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WORK TITLE: Ragged Lake
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY: Manotick
STATE: ON
COUNTRY: Canada
NATIONALITY: Canadian
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Married Julie Oliver (a photojournalist).
ADDRESS
CAREER
Journalist and writer. Bell Media Radio, CFRA talk show host.
WRITINGS
Author of columns with several Canadian periodicals.
SIDELIGHTS
Ron Corbett is a Canadian journalist and writer. He has worked as the CFRA talk show host with Bell Media Radio and also as a columnist with several Canadian periodicals. Corbett has published several nonfiction books, including One Last River Run, A Grand Adventure: America’s First Transcontinental Truck Run, First Soldiers Down: Canada’s Friendly Fire Deaths in Afghanistan, and, with Rick Smith, Beyond Promises. He is also the author of “The Last Guide” series.
In 2017 Corbett published the novel Ragged Lake. Senior Detective Frank Yakabuski is accompanied by two Springfield Regional Police constables as they travel to Canada’s Northern Divide to examine a remote cabin not on any maps. They find squatter Guillaume Roy and his wife, Lucy, and toddler daughter killed inside the cabin, marking the start of a series of murders in the tiny town of Ragged Lake. Yakabuski is returning to this homicide case after working for an extended period of time to bring down the Popeyes motorcycle gang leader. However, he is wary that this case is oddly similar to the murders committed by the Popeyes motorcycle gang. Yakabuski sequesters nine residents and visitors of the town to find out as much information as he can. After reading Lucy’s journal, he learns that she had suspected someone may have wanted to kill her. Gangster Tommy Bangles, who had tormented Lucy before her ultimate death, enters town around the same time a bad blizzard complicates everyone’s lives. Yakabuski, meanwhile, learns just how hard life in the North can be, particularly for the indigenous people when jobs are scarce.
In an article in the Ottawa Citizen, Corbett talked with Andrew Duffy about his move from nonfiction writing and journalism to penning a novel. Corbett admitted: “I wanted to do in fiction some of the stuff I’ve been doing in non-fiction…. I didn’t want to all of a sudden start writing about vampires or something.” Corbett recalled that he had visited a place called Ragged Lake on a four-day camping trip to Algonquin Park while writing an article in 2000. He confessed that Ragged Lake “is the same sort of geography and landscape as Algonquin Park. I wanted to have the novel set in the same location, and write about the same sort of people I’ve been writing about for years—but now as fiction”
A contributor to Publishers Weekly found the novel to be “well-crafted.” The same reviewer admitted that “both the danger and the stark beauty of the place ring true on every level.” A Kirkus Reviews contributor stated: “Familiar ingredients rarely combined—a starkly etched natural setting, a gungho cop, a series of soulful flashbacks, a violent climax—are expertly blended and brought to a full rolling boil.” In a review in the Reviewing the Evidence website, Sharon Mensing commented that while “Yakabuski is … well characterized … most of the villains are less thoroughly drawn.” Mensing concluded that “this is a compelling start to a series set in an unusual location. I am very much looking forward to seeing where Yakabuski is sent next.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, August 1, 2017, review of Ragged Lake.
Ottawa Citizen (Ottawa, Ontario, Canada), December 27, 2017, Andrew Duffy, “Former Columnist Ron Corbett Spins Old Notebook, Travels, into Crime Novel.”
Publishers Weekly, August 28, 2017, review of Ragged Lake, p. 108.
ONLINE
Reviewing the Evidence, http://www.reviewingtheevidence.com/ (October 1, 2017), Sharon Mensing, review of Ragged Lake.
Ron Corbett is an author, journalist, and broadcaster living in Ottawa. The author of seven non-fiction books, this is his first novel. He is married to award-winning photojournalist Julie Oliver.
Former columnist Ron Corbett spins old notebook, travels, into crime novel
Andrew DuffyANDREW DUFFY
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Published on: December 27, 2017 | Last Updated: December 27, 2017 4:04 PM EST
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Former Citizen reporter draws on old notebook, travels in new novel
SHARE ADJUST COMMENT PRINT
On a long-ago trip to Algonquin Park during the dead of winter, Ottawa writer Ron Corbett remembers seeing an ice hut flash with light in the darkness of a frozen lake.
The image stuck him. “It was kid of spooky,” he remembers. “Was it a shotgun going off? Or was it just someone trying to light a lamp?”
The scene would plant in Corbett’s mind the seed for a novel, one that begins with an atrocity inside a remote northern cabin.
Although it would take him more than a decade to find the time to write that book, Corbett’s first venture into fiction after seven non-fiction books has now been realized.
