The Canwest News Profile

The Art of the Con

Stephen Hunt

Will Ferguson knows a thing or two about cons. The amiable Calgary author and father of two was once a young man growing up in Fort Vermillon in northern Alberta, 800 kilometres north of Edmonton, where his central preoccupation was getting out of Fort Vermillon.

Ferguson came from a family with lots of literary game — brother Ian is also an author and Dad lived in a trailer lined with walls of books — but no money. So Ferguson turned to travel-study programs, like Katimavik and Canada World Youth, where a lucky few students are chosen to travel to distant parts of the world — or other parts of Canada besides Fort Vermillon — to do volunteer work and grow up a little.

However, Ferguson didn’t like his odds of being the Albertan selected to join. Instead, he borrowed the mailing address of a buddy who lived just across the border, in the Northwest Territories.

Ferguson got accepted to both Katimavik and Canada World Youth. He escaped from Fort Vermillon. It was his first successful con.

“They probably expected some Inuit guy from the Northwest Territories to come through the door, and in walks me,” he says, with the slightly embarrassed air of a guy who pulled one off.

Much the same way Jack McGreary, a brilliant young con man and the protagonist of Ferguson’s new novel, Spanish Fly, must wrestle with the moral consequences of what he has done every time he pulls off another scam in one of the Depression-era, Texas small towns he travels through with his cronies Virgil and Rose, throughout the course of the novel.

“Con men never seem to grapple with the morality of what they do,” Ferguson says. “Jack addresses it in a really direct way. I always thought the story was about the head of a con man, and the heart of Jack. He has the head for it, but he doesn’t have the heart for it. And that was his failing as a con man, but his redemption as a human. That was the key for his character.”

Ferguson studied film at York University in Toronto and it shows in Spanish Fly, which practically reads like a movie treatment. Think of a cross between Bonnie and Clyde, Bound for Glory and, of course, The Sting.

“The Sting ruined it for other con stories,” Ferguson says, between bites of meat loaf one brilliant Thursday afternoon in early September, following the media launch for the 2007 WordFest.

“The Sting was about the long elaborate con,” Ferguson says, “Where everything relies on a big twist at the end. Spanish Fly is more of a series of small, short cons — each one a short story all their own.”
If there’s a single rule of thumb to the cons perpetrated by Jack, Rose and Virgil in Spanish Fly — not to mention con men throughout the years — it’s not to skimp on imagination.

“The more outrageous a con, the more successful it is, because it’s so far from a frame of reference you can’t compare it to anything,” he says. “That’s why the Nigerian Internet scam works. Beause you or I don’t deal with Nigerian princes.”

If outrageousness works for con men, pace works for storytellers, and Ferguson keeps Spanish Fly moving briskly along.

“My writing background is screenwriting — as far as any training I have — so I tend to approach storytellling like a movie,” he says. “I don’t want to write myself into a box. Some writers can dive in — Michael Ondaatje doesn’t know where his stories are going to end — but I can’t do that. I need to know where the character is going, so you can foreshadow, and lay clues.”

While Ferguson is best-known for his humour books about Canada and the Leacock Award-winning Beauty Tips from Moose Jaw. Spanish Fly is the first book he’s written set entirely in the U.S. Kind of weird for a guy who wrote How to Be a Canadian.

“It had to be set in the U.S.,” he says, adding that in those days, all the best Canadian con men went to the U.S. “The story always dictates the place, not vice-versa.”

Not only that, but it's the U.S. during the Great Depression, before there was even television, let alone the Internet, BlackBerrys, or credit cards.

In fact, the dominant media of the day during Spanish Fly was the radio, befitting a novel that produced a soundtrack.

“Radio was much bigger than the movies,” Ferguson says. “They would stop the movie [in theatres] and broadcast Amos and Andy over the speakers. Otherwise people wouldn’t come. They’d stay home and listen to Amos and Andy. It was live radio. It couldn’t be re-broadcast. You couldn’t download it. You couldn’t record it. You had to catch it live.”

Creeping up on the world — and Jack McGreary throughout Spanish Fly —is the rise of Hitler and spread of fascism across the planet, which at the time was a period when the U.S. had no aspirations whatsoever to global domination. If you were a young American in the 1930s who wanted to fight fascism, you had to migrate to north and join the Canadian military, a fact which informs the ending of the novel.

Ferguson is a bit of a picaresque yarn himself. Following his student days at York, Ferguson lived in Japan for five years (his wife, Terumi, is Japanese), before returning to Canada. (There was also a brief stint in Ecuador in there.) His next book is a travel book about a 1,100-km hike he took around Northern Ireland a few years back, which sounds challenging, but Ferguson is quick to add that there are pubs at the end of every stage of the hike in Ireland, so you can con your legs into going out for one more day on the long walk.

“All my best ideas come when I’m drinking beer,” Ferguson says.

Let’s drink to that.

October 2007
CANWEST NEWS
Calgary Herald
Vancouver Province