Author and Veterinarian Phillip Schott speaks to AW’s Debbie Bateman about his latest mystery novel.
DB: In your mystery novel, Fifty-Four Pigs, the animal characters are as vivid as the humans. We sense the idiosyncrasies of each creature, along with the unconditional affection of their vet. How does your work in veterinary medicine affect your urge to write and the types of writing you do?
PS: There is definitely a strong element of “write what you know” at play here. I aspire to write purely from my imagination, but I do gravitate towards drawing on personal experience and observation. Fortunately, veterinary medicine is a story engine. No two days are alike. Often, no two hours are alike. The pageant of people and animals coming through the doors is endlessly diverse and endlessly fascinating. My first book, The Accidental Veterinarian, was a collection of anecdotes and essays drawn from these experiences. It felt natural for those to become a springboard for fiction. Moreover, I noticed that there was very little fiction already published with a veterinarian as the protagonist, and none with a veterinarian as an amateur detective. This struck me as a gap that begged to be filled.
DB: A light touch of humour runs throughout the novel, mostly related to the ridiculousness of human beings. Do you get enjoyment from writing these lightly satirical observations? What are your thoughts on humour in general?
PS: Thank you for that question because it touches on something close to my heart. I do get a lot of enjoyment from writing that way. In fact, I have to restrain myself from inserting humour in places where it would usually be considered inappropriate. It is a deeply rooted impulse. For me, humour is both a rational response to the basic absurdities of life, and simply a way to prompt a smile, both in me and in the reader. And who doesn’t want to smile more? Has anyone on their deathbed ever expressed regret about having smiled too much?
DB: The protagonist and self-declared detective is a vet named Dr. Peter Bannerman. Although he is socially awkward and often does not fit in, he is driven by a strong urge to understand people even when they do horrible things. Beneath the story of the unsolved murders, runs a deeper mystery about why people do awful things. Were you aware of this uncurrent as you were writing, or did it develop beneath the surface? What are your thoughts on the interpersonal challenges faced by the protagonist?
PS: Yes, this was deliberate. Peter is on the autism spectrum. I didn’t explicitly spell this out because I didn’t want the reader to make assumptions based on a label. Many members of my family are on the spectrum. I want people with autism to be seen as simply part of human diversity, rather than as people suffering from a disorder. Peter is “highly functioning,” as the clinical expression goes, but nonetheless a bit of an alien in the world of neurotypical human interactions. He continually tries to apply logic to understand people’s actions, but often fails because he does not have the more accurate intuitive insights. Peter also has a touch of arrogance, believing that a logic-driven approach to life and relationships is superior. He is consequently bewildered when others don’t see it that way, and when the decisions he makes based on his approach don’t lead to the desired outcome.
DB: The novel is set in a fictional community called New Selfoss. Like the real-world community of Gimli in Manitoba, New Selfoss is home to a large population of Icelandic descendants. Why did you choose to create a fictional setting rather than using a real place? How did exploring Icelandic culture affect the story as it unfolded in your imagination?
PS: I originally planned to set it in Gimli before realizing that local readers would be sensitive to liberties I might take in describing their town. Moreover, I had long harboured fantasies about an ideal Manitoba small town and saw this as the perfect platform to explore that fantasy. I feel freer writing about my own little world than a real one. Yet, at the same time I wanted it to be reality-adjacent, in other words plausible enough to send people looking in their map apps.
I’m fascinated by the idea that Manitoba has the largest number of people of Icelandic heritage outside Iceland. Having this in the background of the novel helped give it what I hoped was a distinctive feel. I wanted the setting to be as interesting to the reader as the story and the characters. The sequel, Six Ostriches (May 2023), explores the Icelandic connection in greater depth.
DB: Would you like to share the basic idea/germ behind the work the very first time it manifested in your mind?
PS: It was the strangest thing. One day, several years ago, a clear mental image of a rural veterinarian seeing a swine barn explode in the distance suddenly popped into my head. I have no idea where that came from. I’m a city vet, so swine barns, exploding or otherwise, are not something I have any experience with, or normally think about at all. And then the thought occurred to me that it would be a perfect way to hide and destroy the remains of a murder victim. That idea bubbled away in the dark recesses of my subconscious, every now then emerging to tease me that I should write a vet detective novel based on this. And so, I did. Eventually.
