Murder, they joked: Brothers Will and Ian Ferguson have fun with the genre in I Only Read Murder

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When sibling comedy writers Will and Ian Ferguson came up with the idea of a 1980s detective show called Parrot P.I. when working on their novel I Only Read Murder, they knew they stumbled upon gold.

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Murder, they joked: Brothers Will and Ian Ferguson have fun with the genre in I Only Read Murder Back to video

Parrot P.I. does not factor all that much into the plot. But it did make them both laugh.

The brothers were working together remotely during the pandemic on what would become their first fiction co-write, a comedic mystery featuring a sleuthing has-been actress named Miranda Abbott. Will was in Calgary, Ian in Victoria. Part of their working relationship was simply “topping up each other’s jokes,” Will says. Their heroine is a delusional actor whose fame has mostly faded. When she is recognized, it’s for playing the “crime-solving, karate-chopping” Pastor Fran, the titular character in a 1980s TV show called Pastor Fran Investigates. But the brothers also wanted Pastor Fran to be a spin-off of another series, which was a regular phenomenon in the 1980s and 1970s. A show as ridiculous as Pastor Fran Investigates would certainly need to be spun from an equally ridiculous show, they figured.

“When we came up with Parrot P.I., we must have laughed for half an hour over the phone,” says Will, in a Zoom interview with his brother. “What would be the dumbest TV show?”

“I think at some point Ian said, ‘What if Baretta’s cockatoo actually helped him solve the crimes? What if that was actually his partner?’ I don’t know why, to this day, I found it so funny. But we laughed so hard.”

While I Only Read Murder does feature a well-constructed mystery at its core, the Ferguson brothers are both known for their comedic chops as writers. It had to be funny. So part of the dynamic during those over-the-phone work sessions was simply to make each other laugh.

The novel is the first in what the Fergusons hope will be a long-running murder-mystery series set in the small town of Happy Rock, Oregon. It’s a town that figures into Miranda’s past and at the beginning of I Only Read Murder, she is summoned back by a mysterious postcard. Eventually, she finds herself involved in the Happy Rock Little Theatre and surrounded by a company of amateur thespians putting on their annual show, a theatrical dog called Death is the Dickens. The stars and backstage crew include a locally famous real estate agent, who can even out-diva Miranda; a hammy drama teacher who went to Yale; a senior with a murky past involving the CIA; a town mechanic with an axe to grind; and a shy but efficient bookstore clerk named Susan who keeps the theatre company running.

Miranda finds herself involved in the production and, later, a mystery when one of the actors is murdered during a performance. In true murder-mystery fashion, everyone is a suspect. That includes Miranda, whose sleuthing skills are initially subpar. This leads her to haphazardly jump from conclusion to conclusion with very little evidence to back her up. This occasionally puts her at odds with the savvy but friendly police chief, Ned Buckley, who also happens to be a Pastor Fran fanatic. It’s all part of the fun and helps expose the reader to several juicy red herrings that will keep them guessing until the final reveal.

“Usually in a small-town cozy like this, the local police officer or the chief of police is sort of a bumbling buffoon that doesn’t really know how to investigate,” says Ian, who will join Will at a Wordfest book launch on June 27 at the Memorial Park Library. “But we said, ‘No, Ned Buckley is going to be a good investigator. He’s still a small-town character but he’s going to be good at his job. Miranda Abbott is a good actor, she is not a terrible actor. We wanted to play a bit with the conventions because usually the amateur sleuth is smart and the police officer is as dumb as a doorknob. So we were playing with that. It’s a very affectionate take. We wanted it to be first and foremost funny, but we also wanted the mystery to be good.”

“That’s where having two authors really helps,” Will adds. “It adds to the mystery because we could play off (each other.) Ian would suggest a red herring, I would suggest a red herring.”

Before this, Ian and Will collaborated on the 2007 book How to Be a Canadian. By that point, Will was already a renowned satirist and novelist, who first earned attention for his 1997 book Why I Hate Canadians. Since then, he has written memoirs and novels, including the Giller-winning thriller 2013’s 419 and his 2016 memoir Road Trip Rwanda and 2020’s The Finder.

Ian and Will were two of six siblings who grew up in Fort Vermilion in northern Alberta. Their upbringing inspired Ian’s 2004 memoir Village of the Small Houses, which won the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour. Most of Ian’s career has been in theatre. He studied set design at Mount Royal and earned a BFA in acting from the University of Alberta and an MFA in theatre directing from York University.

So Ian has spent plenty of time working in both professional and community theatre. The latter, in particular, tends to be fertile ground for comedy. There is a segment in I Only Read Murder where Miranda is surprised to learn that auditions for the annual production of Death Is the Dickens were to be conducted all at once.

“Which actually does happen,” Ian says. “All the actors are in a room together and they all have to audition at the same time reading for the same parts. We just decided we would go up one more level and have an actual audience watching them audition, which I think is hilarious. I’m just trying to imagine any professional actor walking into that situation, what their reaction would be. That was what we had fun with.”

“(Ian) would tell me about the actors he has worked with,” Will says. “It would be mind-boggling. So we would just torque it: The character who never remembers his lines and gets them all wrong; the local real estate agent who thinks she is the star; the person who does all the work, like Susan.”

The Fergusons have already finished the next instalment of the Miranda Abbott mysteries, due out in 2024. It again takes place in Happy Rock and involves the chaotic arrival of a TV film production in town. As with all murder-mystery series, readers will have to suspend disbelief that a has-been actress in a small-town would be called upon to investigate murders again and again, although this idea is perhaps slightly less absurd than a karate-chopping pastor or unusually punctilious parrot solving crimes.

“How many murders can happen in a small town?” Ian says. “That’s actually addressed in the book when the police chief is talking about the character of Pastor Fran with Miranda Abbott and says ‘You know, I’m a fan but if I were a police officer, I’d think you were doing this because every time you show up in a town there’s a murder.’ ”

“As the series goes on, Happy Rock will have an incredibly high mortality rate,” Will adds. “You don’t want to live in Happy Rock because people are dying in Happy Rock all the time.”

Ian and Will Ferguson will be at Memorial Park Library on June 27 at 7 p.m. for a Wordfest event.