Tom Ryan is an internationally best selling, award winning author, screenwriter and producer. His adult mystery debut THE TREASURE HUNTERS CLUB (2024) was an instant USA Today, Globe & Mail, and Toronto Star bestseller. His YA mystery KEEP THIS TO YOURSELF (2019) was the winner of the 2020 ITW Thriller Award for Best YA Thriller, the 2020 Arthur Ellis Award for Best YA Crime Book, and the 2021 Ann Connor Brimer Award. His follow-up YA mystery I HOPE YOU’RE LISTENING (2020) was the winner of the 2021 Lambda “Lammy” Award for Best LGBTQ Mystery. Tom, his husband and their dog live in Nova Scotia.
[Kelp Journal] First of all, tell us a little bit about where you’re from, because I think that it’s an interesting community that a lot of Americans are unfamiliar with.
[Tom Ryan] I grew up and I still live in Nova Scotia, which is on the east coast of Canada. The shorthand I like to tell people is that we’re sort of the Maine of Canada—very similar in terms of a couple of small cities, lots of coastal communities, lots of sailing, a seafaring culture in a lot of ways. I grew up in Cape Breton Island, which is on the far eastern end of the province, and I now live in Halifax, which is our biggest city.
[KJ] What is the population of Halifax?
[TR] The province hit a million people last year, and I’d say the city’s probably pushing around 650,000 or so.
[KJ] So it’s a big city. It’s a big community.
[TR] We’re the biggest city by quite a bit in the Maritime provinces. We feel even a little bit bigger maybe than we are, because we’re kind of the central hub for this part of Canada, and so we get all the bigger concerts, lots of great restaurants, a good nightlife, that kind of thing.
[KJ] Cool. So it’s a must-visit community?
[TR] Oh, absolutely. And one thing about Nova Scotia I’ll say very quickly is if you meet someone from Nova Scotia, they like to talk about Nova Scotia. They like to tell you to come visit Nova Scotia. If you do come visit, we’ll show you around. We’re very proud of where we come from. I think one of the things I love about living here is you really do get a sense of gratitude. People feel really grateful and fortunate to live here and to raise families here and to just kind of have a scene here. Yeah, it’s a great place to be.
[KJ] Why are people so nice up in Canada? That has always been my experience.
[TR] Some of it is performative. I think there’s a darker sensibility lurking beneath the surface for sure, but I think generally people are pretty nice. We’ve kind of got this next-to-the-States thing going on. One of our past prime ministers, Pierre Trudeau, who was Justin Trudeau’s father—I think it was him—said that Canada is like a mouse next to a sleeping elephant. So we always feel a little bit in the shadow of the United States.
[KJ] Let’s talk about this wonderful story. It’s called The Treasure Hunters Club, and it follows a group of treasure hunters that have been treasure hunting for quite some time. There’s a darker sensibility—a lot of people dying. It’s like this dynamic murder mystery where you kind of never know exactly what’s going happen, which is very exciting to read. It also centers around pirate lore. Is there a pirate lore or hidden-treasure story in real life in the area of Nova Scotia?
[TR] Yes, absolutely. I should say Nova Scotia is full of legends and mysteries and ghost stories of all types. It’s just a very oral-legend kind of place. And that goes way back to our Indigenous population. The Mi’kmaq right through the French settlers, the Scottish settlers, German, you name it. There are a lot of stories about everything from haunted houses to buried treasure. And when I was a kid, I was very aware of living in this area where people tell ghost stories as if they’re fact. I always kind of love the fact that there were all kinds of stories about, you know, the old house down the road, the island just offshore, that kind of thing.
When I was about eleven, I found this book called Bluenose Ghosts, and it was written by a woman named Helen Creighton, who was a folklorist back in the early part of the twentieth century. And she would travel from one corner of Nova Scotia to the other. Basically, she hit up every small town, every city, every isolated community, and she collected these stories and compiled it into this book.
