The Royal 22nd is a French Canadian infantry regiment with roots back to the War of 1812. The Van Doos—anglicized from le Vingt-deuxième—have served with distinction in Flanders, Sicily, and Kandahar. Their home station is Quebec City’s La Citadelle, and in 2017 I was there watching the Van Doos’ changing of the guard. Among their many traditions, one snagged my creative attention. Their beloved goat, Batisse.
Don’t picture some yard goat chewing trash. Batisse is magnificent. He stands waist-high and sports a regal blue cape and golden horns to inspect the ritual. Since 1955, the Crown has kept the Van Doos in goats from the royal Tibetan flock. I’d encountered Batisse XI. You can buy his merch in La Citadelle’s gift shop. The city hockey team has his profile on their sweaters. Batisse is the bomb.
A goat heist might make one hell of a story.
But, my right brain interjected, the caper can’t use the actual Batisse. Legal issues galore, and there would be military-grade security to research, and anyway, everyone loves Batisse. No, I should use a Batisse-inspired mascot somewhere easier to access. So long as the heist was humane yet funny.
And that, friends, is where it starts. Those first qualifiers are where ideas bloom or die.
Capers are tricky things. What reads like a lark is precision work by the author. It’s not just mapping an outlandish crime and each next obstacle. A character needs personal stakes in taking such a bold risk, something to balance conflict with that lark tone. Not easy, not at all. It’s why Donald Westlake and other greats of the form get far too little credit. And it’s why a mascot heist remains on my brainstorming list.
There is danger in self-editing a new idea. If reality-checking douses enough creative sparks, that invites negativism. Over time, fatalism, someone afraid the spark is gone. The fine line is curious realism, a weighing of merits not too early to buzzkill the left brain and not too late to waste precious time.
When I first tried short fiction, I might’ve jumped onto a mascot heist because it should be hilarious. Ah, should. An artistic word, so full of possibilities. Except within the big universe of shoulds, we have to recognize the coulds. A goat heist should be a killer premise. But could I make it work? The mascot heist idea had legit problems, not least that it didn’t compel me to solve them.
On that same trip, I walked through Old Town looking for a lunch spot. Quebec City always has cruise ships in port, so the food options abound. Pubs, pizza, creperies, the works. After a search, and hungry, I picked a smallish place with a smallish chalkboard out front promising Québécois fare. Not selling it hard, just saying what the place was about. That simple message spoke to why I’d come to Quebec. To experience it. I had the elk something something.
Journaling afterward at my hotel, I jotted down another idea. Quebec, the real Quebec and someone who craved that experience. Vague, but I understood travel cravings in my wandering soul. Lots of other folks heard the call to here if only based on that cruise ship traffic. We all had our reasons for coming. So could a strong main character.
I started playing with opening paragraphs, and sure enough, my right brain rattled through its early questions. Who is this traveler? Why are they here? What expectations did they have of Quebec? Did those match up to reality? Finding those answers grabbed and held my interest. Which was needed fuel, because this story took my requisite long struggle to nail down. Time well invested. This second Quebec idea grew into “Spirits Along the One North Road” and landed in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine.
Someone, please write a goat mascot heist. I might never be the guy for it. But I’m not sweating that, either. Ideas come and go. Time is the short supply. I’ll take that second breath and stay open to goat capers and travel cravings and to anything else I stumble upon. In the final math, I’ll have more sparks than years to chase them.
Trace Evidence 