Beverley McLachlin – formerly chief justice of Canada, currently a bestselling crime novelist.Fred Lum/the Globe and Mail
There are two kinds of people in this world: Those who require absolute silence while they write, and those who benefit from the burble and hum of background noise greasing the cogs of the creative mind.
Beverley McLachlin – formerly chief justice of Canada, currently bestselling crime novelist – is very firmly the latter.
“You can tune it out for big sections of time, and then you come back and it gives your brain a little relief when you hear a nice piece of classical music,” says McLachlin, midway through turning off the radio in her home office.
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McLachlin turned her hand, in earnest, to novel writing after retiring from the bench in 2017, where she was not only the first – and thus far only – woman to be the highest ranking judge in the Canadian court system, but also, with 17 years under her belt as Supreme Court chief justice, the person with the longest tenure in the job.
“With my first novel, I knew that I didn’t know much about writing novels, but somehow I wrote one, and my editors helped me to bring it up to minimally acceptable standards,” says McLachlin. “It went out, and I didn’t really expect much.”
To her surprise, that novel – Full Disclosure, about Vancouver criminal defence lawyer Jilly Truitt – was published in 2018 and hit No. 1 on the national bestseller list. “I thought, ‘That is amazing. Maybe it’s just because people know my name or whatever,’ but then I realized people were actually reading it,” she says. “I was talking to someone one day, and I said, ‘I sort of feel imposter syndrome being a novelist after having been a judge for so long.’”
The person she was speaking to laughed, McLachlin says, and responded: “The only thing that matters is that people are buying your books.” She resolved then to stop examining exactly why people seemed to like her work, and just trust in the results of that ultimate test – sales figures.
“It’s very gratifying to someone as insecure as I was. I had never done a creative writing class, I’d never published any creative writing before,” says McLachlin of being a fiction bestseller. “It gave me a bit of reassurance, and I realized I was starting on a learning path here, and hopefully I would get better and better, and people would continue to read.”
Nearly six years and two more bestselling novels in the Jilly Pruitt series later (plus a memoir), and you might say that wish had come true. As Proof, her third Jilly Pruitt novel, became an instant No. 1 bestseller when it released in 2024, The Globe spoke to McLachlin about writerly imposter syndrome, the creative process and the important nuance of Canadian crime fiction.
You don’t have a creative writing background, but as a lawyer and a judge you wrote a lot.
We all have our strengths and weaknesses – and Lord knows I have many weaknesses – but I can work with words, and I can work with them in a variety of contexts. When I was a judge, of course, I was using words all the time to describe philosophical legal concepts, to make things clear.
Sometimes it did involve a bit of imagination, but it’s not the same as creative writing. You are not building characters and situations. As a judge, you don’t get to make it up. You can describe them in interesting ways – always with the respect to the parties – but you’re circumscribed.
Did all those years of writing in that very specific way hobble you at all when you were finally left with a page to do whatever you wanted?
I didn’t feel it hobbled me. When I spoke to someone about wanting to do creative writing, they said to me, “Well, you’ve always done didactic writing and I don’t think you could make the switch.” But I did find it easy to make the switch! I found it was very easy to imagine characters and situations. Sometimes I even had to curb my imagination, because as all fiction writers will tell you, sometimes you put something out there and it’s way too far out.
I still get the adrenalin rush when I get a new idea, or something comes out in a character that you don’t expect. When you know you’ve hit it, that’s a high. That’s why you keep going.
Are you ever surprised by what comes floating out of your subconscious?
Oh yeah. I think most writers are. Our minds operate on many levels, and in very complex ways. You’ll have it laid out in an intentional way, but then you start to write it and another part of your brain kicks in and it works out slightly differently. Or you seem to have boxed yourself in a corner, but you take a good walk and all of a sudden when my mind is just floating, looking at the scenery or playing with my dog, and then suddenly I’ll get that idea.
Were you ever tempted to go completely off-piste and write a book that no one would ever expect a former justice to? I don’t know, aliens on Mars?
I’ve thought about it occasionally, but I’m certainly not capable of writing about aliens. There’s something to be said for writing what you know, and I know a little about the court system and how it works, the thousands of men and women who come through those courtroom doors or go to lawyers looking for help, and what can happen.
In terms of telling Canadian crime stories, do we have enough of those?
So many Canadians don’t realize how different our justice is, in so many ways. We need to tell our own stories. My books are very Canadian, and they’re actually set in British Columbia because that’s where I did most of my practice of law. There’s a whole atmosphere and ambiance about how law is practised in different places. In Canada, we have a legal system which is uniform across the country, having one criminal law, instead of many states each having their own law as is the case south of the border. We have a lot more emphasis on rights and freedoms, depending on what state you’re comparing us with, and we have a different way of looking at crime and social problems such as drugs, homelessness and assisted dying. It’s good having these books out there telling what would happen in the Canadian context.
In Proof, I learned that when it comes to bail, the default is essentially your freedom. They have to prove that you should be in jail.
You’re not alone. I’ve seen Canadian movies and novels supposedly set in Canada where the judge gets up and has a gavel and bangs it. I have never seen that happen in Canada. I was a judge for many years, and we didn’t have a gavel. It’s so American, and I just cringe and think somebody didn’t even do the most basic homework about how our system is different. I read one book, set in Canada, where toward the end of a criminal trial, the defence lawyer, the prosecutor and the judge all sit down for a coffee in a hotel and discuss how it’s going to come out. I just don’t think that would happen! I try to be very careful to represent the law properly, as I know it, and I hope it does serve in educating.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
