My Tell Me Your Story guest for May 2025 is Canadian author Barbara Fradkin, a retired psychologist with a fascination for how we turn bad. Born in Montreal, Barbara obtained her B.A. from McGill, M.A. from the University of Toronto, and PhD in clinical psychology from the University of Ottawa. After more than twenty-five years as a child psychologist, she retired in order to devote more time to her first passion, writing. She has three children and, currently, one dog, and splits her time between Ottawa and her cottage on Sharbot Lake, where she finds her best inspiration. Her dark short stories haunt the Ladies Killing Circle anthologies, but she is best known for her award-winning Inspector Green series (which Donis loves), featuring quixotic Ottawa Police Inspector Michael Green. The latest, Shipwrecked Souls, just released in January, is Green’s most emotionally wrenching case yet. Barbara’s most recent mystery/thriller series features Amanda Doucette, a passionate, adventurous international aid worker who has returned to Canada to find a new path after a traumatic ordeal on her last posting.
The Wolf King
Barbara Fradkin
The Wolf King was my first story, printed with meticulous care to stay within the lines of my Grade 1 exercise book. Although the book and the plot have been lost to the mists of time, it launched my writing career at the age of six.
I was always spinning stories in my head, and I entertained myself during the dreary school hours by escaping into imaginary adventures with imaginary friends. I love animals, and my early library books were almost always about wolves, horses, lions, and other noble beasts. Over the years, my writing expanded to include scripts of my favourite TV shows like Bonanza (which had lots of horses) and stories about daily life challenges.
I grew up in the vibrant, culturally rich city of Montreal. My parents were both professionals, my father a philosophy professor and my mother a high school science teacher, and our house was chock full of books. When they ran out of space, my father built another bookshelf. By the time I left home, bookshelves lined just about every wall in the house, including the hallways. As a child, I pored through the books at random, reading great novels from Dostoyevsky to Faulkner, Steinbeck, Hemingway, and Bertram Russell. No doubt I missed a lot of the nuance, but I was entranced by the stories they spun.
In my teens I attempted to write novels but rarely got past Page 30. The old familiar ‘stuck in the weeds’! By my early twenties, I was determined to finish something, so I ploughed through a story about a drug addict redeemed by love. Encouraged by this triumph of will, I embarked on a series of novels over the next couple of decades, all about people’s struggles with daily living. I wrote because the stories were inside me, screaming to be told. The novels accumulated in my bottom drawer, thankfully never published. They were all dreadful, but I did learn a lot about creating plot, character, dialogue, and all the building blocks that came in handy when I finally discovered crime.
Despite this passion for stories, I never thought of writing for a living. Coming from a professional family and being a pragmatist, I knew I needed a reliable way to pay the mortgage. I chose my other great interest – people. That interest was what drew me to stories in the first place. So I studied psychology and worked as a child psychologist until my retirement. I never gave up writing but while raising three children, running a household, and working fulltime in a demanding career, I had to squeeze an hour or two into the corner of my day for writing.
I credit my doctoral supervisor for my life in crime. A scientific doctoral dissertation is as dry as dust, completely devoid of personal involvement . My creative side chafed as I stuck to the rules, and occasionally I would sneak an illustrative anecdote into the discussion of the results. My advisor would cross these out with a red pen and remark in the margin “this is not appropriate for a scientific paper”. I persevered, enjoying these moments of playful rebellion, and he graduated to simply putting a sad face in the margin.
Halfway through this long, deadly dull process, I was ready to kill someone, so I decided to try my hand at a murder mystery. I had always enjoyed a good, Agatha-Christie style puzzle. I thought “how hard can it be?” Something light and entertaining. So I murdered a student in graduate school at the very university I was attending, called the novel Do or Die, and dreamed up Ottawa Police Inspector Michael Green, my impetuous, quixotic hero with a passion for justice and a love of the hunt. I quickly learned that murder is not funny for me, the topic not light-hearted. I found myself writing about people struggling with dark choices and coping with rage, fear, and pain. Inadvertently I had found my true writer’s niche that melded both my love of storytelling and my interest in people. I was hooked.
I never thought of publishing Do or Die , let alone embarking on a series, and but in those stolen hours in my hectic life, I found myself writing a second book, and a third. I discovered that not only did it satisfy my passion for writing and people, but it was cathartic. Dealing with people in crisis takes its toll, especially when children are suffering and justice is not always served. The writing helped me to explore the problems, work through the pain, and as the master creator, bring about some sort of justice.
I have just released the twelfth Inspector Green mystery, entitled Shipwrecked Souls, published by proudly Canadian Dundurn Press in Toronto. This is Green’s most personal story yet, in which the death of an elderly Ukrainian woman leads him on an emotional journey into his own past, where he makes a startling discovery.
I’ve also written about three dozen short stories, four novellas, and a wilderness thriller series featuring international aid worker Amanda Doucette. I’m proud and humbled to have had several short stories, novellas and novels shortlisted for the Crime Writers of Canada Awards of Excellence, and two of my Green novels have won the Best Novel Award.
Inspector Green is still going strong, albeit mellowed and battered by years of dealing with violence and pain. Right now, the thirteenth installment is little more than a vague idea and a few dozen pages. So stay tuned! To find out more about me and my plans, check out www.barbarafradkin.com or find me at https://www.facebook.com/bfradkin.
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