Richmond writer Nick Fonda has a new book getting ready to hit the shelves which takes a real-life Eastern Townships murder mystery and re-imagines it at as a work of historical fiction. According to the author, Murder on the Orford Mountain Railway takes a deeper look at a story that will likely already be familiar to readers of his 2017 book, Richmond Now & Then.
“One of the chapters is the story of this murder,” Fonda said, sharing that he was intrigued by the unsolved mystery of a twelve-year-old boy who was shot in the back in Melbourne, seemingly for no reason. Where there real story leaves a reader hanging, Fonda’s new novel picks up the tale through the experiences of a fictional archivist at the Richmond County Historical Society (RCHS).
“I played with different ideas as to how to turn this into a story,” he said, explaining that in the end he settled on the idea that maybe, somewhere deep in the RCHS archives, his fictionalized self came across the diary of a young girl who saw just enough to put the pieces together not just with regard to this murder, but also another similar event that took place in Farnham only a few days earlier.
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Fonda delves into fiction with Murder on the Orford Mountain Railway
By Gordon Lambie
