Landry Mike - Red-handed: busting the real story of Lisa Moores Caught

The Carrero , a yacht with a certificate of British registry, official number 359983, was sailing south along the Avalon Peninsula off the coast of Newfoundland searching for the town of Ferryland. Well-known to islanders, Ferryland was the provinces first successful permanent colony. But Dr. Arthur Michael Carr, the owner and pilot of the Carrero and former mayor of Catalina, N.L., who had a history of transatlantic sailing voyages, didnt find success in Ferryland. Indeed, he couldnt find it at all.

So, under nightfall that evening of June 24, 1974, Carr was forced to drop anchor in Fermeuse, a fifteen-kilometre drive south from Ferryland. Another centuries-old fishing community with numerous coves and harbours like Ferryland, Fermeuse earns a spot in local history mostly for its odd name. One theory has it that the name derives from a translation mistake by sixteenth-century Portuguese fishermen who mistook the common Newfoundland coastal name Freshwater. Another theory attributes it as deriving from formosa , which is Portuguese for beautiful.

A thing of beauty or a mistake? When the police boarded the Carrero in the early morning of June 25, catching Carr sleeping with his mistress, Angelita Penelope Carr twenty-eight years old and ten years his junior, who had taken the doctors name in an illegitimate marriage it would be hard to imagine the doctor seeing the beauty of the situation in Fermeuse. He had certainly made a mistake the arresting officers woke him up and slapped handcuffs on him, charging him with importation of almost two tonnes of cannabis marijuana into Canada.

Arthur Carr was one of eight people charged or wanted in connection with the first major drug bust in Newfoundland history. The story made headlines across the country, and Jack Fitzgerald, author of twenty-some historical books about Newfoundland, says it was absolutely sensational.

We had it monopolize the news, he says. And this doctor, that was big news because that fella was dearly loved.

The police had been tipped off the day before by local fishermen from Tors Cove, a community forty minutes north of Fermeuse. The story goes the fishermen, noticing the foreign Carrero , had attempted to approach the craft in a friendly greeting. When the fishermen were snubbed by the crew, the lack of common coastal courtesy raised their suspicion and they called the cops.

The fact the crew on the Carrero had just arrived in Newfoundland after a twenty-three-day journey up the eastern seaboard from Colombia might have cooled their Newfoundland congeniality, but more likely the crew was preoccupied with unloading the forty-nine jute-wrapped bundles of marijuana they had stored below deck, which the police found in a cave along Kearneys Beach.

Other seized evidence included: containers of seeds; a chart of the Avalon Peninsula and Saint Pierre and Miquelon; two seat cushions; a road map of Colombia and seven nautical charts; and handwritten statements from Angelita Carr that sold the whole crew down river.

St. Johns author Lisa Moore, arguably the biggest name in contemporary Atlantic Canadian fiction, if not Canadian fiction, isnt sure when she first heard about the drug bust at Tors Cove in 74. She was only ten years old at the time, but she would have come of age during the rise of drug culture on the island, overhearing partial stories, bits and pieces while drinking in bars.

She soon developed the desire to create a whole story, one that encompassed something about her formative years. Its a story shes wanted to tell for the past twenty years, one shes now captured in her third novel, Caught , published in June by House of Anansi Press.

I was excited about the idea of taking it on, stepping into the shoes of a consciousness that was absolutely different than my own a twenty-five-year-old pot smoker and also an adventurer, Moore said from her home in St. Johns during a recent phone interview. Its a very different life from a middle age dare I say lady who is sitting at home and writing books. And it was thrill to live in those shoes.

Among Moores fans, Caught s outlaw narrative might raise more than a few eyebrows. Her debut novel, Alligator , won a Commonwealth Writers Prize for Fiction, and Moore herself has been lauded by the New Yorker and praised by writers such as Richard Ford. Her CanLit stock skyrocketed this past winter when February , her sophomore novel, won CBC Radios 2013 Canada Reads competition in a contest pitting the best regional books from across Canada against each other. Although the prize doesnt have a monetary value, winning novels can see sales rise by thirty thousand copies.

February is a heart-wrenching story that follows a grieving widow of one of the men lost during the sinking of the Ocean Ranger oil rig off the coast of Newfoundland in 1982. Its an incredibly difficult and moving book, one that Moore describes in an interview with Bookgroup Info as a kind of elegy to the men who died out there.

Caught , though, begins with Moores protagonist, David Slaney, a convicted drug smuggler, who has just escaped from prison in Nova Scotia. Hes on the run across Canada, as the dust jacket summarizes, to make good on the heist that went wrong, win back the woman he loves, and make a big enough profit to buy himself a new life.

But it would be a mistake to think Caught drastically differs from Moores previous short stories and novels. Moores recurring themes of regret, the elasticity of time and truth, and the sensory overload she packs into her sentences and every one of her scenes are all seamlessly woven into the suspense-driven Caught .

Much like with February , its entirely possible to read Caught without any knowledge of the events that informed Moores story. Although some of the plot points are ripped from the headlines, the majority of overlap with true events in Caught is coincidental. There is no mention of the true events on the dust jacket or in Moores acknowledgements.

Caught can also be considered an extension of Moores work in February , where she found something mythic in the loss of the rig. Caught springs from another island legend, one almost entirely forgotten by mainlanders.

This is her accomplishment in Caught , one that lifts the already lauded author to the upper echelon of CanLit, alongside Atwood, Ondaatje, Shields, MacLeod, Davies, and Munro. Moore shares the hallmarks of each of these writers: a search for identity; a tendency toward historiographic metafiction; characters as figures of universal humanity; a dialogue with Canadas garrison mentality; and a fascination and play with lifes ambiguities. But unlike these writers, Moore doesnt need the sentimental crutches of rural homes or terrific histories of war. She has applied the art of Atwood and the mastery of Munro and MacLeod to a novel that is on the surface a narcocorrido, a pulpish drug smugglers adventure.

Im interested in the power of a larger story and how it's manifest in the particular, or a particular character. All novels and stories pass through us from elsewhere, whether weve heard others telling them or they come from all the writers weve read. No story is ever wholly original, Moore says.

I grew up reading fairy tales. Im interested in the layering of stories that are told and told, and how meaning changes, and the story changes, with each iteration.

Theres a legend in Newfoundland that iconic gangster Al Capone once found himself 2,800 kilometres from his Chicago home on the island built by cod. Theres no mention of Capone in Newfoundlands historical records, but he had a liquor warehouse on the nearby French island of Saint Pierre, to smuggle liquor into America during prohibition.