Swift Current author Irene Bingham has written her first murder mystery. Inspired by two true real events that the author twisted together, the book And Heaven Finds a Witness takes place partially in the Yorkton area, and had a launch at the Yorkton Public Library.
Bingham started with two real events. One was a murder in Cook’s Inlet in Alaska in 1982. The other was the RCMP driving a replica of a truck across Canada trying to find witnesses in the Wells Gray murders.
“I’ve taken a cross of the two and come up with a solution in Yorkton. It’s a very simple incident nobody thinks about.”
The setting in Yorkton came from Bingham’s own past, as they lived in Yorkton for over 30 years. She also says that there were many witnesses in Yorkton who saw the truck that inspired the book.
Putting the book together took a lot of advanced planning, and Bingham mapped out the book well in advance of writing it. With this as her first time writing a novel, she says she wanted to make sure each chapter connected to the most important part of any murder mystery, the victims.
In a way, the book is a combination of Bingham’s dreams and her reality. She says part of the reason why she wanted to write a murder mystery was to become a police officer in fiction, as she always wanted to do in real life but never had the chance. On the other hand, a central character is a waitress at the local Dairy Queen, which was also Bingham’s job when she lived in the area.
Bingham has two novels in the works, one a sequel to this novel, inspired by another real murder, and the other a western, both based in Saskatchewan. The western began with a frustration with most western novels.
“I like Louis L’Amour westerns, but I don’t like the fact that the man is always the hero, so I figured that the lady should be the hero.”
Writing Saskatchewan stories is natural for Bingham, because that’s where her and her husband have lived all their life. She believes anything can happen here.
