About Norah McClintock
young adult novelist, and mystery writer

" I love mysteries. I love to think them up and I love to write them. Sometimes the idea for a mystery comes to me from thinking about a character. Sometimes I think up a situation. Sometimes I see something in a magazine or newspaper that makes me wonder.

For example: I live in a downtown neighbourhood in a big city — Toronto. Sometimes it seems like everything is changing all the time — a grocery store is torn down and replaced by an apartment building. An office building is turned into a parking lot. A parking lot suddenly becomes a condominium development.

Every time a big change happens, I feel a little sad. That’s the way I felt when a car dealership that was a landmark in my neighbourhood suddenly closed a few years ago. Sad, and a little surprised, because the place had been there forever — I passed it every time I went to the library or the video store or the drugstore. We bought one of our cars there and had it serviced there regularly. The people who worked there were friendly and helpful. It was a little piece of my history and my neighbourhood history, and it was going to be torn down.

Then one day I opened my newspaper and read that the crew that was demolishing the place had found a big surprise. Buried underneath the car dealership was a body! The police had been called in and were trying to identify whose body it was and how it had come to be buried there. A story about a week later said that the body had been buried for about thirty years.

That made me start to think. Somewhere there was a family, a loved one, a friend — someone who had known the person buried under the car dealership. Someone who may have spent the past thirty years wondering what had become of that person.

And somewhere out there was someone who had buried the person. Someone who was hoping the body would never be discovered. Someone who was probably worried that the police would find out exactly what had happened all those years ago.

I wondered: what if the person who had been found were my mother or father, or my sister or brother? What if that person had disappeared from my life years and years ago? What if I had been trying to find him, or had felt abandoned by her?

The more I thought about it, the more I thought: what an interesting place to start a mystery. That mystery became The Body in the Basement. If you’ve read it, I hope you liked it. If you haven’t read it and you like mysteries, why not give it a try? "

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