Home

Novels

Bio

Morgue

News

Blog

Forum

Gallery

Contact

Click to buy

• 
•  
• 
•  
• 
•  
• 
•  
• 
•  
• 
•  
• 
•  
• 
•  
• 
•  
• 
•  
• 
•  
• 
•  
• 
•  
• 

Slade's Morgue:
Headhunter

HEADHUNTER is Michael Slade's first psycho thriller. Here's the story behind it. Let's start where it all began. Winnipeg, Manitoba. Fort Garry. Wildwood Park.

Wildwood Park - a neighborhood in the Fort Garry suburb of south Winnipeg - sits in a bow of the Red River. Upper and Lower Fort Garry played a crucial role in the creation of the Mounted Police. Upper Fort Garry was seized by Louis Riel in the Red River Rebellion of 1870. After the British army suppressed the uprising (which led to the Province of Manitoba joining Canada), a Redcoat named William Francis Butler was dispatched alone by dogsled on a 4,000-mile winter trek across the Canadian prairies to report on conditions in the wilderness. His recommendation led to the formation of the Mounted Police in 1873.

Fictionalized as a villain, Butler morphed into the Mad Mountie, Inspector Wilfred Blake, in HEADHUNTER.

Mounted Police recruits were trained at Lower Fort Garry. The order was that riding practice should go on unless the temperature sank below minus 36 degrees Fahrenheit! On June 7, 1874, 275 Mounties embarked on the Great March west to Fort Whoop-Up, to expel American whisky traders from Canada and establish law and order all the way to the Rockies. Fort Calgary (see "Why Slade Writes What He Writes" in BIO) was built the following year.

The Wild West was shooting it up south of the border. Custer's Last Stand, and Wild Bill Hickok with his "dead man's hand" in 1876. Wyatt Earp and "Doc" Holliday in the Gunfight at the O.K Corral, and Sheriff Pat Garrett shooting Billy the Kid in 1881. Jesse James gunned down by Robert Ford in 1882. To avoid the same in Canada, the Mounties marched West before the land rush, so the law was in place instead of having to be imposed later. Because their task was to sign treaties with the Cree and Blackfoot, the scarlet tunic was designed to clearly distinguish them from the U.S. Army bluecoats fighting the Indian Wars.

Here is THE LAST GREAT COUNCIL OF THE WEST by Sydney Hall, who was present at Blackfoot Crossing in 1881. Inspector Wilfred Blake is in the picture. It currently hangs behind the horseshoe desk in Chief Superintendent Robert DeClercq's office at Special X.

In the dying days of the Western frontier, Almighty Voice sounded the last war cry. Twenty-one years old, the Plains Cree was arrested by the Mounties in October 1895 for slaughtering a settler's steer. That night, due to a jailer's dereliction of duty, he escaped from custody and swam across the icy South Saskatchewan River.

A week later, Sergeant Colin Colebrook caught up with the fugitive. As the Mountie approached on horseback, Almighty Voice, on foot, shot him through the neck with a double-barreled shotgun. Colebrook tumbled to the ground dead.

"A Member is down!" is the call to arms that reverberates through the Mounted Police from coast to coast to coast. Kill a Mountie and you take on the entire force. Slade would learn that in 1976 when he argued the last hanging case in the Supreme Court of Canada: the ambush and shooting of a young constable on the eve of his wedding. In 2005, four Mounties were gunned down in Mayerthorpe, Alberta. The shooter then killed himself. That didn't stop the Mounted Police from putting 300 officers on the case and spending $2 million above normal wages to convict the men who supplied the gun and drove the killer. Their pyramid command structure allows the Horsemen to pull in whatever resources are needed.

It took the Mounties nineteen months to track down Almighty Voice and corner him with two teens on a poplar bluff near Duck Lake. After two officers were wounded, the Mounties stormed the bluff. A shootout ensued, and when the smoke cleared, Corporal Charles Hockin, Constable John Kerr, and the Duck Lake postmaster, Ernest Grundy, a former Mountie, were dead. Almighty Voice and his friends remained dug in.

News of the deaths interrupted a gala ball at Mounted Police headquarters in Regina. The event was to celebrate the departure the following day of the Mounted Police contigent going to London for Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee.

By 1897, Victoria had ruled for sixty years.

By then, it could literally be said, "The sun never sets on the British Empire."

Victoria's soldiers had colored the map red around the globe. For her Diamond Jubilee, troops from every British colony and dominion, together with those sent by Indian princes as a mark of respect to the Empress of India, were converging on London, the center of the greatest empire history had ever seen. By far the largest chunk of that was the realm of the Mounted Police. In the Mounties' twenty-four years as a police force, only three Horsemen had been killed by Indians. Now, less than a month before Victoria's Jubilee, Almighty Voice had killed three more.

The Mounties' commissioner stopped the ball with the words, "The Police have other things to do besides dancing." At six the following morning, a special train left Regina HQ with reinforcements and a cannon heading for Duck Lake. Soon, a hundred armed men and two artillery pieces aimed at right angles surrounded the bluff. Watching from a distance, Almighty Voice's mother sang the Cree death song to her son. After a bitterly cold night, the bombardment began. Fifty shells, most of them high explosive shrapnel, tore into the trees. When the bluff was stormed to search for survivors, Almighty Voice, Tupean, and Standing-in-the-Sky were found blown to pieces.

In Slade's world, however, that wasn't the end of the saga. Another young Cree named Iron-child had joined the last war cry, and during the night before the cannonade, had slipped away in the dark.

The Mounties' official motto is "Maintiens le Droit." "Uphold the Right." But many people think it's "The Mounties always get their man." The origin of that statement was a story in the Fort Benton, Montana, Record in April 1877: "The Mounted Police are worse than bloodhounds when they scent the track of a smuggler, and they fetch their men every time." By 1897, that unofficial motto was a reality thanks to the uncanny and relentless tracking skills of a single Redcoat who thrived on hunting alone in the wilds.

