Vancouver author combines stand-up comedy, civic politics, and depression in latest mystery

Doctor Boudreau is back!  Vancouver-based stand-up comic turned author Charles Demers is out with a second novel starring the mystery-solving psychologist who he based on his own therapist.  Noonday Dark:  A Doctor Annick Boudreau Mystery #2 comes not even two years after Primary Obsessions, the first book in the series.

The story centers around the disappearance of Danielle, a stand-up comic who writes jokes on the side for a Vancouver mayoral candidate.  It’s based on the time author Demers wrote jokes for then-BC NDP leader Adrian Dix when he was running against then-Premier Christy Clark.

One of the zingers Demers wrote for Dix even made it into the book!

“Theoretical Marxism Thursdays was a joke that Adrian told at the Vancouver Board of Trade right after Christy Clark had announced Free Enterprise Fridays,” he explains.  “Apparently, the line just brought the house down.”

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His duties for Dix, and later Premier John Horgan, also included “punching-up” speeches.  But Demers demurs (his word) when it comes to questions about advising the current BC NDP government about political messaging, even if theirs does make him cringe sometimes.

“Most of the people in government are now people who I know and like personally,” he says.  “So, when they do step in it, I always have the embarrassment of a friend who goes, ‘Ooh, why did you have to say that way!'”

Demers is also big on establishing the settings of his novels.  He says a good mystery should be like a ticket to the place where it is set.  In Noonday Dark, Vancouver once again plays itself.  This time, a man running to be mayor runs afoul of local organized crime by promising to gentrify the Clark-Knight Corridor, the north-south truck route that links the port with the rest of the Lower Mainland.

“That really felt like a very Vancouver-y question and actually really plugged into the kinds of decisions that are up in the air in Vancouver about what kind of place is it going to be,” he explains.

“As we, sort of, squeeze the last drops out of what used to be a resource town, a blue collar place, where things were made and things were moved around, and things were shipped out and shipped in [to] increasingly…a place where people live and consume things.”

While the first book, Primary Obsessions, mined the author’s experiences with obsessive compulsive disorder, in this second Boudreau mystery, Demers explores the questions surrounding his own depression.

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“One of the things that I’m trying to do with this book, I guess, is find the line between clinical or therapeutic depression and existential, philosophical depression,” he says.

“Can my character explore the larger, metaphysical questions about depression as well as being someone who can help a patient through the symptoms of it?”

He also hopes this book isn’t the last you’ve seen of Doctor Boudreau.  The ending certainly suggests there may be a third installment.

“I have designs for her life, and it would be my great pleasure to write at least one more of these,” Demers says.  “So, we’ll see.”