This is true. This actually happened a couple of weeks ago. I get on a zoom call with these self-professed film producers from Philly. They read the article, one of the articles on the book being, wish you were here being published in the United States.
And they're like, hey, can we talk to you about developing this into a... I don't know what they wanted to do, ducky drama or, you know, fictional account. And I'm, I don't get flooded with these, you know, I get some of these. So this time, normally with that, I just say contact my agent working out, which I did say.
I said, you know, I just, I just letting you know, you know, there's two agents, there's two writers. This is complicated. But anyway, I'll take the call. So I get on the zoom call with these two guys and they come on the screen and the film producers from Philly.
And I look at them and I think to myself, I'm looking at an American version of Stefan Peron and we'll go for debt, right? And if you don't get that reference, read, wish you were here. And I'm just looking at them and I'm thinking, you guys are in wheel your heads. And I was probably a bit of a dick on the call.
Because I checked their, you know, I checked their work with a done, they do true crime stuff. You know, I kind of looked at it. Yeah, they're on Netflix, but you know, it doesn't come, you know, when you're on your search engine, you know, it's not the titles that are brought to you in sort of like, you know, what's new or even under true crime. You'd really have to dig in the back catalog to find their, you know, true crime stories with a clown pitcher, John Wayne, Gacy, or some such bullshit.
So, you know, I went into this already kind of going, this is not going to happen. But I guess, I guess it was a slow day and they start talking to me. You know, I'm telling you clearly they don't know anything about me or I don't even think I don't even think it was clear to them that Teresa lore is my sister. They kept dancing around sort of like the victim and I'm like, oh boy, you know, so they read an article, but they didn't really remember an article.
But, you know, somewhere along the lines in the call, they're like, well, we hear you working on another book because it was in the, it was in like the publishers trades or something, you know, one of those announcements. And I say, yeah, and they're like, well, can you tell me a little bit about that? Can you tell us a little bit about that? I say, no.
No, I can't. I can't do that. It's not the way this works. You buy the property and then you get the surprise.
I don't get to tell you the surprise. And surely after that, right, the zoom call just drops. It just drops and I think I got a bad connection. So I try to get back on with these film producers from Philly and, you know, the call has ended.
Nobody's there and I'm just like, okay, fine, whatever. About 10 minutes later, I get an email. Sorry for the drop call. Let us know when you're willing to discuss the second book.
And that's it, right? Like, not even just completely, completely shameless. At this point to the whole machinations of how in today's world all of this works. And I didn't respond.
I didn't respond with a go fuck yourself email or even a, you know, sort of keep the irons and the fire will do. I just didn't respond because I don't give a flying fuck about this kind of crap nonsense. This is who killed through so. I took a month off, but it's a new month.
I needed to clear my head a little bit since running. What was that? 24 episodes, really a Quebec-sico about Sherbrooke Quebec. More than anyone would ever want to know about Sherbrooke Quebec.
And I really needed some distance from that. I wrote a lot. Road. I'm a son.
I like my road bike. I completely enjoyed the Tour de France, both the men's and then, you know, the icing on the cake for me was the first the woman's Tour de France, which just ended yesterday with the first Yellow Jersey victory. Fully hope that that is expanded by stages over the year. So we get to the full three weeks.
And but while all that was going on, I should say that I got an offer which I signed for a project, the second book. That is called If That Case Is Not Here. That's the working title. It will probably change.
I think in in it was a strange thing. My, I don't know, sometime in the spring, my agent contacted me and said there's a client who wants to know how quickly you could get a manuscript out. I just sort of said I could do it in a year. And then shortly after that, he wrote me and he said, well, this is unusual.
They just skipped the formalities and sent you a contract here. It is. They sort of said, we've met with our board and they all agree we want to do it. And please sign on the title of the line.
I had a few things that I wanted to finagle in the contract. Not a lot, but the main one was the broadcast. That's right. Of course, they had a written that they had 100% of all broadcast rights that might might come from that.