After Custer's Last Stand, Sitting Bull and his Sioux warriors had crossed into Canada. Superintendent James "Bub" Walsh (dubbed "Sitting Bull's boss" by the American press) and Inspector Wilfred Blake had entered the Sioux camp hanging with scalps to lay down the law. To drive home their point, they'd arrested a horse thief amid the overwhelming odds. In 1885, Louis Riel's North-West Rebellion had tried to accomplish what it had failed to do in the Red River Rebellion of 1870. The Mounties had crushed the insurrection and sent Riel to the gallows.

Constable Edward Drinkwater, the great-grandfather of Lee Clarke, co-author of Slade's GHOUL, was a Mountie from 1885 to 1909, and served during the North-West Rebellion.

Now, the Mounted Police had silenced the last war cry: what history records as the final battle between white men and Indians in all of North America. The Mounted's contingent in London could hold their Stetsons high among the other "Heroes for Victoria" at her Diamond Jubilee. One man, they'd say, could not attend. He had other work. Inspector Wilfred Blake was on the hunt.

Not until a century later (see CUTTHROAT) would the ugly truth about Blake's deep-seated genetic psychosis be revealed, when C/Supt. Robert DeClercq found the cache of grisly trophies hidden in the false bottom of the inspector's regimental trunk. On that final hunt during which he vanished into the mists of myth, Blake tracked Iron-child across the North-West and up into the Rocky Mountains.

Here's the beginning of HEADHUNTER. Meet the Mad Mountie:

 

The Headhunter is loose on the streets of Vancouver. The victims are everywhere - floating in the Fraser River, buried in a shallow grave, nailed to an Indian totem pole on the university campus. All are women. All are headless. Then the photographs arrive. Carefully posed shots of the women's heads stuck on poles. Enough to convince Superintendent Robert DeClercq that the Mounties are dealing with a unique brand of killer. A killer whose sexual psychosis stretches back through the steaming Ecuadorian jungle and a scream-filled New Orleans dungeon to a dead-of-winter manhunt in the Rocky Mountains a century ago.

"Bizarre! Full of tension and mystery, with unforgettable scenes and weird happenings." - The Scotsman

"First rate, compelling, nerve-tingling. A novel of sex, death, and the macabre. Extraordinarily vivid. A thinking man's TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE. It works exceptionally well." - The Vancouver Sun

"Well written, well researched, and a gripper." - The Daily Mail, London

"Awesome. A tour de force! A brilliant, shocking, bizarre story. Moves at a crackling pace. HEADHUNTER does for the mind what a roller coaster does for the body." - Australian Magazine

If you're one of those people driven crazy by loose ends and unanswered questions, and you're wondering what happened to the Mad Mountie in the Rocky Mountains, here's the answer:

Michael Slade (see BIO) was born at Fort Whoop-Up in May 1947. That October, his parents moved to Fort Garry, where they settled in Wildwood Park. So, within his first year, Slade lived at both ends of the Great March, and along the route that Blake blazed with his 4,000-mile dogsled trek into the wilds, and later on his manhunt of Iron-child.

Have you ever been attacked by a mad dog? Not a barking, snarling, baring of teeth fright, but an all-out attack where the berserk beast sinks its fangs and tries to tear you apart? Slade has. As a preschooler. In Wildwood Park.

Wildwood has an interesting layout. Not only does it sit in a bow in the Red River, but the main road encircles it by following the water. Looping off that lariat are horseshoe-shaped streets called "sections." The sections bear alphabet letters. Slade lived in H Section.

The houses in each section line both sides of the U. Those inside the loop are divided by a central walkway. The walkway in H Section is where the attack occurred. Here is Slade on his tricycle at the scene of the crime (taken shortly after the Winnipeg Flood, when the water rose past the windows, forcing evacuation).

Winnipeg in the winter is bitterly cold. The Great White North. Note Slade's snowsuit.

Even when the snow retreats, the cold hangs on. So on the day of the attack, Slade was in his snowsuit pedaling his trike on the central walkway when a vicious dog ran between the houses and tore into his leg. Slade let out a scream and tried to kick the beast away. Refusing to let go, the mad dog ripped and gnashed with its fangs.

Luckily, Slade had a dog of his own. As you'd expect from the son of a pilot, his dog's name was Jet. Jet was a Shetland collie (now called a Shetland sheepdog), a miniature version of Lassie, a breed that is highly protective.

On hearing Slade scream, Jet came dashing from the far side of their home. The dogfight was a mismatch. Jet was smaller. The counterattack gave Slade an opening to stand up on the trike's seat. The dogfight raged around him, and he feared Jet was getting killed. The mad dog would shake off the Sheltie and bite into Slade's leg again, only to have Jet recover and pounce. Then neighbors responded with weapons.

The doctor summoned told Slade's mother that if not for his clothing, the boy would have lost his leg. The fangs shredded the snowsuit to tatters, but didn't get through his jeans and longjohns. If not for Jet, Slade might have lost his life.

Police put down the mad dog.

Slade's father returned from a flight to learn of the incident. He found his son in his room, hugging Jet. As you'd expect from a professional artist (his dad's job before the War), Slade's room had a Creative Corner. On the table was a looseleaf binder with blank pages for drawing. Slade's father sat down on the edge of the bed with the binder in his lap, and drew a swift sketch of the "hero" of the day. You can see the binder holes down the left edge. Note the damage to Jet's eye. He recovered.

The name of the mad dog was Sparky.

Decades later, Sparky became the name of the mad dog killer - the psychotic personality - in HEADHUNTER.

Above is a photo of Slade's father reading with him.

Below is a photo of Slade reading with his daughter. Note the look in Rebecca's eyes and the bit lip. Is she into the story, or what? The book is FRANKENSTEIN. She would grow up to co-write as Slade from HANGMAN on.

Except for instilling a strong moral code - how to do "the right thing" - the greatest gift a parent can bestow on a child is to read with him or her. Note the word "with," not "to." TV, movies, and video games are no substitute. They foster consumers, not creaters, for all the child must do is absorb someone else's creation. In reading, however, there is another step. Electricity sparks in an author's brain, and he or she creates a fantasy world. That same juice taps the letters on a keyboard to type strange black squiggles on a white background. The reader must take those squiggles and recreate the fantasy world in his/her imagination, and then go "live" in it. The result is the child learns how to create something from nothing, for his/her fantasy won't mirror the author's.

