I have to admit, seeing the words ‘Licensed Private Investigator’ followed by a badge number did send a shiver of excitement down my spine when James B Petrie emailed us about his new novel Digging Deeper. When he’s not writing, James is locating missing persons, doing criminal background checks, carrying out domestic and child custody investigations and, yes, investigating murders. He knows what it is to earn your living as a PI, and he’s seen a lot in his 25-years operating Advanced Private Investigations.
Originally from Charlottetown in the tiny Canadian province of Prince Edward Island, James was washing cars in Alberta when he met a seasoned investigator in 1981. He became an associate, learned the skills, and ended up a licensed PI in Cary, North Carolina, where he set up his current firm. He’s gone from soap and sponge to detective, which sounds exactly like what might happen in an 80s detective novel.
Now, he’s gone full circle by setting his first Joe MacGregor mystery in Charlottetown, a peaceful place but in Digging Deeper, it’s one that holds many secrets. Crime fiction lovers are going to love this, too, because Joe’s first case is to find a missing crime author. With the quiet setting and the case itself, it all sounds as cosy as can be, but this is a novel informed by James’s real world experience, so you can expect plenty of authenticity.
With his fascinating background, we had to find out more about James, his character Joe, and his first book – which might be the first PEI PI crime fiction we’ve ever come across…
So, first off, why did you decide to become a crime author?
After decades of real investigations, I found myself with stories that deserved to be told in a form that could reach people who would never read a case file.
What are crime fiction lovers going to love about Dig Deeper?
The authenticity. Joe MacGregor investigates the way real investigators work: methodically, quietly, reading people rather than chasing them. Joe listens to what people say, notices what they do not say, and follows the thread that everyone else has dropped. Readers who love Stuart Woods, Michael Connelly or John D MacDonald will recognise that register immediately.
Who is Joe MacGregor and what’s the inspiration behind your protagonist?
Joe is a former Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer who left the force and set up as a private investigator in Cary, North Carolina. He knows Charlottetown the way you only know a place that has cost you something. He is dry, restrained and precise. He does not explain himself, and he does not waste words. I developed him by asking one question repeatedly: what would a man who has spent his life uncovering what people hide actually look like when he walks into a room?
What’s he up against in Dig Deeper?
Joe is hired by the brother of Raymond Connelly, a New York Times bestselling novelist who has vanished from his Brighton Shore estate. The Charlottetown police have closed the file. The official story is tidy and plausible. Joe’s job is to find the thread in that tidy story and pull it. What he finds is that the most dangerous person in the investigation is also the most composed — someone who planned carefully, read everything, and understood exactly how to make a disappearance look like a departure.
The setting immediately caught my eye. We don’t see much crime fiction from PEI and when we do I suppose we think it will be cosy. Are you going to confound expectation, or does it have a cosy vibe?
Deliberately not cosy. PEI has a literary identity built almost entirely around Anne of Green Gables, pastoral, gentle, nostalgic. Dig Deeper uses the same island geography to tell a completely different kind of story. The Basilica on Great George Street, the manicured estates of Brighton Shore, the quiet that settles over the island in the off-season, these are not cosy backdrops. They are places where things can be hidden effectively precisely because no one expects anything dark to happen there. The setting is essential to the story because the island’s reputation for innocence is exactly what the antagonist uses against everyone around her.
One thing worth mentioning is that Dig Deeper exists because I believe Joe MacGregor needed a soft landing on PEI before he told a heavier story. The reception has been great. People on the island have shown great interest, and there have even been some from Ontario and British Columbia who have asked where to find the book. Charles Mills at The Bookman in Charlottetown, calling it a five-star match for the genre, has confirmed that the story found its readers. That is all any writer can hope for.
The victim is an interesting character too, although deceased. Can you tell us more about Raymond Connolly, the author?
Raymond is the kind of man who has spent 40 years writing about the darkest corners of human motivation and never once suspected that someone was taking notes. He is charming, generous and genuinely gifted. He also has a fatal weakness – he cannot resist someone who truly understands his work. That weakness is what Callie MacIsaac finds and uses. The irony that a man who made his career documenting the perfect crime becomes the subject of one is not accidental. It is the whole engine of the story.
Secrets seems to be a big theme in the novel. How does Joe bring them to the fore and what other themes did you want to explore in this novel?
Every investigation is ultimately about secrets: who is keeping them, who is protecting them, and what they cost. In Dig Deeper, the secrets are layered. There is what Raymond’s assistant says happened. What the neighbour witnessed and chose not to report. There is what Raymond himself knew and chose not to act on.
Joe’s method is not to force secrets into the open but to create conditions where they surface on their own. The other theme I wanted to explore is complicity – how ordinary people become accessories to something they did not choose and cannot undo.
How much does your own background as a licensed PI inform the procedural side of the investigation, and how much creative license have you taken, for example to keep things moving and interesting?
Almost entirely. The way Joe conducts interviews, the specific questions he asks, the ones he does not ask, the physical details he notices, comes directly from 30 years of practice. Real investigation is not dramatic. It is repetitive, patient, and often boring until it suddenly is not. What I took creative license with was to compress it. A real investigation of this kind would take months. Joe moves faster because a novel requires momentum. But the method is authentic.
What are some of the crime books and authors that have inspired you, and what are you reading at the moment?
Currently, I’m reading whatever I can find that illuminates Prince Edward Island history for my novel, Joe. It goes further back in history. I have also recently read Ian Rankin; there is nobody better at using a city as a moral landscape, and that relationship between place and crime is something I think about constantly.
Aside from my history books, Michael Connelly is my primary influence; nobody constructs a procedural scene more precisely. I handwrote two of his novels word for word to understand how he built a scene. John D MacDonald gave me Travis McGee and the idea that a PI could be a genuine moral force in a corrupt world. Raymond Chandler gave me the voice, that dry, precise, slightly melancholy register that Dig Deeper tries to inhabit.
What’s next for Joe MacGregor and what’s next for James B Petrie?
I have a full-length novel called The Cages of Mount Herbert in final editorial review. It is a significantly larger and more serious work than Dig Deeper. Joe goes back to Prince Edward Island to investigate something the island’s establishment has spent decades trying to keep buried. It is the book I have been working toward for a long time. There is also an origin novel called Joe that traces MacGregor’s childhood on the island and the events that shaped the investigator he became.
Dig Deeper by James B Petrie is available now, and you can purchase a copy with our Amazon links below.
