Chris Humphreys has emigrated ten times.
He said he’s a serial emigrant, not a settler. Which makes it all the more interesting that thirteen years on Salt Spring Island turned out to be the longest he’s lived anywhere.
Readers know him as C.C. Humphreys, author of more than twenty novels. On the Pulse Podcast we were catching up after his move back to England. I asked him what pulled him away from Salt Spring, and after the professional opportunities and the pull of the historical settings he writes about, he landed on the real answer with a laugh: he can walk to a pub from his new place in Totnes, Devon. Five minutes, he told me, to a spot called The Albert.
We talked about his two brand-new books, The Double Life of Eve Sinclair and One London Day, a book that almost didn’t happen. He wrote it, couldn’t find a publisher who’d take a historical fiction writer seriously as a thriller writer, self-published it quietly, and moved on. Years later an agent showed it to the right publisher at the London Book Fair, and now it’s the start of a trilogy.
There’s something in hearing that story for anyone who’s ever shelved a project they believed in.
Chris said – almost in passing: “research is the queen, but story is king.” He reads for months before he writes a word, but he’s clear that the facts only exist to serve the character’s journey, not the other way around. After twenty-plus novels, a stage and screen career, and a childhood split between Toronto, London and California, Chris still writes like someone chasing a story he hasn’t caught yet.
Hear the whole conversation, including his parents’ real-life spy and fighter pilot story that inspired Someday I’ll Find You, here: https://bit.ly/S2EP42PulsePodcast
The PULSE Community website: ThePulseCommunity.ca
Peter McCully is a multimedia creator and podcast host based in Parksville, BC. https://mccullymedia.ca/category/blog/