachery and revenge. The journalist only requires his protagonist to produce a bang-up ending.
[Ian Weir's mother Joan Weir received an honorary doctorate from the University of the Cariboo in 2004. Born in Calgary, Alberta, on April 21, 1928 as Joan Sherman, she was the youngest child of Archbishop L. Ralph Sherman, Bishop of Calgary (1927-1943). After attending University of Manitoba, she wrote and produced children's programming in Winnipeg (1948-1954), married a surgeon, moved to B.C. and hosted a children's television series for CFJC in Kamloops (1973-1976). She subsequently wrote more than twenty books, including several important B.C. history titles.]
BOOKS:
The Video Kid Rides Again (Scholastic, 1991)
Daniel O'Thunder (Douglas & McIntyre, 2009) $22.95 978-1-55365-564-0
Will Starling (Goose Lane, 2014) $29.95 9780864926470
The Death and Life of Strother Purcell (Goose Lane, 2018) $22.95 978-1773100296
[BCBW 2018] "Fiction"
REVIEW
The Death and Life of Strother Purcell
by Ian Weir
Goose Lane Editions
$22.95 / 9781773100296
Reviewed by Valerie Green
*
Whether or not early British Columbia can, in reality, be lumped into a western American formula is for the professional historian to decide.
Meanwhile, if you are a fan of the stereotypical old Wild West with all its elements of blood, sweat, guts, and gunfights—where a man’s life is of little value and revenge is all-important—Ian Weir’s The Death and Life of Strother Purcell is definitely for you.
Weir, a widely experienced screenwriter, brings the reader into the late 1800s with amazing detail. His expressive text, both dialogue and prose, is both realistic and faultless. And, despite the occasional bloodthirsty violence, Weir’s humour shines through in the dialogue.
The story begins in the winter of 1876 when three Americans from the Deep South stop by a roadhouse near Hell’s Gate, a few miles from Yale, along the old Cariboo Wagon road in the Fraser Canyon. What happens there over the next few days sets the stage for a long, twisted, involved story of hate, revenge, love, and tragedy.
When I first began this story, I wasn’t quite sure if this tale was non-fiction or fiction. Was Weir describing real characters from the Wild West? His characters seemed so authentic that I felt they must surely have lived and died in those days.
A freight wagon on the Cariboo Road in the Fraser Canyon, by Edward Roper, circa 1887. Winkworth Collection, Library and Archives Canada
The story of Strother and his stepbrother Elijah (known as Lige) is told in an ingenious style through the eyes of many different people. And therein lies the beauty of this work because, as we know, everyone tends to see the past differently. For this reason, the reader is left to wonder what exactly is the truth?
Yale Branch, Barnard’s Express, circa 1867, at the start of the Cariboo Road. Frederick Dally photo. Uno Langmann Collection, UBC
One of the narrators, Barrington Weaver, is a journalist looking for a good story to help make himself famous. His first idea is to write a book about Wyatt Earp but his encounter with Earp and his wife (an amusing episode) comes to nothing. Once he discovers that the legendary Strother Purcell is still alive, and did not perish in a snowstorm sixteen years earlier as he was purported to have done, Weaver becomes hell bent on writing his story.
The Death and Life of Strother Purcell is not told chronologically but flips back and forth from that first scene in 1876 to sixteen years later, when the supposedly deceased legendary lawman Strother Purcell re-appears in a San Francisco jail under another name and as a completely different person. He is now a one-eyed, derelict, homeless man.
So what happened in the years between?
The genius of this well-crafted story is that what happened in those years is told through those numerous written accounts from different people. Perhaps this might prove to be confusing to the reader, which it certainly is on occasion, but it also shows how legends are born and exaggerated upon through the years. What is the real truth?
The only problem for Weaver as a storyteller is that he needs an exceptional conclusion to bring together Strother Purcell with his estranged step-brother. So should Strother Purcell be portrayed as a legendary lawman, or should he be depicted as the one-eyed radical he later became? And was his stepbrother truly an unspeakable murderer?