And I, they were my only stipulation, a couple of person icky ones. My only stipulation was that I got 100% of the broadcast rights. They could keep everything else. But I was going to keep that.
Other things about, you know, who does an audio book and all that to sin for that. But I certainly, if and when we get to that stage, you can bet as sure as shit. And if we get to an audio project, it's going to be my voice that does that case is not here. This has been a, I haven't talked about it a lot because I don't like discussing pipe dreams that don't count a fruition.
But this was a long process. Shortly before I started the last year that Theresa Martin thing, I had completed a full proposal, which was like 68 pages really long and in depth. If you've ever done one of those, you need to give like a chapter by chapter breakdown of what you're going to do. You have to include marketing data to tell them why your book is going to sell.
You know, it links to every single interview you've ever done. Who you're going to talk to, who you think might do the blurb on the book jacket. You basically have to do all of their work for them in this day and age, which is fine. That's fine.
But you know, all of that is to say for the next year, I'm going to be focusing on writing that case is not here. And that's already started. In many respects, I started that project a year and a half ago. The first thing I did was because I learned my lesson again in all my FOIA requests for the information act.
I learned my lesson in the last year, which is the request to penalize an agency such as the CIA, the FBI, Bureau of Drugs, Alcohol and Tobacco, the RCMP, et cetera, et cetera. Are you interested yet? So all of that was done. I've done last month five interviews now with folks that I hope to use some of the content in the book.
I don't want to get into analysis paralysis of doing too many interviews, but there's some core ones that I really think the project will benefit from focusing on. The title of that case is not here. It came up from a records manager, public records manager with a police force. I contacted them with a case I was interested in, which is the focus of the book, and they couldn't find it.
And they replied in an email that case is not here so it's lost. And I found that very provocative and appropriate. So I ran with it. As I said, it'll probably get changed.
One of the one things they did publish or said in the writing is they didn't like that title. I don't care. They can call it whatever they want. I just don't want a murdered brother and quest for a serial killer or anything of that flavor.
Well, maybe something of that flavor. But believe me, the word serial killer will, I don't think have a part of this project. But with the exception of Montreal, my goal is to reach 100,000 words without ever having mentioned the rest of Quebec. I don't want to go there in this project as a focus on, again, with the exception of the city of Montreal and its cosmet, politics and nature, a particular era in our past.
I don't think I need to go there. The project was turned down by Canadian publishers. We did a round of that. I believe right around.
We do that. We did that in the fall of last year. And I think the idea was a little too true crimey for them. They snubbed their nose at that.
They kind of wrapped their true crime and pretension to suggest that it's not really true crime. I do that myself. I don't like to be known as a true crime writer. I like to be known as a memoirist to shake the sh- shake the stank of that category.
Nevertheless, right? It is what it is. And I think it was a struggle for some American publishers. There's an element of it.
There's a foundation of it. It's a little too Canadian for them. I think they felt that it couldn't sell. Quite honestly, and after a year of perspective going back and looking at the proposal, I could have written that a little better.
I see the good thing as I see now. I also have the benefit of the rejection notices. They're quite specific as to why some of these big publishers, MacLoe and Simon & Schuster, reject it, which is constructive. I can, in some ways, some of it address.
I'm going to cave and address all of it. But some of it, I just felt I can be clearer about what I'm doing. There's also an aspect of it that is memoir that was really, really hard to describe without sounding like a total narcissist. It's like an asshole, which is an element of that.
But again, it's hard to capture, I don't know, the selling of oneself. Jung Didian, I think about that, about the very act of writing is such an aggressive stance. I can't remember words, but really, you're taking your ideas and words and infiltrating somebody else's mind. So it's a real transgression.
You know, that's from Jung Didian, that's why everyone loves her. She's got cuts to the chase. Yeah, it's an American publisher, which is different. Yeah.
Last time around was Penguin Random House, which you tend to associate with the world, but it was Penguin Random House, Canada. And then it was pitched and bought by Penguin Random House USA. So this time around, I don't want to say who it is, partly because I can't really discuss the deal. It's part of the contract.