One of the chapters is about a small island off the South Shore of Nova Scotia called Oak Island. And for over two hundred years, people have been trying to find this supposedly buried treasure. At certain points, people like FDR, various wealthy American industrialists pumped a bunch of cash into trying to dig up this island and find this treasure. People kept finding little bits and pieces that indicated that there really was one. Some people say that it was the Knights Templar who dropped a cache of gold there. The most commonly heard thing is that it was Captain Kidd’s buried loot. I think that doesn’t quite hold up to scrutiny, but it’s kind of a fun story for people to spread. But it’s a very important part of our local lore. It’s the story of Oak Island, and that story of the Oak Island treasure was kind of the seed that planted the idea for this book in my head.
[KJ] So was this percolating for a long time? Did you know that someday you might want to write a book about this stuff? Or did it come up more recently when you started this project?
[TR] The Treasure Hunters Club was actually a completely different book. So I should say that I had written a lot of young adult books. The books that did the best were two YA thrillers. At a certain point, about three years ago, I had failed to find publication for my next thriller. I’d been sort of on a string of good luck with those thrillers, and I wrote a book which I thought was my best. My agents brought it out to market, and after a year, it just died on submission. We could not find anyone to take this book, and so I was sort of in a career crossroads. And I decided that I was going to take a crack at writing an adult mystery because I’d always wanted to, and I felt like, you know what? It’s as good a time as any. I’ve had this sort of career setback, why not? And my in-laws—my husband’s parents—live outside of Lunenburg, on the Nova Scotia’s South Shore. They asked me to come visit them for a week back in 2021, and I just started playing around with the idea. I was thinking I’d like to set something in this part of the world that’s really atmospheric, kind of a beautiful small town set against this amazing coastal backdrop.
And one day I took my dog for a drive just to kind of throw in some music, hit the road, and, see if any ideas came to me. I drove past Oak Island, and I had been pulling these ideas for a murder mystery together. It was when I drove past that sign for Oak Island that something clicked inside. And I thought that could be a great premise for a murder mystery: People who have been searching for this legendary buried treasure suddenly start to turn up dead. I didn’t know really where the story was going, but I figured it was as good an idea as any, and I took it and ran with it.
[KJ] And you nailed it.
[TR] Thank you.
[KJ] It’s a great book and it did very well. It’s garnered critic praise and is a bestseller. I hope you’re as proud of it as your team seems to be.
[TR] I am proud of it. I will say that the thing I’m happiest with is that—I’ve been writing for teens forever—this was the first book that I’d written that I actually imagined myself as the primary purchaser, and I think it made a difference. When you think of telling a story that you want to tell because it doesn’t exist and you really want to read, I think that’s a good starting point for writing a book.
[KJ] This novel has a pretty complicated structure, right? What was that process like?
[TR] Well, I’m a plotter from the get-go. Every book I spend a significant amount of time figuring out how it’s all going to fit together. I love structure. I love to read mysteries. I like to read things that don’t quite fit a prescribed formula. And so I spent a solid two months just figuring out how the story was going to fit together. There are three protagonists, which isn’t always common. Or isn’t usual in mysteries. So I have three main characters; the chapters kind of divide between them, jump from one perspective to the next.
Then there’s a backstory that took place about a hundred years ago, that comes across through these hidden journals. There are a lot of moving parts, and it was really important for me to know not exactly 100 percent, but to have a really clear idea of where I was going with the story. In particular the very end. There are a couple of significant twists that I don’t think I could have written towards them if I hadn’t really figured them out pretty clearly before I started, because they were complicated to figure out on the page.
[KJ] I enjoyed the plot twists. The thing I liked about them was that I didn’t see them coming. It was one of those things that were inevitable but not obvious. It felt like it landed well.
Do you want to tell us about the three main characters?
[TR] The first premise for the book was very, very basic. There was no treasure. As I said, I was house-sitting for my in-laws, and it was November, which is when the tourists are gone. A lot of the summer residents are long gone, and my in-laws live on this quiet road along the ocean. There was nobody around. I was taking care of their dog, and the dog and I would go for these long walks and not see a single person for miles and miles, and I started to think, boy, this would make a great premise for a mystery: A house sitter comes to this small town. He or she doesn’t know anyone. People start to turn up dead, and that book was going to be called The House Sitter. That character became Cass, who is a failed young adult novelist, which was probably derived quite a bit from my own experience.
