Stephen Legault's The End of the Line

For those looking for a glint of Canadian history set in a more riveting narrative, Canmore writer Stephen Legault’s Western The End of the Line  (Touchwood Editions, 2011) combines the guilty pleasure of a page turning murder mystery with the brain food found in Pierre Berton’s history books. Legault took a few minutes with Avenue to mull over his motivation, inspirations and goals for his latest work.

What drove you to the mystery genre? 

“I came by writing mysteries accidentally. My girlfriend and I took a little vacation to Costa Rica in the early 2000s and it was incredibly wet. We just sat in our cabana on the ocean and read trashy mystery novels. I thought to myself, ‘I could write something like this.’ And literally while flying home after that trip I conceived of my first mystery story.” 

What made you want to include elements of Canadian history in your western-themed mystery?

“I started writing these novels because I really like Canadian history. I’m often amazed at how ignorant we are about our own history, which has no end of stories that deserve to be told. In Canada, we are of the belief that our history was forged without the violence that characterizes the American West, but that’s not entirely true. Men were killed in the Canadian Pacific Railroad camps all the time. A knife fight or a gunfight would break out, an unpopular man would be killed and everybody would have a party.” 

Why did you choose to place your mystery in the Canadian West, specifically around the town we now know as Lake Louise?

“I moved to the Rockies in 1992 to work for Parks Canada. Since that time I’ve always wanted to write a story about the Rocky Mountains — I just had no idea it would be a historical murder mystery. The Western genre is a fun backdrop against which to tell the story. It’s a Canadian western, but we have to remember that while Durrant Wallace is investigating a murder at the end of the track in 1884, men on horseback were slinging six guns. And frankly, after living in Lake Louise and experiencing a winter there, I wondered what would it have been like without the ski hill. Imagine, 500 guys watch 11,500 of their colleagues depart in December knowing that they’ve got four months of living in the most brutal conditions imaginable. All they’ve got are woolen garments and, in some cases, only tarpaulin and canvas shacks to live in, while they are faced with 30 feet of snow and -30?C temperatures for weeks at a time. The story of these men is fascinating and I wanted to create a vehicle to tell that tale.”

How much does your fiction cross over into non-fiction?

“Obviously it’s a work of fiction, many of the things in this book never happened — but they could’ve. Mark Twain says, ‘First get your facts, then distort them at your leisure.’ My role in writing historical fiction is to know the facts in the story as best I possibly can, then to create a fictional shell to carry those facts.”

Stephen Legault’s The End of the Line is $18.95 and available at Pages on Kensington