Ragged Lake has been published by Toronto’s ECW Press.
“I wanted to do in fiction some of the stuff I’ve been doing in non-fiction,” says Corbett, a well-travelled Ottawa newspaper columnist, radio host, author and publisher.
“I didn’t want to all of a sudden start writing about vampires or something.”
As a writer, Corbett is best known for The Last Guide, a book that describes the life and times of Frank Kuiack, Algonquin Park’s last remaining fishing guide. A sequel, The Last Guide’s Guide, was published last year.
A former Citizen and Sun columnist, Corbett introduced Kuiack to readers in October 2000 in a newspaper feature based on their four-day camping trip to Algonquin Park. Their destination on that trip? A place on the southern border of the park called Ragged Lake.
Corbett draws heavily on his experiences and travels as a journalist.
“The book,” Corbett explains, “is the same sort of geography and landscape as Algonquin Park. I wanted to have the novel set in the same location, and write about the same sort of people I’ve been writing about for years — but now as fiction.”
Corbett’s novel follows detective Frank Yakabuski as he investigates the seemingly senseless massacre of a young family living in a ramshackle cabin in the woods outside a tiny northern town, Ragged Lake.
Ottawa-area readers will recognize the outlines of many places described in the book since they’re drawn from Corbett’s lifelong fascination with the Ottawa Valley and Algonquin Highlands.
“The landscape around here I find beautiful,” he explains. “I look at it and I want to describe it somehow.”
While Corbett had long thought about writing a novel, it was only through a bit of misfortune that he found the time to attempt one. In February 2016, when Bell Media Radio laid him off from his job as a CFRA talk show host, Corbett resolved to use his sudden unemployment to finish the novel he had first envisioned on a dark lake in Algonquin Park.
Ron Corbett. Julie Oliver/Postmedia JULIE OLIVER / POSTMEDIA
He set to work with conviction. Waking at 5 a.m., he spent his mornings writing and, in the afternoons, he worked on another long-held dream: to launch a local publishing company. (He now operates Ottawa Press and Publishing.)
Corbett enjoyed the freedom of fiction writing.
“I found fiction a lot of fun, in certain ways: It’s neat working on a story that you completely control,” he says. “Some days, I jumped out of bed because I was so anxious to start writing: I’d wake up and think, ‘Geez, I wonder what’s going to happen to him (Yakabuski) today.”
After four months, he sent a manuscript to Montreal book agent, Robert Lecker, who immediately agreed to take him on as a client.
“I read it and I could tell after the first page that this was the real thing, this was something I wanted to pursue,” remembers Lecker, who quickly negotiated a three-book deal for Corbett with ECW Press.
Lecker says it was among the easiest deals of his career. “Ron is the kind of author who makes use of all the senses,” Lecker says. “When you’re in his world, you see things, you taste things, you smell things, you hear things. That’s what gives his prose their unique quality.”
For Corbett, the book deal means more early mornings. He has already completed the first draft of his second novel and is now at work on his third. All of the books will follow the dark and violent story arc launched by Ragged Lake.
Corbett is working in a book genre sometimes described as “rural noir” or “country noir,” and he aspires to its intensely local nature: “The landscape is so important to these stories, that it may as well be an extra character.”
Ron Corbett is married to Ottawa Citizen photographer Julie Oliver
Ragged Lake
Publishers Weekly.
264.35 (Aug. 28, 2017): p108.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Ragged Lake
Ron Corbett. ECW (Legato, U.S. dist.; Jaguar, Canadian dist.), $14.95 trade paper (336p) ISBN 978-1-
77041-394-8
Corbett's well-crafted first foray into fiction (he has published seven nonfiction books) takes the reader into
a grisly, claustrophobic world. Det. Frank Yakabuski and two regional police constables head to Canada's
North to investigate the triple murder of a secretive family who built a makeshift cabin on logging land.
Frank has to find the killers, battle a deadly gang who have arrived to clear all traces of their exploded meth
lab, and confine a handful of residents of the abandoned town--and a few outsiders--in a local fishing lodge
for their own protection. As he looks for answers, harsh lives in a harsh land are revealed--particularly those
of the indigenous people of the North--along with terrible secrets and the desperation that sets in when jobs
disappear. It's a visceral, occasionally blood-soaked tale that unwinds slowly and provides a shocking
conclusion. Corbett knows the North and its people. Both the danger and the stark beauty of the place ring
true on every level. Agent: Robert Lecker, Robert Lecker Agency. (Oct.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Ragged Lake." Publishers Weekly, 28 Aug. 2017, p. 108. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A502652618/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=42c1d54f.