But it's a mid-sized publisher, right? It's smaller, which has its benefits and challenges. Working with Penguin Random House, particularly, you know, it's on the front page of the newspaper that, you know, it's in the courts. Is it Simon & Schuster that they're going after?
The big five to create a monopoly. Biden administration came right out and said, this is a monopoly, so they're having it out in the courts. And I'll tell you, for the waves, the ramifications of that takeover, which began two years ago, I felt directly in the process of the selling and promoting of the book in the United States. From my opinion, from the moment the takeover was first introduced over two years ago, the shop that I was dealing with in Toronto virtually shut down and was in the process of having a makeover for potential new overlords.
And it was a lot of soul searching and who's in charge of what, and who's going to take what portfolio and this kind of stuff, which I imagine left a lot of authors, myself included, kind of in limbo, which I didn't appreciate. So that element of being a cog in a very, very big machine, I didn't like about Penguin Random House. The editing process was first rate. I had an editor and I had a copyright editor.
I think this time around, I'm just going to have a copy editor, which is different. But the other elements, the marketing of the book published how they waged publicity. I've talked before about the audiobook, which I thought the whole process was a miscalculation. I thought the rollout of the product during COVID was a miscalculation of the business and what was going on.
But I don't have to deal with that this time. As I say, it's not a mid-size American publishing house. Honestly, without the clout of a PRH, but they have other weapons. And at the end of the day, their product sells on Amazon.
And whether you like that or not, that's the reality. They do not have such a presence in bookstores. But let's be frank, Wish You Were Here was not in an American bookstore unless I chose to do a reading. And then they would order the book and all of that.
And I did three readings of Wish You Were Here and then considered doing like a book tour and decided to stop. Because if the goal is to sell books, there are other goals you could go for. You could go for it over time. I want to build an audience and have people aware, unawareness.
But I just thought that the work that would have had to go into that did not justify the end goal. Because at the end of the day, an author like me, going around independent bookstores, showing up with a case of books in my trunk or whatever, selling them in a lobby when they sell out inside letters, book, stock, or whatever, whatever the case would be. It was not worth it. Because I'm never going to draw an audience of 100 people.
I'm not saying never. I'm not now going to draw 100 people. People don't know who I am. So what you're going to get when you go to those events are people who go every single event that are curious.
And mom's dad and girlfriend are friends who know you happen to live in the area. And even then they feel guilty. They feel guilty to go into these things because you said you're there. And I'm not going to do that route.
I'm just not terribly interested in that. I've done theater with more people in the audience. I've done bad theater. The worst show I've ever done in the shittiest, haval in some East End shitbox in Toronto.
I've done a bigger draw than not only me. It's not just self-deprecating. I've done my reconnaissance and sat in on readings. There's nobody's there.
No one is there unless you're like a big bucks. You know, Hillary Clinton and Louise Penny's, they're going to show up for something. And all of the grandmas show up for that book about that reading. All of that is to say this is an industry that's changing rapidly.
And I don't think any writer feels like they're on firm footing right now. So with that, I'd say before you figure that I'm in the chips or something. This was in a recent New York Times article on the publishing industry. As book buyers have migrated online, it has gotten harder to sell books by new or lesser known authors.
With the exception of surprise runaway bestsellers, like where the crawdad sing, man, is that a stinker. And books by celebrities or brand name authors, like James Patterson, most writers fail to find much of an audience of the 3.2 million titles that book scan tracked in 2021. Fewer than 1% of them sold more than 5,000 copies. I raise my hand and I attest that that is true.
I wish you were here has sold over 5,000 copies. Just. Just. And that's after what is that?
That's after 22 months of work. That's not what made it a bestseller. What justified. The ability to put.
Bestseller on the cover of the American edition is the fact that for one week, it cracked the best seller list in the Toronto Star in Canada. That alone was the reason we could say best seller. Somebody asked me several people who've asked me recently about getting into writing a book or getting into the publishing industry. So I guess today that this is a little bit about that.
