Vicki Delany - In the News

Mystery Author Meets Draft Dodgers
- Sarah Ripplinger, Nelson Daily News - June 2007

Nobody knows better that a good mystery deserves another than Vicki Delany. Her novel captures all the ruckus over Nelson’s draft dodger-mania that erupted last year and the controversy that continues today.

Vicki Delany is capturing the controversy surrounding the draft dodger statue being offered to Nelson in her newest mystery novel, In the Shadow of the Glacier.

Delany, who read about how the Our Way Home group is trying to find a home for a war resisters monument in Nelson, said she was immediately fascinated by the situation and wanted to write a novel circulating around the community’s potential reaction to the instillation of such a monument.

“I thought, well what would happen if the town went ahead with [the statue] and if people that were opposed to that idea started get upset about it,” Delany said.

The main character of the novel, a police woman by the name of Molly Smith, finds a body near the draft dodger statue in the fictional town of Trafalgar.

Smith’s parents are American draft dodgers in support of the monument, and so the young protagonist has to grapple with her desire to please her parents and assert herself as a female police officer new to the force.

Delany said that although the names differ, it isn’t hard to see that Trafalgar is a reflection of Nelson.

The difference is that Trafalgar dedicates a garden and a fountain in the honour of draft dodgers, while the controversy surrounding whether the statue honouring draft dodgers will be installed in Nelson continues.

Unlike her first two books, Scare the Light Away and Burden of Memory, which Delany said are more psychological suspense novels, In the Shadow of the Glacier is a traditional mystery novel.

“I think mystery novels tend to generally speaking come to a satisfactory conclusion,” Delany said. “I think people find it satisfying in a book where something has gone wrong but in some way its able to be fixed and the perpetrator brought to justice,”

Delany said she decided to start writing mysteries because of her personal interest in the genre.

“I read mystery novels mostly,” she said, “and I’m a great believer that you should write what you want to read.”

In the Shadow of the Glacier, which is scheduled to launch this September, is the first of a series of mystery novels that follows the life of Molly Smith in the pretend realm of Trafalgar.

Delany says that she has enjoyed her time in Nelson and hopes to keep writing in the area as long as possible.

“I like Nelson a lot,” Delany said. “So if you’re going to write about a place and you have to spend some time there you’re just as well off to make sure it’s someplace you want to be. Plus, I think Nelson itself is such a varied community; there are so many different types of people, so many interesting stories that people have.”