Even the Prologue is extraordinary. It reads as if the actual editor of this book is talking about the manuscript he just received from Ian Weir, the author; but instead it is really all part of the story. It’s a very creative and unusual way to begin a story.
The only problem a reader might encounter is trying to keep track of the myriad of characters, some of whom change their names throughout the story. The time period switches from the 1870s to the 1890s with alacrity, and then goes back even further to the years between 1848 and 1850. I found myself constantly back-tracking to confirm who was who.
Regardless, Weir manages to build the tension and somehow hold your attention to the final scene. At the beginning and at the end of the story, he writes:
They were passing into myth before the snow had commenced to fall in earnest on that bleak midwinter afternoon, blurring the hard distinction of this world. So it is not possible with confidence to say where certainties begin and end. There were three of them; this much at least is beyond dispute….
*
Valerie Green has published more than twenty books, most recently Dunmora: The Story of a Heritage Manor House on Vancouver Island (Hancock House, 2017). Her soon-to-be-released debut novel Providence begins a family saga set in early B.C.
***
The Death and Life of Strother Purcell by Ian Weir (Goose Lane Editions $22.95)
Review by Valerie Green
Whether or not early British Columbia can, in reality, be lumped into a western American formula is for the professional historian to decide.
Meanwhile, if you are a fan of the stereotypical old Wild West with all its elements of blood, sweat, guts, and gunfights—where a man’s life is of little value and revenge is all-important—Ian Weir’s The Death and Life of Strother Purcell is definitely for you.
Weir, a widely experienced screenwriter, brings the reader into the late 1800s with amazing detail. His expressive text, both dialogue and prose, is both realistic and faultless. And, despite the occasional bloodthirsty violence, Weir’s humour shines through in the dialogue.
The story begins in the winter of 1876 when three Americans from the Deep South stop by a roadhouse near Hell’s Gate, a few miles from Yale, along the old Cariboo Wagon road in the Fraser Canyon. What happens there over the next few days sets the stage for a long, twisted, involved story of hate, revenge, love, and tragedy.
When I first began this story, I wasn’t quite sure if this tale was non-fiction or fiction. Was Weir describing real characters from the Wild West? His characters seemed so authentic that I felt they must surely have lived and died in those days.
The story of Strother and his stepbrother Elijah (known as Lige) is told in an ingenious style through the eyes of many different people. And therein lies the beauty of this work because, as we know, everyone tends to see the past differently. For this reason, the reader is left to wonder what exactly is the truth?
One of the narrators, Barrington Weaver, is a journalist looking for a good story to help make himself famous. His first idea is to write a book about Wyatt Earp but his encounter with Earp and his wife (an amusing episode) comes to nothing. Once he discovers that the legendary Strother Purcell is still alive, and did not perish in a snowstorm sixteen years earlier as he was purported to have done, Weaver becomes hell bent on writing his story.
The Death and Life of Strother Purcell is not told chronologically but flips back and forth from that first scene in 1876 to sixteen years later, when the supposedly deceased legendary lawman Strother Purcell re-appears in a San Francisco jail under another name and as a completely different person. He is now a one-eyed, derelict, homeless man.
So, what happened in the years between?
The genius of this well-crafted story is that what happened in those years is told through numerous written accounts from different people. Perhaps this might prove to be confusing to the reader, which it certainly is on occasion, but it also shows how legends are born and exaggerated through the years. What is the real truth?
The only problem for Weir as a storyteller is that he needs an exceptional conclusion to bring together Strother Purcell with his estranged step-brother. So should Strother Purcell be portrayed as a legendary lawman, or should he be depicted as the one-eyed radical he later became? And was his stepbrother truly an unspeakable murderer?
Even the prologue is extraordinary. It reads as if the actual editor of this book is talking about the manuscript he just received from Ian Weir, the author; but instead it is really all part of the story. It’s a very creative and unusual way to begin a story.