And I would say don't do it unless you love it and do not give up your day job. I'm not in the chips. This is this is a hobby. And I do.
I have a career. I don't just have a day job. With that, you know, you can do the arithmetic and say that. I there's an argument to be made that I could make more money simply, you know, selling.
That case is not here on some stack with podcast posts. With the exception that the traditional publishing still holds some advantages. There's still a cache about saying you're a published author that has some weight and you can step in stone your weight, something else. But, you know, many people are going the route to the biggest thing that you notice is that traditional journalists, particularly print journalists are leaving.
You know, rackets like the New York Times, the Washington Post and hanging up their shingle on sub stack because they have more independence to write the stories that they want. And they're making the same, if not more money, you know, some of them are hitting the lottery and making a lot of money. I'm going to read for you the synopsis, the table of contents that was proposed for that case is not here. These are the chapters.
There's a prologue called Saint Genevieve, a city without law, trains and boats and planes, some a song or a rigmarole pattern recognition. There's a pattern recognition here. You'll recognize some of these titles. Kevincico, the confines of memory, the case is not here, so it's lost.
Middle village, Mr. K, a super crime fighter, the magician's trick, apophania. Let's go back and back and back. It's the proposed final chapter 14.
All of that's going to change. But if you're diehards, and it's part of the reason why I pop back in here for podcast is I don't nuts. Not my nose at the fact that I have a regular listenership. And so my great appreciation for that.
And all the more reason to disclose to people who listen, what I've been thinking and what I'm going to be up to. And when you hear that list, you will hear some triggers and there's things you've heard in the past. So it does incorporate things. It does, that case is not here, does incorporate elements of the Theresa Martin case from 1969.
The confines of memory, it does incorporate the story of Margaret Peggy Coleman, the American hitchhiker, who along with a friend, were found on a road outside Longe, Quebec in 1970, the friend survived Margaret, died, apparently from jumping from a moving vehicle. So that story is incorporated in that case, it's not here. There's a fly in here now, and it's going to become part of the remainder of this episode. Sorry, hopefully you'll settle down.
The confines of memory, interestingly, in the last month, Peggy Coleman's cousin contacted me and trying to get in touch with Peggy's family. Because as happens in these matters, he lost touch with the family and he's interested in reigniting Margaret's case from 1969. And together with a little information from him and a little sleuthing, from me, I was able to track down Peggy Coleman's parents who are now deceased. They had moved from California to Mesa, Arizona.
But from that, with that information, we're trying to track down Peggy's sister. And more importantly, the friend who survived, who ultimately are ultimate goal to talk to. So there's that element, these things go on. One of the things, I'm still trying to figure out how to maintain this podcast and whether it will still be called Who Killed Theresa through all of this.
One idea is to continue the podcast, but less frequently, just keep the pulse running, right, keep the faucet dripping. Another idea is to, you know, there's 44 episodes from the first season that have not been heard in over four years. So one another idea is to republish those 44 episodes as a way of buying some time while I'm writing. And still, another idea is to just abandon the thing altogether and start fresh closer to publication date.
The Kebexico series, you know, in many respects was kind of my final statement on those matters and the matters of Theresa. So who killed Theresa May have run its course? I'd be very interested in your thoughts and your wishes. You can reach out to me on, you can email me my emails on the website, threesiller.com.
Or on social media, I'm at JustASky, JUSTUY on Twitter. I'm on Instagram, there's the Facebook page who killed Theresa, the podcast, you can drop me a message and let me know your thoughts around that. Then over here on Substack, you know, the idea is what to do to keep people engaged and I'll probably write about the case from this book periodically without giving too much away. I can probably keep you up to date.
You know, chapters go along and things like that. And oftentimes what happens is you do a little bit of research and you're like, well, I know that's not going to get in the book, but that's really interesting. I can probably do some topics and write about that. And you know, die-hards anyway out there.