Reading "with" a child is a performance art. The trick isn't to drone on in a monotone, to put the child to sleep, but to act it out in various voices while the child reads along. Bring the squiggles to life.

So let's meet one of history's most animated storytellers. That most formidable force: the doting English grandmother! (See the effect of the Flood on the photo?) Somewhere in that bookcase is her magic wand: the unexpurgated tales of the Brothers Grimm.

Remember "The Wolf and the Seven Kids"? A mother goat warns her kids to beware while she's out shopping, and comes home to find her house torn apart. A wolf sleeping outside has something struggling in his stomach, so she cuts him open, and out come her kids. After substituting stones, she sews the wolf shut. The wolf awakes and goes to the well for a drink. When he stoops over, the stones drag him down and he drowns.

When Grandma read that story, Slade's role was to howl like the wolf. Her hand would repeatedly squeeze his stomach for the squirming of the kids. She would do their crying. Slitting the belly was a finger sweep from Slade's navel up to his chin. Sewing in the stones was a zigzag back down. The wolf tumbling into the well was a howl through Slade's cupped hands.

Reading a story with Grandma was thrilling stuff. And, of course, the Brothers Grimm (Jakob 1785-1863; Wilhelm 1786-1859) have stood the test of time. Their "fairy tales" are untouchable by censors. Fairy tales like "The Robber Bridegroom."

"What will it be tonight, love?"

"Tell me the one about the chopped finger, Granny."

A miller betroths his daughter to a secret robber. To find out who she's marrying, the bride-to-be sneaks into his house and hides behind a barrel...

Quote: "No sooner had she spoken than the wicked robbers came home, dragging another young girl. They were drunk and paid no attention to her screams and moans. They gave her wine to drink, three glasses full, one white, one red, one yellow, and her heart burst in two. Then they tore off her fine clothes, put her on a table, chopped her beautiful body into pieces, and sprinkled them with salt. The poor bride behind the barrel shuddered and trembled, for now she saw what the robbers had in mind for her. One of them caught sight of a gold ring on the murdered girl's little finger, and when it wouldn't come off easily, he took an ax and chopped off the finger. But the finger jumped over the barrel and fell straight into the bride's lap. The robber took a candle and went looking for it..."

How many taboos can you spot in that one? Pedophilia? Kidnapping? Drunkenness? Sadism? Drugging? Stripping? Butchering? Cannibalism? Greed? Mutilation?... It does put the grim in the Brothers Grimm, doesn't it?

The end result of "raising a reader" was this:

No, you're not looking at Rodin's statue of THE THINKER, despite the hand on the chin. You're looking at a candid shot of the Daydreamer, caught doing what Slade calls "drifting away." He's creating a fantasy world in his imagination, so that he can time warp from the real world to that one, and live for the moment in that alternate reality.

Which would lead to real trouble with the headhunter covers.

Are you wondering why there's a target sight over Manchester Park on the Wildwood map? If so, it's because that's where HEADHUNTER began. With a fever.

Manchester Park was a wildwood: an ungroomed forest. For grade one, Slade's route to school saw him cut through a neighbor's yard and follow the red path to Manchester Park. In fact, there were two paths through the tangled woods. The Witchy Path to the north skirted three totem poles. The poles, carved by neighborhood youths, had Thunderbird, Flying Bird, and Big Mouth monsters. Imagine how they looked in fog, rain, snow, the blazing leaves of autumn, and the sunlight shafts of spring. The Ghosty Path to the south was a gamble. It was blocked by a pond crossed on a raft. If the raft was on your side, you could pole across like Huck Finn. If the raft was on the far side, you had to retreat to the start and take the Witchy Path.

That was a bad year for the flu. Slade's temperature spiked on the Witchy Path as he walked the mile to school, and a feverish hallucination brought the totem poles to life. When he threw up in class, the school sent him home. He was sitting on the curb waiting for a bus, when, by chance, his dad drove by on his way home from an overnight flight.

Wildwood was served by an all-in-one shopping center. A gas station, with a soda fountain, a pharmacy, a food section, and a clothing nook. Father and son stopped at the drugstore near Manchester Park to stock up on flu medications. Because he'd be sick in bed for days to come, Slade wandered off to the comic racks. Comic books were at the back, past the magazines, and that's how he got waylaid by the headhunter cover on one of the "armpit slicks." That's what their publishers called them, armpit slicks, the men's magazines of the 1950s that catered to the wild adventure and sexual fantasies of men who came home from the War.

This isn't the actual cover, but you get the idea.

Have you ever been so feverish that you hallucinated? Only later would it become evident how ill Slade really was. His temperature rose to dangerous degrees above 100F. It wasn't the Daydreamer's usual "drifting away," it was getting sucked in. One of the headhunters might as well have grabbed Slade by the throat and yanked him into the cover, for his delirium had him surrounded by actual Jivaros. His fever had melted the turn-off switch, so there was no escape.

Not until his father's hand turned over the cover. "Does that picture frighten you?" he asked. "It's meant to frighten me, to frighten men. We all have to learn how to conquer fear. To do that, simply turn over the cover."

The Great Flight west took place between grades two and three. The move from Winnipeg to Vancouver. Goodbye, Great White North. Hello, Lotusland.

The second headhunter cover was waiting in a drugstore on the West Coast. Again, this one's a stand-in.

This time, it wasn't fever. It was a trance.

Have you ever seen a first-class hypnotist? In Slade's case, it was Reveen, the Impossibilist. His stage act ends with post-hypnotic suggestion. That involves bringing the mesmerized group out of its trance, and implanting each with a notion. One man is told to leave the stage, but when his foot hits the bottom step, he'll realize that he left his tie behind. Returning to the stage, he'll ask Reveen for another. Eventually, he has so many ties around his neck that those in the theater can't see his chin.

Well, this was like that. The Amazon image entrancing Slade brought back the feverish horror of having Jivaros hunting his head. Deja vu. But again, his father's hand turned over the cover. "Remember what I told you?"

Grade three included a field trip to the Vancouver Museum. There, three exhibits riveted Slade's attention. A painting of Jesus, with eyes that followed you around the museum. The mummy of a child. And a genuine shrunken head.

Here's the author photo for GHOUL. The head is on the table.

Though a different head, this is what it's like up close. And now Slade knew exactly what those headhunters did with their trophies.