And Peter, the second main character, is a gay man approaching forty. He lives on the west coast of Canada, Vancouver. His life is pretty much on the skids. Has a roommate. He has a dead-end job. He has no real relationship worth speaking of. And he’s just kind of in that sort of drudgery, living the grind, and he gets a letter out of the blue from a grandmother that he didn’t know existed. And she tells him, Listen, I live in this town in Nova Scotia. You’re my last living descendant. It took me a while to track you down, but I would really like you to come to Nova Scotia and help me work through family business before I die. He has nothing going on, so he says, To hell with it, I’m gonna fly to Nova Scotia. So he lands in the small town.
And then the final character is Dandy, who is a teenage girl. She’s bit of an oddball. Marches to the beat of her own drummer. Her best friend for her whole life has been her grandfather, who’s sort of this old salt who taught her about the sea. He would go beachcombing with her, and when we meet her at the beginning of the book, he’s just died and she’s adrift. And she finds that he left her basically a mystery to solve. Turns out he’s been part of this society that’s been trying to find this missing treasure. A very secret organization and he was on the cusp of a big insight. And so he handed off these clues with a message that said, I want you to join the society of old people and help fulfill my dream of finding this treasure.
And so that’s kind of the book. You got these three characters. They don’t know each other. They’re all in a small town. This treasure hovers over the whole story. Things take off, and of course, because it’s a murder mystery, people start to die.
[KJ] Yep, and it’s a thrill ride. Everyone who loves mystery should pick up a copy. Do you have any tips for emerging writers?
[TR] As far as tips, I love to talk about writing. It’s fun. I mean, we spend so much time in our bedrooms, indoors. It’s nice to get out and talk shop with people who kind of understand what you’re going through. I would say I’m not self-taught. I did get an English degree and started writing short stories, and I was really lucky to work with my first editor, who edited my first book. She kind of took me in. I didn’t know what I was doing, and she guided me through the process. So I would say find people who will read your stuff and give you honest insights—and there are people out there. There are writing groups in every community. I have met so many people who aspire to be published, and I think that’s great. But I think what sometimes gets lost for some people is that it’s better to get published after you’ve got some experience, just raw writing experience behind you. And a great way to do that is just write stories. Take a crack at a novel. Don’t have major aspirations for your writing. Just try to write the best that you can. Let people look at it and give you insights, honest insights as a reader, and then take those insights and work them into your next thing, and you’ll know when you’re starting to get somewhere. There are so many people who are in such a rush. Take your time. You’ve got lots of time, ideally, and what you really want is to not just get your first thing out the door. You want to get your first really good thing out the door.
The most important advice other than taking your time is just to be doing it. Sit your ass in the chair and do it, and do it. And read widely, by the way. And I already alluded to this, but I think that the best material that I put out are when I didn’t pay attention to what was missing in the marketplace, but I did pay attention to what was missing on bookstore shelves or library shelves. So what’s an angle on mysteries that I’m really into, but doesn’t exist yet? I don’t think anyone has written a book like this in the mystery genre, but you know, as I started to write it, I realized that it was a book that I really wanted to see out there. And so if you can write with yourself as your first reader, if you write towards a completed product that you’d be happy to buy and take home and read, then I think you’re off to a good start.
[KJ] All right, we’re running out of time, but you have a next project that you sent to your editor, so I don’t know if you can talk about that or not, but that’s exciting.
[TR] I can. Yeah, it is. So this was a two-book deal, and the next project is the second book. We’re not announcing it officially till after the holidays, but I will say this much: Another three-voice mystery. Three main characters. And it’s completely different from The Treasure Hunters Club. But it’s another murder mystery. Stuff happens in the past and stuff happens in the present, and the two storylines kind of come together. So it has that in common with Treasure Hunters, but it could not be more different beneath the surface, and I’m really excited about it. My editors are keen on it, and I can’t wait to start screaming about it in the new year.
[KJ] Well, I’m excited to read it too. I appreciate your time.
[TR] Thanks a lot. Appreciate it.
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