Cassandra Mitchell, the librarian, met Staff Sgt. Karl Alberg of the RCMP for the first time over lunch in the sleepy town of Sechelt, BC in 1985 – according to the first mystery book by L.R. (Bunny) Wright. The book was titled The Suspect, and it was an auspicious start to an 11-book mystery series career for the author. She won an Edgar Allan Poe award for it and continued with a sequel, Sleep While I Sing.
Later she earned other awards including an Arthur Ellis award for crime writers for A Chill Rain in January. By then, the intertwined lives of the librarian and the Mountie had put their Sechelt home on the map for readers.
Last Saturday, the Sechelt Public Library – as the literary site of Cassandra’s workplace – celebrated 30 years of The Suspect by hosting a reading from Wright’s books, a cake, and a visit from a handsome Mountie in red serge, Const. Glen Martin.
Sandy Friedman of the Friends of the Library, who organized the event, suggested that the book was not dated.
“Read it again now that it’s 30 years later,” she said. “It gives you a real flavour of the Sunshine Coast.”
Library friend Dorothy Fraser agreed. She has organized scavenger hunts based on the Wright books and found they were able to pinpoint exactly the locations in the books from Wright’s descriptions. A former Sechelt librarian, Iris Loewen, was in attendance at the celebration and recalled that it was reading The Suspect that first drew her to the Coast. After reading it and taking a library course from a previous Sechelt librarian, she decided to travel to the Coast to check out Cassandra’s home base. Loewen took on the chief librarian position for many years.
When the book Kidnap was published in 2000, Wright launched it at the Sechelt Library. It was almost her last – she passed away in 2001.
A stage adaptation of The Suspect has been written by Wright’s daughter, Johnna Wright, who lives in Saskatchewan. It received public readings at the Saskatchewan Playwright’s Centre’s Spring Festival of New Plays in May and at the Saskatchewan Festival of Words in July.