What's the worst thing that ever happened to you? A trauma so severe that it changed the course of your life. Here's Slade's.

To fully grasp the effect on Slade, you need to know his dad.

First, his father had nerves of steel. From age nineteen on, he flew a bomber in the War (see SWASTIKA and CRUCIFIED). Forty-seven combat missions with 1-in-5 odds of not returning from each. Imagine a revolver in your hand, with five chambers, one with a bullet. Spin the cylinder, put the gun to your head, and pull the trigger. Repeat that game of Russian roulette forty-seven times. Your odds are 2-in-100 of surviving the War.

Second, he was a natural leader, humorist, and public speaker. Need a commanding officer for air cadets? He was your man. As evidenced by the condolences sent, he was idolized by the youths. Need a master of ceremonies? He was your man. But most of all, in a crisis, you could depend on him. One story - pieced together from several sources - illustrates that.

A man returned from the War with anger management issues. He brought back a war trophy taken from a Nazi. A handgun with ammunition. His son was warned on pain of a whipping never to touch the pistol. That was an era when every boy played Cowboys & Indians and Guns. So the boy played with the real gun and blew off his finger. The father was away when he learned of the injury and went berserk. The mother was afraid her husband might kill his son, for he was on his way home, enraged, to make good on his earlier threat.

Who could she call?

Slade's father was waiting when the man stormed in the door. The man had his belt off with the buckle hanging down. The boy was behind Slade's dad. The man shouted for the buffer to get out of the way. Slade's father told the man the boy had suffered enough. The person to blame was the person who left a loaded gun around, and in order to get at his son, he would have to go through him.

In the end, he talked the man down.

Third, he was a father who put his heart, mind, and soul into that job. Here's Slade's first train set, which his father created when the boy was three. It's called The Countryside. See the planes at the airport, and the accurate runway configuration? See how the knotholes are sunk to make ponds? See the tractor and the animals on the farm, with the cash crop in $ signs? See the school bell ringing, with the kids running to class? And how the dog follows one along the street?

Slade's dad made him a soapbox racer that flew like the wind. And a two-story fort with a ladder inside, a periscope, secret passages with hidden codes, and an inkwell filled with "invisible ink" (lemon juice that turned brown when Dad warmed the paper in the kitchen). When they flew in a plane, Slade went to the cockpit. When they drove in a car, his dad pulled into the big bakery, the dairy, the Coca-Cola plant, you name it, and talked each manager into giving his son a tour. He was never turned down. When it snowed, he spent hours building slides and tunnels, wetting them to freeze. When Slade passed the auditorium at school, he could hear his dad whistling. Single-handedly, he was constructing and painting the stage for the Christmas concert. And so on...

Every day was a big adventure being with him.

On the morning of December 10, 1956, Slade came down to breakfast to learn he wasn't going to school. His father's flight had "gone missing" in the Cascade Mountains the night before.

Pilots called the Cascade Mountains "the Graveyard of the Air." Wind roars in from the Pacific, up the Fraser Valley, and slams into them. Air currents change in the blink of an eye. Downdrafts can mean there's suddenly no air under the wings. Flying a piston and propeller plane, not a jet, Slade's father had run into a deadly winter storm. Icing became so heavy that an engine burst into fire. Unable to maintain altitude, he turned around. While flying blind, something went wrong with the guidance beacon. Then the plane vanished from radar.

A massive air rescue was launched in dangerous weather. The turbulence was so violent that searchers were torn from their cockpit seats despite being belted in, and one pilot was almost knocked unconscious. Visibility was nil, for it snowed every day for a month. Eventually, the search was called off, and what became of the plane remained a mystery.

For Slade, life hung suspended. Historical events proved those lost could survive in the mountains. A schoolmate suggested survivors could eat dead passengers. At Christmas, he got his dad's gifts, all hand-created, but his dad wasn't there. Every morning from December 10 on, he'd rush down from his bedroom to see if his dad had returned overnight. As the weeks wore on, hope dimmed to an ember. And that's when he walked into a store on an errand for his mother, and found the third headhunter cover waiting for him.

Again, a stand-in. Jivaro covers were common in the 50s.

The jolt of seeing it kicked in the nine-year-old's fight or flight response. He turned and fled from the store so fast that he smashed the glass door. In hindsight, it's easy to work out the psychology. Losing control of your mind is a terrifying experience. It only happened to Slade once, because of a feverish flu, but left him trapped amid bloodthirsty headhunters harvesting trophies to shrink. Until his dad freed him.

Though much weaker, the second incident involved a trance. Again, his father broke the spell. Now, the boy was hoping against hope that his father was still alive, and having to cope alone with this hypnotic phobia was tantamount to admitting his dad was dead. Better to avoid it through denial. Patients with terminal cancer go through the same thought process.

Also, there was the horror of severed heads. What's the classic image that tells an explorer he's entering barbaric territory? A head or skull stuck on a pole. The Celts and Picts were headhunters. What did the English mount on the walls of York and Traitors' Gate to warn against treason? Severed heads. What do Islamic terrorists post on the Internet to horrify Westerners? Beheadings. The reason beheading works so well on the human psyche can be found in the French Revolution. The human brain can survive for up to a minute on its current blood supply. After the guillotine fell, many heads lived on. The executioner would hold them up and show them their headless bodies to thrill the vengeful mob.

You can run, but you can't hide, so here's where Slade's trauma got worse.

"Full of spooky weird stuff, fast-paced action, and a surprise ending. This is a thriller that works. The pace speeds up steadily as hunters and hunted close in on each other. There are twists and turns, false leads and sudden shocks, and some serious shoot-em-up action. Like a series of veils drawn away from the criminal one by one, you get clues, but probably won't be able to figure out whodunit. HEADHUNTER will keep you interested to the end." - The (Montreal) Gazette

What happened next reads like science fiction. One of those tales of a humming, invisible force field that won't let anyone through. For that's what halted Slade the next time he went to a store that sold magazines. He and the door were like the same poles of two magnets. They repelled each other, and the boy physically could not cross the threshold.

