Watching the detectives

Hart Hanson made his bones scripting crime TV. With his new novel, 'The Seminarian,' he channels the great literary private eyes

- JANET SOMERVILLE

In the new novel by TV producer Hart Hanson, private investigator Xavier Priestly and stuntwoman Dusty Queen look into her girlfriend's disappearance. The "engaging weirdos" in the book are based on people Hart has seen around Venice Beach, Calif.

There are two places that bestselling novelist and award-winning screenwriter Hart Hanson aches for: one is Toronto, and the other is the Gulf Islands off B.C.’s coast, where he spent his boyhood. Hanson spoke with the Star recently by phone from his home in San Francisco where he lives part of the year to be close to his grandchildren. The rest of the time he lives in the heart of Venice Beach, the colourful, eccentric Los Angeles community where his twisty, entertaining new crime novel, “The Seminarian,” is set.

Hanson said he’s grateful to his father for “making reading into a forbidden fruit. It was so desirable to me, so I read when I could. I had a secret stack of library books under my bed. Writers were so exotic when I was a boy on Vancouver Island. I’d never met any, so they were almost historical figures to me.”

After a year studying physics at the University of Victoria and realizing that “half the class seemed to get it instantly on a level that I had to work hard to understand,” Hanson enrolled at the University of Toronto to do a degree in English and political theory.

Living in residence at University College, he remembers in his freshman year gazing into Frank Watt’s creative writing seminar: “The room was all lit up and students were reading their work aloud. It sounds corny, but it looked like the best place on earth. A slice of heaven.” During the following term when Hanson participated in that workshop, he said, “I’ve never been so pleased to get somewhere in my life. That was the right room, and it changed everything.”