Accessed 4 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A502652618
3/4/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1520198427416 2/2
Corbett, Ron: RAGGED LAKE
Kirkus Reviews.
(Aug. 1, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Corbett, Ron RAGGED LAKE ECW Press (Adult Fiction) $14.95 10, 3 ISBN: 978-1-77041-394-8
Ottawa journalist Corbett's (A Grand Adventure, 2011, etc.) first novel is a tale of murder, murder, and
more murder in Canada's Northern Divide.After one look inside a supposedly abandoned Ragged Lake
cabin so isolated it doesn't appear on any of his maps, a young tree-marker phones the Springfield Regional
Police, who send Senior Detective Frank Yakabuski from Lowerton. Although Guillaume Roy, the squatter
inside the cabin, hasn't been literally cut in half by shotgun fire, the scene is otherwise even worse than the
young man described it. Not only are Roy and his wife, Lucy Whiteduck, dead, but so is their toddler
daughter, Cassandra--and their deaths are only a foretaste of more to come. Yakabuski, investigating his
first murder after a long undercover stint that sent Popeyes motorcycle gang chief Papa Paquette to prison
for life, can't help feeling that the new case has uncomfortable ties to the old. Sequestering every local he
can find except for ancient Anita Diamond into the Mattamy fisherman's lodge--a total of nine citizens and
passers-by, including the Mattamy cook, bartender, and waitress--Yakabuski hunkers down to read the
journal, first evocative, then gripping, Lucy Whiteduck kept on the advice of her therapist and learns that
she'd feared for her life long before it ended. All the while, two storms are bearing down on Ragged Lake:
Tommy Bangles, a gangster who'd made Lucy's last months a nightmare, and a blizzard that's certain to
complicate any schemes Yakabuski can hatch to identify the guilty party and protect the innocent.
Following a hyperextended standoff Corbett pulls off a lot more successfully than his hero, there'll still be
room for one final surprise. Familiar ingredients rarely combined--a starkly etched natural setting, a gungho
cop, a series of soulful flashbacks, a violent climax--are expertly blended and brought to a full rolling
boil.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Corbett, Ron: RAGGED LAKE." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Aug. 2017. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A499572791/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=7bf1ec4d.
Accessed 4 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A499572791
RAGGED LAKE
by Ron Corbett
ECW Press, October 2017
336 pages
$14.95
ISBN: 1770413944
Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada
There is plenty of violence in Corbett's debut, the first in the Frank Yakabuski series, but it is the gorgeous writing that makes the biggest impression. Whether it is describing a howling storm, depicting the way the fire following a meth lab explosion turns the snow to rain, or sharing the quiet sounds a building makes when everyone has gone to sleep, Corbett enthralls with his writing. Purists may dislike his use of phrases rather than full sentences at times, but his razor-sharp, economical use of words manages to portray a sense of place and depth of feeling better than the most voluble writing.
That direct and to-the-point style of writing suits his main character extremely well. Yakabuski, an ex-military man, is a regional investigator in a land where the regions are huge. When he gets the call that an isolated and reclusive family living in a makeshift cabin far from what passes for civilization along the Northern Divide has been slaughtered, he and his junior officers must snowmobile through the frozen landscape for a full day to reach the area. The town of Ragged Lake consists of just a few people, and none of them is law enforcement. Since the lumbering and milling operations closed decades ago, the lodge, a survival school, and the camp of an elderly Cree woman provide the only ongoing shelter in town other than the squatters' cabin which is the scene of the crime.
When Yakabuski arrives in town, he discovers that lawlessness prevails, with some gangsters from his past having moved into the void. As he attempts to determine what happened to the family, he uncovers the dead woman's journal, which provides history and background regarding the effects of deep isolation and lawlessness as well as the historical relationships between the loggers, millworkers, and native Cree. Beginning with so few residents, Ragged Lake is essentially deserted by the time Yakabuski and the criminals are done with their confrontation. But in the midst of all of the violent action, Corbett allows us to enter the head of the dead woman, giving us a fully realized and sympathetic character. Yakabuski is also well characterized, although we will be learning more about him as the series progresses. Most of the villains are less thoroughly drawn, sometimes fitting neatly into stereotypes.
This is a compelling start to a series set in an unusual location. I am very much looking forward to seeing where Yakabuski is sent next.
§ Sharon Mensing, retired educational leader, lives, reads, and enjoys the outdoors in rural Wyoming.
Reviewed by Sharon Mensing, October 2017