Again, hindsight reveals the psychology. If he couldn't get into the store, he wouldn't face the headhunter cover. If he didn't face the cover, he didn't need to face up to his father's by now almost certain death. One had become psychologically representative of the other, and his mind was protecting him from that overwhelming pain.

That, however, gave rise to another anxiety. The mid 1950s were very repressive years. McCarthyism, the Hollywood Blacklist, the Comics Code Authority, school drills with kids hiding under their desks against atomic bombs, nuclear air raid sirens going off unannounced to keep you on your toes, etc. The word "pregnant" was so dirty that it could not be uttered on I LOVE LUCY. Alfred Hitchcock could not have a flushing toilet in his movies. Elvis Presley could not be filmed below the waist. Conformity to the norm was a rigid, paranoid rule, and if you were a "nut" on the West Coast who stepped out of line, you were involuntarily "sent to Essondale."

Essondale was the "nuthouse" in the woods by the Fraser River, where mad doctors in white coats pumped you full of drugs behind barred windows, and kept you caged in a straitjacket in a padded room, so they could strap you into a chair for electro-shock therapy, then carve out bad parts of your brain in operations called lobotomies. You have read or seen ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST, right?

In case you think this is exaggeration, here's another writer, Stephen Osborne:

When I was a kid, Essondale and insane asylum were synonyms that when spoken aloud in a whisper or a hiss could elicit shivers of terror in the schoolyard. Esso­n­dale we knew to exist in a dark vortex beyond the city limits, where also could be found the penitentiary, and a place called Crease Clinic - where mental patients were subject to brain-creasing operations or, according to another theory, had grooves of varying depths cut into their brains by a tool like the router we were learning to use in Industrial Arts class.

Essondale!

That's where Slade was sure to go if anyone learned his secret. And it was inevitable that someone did. How many times can you go to the store with your friends on the day the new comics come in, and be forced to ask them to buy for you while you wait outside? Eventually, Slade confided in his best friend, and said he'd be going to Essondale.

His friend, being a best friend, would have none of that. It wasn't going to happen without a fight. What they had to do was find a way to "break the spell." He'd go into a store on a scouting mission and case the magazine racks. Slade would know where not to look when he entered between two friends. And if he felt compelled to look (obsession & compulsion are Jekyll & Hyde), his friend would throw a jacket over his head the moment his face began to turn, and the flanking boys would drag Slade backward out of the store.

Guess what? It worked! The force field vanished. And Slade admitted to himself that his dad was dead.

That May, five months after the plane disappeared, a mountain climber found the wreckage in the Cascades. The arrow below indicates where the plane hit the rock face.

In this photo of the peak from 1994, you can see the scar where the plane hit and remnants of the wreckage. Just fifty feet higher and the North Star would have cleared the mountain and been home-free in the Fraser Valley. The irony is that after surviving the War against 2-in-100 odds, Slade's dad fell prey to a vicious winter storm combined with mechanical failure. The Nazis couldn't get him, but Mother Nature did.

In 1994, his pilot's flight bag was found on the mountain, with his name still etched in gold.

Slade's youthful psychotherapist would grow up to become a top-notch trauma and cancer surgeon. If you were in a serious car crash that rearranged your organs, he was the doctor who put you back together in a marathon operation. At the height of his career, he suffered a brain tumor. Slade gave the eulogy at his funeral.

If you work out daily with weights, you are going to get muscles. Likewise, if you constantly stretch your imagination, it will strengthen under your control. One incident of "Just my imagination running away with me" was enough for Slade, so from then on, he worked at turning "drifting away" into conscious "projection." The result would be a useful tool in both of his careers.

Have you ever played with a yo-yo? Do you know how to "walk the dog"? You project the yo-yo from your hand and let it spin on its extended string near the floor, then you "walk" it along. A flick of the wrist brings the yo-yo back to your hand.

A lawyer trying a murder case gets full disclosure. Detailed photos of the crime scene and the autopsy. Police reports, witness statements, and recordings of conversations caught by wiretaps. In his legal career, Slade has acted in more than a hundred murder cases. Armed with such disclosure, he would go to the site where the murder was committed, and project his imagination back in time to the event. After watching what went on in front of his mind's eye, he would - depending on which hat he wore - construct the defense or prosecution case.

The same with writing. Why sit alone in a room telling yourself stories if you can go out and "live" them instead by projecting your imagination into real places and recording what you "see?"

Here's the map from HEADHUNTER.

Slade was called to the bar in 1972. His first law office was in the vicinity of Headhunter Headquarters, number 1 on the map. Now, all he required was a client. A call to the Legal Aid Society gave him a lucky break. The case they sent him was the first charge under Canada's new prostitution law. A new crime is a lawyer's dream, for that means every argument is open to him. Other lawyers haven't mined out the gold.

It was easy to get that first charge tossed on a technicality. Since prostitutes network to protect themselves against bad johns, word about Slade having beaten the rap spread through the oldest profession. Overnight, Slade became the "hookers' lawyer," and went on to defend about 200 soliciting cases. Hookers charging big bucks in the fancy hotels. Junkies who'd do anything for the price of a cap. Young boys on Broughton waiting for the chickenhawk. Transvestites and transsexuals. And dominatrices.

Not only did that give Slade a window on the nitty-gritty of the sexual underground, but it also allowed him to ask each client, "What's the kinkiest john you've ever had?" Soon, his practice expanded into obscenity charges. While representing a distributor facing thirty-odd trials at what became known as the Dirty Assize, Slade encountered the twist that the three garbagemen - Jeff, Slim, and the Perfessor ("the world's foremost authority on women, liquor, and life") - find in the garbage can at the end of HEADHUNTER.

In his first year of practice, Slade's name wasn't in the phonebook. However, the senior partner of a major corporate law firm shared the same last name and first initial. Soon, that lawyer's waiting room was inundated with inappropriately dressed streetwalkers. Slade got an icy call asking him to fix the problem. "What do you want me to do?" "Change your name," the caller said.

One client was incensed that an undercover cop had busted her by pulling up alongside her stroll in a farm truck filled with manure. "How was I supposed to know he was a cop?" Outside the courtroom, Slade told the officer, "That was unfair." To which he replied, "No way. I gave her a fighting chance. She should have guessed from the fact the truck was full of pig shit."

