If you’ve spent time in Chatham-Kent, Windsor or Detroit, you might recognize some of the locales in a new novel set in the early post-9/11 era.
The story behind Vern Smith’s The Green Ghetto, being released Friday, has its characters travel from Detroit over the Windsor border, up Highway 401 and through areas like Chatham, Dresden, Wallaceburg and Walpole Island.
The book’s title refers to an area of Detroit which became almost rural after being left without services by the city government. This is where one of the main characters has a farm which grows marijuana.
Agents from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, eager to find links between drugs and terrorism, catch on to him and through a series of events, his cannabis plants get taken into Canada to a buyer in Dresden.
Smith, who grew up in Windsor and worked for the Chatham Daily News for about a year in 1990, said he is personally familiar with many of the locations the characters visit in the novel, but he travelled these areas again while working on the book.
“I spent a lot of time with the details of my locales and … it wasn’t enough that I’d been there before,” he said. “I just really looked at these places in a way I’d never looked at them before, tried to see them through my characters’ eyes.”
The novel – which Smith refers to as an “urban western” – often refers to the names of streets characters take to get from one place to another and it has them stop at real places like the former Wheels Inn in Chatham, which was still around in the 2002 setting of the book.
Another main character is from Walpole Island, where some of the novel is set. Smith said he worked on stories as a reporter about the area’s troubles with access to clean water, which is referenced in the book.
The writer took a job in “low-level communications” in the provincial government after the Ontario NDP won the 1990 election. However, his novel notes that Premier Bob Rae did not keep an election promise to fund a clean water pipeline for Walpole Island.
“I never figured out, my naivete, how it could be that way and how it could just be left that way,” said Smith. “My time in Chatham, that was a thing that was always left with me.”
The water issues are “integral” to the character from Walpole Island, he said. She questions the condition of the water when she sees something unusual on the marijuana farm in Detroit.
The author now lives about 30 minutes outside Chicago near the Illinois-Indiana border. He also worked a few years ago as the station manager for CJAM 99.1 FM, the radio station on the University of Windsor campus.
He said the characters are “informed,” but not based on, real people he has encountered by living in all of these different areas.
It’s “entirely accidental” that his book is being released as cannabis has been legalized in Canada and some American states, including Michigan, said Smith.
Over time, he said he realized the novel would work best as a period piece to offer “perspective” on the links between the War on Drugs and the War on Terror after 9/11.
“On some level … it certainly could be (set) today, but it would be a different story and I think the story points would be different,” he said. “But overall, you still have a hysteria when we really ought to be moving on to more important things.”
The Green Ghetto, released through Run Amok Books, can be purchased through online retailers such as Amazon and Indigo.
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