The only problem a reader might encounter is trying to keep track of the myriad of characters, some of whom change their names throughout the story. The time period switches from the 1870s to the 1890s with alacrity, and then goes back even further to the years between 1848 and 1850. I found myself constantly back-tracking to confirm who was who.
Regardless, Weir manages to build the tension and hold your attention to the final scene. At the beginning and at the end of the story, he writes:
“They were passing into myth before the snow had commenced to fall in earnest on that bleak midwinter afternoon, blurring the hard distinction of this world. So it is not possible with confidence to say where certainties begin and end. There were three of them; this much at least is beyond dispute….”
Ian Weir’s previous novels are Daniel O’Thunder (D&M, 2009) and Will Starling (Goose Lane, 2014). 9781773100296
Valerie Green has published more than twenty books, most recently Dunmora: The Story of a Heritage Manor House on Vancouver Island (Hancock House, 2017). Her soon-to-be-released debut novel Providence (Sandra Jonas Publishing) begins a family saga set in 19th century B.C.
[BCBW 2019]
Articles: 3 Articles for this author
Daniel O’Thunder
Review (2009)
Daniel O'Thunder by Ian Weir (Douglas & McIntyre $29.95)
Laced with blood, thunder, sex, murder, rape, mayhem and miracles, Ian Weir's first novel is about good versus evil. It's the vibrant story of a has-been boxer named Daniel O'Thunder who makes a Lazarus-like comeback to fight for Christ. Rocky Balboa goes to Dickensian London and gets religion.
Fighting with fists has been a sport ever since the early Romans, and the Brits raised it to a national pastime in the 19th century when illegal bareknuckle bouts were usually ignored by authorities unless a competitor was killed.
From multiple narrators we learn O'Thunder is a battered one-time boxer, an army deserter and a reformed drunk. When he's not preaching or consoling his mission of fallen souls, he fights for Christ with the gift of a golden voice and a fist like a thunderbolt.
God helps him in both endeavours. But every good screenwriter knows a good protagonist requires a formidable antagonist, so Weir pulls no punches in that department. O'Thunder hankers for a punch-up with Lucifer himself.
As the chief adversary in this Book of Daniel, the Devil is more of a presence than a person, a chimera rather than a character, but his influence is continuous and very real to the hero.
Reverend Jack Beresford, the most-heard narrator, recalls when he himself was a preacher in Cornwall in 1849. By 1851-52, when the bulk of this tale takes place, the not-so-reverend Jack has become Jack Hartright.
He claims the whole story really can be traced back to Biblical times when, for forty days and nights, the son of God spent some time in the desert with that tempter, the Devil.
As Milton has already made clear in Paradise Lost, all sensitive Satan ever really wanted was to be God's special companion, but he was pushed away, and we all know the results of that.
Most of Weir's characters will transform or reveal themselves in a different light by story's end. John Rennert, nicknamed Jaunty, is a sleazy, ex-military man who sets up illegal boxing bouts to pay off his mounting gambling debts. He tracks down O'Thunder in an effort to lure him back into the ring.
Another strong voice belongs to Nell, initially the adolescent ingénue, but aged twenty-seven years by the end of the novel. Reduced to whoredom, the belle Nell is searching for the mother she never knew. Like almost everyone who meets him, outside the ring or in it, Nell is struck by O'Thunder's charisma.
A newspaperman in reduced circumstances, William Piper adds his penny-a-word viewpoint, as does his mother and his mother's aide, Dorcas.
From the outset, even if we haven't read the author's biography, we know we are in skilled hands. In the first chapter, Jack writes, "...to tell my story we must begin where it all began to go wrong."; What reader can resist reading about all the things that have gone wrong in someone's life?
Son of B.C. author Joan Weir, Ian Weir has written more than 100 television episodes, several radio plays, and received two Geminis, a Jessie, and a Writers Guild of Canada Screenwriting Award for his labours. He was also a writer and executive producer of the CBC series, Dragon Boys.
So soon enough you can relax, knowing he's going to hook you, reel you in, let you run, and then release you, only to throw some juicy bits over the other side of the boat to tempt you back.
