Lonely When You’re Dead by Roy Chaney

A freelance journalist covering a Quebec poetry festival is pulled into a dark web of intrigue and murder that may be his last story.

In Lonely When You’re Dead by Roy Chaney, a Boston journalist seeking his next big story is assigned to cover the raucous atmosphere of the Quebec City Poetry Festival, but when a riot reveals a murdered man, he must choose between a bombshell story or his life. 

Autumn, 1996: Claude Murphy, a Boston freelance journalist for a small arts and culture magazine, Bastion, travels to Quebec Province to cover a four-day poetry festival, where more than fifty poets from across North America and Europe will read their works on stages across Quebec City’s nightclubs and cafes. Murph does not anticipate anything too exciting, after all, “how dangerous could a poetry festival be?” Turns out, plenty.

While taking photos at a nightclub poetry reading, a riot breaks out that may or not be instigated by Quebecois separatists, and Murph gets bloodied in the process before finding a dead man at his feet, his throat slashed violently. 

Escaping the scene, he wonders whether he is a suspect and whether he should continue to seek out the poets his editor wants him to interview—Ian MacGregor and Georges Zazou. A few hours later at a bar, he meets another freelance writer, Delphina Wrench, who says she knows MacGregor and can lead Murph to him. 

From a safehouse in the city, Murph finds himself ensconced with Delphina and René, a member of the motorcycle club Satan’s Shovelheads who acts as MacGregor’s bodyguard. Discovering that MacGregor has escaped the apartment, the three launch into a search for the missing poet that reveals criminal ties to the drug world and, for Murph, even more sinister connections to a previous story he wrote about a murdered conga drum player. If it sounds far-fetched, Chaney makes these odd associations work through noirish dialogue and well-crafted scenes.

When Murph learns that the dead man in the bar is Zazou (a poet he was meant to interview), he decides to follow this much juicier poetry festival story wherever it will lead him, despite “feeling he was chasing another kind of ghost … A ghost named Ian MacGregor, who only existed as a voice on a tape recorder. A voice stretched thin, ready to snap.”

But one corpse is not enough for whomever has a vendetta against literary bards. Murph’s troubles are just beginning when he runs afoul of the Canadian police and military. Who knew “poetry readings as a blood sport” was a real thing?

Readers get a fascinating glimpse of the 1996 Quebec City riots, “the dark heart of the poetry festival story,” as Murph is in the middle of it, documenting with his camera as a “Molotov cocktail shattered against a set of stone steps, the burning gasoline flowing down the steps like a carpet of fire.” 

Chaney’s prose contains bursts of vivid imagery throughout, and while the action lags a bit in the middle, it picks up exponentially after the second body is discovered. From there, Chaney ratchets up the tension as Murph realizes his past journalism rhymes with his present assignment. Can he sketch out the amorphous webbing into a cohesive story without becoming the headline himself? 

This deeply original tale spotlights Quebec poetry festivals in the mid-90s as well as the combustible history of Quebecois separatists fighting for an independent French Canada. With this backdrop, he produces a ripping plot-line pitting poets, drug dealers, and rival motorcycle clubs into a solid and enjoyable thriller. 

Lonely When You’re Dead strikes the right balance of action, literary insights, and murderous designs that readers will find captivating.