Day in, day out, Slade was up against the same clutch of vice cops. So, of course, they needled each other.

In the early 1970s, the obscenity law was crumbling. The vice squad raided a theater showing an S&M porn film. The case came before a judge who had a weakness. He couldn't make a decision. Consequently, he was known for endless adjournments. Two years went by without the case coming to trial, and the film was getting weaker as porn went mainstream. Finally, the prosecutor demanded the trial proceed, and the judge sent the lawyers to the police station to preview the film.

The screening took place in the inspector's office. More like the inspector's broom closet, for the overcrowded police station was bulging on all sides. Two detectives, three lawyers, and the exhibit projectionist were crammed into the cubicle to watch a woman in a G-string get suspended from a ceiling beam and whipped with a cat-o'-nine-tails. The phoniness was she wasn't tied, but holding onto the cord, and the whip was made of satin ribbons that left no marks. Slade couldn't resist teasing one detective, "If this is your idea of porn, you must have a dull sex life."

Macho cops do not like having their virility challenged. Chuffing, he said, "You need the sound for the full effect." With that, he cranked the volume up to ear-bleed level. The onscreen woman let out a scream that could wake the dead, and someone off-camera shouted, "Hit her again! Give her the whip! Rip the skin off her back!"

Suddenly, the other door to the office burst open. Filling it was a burly detective as mad as could be. "What the hell's going on in here!" he bellowed. "We're trying to run a lineup!"

Behind him were eight of the most terrified conmen you've ever seen, having to listen to what the cops are doing to some poor woman in the next room, and wondering if they were next.

Nothing irked the transvestites who lived their lives as women more than being charged under their male names. The rule was only transsexuals - "those who'd had the nip and tuck" - were charged as females.

Slade's second office was in Gastown, on Maple Tree Square. Number 7 on the map, that's where pioneer Vancouver began. One day, the receptionist sent in a new client. Slade found himself facing a drop-dead-gorgeous femme fatale straight out of film noir. The redhead made him feel like Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe. Then "she" proudly slapped down her "before" and "after" pictures - the nip, but not the tuck - and said that's why "she" was hooking. To fund the operation.

When the case was called in court, "she" made a grand entrance. Medusa hair and makeup that took hours of work. White linen suit hugging an hourglass figure. Bracelet of a snake coiled around "her" wrist, with the fanged head between "her" thumb and forefinger. As "she" came down the central aisle of the amphitheater courtroom, the crusty old sheriffs - ex-cops all - were nudging each other and whispering they wouldn't mind spending a night with her. You could hear snorting and a choke or two when the charge was read.

Slade got the charge quashed because they left out the words "in a public place." After court, his wife met him to go for dinner. Prime Minister Trudeau had endorsed a nearby Chinese restaurant, the route to which took the Slades past the "Moonlight Arms," number 8 on the map. His client was already back at work, and as they passed she blew her lawyer a meaningful kiss, asked him if he'd liked to go upstairs for his tip, and told him he'd learn the real meaning of "mouthpiece."

Slade declined. As they continued along the street, Slade's wife asked him, "What was that all about?" He replied, "It's not what you think. That woman is actually a man." The skeptical look he got in return said, I know a woman when I see one. To this day, that client remains one of the best-looking females Slade has encountered.

He loved being the "hookers' lawyer." Never a dull moment.

Another transvestite client was at the other end of the scale. He had nothing going for him. First, he was ugly as a man, and had a Nixon beard shadow. To mask it took so much pancake makeup that he looked like a cadaver. A chronic junky, his figure was a skeleton. And when he cross-dressed, he had no fashion sense.

Slade had a rule: no matter how high he climbed on the criminal food chain, he'd always keep the clients from his first year. This client got charged so many times that Slade could have retired. Soliciting, heroin possession, petty theft. Again, and again, and again. He couldn't afford the operation. All his money went on junk. So while he lived as a woman, he was always charged as a man. And as the years went by, the affront of that made him more and more high-strung.

Slade's third office was between map numbers 6 and 7. During construction, the skylight got delayed a month at the U.S. border. The old office was gone, and the new office wasn't ready. So, the interview room was the adjacent cafe.

To speed things up, Slade was painting the office when his secretary announced there was a crisis next door. She feared his long-time client was about to snap. So, dressed in painter's overalls and a painter's cap, and with speckles of latex dotting his face, Slade went to the cafe. Due to its central location, the coffee shop was a hangout for taxi drivers and cops. By now, his client was balding, and wearing the cheapest of wigs. His clothing was a mishmash of female garments from consignment stores, wrapped with a ratty fox stole. All but passed out from a recent fix, a gaunt junky had her head resting on one of his shoulders.

Slade walked over, sat down, and asked, "What's wrong?"

His client was twitchy from not having fixed. Not until this was dealt with. Shaking in his hand was his latest charge of soliciting, under his male name. Suddenly, he could take the disrespect no more. He slammed the paper down on the table and shrieked, "THAT'S DISGUSTING! I'M NOT A HOMO! I'M A LESBIAN!"

Bursting into tears, he jumped up and ran wailing from the cafe. Every head in the coffee shop turned in Slade's direction, just as the nodding-off girlfriend collapsed into his lap. From the look on their faces, all were wondering what proposition this just-off-work painter had made to the hysterical whatever-it-was.

And guess who was in the cafe?

The detective who Slade had needled at the movie screening approached his table. "You're right, counsellor," he said, with a big smile on his face. "Your sex life is so much more interesting than mine."

Slade's first murder trial was a horrific affair. The police were called to a bus station. In the men's room, a man was standing on his head in a urinal, shouting that he was Jesus Christ. The car he'd driven there was stolen, so he was sentenced to a few months in jail. To protest his imprisonment, he would strip naked, defecate, and smear himself and his cell walls. The jailers would hose him down, move him, and clean up. On one such occasion, they found a torn-up piece of paper on the floor. It was a handwritten death warrant for his wife. It ended with "the witch shall be burned at the stake, and all those who led her astray shall eat her ashes."

The note was ignored, the man was released, and he returned home. Gazing in through the kitchen window, he saw his wife talking on the phone. He could hear the conversation - an auditory hallucination - with her lover. In fact, she was talking to a female relative. Bursting in through the back door, he pulverized her with a baseball bat.