Although the thinking in this novel is modern; the scope of the tale is Dickensian. How divine is O'Thunder? Can he really perform miracles? Will he get a chance to fight the Devil, if in fact the Devil exists at all?
Is Lord Sculthrope the Devil, and if he is, what does that make Nell? And who has been murdering those street women (prior to the days of Jack the Ripper)?
In addition to knowing the importance of jumping into the story at the height of the action, Weir also knows how to create a strong sense of place and how to weave a story that shows instead of tells.
While crafting a rollicking tale with a payoff, Weir adds research to match his wit. Several of the mid-19th-century pugilists in the novel were actual boxers such as Tom Cribb and the Tipton Slasher.
Pungent, repelling, frequently noxious-the smells and sights of low-life London in the 1850s come through shudderingly strong. The desolate cold of Barkerville's northern B.C. winter in the final part of the novel, when (or if) O'Thunder battles with the Devil, is also chillingly evoked.
Yes, it's movie material. If Mickey Rourke's agent is looking for a follow-up vehicle to Rourke's Oscar-nominated performance in The Wrestler, Weir's rollicking morality tale could easily be re-titled The Boxer.
This is one of those novels that can be re-read. At the very least, go back to that first chapter. You can see how everything has been neatly trundled together and how things apparently random all make sense.
978-1-55365-435-3
-- review by Cherie Thiessen
[BCBW 2009]
Cherie Thiessen
Nominated for Daniel O’Thunder
BC Book Prizes (2010)
In the 1850s, in the slums of London, Daniel O'Thunder, a troubled but charismatic former prize-fighter turned evangelist, runs a safe house for those in need of food, shelter, prayer and good counsel. But in the dark streets an ancient evil is stirring, throwing into peril the lives of the city's most vulnerable souls. O'Thunder, no longer young but still wielding a right fist dubbed "The Hammer of Heaven,"; returns to the ring to start training for his greatest fight yet - with the Devil himself. Surrounding O'Thunder is a strange collection of admirers: Jack, a spectacularly failed cleric and actor who is the compiler of O'Thunder's story; Jaunty Rennert, a shady small-time operator and Nell, the prostitute who will carry her love for O'Thunder into the wilds of the Cariboo gold rush. Ian Weir is an award-winning screenwriter, playwright and novelist with over 100 television credits as a writer and executive producer. He lives in Langley.
BC Book Prizes program
Will Starling by Ian Weir (Goose Lane $29.95)
Review (2014)
Will Starling is Ian Weir's follow-up to his debut novel Daniel O'Thunder that was shortlisted for the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize and Commonwealth Writers First Book Prize.
Having spent five years assisting a military surgeon during the Napoleonic Wars, nineteen-year-old Will Starling returns to London to help his mentor start a medical practice in the rough Cripplegate area. It's an era when surgeons and anatomists rely on body snatchers to obtain human cadavers. When a grave robbery goes awry, brash Will is led to suspect London's foremost surgeon, Dionysus Atherton, could be conducting scientific experiments on the living.
The origins of Will Starling can be traced to a summer evening at the Weir's family cottage at Shuswap Lake in the late sixties when Ian Weir was about twelve. When a neighbour's son rode his mini-bike at considerable speed into a barbed wire fence, he was carried like a battlefield casualty to the Weir's front porch where Weir's father, a surgeon, was reading. Dr. Weir proceeded to calmly unfold himself from his lounge-chair, retrieve his battered black medical bag, and stitch up the young patient who was shrieking on the picnic table.
"I'm pretty sure the idea for Will Starling began to germinate right then and there,"; says Weir, a screenwriter who has won two Geminis and four Leos, "as my brothers and I looked on agog and my mother-the novelist and historian Joan Weir-tried gamely to channel Florence Nightingale. It took me a good while to figure this out, of course. But 40-plus years later, midway through writing a literary gothic thriller set amongst the surgeons and grave-robbers in 1816-it finally dawned. The novel is at heart a wistful tribute to my Dad, who passed away seven years ago.";
9780864926470
BCBW 2014
