When Alan McKercher, author, newspaper columnist and high school teacher, spoke to the Media Club on March 20, he talked primarily about his experience writing historical fiction.
He discussed how he started writing his first book in 1982 while teaching in China and finished it 30 years later after retiring as an English teacher at Ottawa’s Glebe Collegiate. He talked, too, about the process of writing a novel, what historical fiction entails and how it took him seven years to get his first book published.
The author of two books, McKercher explained that the first one, called The Underling, is set in Ottawa and opens in August 1934. It relates the story of a fictitious teenager, Frances McFadden, who is chosen from her high school to work for the new Bank of Canada and among other adventures is sent on a secret mission to Warsaw.
McKercher told the audience how the imaginary stories in his novels are woven around actual historical events like the onset of the Second World War and the establishment of the Bank of Canada and how fictional characters interact with real life figures of the day like Prime Minister R.B. Bennett and Graham Towers, first Governor of the Bank of Canada. He explained that for the convenience of readers he has included a glossary of Historical Personalities at the end of each book with details about the real people who appear in his novels.
McKercher said that it was the enthusiastic response to his first novel that led him to write The Incrementalist, as a sequel to The Underling, and he spoke about that second book as well.
McKercher’s talk concluded with questions from the audience, such as why his second book says it is a novel while the first one does not, and what was the social history of Canada.
As the back cover of his second book notes about McKercher’s novels, “This fusion of fact and fiction brings authenticity to a little known facet of Canadian history.”
The Underling was published in 2012 by General Store Publishing House (GSPH)
and the Incrementalist was published In 2016 by Burnstown Publishing House, formerly GSPS.
