What do your characters look like?

I had a radio interview yesterday with a station in Santa Barbara, California. 1290 KZSB, with Baron Ron Herron. This was my third time on his show, and thanks to P.J. Nunn of Breakthrough Promotions for organizing it. Five minutes sure isn’t long, and it’s hard to get too much about a book in, but I tried. He threw me for a loop when he asked who I’d like to see play Molly in a movie.

Honestly – never thought about it. I know that a lot of writers have mentally cast their novels, but perhaps because I don’t watch TV and rarely go to the movies, I haven’t. And it’s not a game I’m going to bother playing now, because it’s not going to happen.

The only one of my characters, in all my books, that I know what they look like is John Winters, detective Sergeant with the Trafalgar City Police. I was on the GO train (the Southern Ontario commuter train) when I’d just begun In the Shadow of the Glacier and a man walked into the car. I looked at him and thought “that’s what John Winters looks like.” I jotted down a brief description and when I went home, I put it in the book.

So there you are, unknown GO train man, you are in a mystery novel.

I saw a cop in Ottawa about a year ago, walking down the street, and I thought “that could be Molly,” but of course by then Molly was already created.

Fiona MacGillivray in Gold Digger would probably be the easiest of my characters to cast. She is described as the most beautiful woman in the Yukon. Not like beautiful women are hard to find in Hollywood, is it?