Deep County

New work of fiction from author Peter Blendell

The year is 1967, and a four-man salvage crew is tasked with recovering a one-eighth scale model of the Avro Arrow resting in shallow water just offshore from the tiny island of Deep County. There’s a dispute over the spoils, and one of the men hides the rocket. The expedition leaders are now gone, but their descendants have never let go of the old quarrel. The locals believe that the invaluable relic is hidden somewhere on the tiny island, and now someone has gone missing. That’s the premise of Peter Blendell’s new book, Deep County, which was released at a book launch on Sunday at Blizzmax Gallery. Mr. Blendell is the co-founder of Cressy Lakeside Books publishing company, along with Shelagh Mathers and J. D. Carpenter.

At Sunday’s launch, Mr. Blendell was introduced by his colleague and fellow writer J. D. Carpenter, who described Mr. Blendell’s writing as “Faulknerian in its complexity, and always fascinating.” Rather than speaking directly about his new book, Mr. Blendell spoke instead about an author who had a significant influence on his writing— Valdimir Nabokov, author of Lolita. Mr. Blendell spoke about Nabokov’s 25-year evolutionary arc to get to Lolita, saying the book was “A marvellous, beautifully crafted text, but one that doesn’t work as a vehicle to convey any message from the mind and soul of the author. Whatever the reader gets from the book has to be created by their own imagination.” It is that quality of prose Mr. Blendell is struck by. “It inspires me to create prose that’s lively enough to entice you to speculate and wonder and enjoy,” he said.

Mr. Blendell is a semi-retired carpenter who still designs and makes furniture. He said that his work as a carpenter gives him the time to think about his writing. He has been writing for many years, originally mostly non-fiction, writing reviews and film and art criticism. His first work of fiction came in 2006 with his novel Jonagold. He has since written four other novels, three novellas and various short fiction and non-fiction. He and Mr. Carpenter and Ms. Mathers started Cressy Lakeside Books as a cooperative publishing company that was “small and friendly and looking to produce some good books.” He was inspired to write Deep County by the changes that have taken place in the County over the past 40 or so years. “Setting the story back in that time and having it move to the present was a good way of showing what I remember from those years when we first moved here.

It really was very isolated and the people were very welcoming and good friends to us,” he said. He calls the inclusion of the Avro Arrow a “MacGuffin”—introduced merely as a plot device—but said he is fascinated by the engineering and design and the tremendous effort made by the scientists and engineers who worked on the project.

He said it was a two-year process from when he started writing this book to getting it published. “It is about as much work to turn a manuscript into a book as it is to write the manuscript. I had a year of writing and then a year of bringing it to press. First the manuscript goes to the editor, and there are revisions. Then it goes to the illustrator, and there could be delays there, then it goes to the typesetter and there are changes so that the pages look nice. Then it finally goes to the printer, only to be told it’s in the queue and we have to wait,” he said. He expressed his gratitude to Nancy Butler for editing the book, Irene Götz for her illustration and cover art, and to Susan Hannah for design and typesetting. He noted that the art of typesetting is very much underappreciated. “That is something that is only good when it’s invisible. You notice it when it is bad,” he said. Deep County is available from Books & Company, The Local Store and directly from Cressy Lakeside Books at cressylakesidebooks.ca. Cressy Lakeside Books welcomes submissions from authors seeking to have their work published.