As I said, I'm going to recognize the chapter titles. So you know some of the content that's going to be covered. And I'll also let you know, in the last two years, I've been dropping hints and Easter eggs all along the way about that case is not here. And if it's not directly in the writing, it's in the music, it's in a poem or a turn of phrase.
You know, if you like that kind of thing, you know, when this project runs its course in two years and you go back, you go, oh, that's what that's all about. You know, three of you will actually do that. But nevertheless, some people like that kind of then I like those kind of puzzles. So housekeeping, the Canadian press, which is like the Associated Press in Canada, in a pretty good article, cheekily titled Quebec Provincial Police Cold Case Squad, has yet to solve a murder.
Brilliant. And I provided some content to that, to the writer. Theresa Martin's sister also spoke to them, murdered in Montreal in 1969. She's featured in there, I think she gets the last word, again, as she should.
It's a really, really good article in many ways, kind of some nation of the state of affairs we have when we concluded Quebec's Co. That whole thing was ultimately, it was very satisfying. I don't regret, I have a single regret that I did 24 episodes about what I consider the problems and the inertia of why my sister's cases was never solved. Nevertheless, tremendously disappointed about what did not happen, what should have happened after that.
Very brief summary. The newspaper left press, was supposed to do a full article on it, they never did. They got cold feet and said, well, when I wait for things to cool down, and we'll address it in the fall, I doubt, I'm not going to bring it up. I've moved on, so it's on their shoulders to do the right thing.
I doubt they'll do anything in the fall. The police, I've said it, I've not talked to the police, I've spoken to the police in over a month. They went silent, I lost my investigator, I reached out to this, they had to go back and said, can you tell me who my new handler is? They never responded.
That's all I needed was the fact that they never responded. I'm not going to be like a dog chasing somebody's pet cuff leg. It's on them. I've got other things to do.
No one in the Sherbrooke area did a damn thing. Sherbrooke police owed me a call because they wanted to take my statement, they never got back to me. Surprise, surprise. Major journalists in the area with a tribute and television radio turned up windy.
They need to live, everyone there needs to live with that. I've said what I said, I think I know who not only killed Theresa, but was an element in a criminal force in the area for decades and responsible for more murders. No one wants to follow up on it, that's fine, but don't come to me in two years and say, you know, who is your sister's case still unsolved and why? Don't do that, don't do me like that.
I don't want to hear it. Second little bit of business, Nick Barube, we can do a feature on the 50th anniversary of the murder of Andre Vasart. Vasart was a teenager in Saint-Terese, Quebec, just in the north of Montreal, in the summer of 1972. I believe July 28th, 1972, he was shot by a police officer and killed a little over a year ago, or almost a year ago, I did a story on Vasart.
La Press, Nick Barube lifted the whole thing, lifted my story and did a French version on it and ran with it, which I'm okay about. He told me he was going to do that, and it was sort of like a tit for tap. I had done the same thing to him with the James Dubey story, the fisherman from the gas bay. I pinched his story.
I think the only difference is that the first thing I said in that story was this comes from Nick Barube, and Nick's return of the favor. It's the last thing he did. Way at the bottom gives mention to the fact that I did a story on Vasart a year ago. So I guess that's okay.
I'm waiting to do it by the way. That's it. That's my update. For now and again, at a minimum, I will podcast once a month, and I would imagine if I got something to say, I will come on more than that.
Just until I get my footing, I think I need a good six months to really get some distance and get entrenched with things. And then we'll go from there. In the meantime, if you have thoughts, you can reach out through all the elements of said, including some stack. And let me know what you think.
Let me know what you want. Nothing at my sleeve. The goal here is to keep you engaged. And then, you know, until we get to the point of a manuscript and then we finish it and publish and then get you to buy that case is not here.
That's it. And, quite frankly, to continue to tell really, really good stories. You know, I'm not writing a piece of advocacy or some bullshit fantasy of triumph over adversity or something whose endgame is some shitty television program. I just want to write a really, really good story.
And I know I've got a really, really good story that nobody knows about. So there. This has been Who Killed Teresa. I'm your host, John Allor.
Have yourselves a great, great day.