Only with anti-psychotic drugs could psychiatrists find the man fit to stand trial. But even then, it was iffy. Slade and his co-author for HEADHUNTER defended the case in tandem. A lawyer to deal with the evidence, and a lawyer to calm the accused. Have you ever witnessed someone turn psychotic in front of your eyes? They did. In the interview room. The room filled with a smell like rancid goat cheese. There's the sweat of work, the sweat of fear, and the sweat of insanity.

Deep in the trial, the prosecution called a surprise witness. The man's grandmother testified that he had told her about the killing. That might show that he understood "the nature and quality of his act." In cross-examination, Slade's first question was, "Mrs. X, why have you flown here all the way from Quebec to give the evidence that could send your grandson to prison for life?"

Like all witnesses, she had been kept out of the courtroom. An elderly woman, rather confused, she scowled at Slade like, Who are you? Her answer was, "The police told me that talking to my grandson's lawyer would help him."

She was pointing at the prosecutor.

The prosecutor jumped. He knew nothing about the police ruse. Abruptly, the woman cried out, "Oh, how that boy has suffered!" And launched into a litany of child abuse, holding a phantom baby up by one leg and hitting him with her fist. Then she switched hands and did it again. Then she acted out burning him with cigarettes...

None of this evidence had been tested for admissibility. The judge ordered Slade to control his witness. Slade replied, "She's not my witness, my lord." The judge ordered the sheriffs to clear the jury box. The jury weren't leaving their seats. They wanted to hear this. Some began crying. Even the tough men were staring at the accused in a new light. When pandemonium subsided and the smoke cleared, it didn't take the jury long to find him not guilty by reason of insanity.

The acquitted man was sent to the Riverside Forensic Psychiatric Hospital, the successor to Essondale.

A week later, Slade was doing out-of-court business. Among other chores, he picked up a box of business cards from the printers. Then he drove to the two jails - Oakalla and the B.C. Pen - and the psychiatric hospital to see clients. While talking with the man who'd been recently acquitted, Slade was called out of the room to consult with the hospital's director. When he returned to his law office, he found the box of business cards half empty. He called the printers and was assured that he had received the full order.

Then the phone began ringing.

"Macabre. A very polished tale." - Sunday Telegraph, London

"An encyclopedia of weirdness. HEADHUNTER is an engrossing tale of crime and insanity in the Great White North. Slade is three lawyers who specialize in criminal insanity cases. Their experience shows. There's enough assorted kinkiness, perversion, and psychosis in HEADHUNTER to fill a dozen insane asylums. The setting is refreshing, with real suspense and interesting characters." - Asbury Park Press.

"Michael Slade - a trio of criminal lawyers - has spent many years sifting through the manifold perversions of humankind - and it shows! HEADHUNTER is undoubtedly the most chillingly impressive tome of its genre I've read in simply ages. I can assure you that the ending is a total surprise. Gruesomely mesmerizing, HEADHUNTER is compulsive reading." - Kerrang!

"Compulsively readable through to the really shattering surprise ending." - Weekend Australian

Inmates acquitted by reason of insanity and inmates assessed for fitness to stand trial were confined in the same hospital. Having "borrowed" the business cards, Slade's client was handing them out.

One caller was a Canadian who had volunteered to fight with the U.S. military in Vietnam. He had gone there armed with a supply of LSD, and served as a gunner in helicopter raids. Supposedly, he fitted one of those WWI leather flying helmets like Snoopy wore to battle the Red Baron with a horse's bridle in his mouth rigged to fire his weapon. Ripped on acid, he would wrap himself around the machine gun so it extended like a huge mechanical penis, then throw back his head and use the ratatat-tat vibrations to make him ejaculate.

When questioned by the brass about his combat behavior, his reply was, "We're here to fuck the Cong. That's what I'm doing." He was discharged as unsuitable for warfare.

Back in Canada, he was suspected of waylaying tourist campers in the woods, and staking them facedown over boulders to sodomize, before dropping heavy rocks on their heads.

In court, he refused to acknowledge that he understood the charge. His response was gibberish. The judge told Slade and his co-author to consult with their client. No sooner were the three locked in the interview room than it filled with the same reek of rancid goat cheese that the lawyers had smelled only once before.

Eventually, the Attorney General sent Slade a murder case to prosecute. A French Foreign Legionnaire was sitting in the desert when he felt a painful wrench inside his skull. He was sitting sideways to the North and South Poles, and formed the delusion that a burst of polar electricity had interacted with his front-to-back brain waves, causing his brain to jerk a quarter turn around in his skull. His brain's greater length being crammed into his skull's lesser width caused excruciating headaches. Only by standing on the North Pole could he reverse the sideways realignment. So that's why he came to Canada.

As the deadline for his visit neared, he turned more psychotic. He began hearing voices talking through the walls conspiring to deport him before he could earn enough money for his northern trek. The upshot was he dressed in Foreign Legion combat fatigues and went on an urban shooting rampage, causing death.

"As any decent mystery writer knows, the more gruesome the killing, the better. This clever whodunit has everything you'd expect to find in a good heart-stopper. It has more madness than the average psychiatrist is likely to see in a decade. The action quickly explodes within the first few pages. It isn't until the tale draws to a finish that we're able to connect neatly all the bits and pieces so expertly placed to flirt with our curiosity. Suspense of the best variety compels us to keep on going no matter how grisly the reading becomes, or how chilling the manner in which it's able to keep us hanging in a consistently dazzling way." - The Victoria Times-Colonist

"WARNING: Not for the squeamish. A novel so terrifying it will haunt your dreams for weeks." - Book of the Month Club Magazine

"It's really good." - Alice Cooper in The Georgia Straight

As one judge put it injudiciously, "Counsel, you seem to have a corner on the crazy market." Though not his case, Slade took note of a local murder. It occurred in a skid road rooming house full of drunks and junkies. Two men were vying for the affection of a single woman. One night, she answered a knock on her door. There stood one of her suitors, with a gift. "I love you," he said, offering her a plate containing the head of the other man. Cops and lawyers called it "the John the Baptist killing."