DB: How long did it take you to write the first draft? What was the core of the developmental process between drafts? As you moved through drafts, were you working mostly on the structure, the story world, aspects of style and language, or something else?
PS: It took about six months. I’m a fairly disciplined writer. I have to be because I’m still a practising veterinarian (and a parent, husband, friend, etc.). I set aside one day a week and plan to write 3,000 words. Sometimes it’s 2,000 and then I catch up the missing 1,000 on the weekend. Do that for six months and you have a 72,000-word novel! My first drafts usually require very little revision. The second draft is really just a tidying-up process, mostly looking for plot holes. I’m able to manage this because I write in my head first, typically while on long walks. I’m not composing actual sentences on these walks, but I am developing the story arc in detail in my mind. The style and language are just what comes naturally to me, as is the world to a large extent. Most of the effort is put into structure.
DB: If this book were optioned for a tv series or a film, what aspect of the original work would you be most conscious of preserving? Why?
PS: It’s funny you should ask this because I recently had a conversation with my editor about the perils of optioning. He was warning me that while having the story turned into a tv show or film would be exciting, I’d have to prepare myself for the possibility of fundamental changes to it. For example, the veterinarian in Manitoba could—presto—become a chiropractor in Alabama, if that’s what the producers decided. I was horrified. So, to answer the question, the main character must be a veterinarian because otherwise it would make no sense to me, and it must be set in Manitoba because I am determined that people become intrigued by this place which usually sits too quietly at the edge of the national consciousness. And I would want Peter to remain his quirky mildly autistic self, because it’s important to me to showcase neurodiversity.
DB: If you had the chance to visit the periods or the places in the work, what would be the first place you’d visit and why?
PS: That’s easy, The Flying Beaver pub in New Selfoss. One of my hobbies is long-distance walking in the United Kingdom, and that has made me a passionate fan of the traditional British pub. That something similar does not exist here is tragic. To be fair, there are some nice bars in Winnipeg, and some that almost, sorta, kinda approach the British pub vibe, but the pub situation is dire in the small towns. New Selfoss, as my fantasy small town, had to be different, and The Flying Beaver was an important component. I even know which table I would sit at (in the nook, under the garlands of hops) and which beer I would order (the Manipogo Pale, a name that is a story unto itself).
DB: What was the most satisfying aspect about writing this book (other than perhaps the satisfaction of finishing it)?
PS: The most satisfying aspect was getting the Rube Goldberg mystery plot to work properly with all it’s complex interlocking mechanisms. I set out to write a mystery in part to challenge myself with creating a complicated but internally coherent plot. I wanted to dribble out enough clues that the ending wouldn’t seem like an arbitrary and lazy deus-ex-machina move on the writer’s part, yet not so many clues that readers would be bored by the inevitability of the conclusion. Getting this balance right was difficult, but ultimately very satisfying.
DB: Other than finding the most effective way of telling the story, were you conscious of any particular literary ambitions such as developing a distinctive voice or narrative style, or disrupting standard reader expectations of the genre?
PS: I have a confession to make. I don’t read a lot of mysteries. I usually find them either too gritty or too cute. I wanted to forge a middle ground. There had to be tension and violence, and people had to behave and speak the way people really do, but there didn’t need to be gratuitous gore or endless scenes of people being vile towards each other. I also wanted the detective to depart from the cliché and not be a burnt-out, divorced or widowed, middle-aged man with a laundry list of vices and weaknesses. Peter may be a middle-aged man, but he is happily married, and while he’s odd, he’s no more broken than most people and may even have a below-average number of skeletons in his closet. I’ve been told that Fifty-Four Pigs is semi-cozy. I’m ok with that.
Philipp Schott was born in Germany and grew up in Saskatoon. He now lives in Winnipeg where he practises veterinary medicine, writes, and shares a creaky old house on the river with his wife, two teenagers, three cats, and a dog.
His first book, a collection of essays titled The Accidental Veterinarian, was a bestseller and was translated into five languages. Two sequels have followed. He has also written a novel, The Willow Wren, and has started a mystery series, Fifty-Four Pigs, featuring a veterinarian moonlighting as a detective. All five books have been published by ECW Press (Toronto).