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Local Crime Author Sticks to Fictionby Damian Inwood
Vancouver author Dennis Bolen has to be a bit careful when he writes his Barry Delta crime novels. Bolen is a parole officer and so is his hero, Delta.
And while the writer cheerfully admits there's a large slice of himself in Delta, he knows his co-workers and parole clients might not take too kindly to seeing themselves depicted in print. "There are specific events that I've fictionalized that are pretty close to what happened," he says. "Those events involve people who are now dead. I find fiction a far more comfortable world to live in than truth, although truth is better than fiction in my business." His new book, Krekshuns, has just been published by Random House. Bolen writes in a tough streetwise dialogue, not unlike Elmore Leonard in style. Delta operates out of a Vancouver parole office. While he's a womanizer with a cynical slant on his job, Delta genuinely believes in good and evil, although sometimes he blurs the lines. "I've completed work on a third Barry Delta novel, which is before the publishers now, called Toy Gun," adds Bolen. "It will be about boys who refuse to grow up, the main offender being Barry Delta himself." Bolen's first book, Stupid Crimes, was optioned by Alliance for two years for a possible TV series. He says that it's now been picked up by a local film production company, Cactus Production, where Christine Haebler, producer of Hard Core Logo, wants to make a film of it with Bruce MacDonald. "Stupid Crimes was a snapshot of a lot of crimes and my take on them," he says, "Krekshuns is about sex offenders, power and the abuse of that power in the workplace." A parole officer for 20 years, Bolen says there are times when he would really like to be like Delta. "There are also times when I offload onto him any weakness in character I see in myself," he adds. "I exaggerate, amplify and dump on him. It's kind of fun. You can create a world that's not unlike yours and have a character who's not unlike you and push the problems and the capability." In Toy Gun, he says, Delta's almost a "super intellect" when it comes to figuring out the criminal mind. "By the third book, the whole woman thing has caused him so much trouble that he's confronting himself and trying to change all that," says the 43-year-old. Bolen was born in Courtenay and spent nine years there, four in Qualicum Beach and his teenage years in Port Alberni. He went to UVic and graduated with a degree in creative writing. There were no jobs for creative writers," he laughs. "I was always interested in law enforcement and had taken a lot of social work and other related courses in university. I got recruited off campus into what was then called the Canadian Penitentiary Service." In 1981 he took a novel-writing course at UBC, where he now teaches part time, and began his first Barry Delta story. He abandoned it and started writing short fiction. He self-published Stupid Crimes in 1992 and it got good reviews in Toronto. Bolen got himself an agent and then wrote a second book, Stand in Hell, an historical novel about the Holocaust. He says American editors have called him and told him that they would be hugely popular if they were set in the U.S. ©Vancouver Sun |
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