In 1981, a recession took hold. Interest rates skyrocketed to 22%. The government slashed the legal aid budget by half. Obviously, there would be much less work for lawyers to do. Slade suggested to his partners that they ride out the downturn by jointly writing a novel. They asked if he had a plot in mind. Slade said, "Yes, I do."

"Write about what you know" is the mantra drummed into would-be novelists. Now, decades later, Slade teaches mystery writing at a university, and an annual writers' conference. He begins each course with two questions. "What's the worst thing that ever happened to you? And how are you using that trauma to power your fiction?" If a writer isn't using the most dramatic event in his or her life, then he or she is short-changing the reader with his or her lesser material.

The plot Slade pitched to his partners in a 100-page outline involved a Mountie named Wilfred Blake in the early days of the Horsemen (Slade's pioneer family history in BIO), a New Orleans dominatrix named Suzannah (his baptism as the "hookers' lawyer"), a psycho killer named Sparky (the mad dog attack in his childhood and trying insanity cases), and a cop who suffered a trauma in his youth that linked headhunter covers to the death of his dad. Instead of that father being the pilot of a doomed plane, he would be an out-of-work parent shamed by his son into taking the fateful flight to find employment. The guilt of causing his father's death would follow the cop into adulthood, and the case of a psychotic headhunter terrorizing the city would fixate his headhunter neurosis on the photos of severed heads sent to taunt the police. Obsessive-compulsive urges would make him blow up the photos. That's how he'd spot the anomaly Slade had seen on the Boston Common.

HEADHUNTER was published in 1984.

As a first-time author, Slade had no input into the cover. How full-circle that a book spawned by cover images of heads on stakes should be published with cover images of heads on stakes. Usually, publishers don't use other publishers' cover concepts. They want their own unique stamp on their editions. Here, however, the British image was not only picked up by the Americans, the French, and the Dutch, but the Americans - like the cop in the novel - also blew it up. As you can imagine, that image caused a stir. Particularly when it was displayed throughout London's transport system - both double-decker buses and the Underground - along with the police slogan, "Do you know this woman?"

The cover of a book aims to grab your attention. This image does for the same reasons outlined above in the comment about the French Revolution. That's also why - in a real-life full-circle to Winnipeg - this horror, among all the murders committed in the world that day, caught the attention of everyone, no doubt including you.

The proverb says, "You can't judge a book by its cover." In the case of HEADHUNTER, you can, and you can't. So, what about the novel itself?

You don't really think that three lawyers who came of age with the Second Wave feminists - the ones who broke down the barriers - sat down to write a novel about hacking the heads off women, do you? If so, there's a New York con man itching to sell you the Brooklyn Bridge. Every Slade novel is plotted from back to front. Why? Because that's how real-life crime unfolds. It starts with motive - the who in whodunit - and that, in turn, determines the victims. Given the motive in HEADHUNTER, the victims must be women.

HEADHUNTER was written as experimental fiction. Instead of the paint-by-numbers theory that every scene must lock into the story arc, the idea was to give the reader a sense of what cops and lawyers face in trying to make sense of the chaotic evidence clashing in real murder cases. Not all critics saw that. Here's one who did.

"One of the novel's more noteworthy achievements is a complex structure of flashback sequences and parallel story lines, which allow the authors to artfully play the old genre game of posing various solutions to the identity of the killer." - The Vancouver Sun

That structure - in reality - is why prosecutors solve trial whodunits one way, and defense lawyers usually unmask different killers. HEADHUNTER is what it is. You decide.

A quarter century has shown that as many women as men enjoy the novel. Slade asked a prominent barrier-breaker (her reaction to the plot was, "Holy shit!"), "Why do so many feminists like this book?" She was the first female lawyer to wear pants into court. The judge refused to hear her until she was in a skirt. She stepped out of court, removed her pants, and re-entered in her underwear, with the jacket of her suit as the world's shortest miniskirt. That caused the judge to freak. He ordered her to put on her pants. If there's one thing a lawyer understands, it's precedent. And that's why female lawyers are free to wear pants today.

The gist of her answer was this. Feminism - real feminism - is about complete equality. For too long, a female villain was a woman who flashed cleavage and leg, and manipulated men. Meanwhile, male villains were pistol-whipping and wrenching teeth out with pliers. What Slade created in the woman who creates Sparky could hold her own against any male villain in any novel.

The cover, of course, took on a life of its own. It became a lightning rod for those with a political agenda. Slade's favorite story is about a bookstore in which two female booksellers objected to having to look at the cover. The other booksellers objected to any censorship. They settled their disagreement by dividing the store down the middle. The two women would stay on the side with the women's washroom. HEADHUNTER would be set up to face the other side of the store. For the duration of its shelf life, the women wouldn't sell books, so as not to confront it. Instead, they would stock shelves and do accounts in their half of the store.

Slade admires that compromise. It reminds him of the biblical tale of King Solomon and the baby. But he prefers his father's method, based on Occam's razor: the simplest answer is often correct. "Does that picture frighten you?" he asked. "It's meant to frighten me, to frighten men. We all have to learn how to conquer fear. To do that, simply turn over the cover."

But what Slade anticipated most was the Mounties' reaction. HEADHUNTER is definitely not your granddad's Mountie story. The answer came when a local paper posed that question to an inspector - later superintendent - at a Vancouver detachment. "I thought it was good reading and very factual," he said. "I read it as a story and (the twist ending centering around an RCMP officer) didn't offend me at all."

Slade phoned the inspector to thank him for being magnanimous. He told Slade a story about when the pope was in Vancouver. That was not long after John Paul II had been shot in St. Peter's Square. So the Mounties created a cordon around the cathedral in which the pope was sleeping, with snipers ringing the rooftops. About three in the morning, an officer called the assault team and asked what they were doing. The answer? "Trying to figure out who's the Deep Throat feeding Michael Slade the inside scoop on us."

Slade told the inspector, "There is no Deep Throat. If you hang around the Mounties during court adjournments in a thousand cases, you'll overhear what they talk about."

"No need for that," said the inspector. "For a century, we've been depicted as caricatures. If you want to present us as we really are, I'll arrange interviews with the appropriate members."

Slade took him up on that offer, still honored by his successors, and has been writing about Special X ever since.

 

 

Slade on facebook | Slade on MySpace