You may have heard of Peggy Blair. Besides being an avid boxer, her bestselling mystery novel, The Beggar’s Opera, won the 2012 Scotiabank Giller Prize Readers’ Choice Award after being shortlisted for the 2010 Debut Dagger Award from the Crime Writers Association, among others. It was also rejected 156 times before being published by Penguin Canada.
Penguin later published Blair’s Capital Crimes but turned down Hungry Ghosts because of its Canadian angle: one of Blair’s main characters was Ojibwe from Northern Ontario. I spoke with Blair in early May, and she said she was told to “rewrite Charlie Pike to be a Cherokee or Choctaw and set [the book] in Florida,” if she wanted it published.
“Nobody goes up to an artist… and says ‘you should put more teal blue in that, you know, teal is a popular colour this year’,” she says.
Blair declined and switched to Simon and Schuster, which published Hungry Ghosts and Umbrella Man. Both of these books became national bestsellers, but Simon and Schuster turned down Blair’s next novel, Shadow Play, about an LRT scandal in Ottawa.
Peggy Blair. Photo by Tim Skinner.
“I honestly think the publishing industry is broken,” she says.
“The people who take the risk in this business are the publishers,” Blair continues, “and it’s a huge country, so distribution is expensive… If people can return your product to you at any point in time, in any condition, for a full refund, you just tie up your inventory, and you have no income. I think that’s why they’ve always had their eye on the American market. There’s just more readers.”
“Canadian readers want Canadian content … If Canadians can’t tell Canadian stories, who’s going to do it?” – Peggy Blair
Blair had already decided what to do.
“I created ReBound Press and I put Shadow Play in print,” she says.
The Indigenous origins of her characters and the book itself spoke to what she had witnessed as a senior adjudicator in the Residential School claims dispute resolution process. “It was like cognitive therapy as I wrote it, and rewrote it, and wrote it, and rewrote it… before that, even seeing the word ‘child’ in a newspaper story would trigger me, my heart would start pounding.”
Things didn’t get easier, but Blair wanted to make a difference for other writers.
“I discovered, when I created ReBound Press and self-published, that I no longer qualified for any of the awards that I previously won, so I created the Toby Award for self-published authors.”
The 2025 Toby Award will be announced on May 8 at Little Branches Rural Roots, the annual Eastern Ontario Library Conference.
“I think there’s a lot of good writing out there,” Blair says.
ReBound Press is also publishing work by Chris Forrest, another crime fiction writer originally from Ottawa. “I think the [books that] people are self-publishing are just as good and, in some ways, better than the books that are being picked up by more traditional publishers because they don’t have to appeal to the masses.”
Peggy Blair will be publishing The Bone Finder, the third book in her newest series, through ReBound Press this month. Also coming soon is The Mystery Writer’s Guide to Getting Published. Both will be available on the soon to be revamped ReBound Press website.
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