Mauro Azzano says his mind is like a movie house.
When the Richmond author closes his eyes, characters in his murder mystery stories spring to life, complete with dialogue and detailed scenes that he’s used to fill three books — the latest one, Death by Deceit, will hit bookstores and Internet sellers on July 11.
Azzano, who has lived in Richmond for the past 23 years, said he started writing because he had a backlog of images in his head from daily observations and, “I basically wanted to clear them out of my memory banks, and the best way I thought of to do that was to write a book.”
So, he chose to focus on crime drama and published his first book — The Dead Don’t Dream — in 2012. That was followed up two years later by Death Works At Night, and his latest Death By Deceit.
After the first book Azzano, who works in IT, thought he had rid himself of material.
“I thought it was one and done,” he said. “But my wife read it and said, ‘This is really great, but what happens to the characters?’”
A sequel was the answer, but halfway through that Azzano realized the story had enough legs to stretch out into a third book.
“When I wrote all three books I saw them as movies in my head and I was dictating the action to the reader. If you can’t see it happening, it doesn’t feel real,” he said. “I never do spread sheets, outlines, or anything on paper before I start typing. It’s all stream of consciousness when I write.”
When he finishes, Azzano puts his work away for up to two months, then revisits it to clean up any passages requiring it.
The stories follow police investigator Ian McBriar, a Metis from Saskatchewan who toils in 1970s Toronto. It’s a setting Azzano purposely chose.
“You can do things in the 70s you can’t do nowadays,” Azzano said, explaining the federal government’s loophole back then allowed the public to apply for SIN cards that were not cross-referenced with death records by officials. That allowed the creation of false identities using deceased people.
The decade also gives the stories a more human scale, he said.
“You don’t have DNA (tests), you have to wait three days for other police departments to mail you things, so you have much more human interaction than just a police story.”
Azzano said he also feels his ability to be an outsider looking at a situation — a vantage point derived from landing in Canada with his family from Italy as a 12-year-old in 1968 — is also unique.
“As a fish-out-of-water I had chance to see this society from a foreigner’s perspective,” he said, adding he stopped short of making his lead character an immigrant, Italian cop.
“That would have been too cliche,” he said. “The character of a Metis really resonated for me, because they were really hosed.
“They were the last people to get the vote, last to get benefits from the government — they fell through the cracks as neither native or Canadian — and they really didn’t exist as people in a very large sense of the word.”
As for the nuts and bolts of dialogue in the stories, Azzano said he made them ring with authenticity by simply asking a lot of questions.
“I’ve been asked by police officers who’ve read the books where I served as a cop? Apparently, I’ve managed to get the details right, in terms of the back and forth banter that goes on,” he said. “They’re (cops) not Dirty Harry, and they’re not weeping at every crime scene.
“They have to see to their role as a job and have a sense of detachment, otherwise, it would kill them.”
Azzano said he achieved the realism simply by interviewing a lot of police officers over the years, focusing on how they proceeded with their jobs.
“My gut feelings before I started the process were bang on,” he said. “They (police) care about what they’re doing, but they can’t agonize about the cases.”
So, beyond the next couple of books, where does Azzano see his stories going?
“All writers would probably like to see them go into a TV series or movie. But realistically, there’s so much competition, the chances are getting to that point are like wining the lottery.
“I don’t expect to make money off these books. But if I was able to have them as a legacy, so that 200 years from now if there’s a bookstore on Mars, someone might say, ‘Wow, not bad.’ that would be good.”
Azzano’s books are available at Chapters, Amazon and Black Bond Books.
