Banff raconteur Bob Clarke has brought his Trig Carlyle series to a close after seven books and nearly a decade with the release of Alberta 1905, Book 7.
This final book brings Carlyle, an Irish adventurer, fur trader and businessman, who has now been in Canada for 30 years, to a point in his life where his business interests have brought him wealth and leisure.
With time on his hands, Carlyle sets out to circumnavigate and survey the boundaries of the proposed province of Alberta, before returning to his ancestoral home in Ireland to take care of a large inheritance left to him by a wealthy relative. Along the way, much like a fur-trading and ranching Forrest Gump, Carlyle manages to insert himself into many of the major events – including the Frank Slide – in the period before Alberta is named a province.
Ensuring his story intermingles with adventure and the West’s history has been Clarke’s approach from the beginning.
“Trig was a catalyst,” said Clark, who is hosting a book launch at the Banff Public Library on Saturday (Dec. 22) from 4-6 p.m. “I used a lot of other names and characters, but everything happened around him or because of him.”
Some of those names and characters include surveyors Peter Fidler and David Thompson, painter Paul Kane and Rev. Robert Rundle, a Methodist missionary, whose name graces Mount Rundle.
Clarke works each of those individuals into the story as a way to introduce readers to Western Canada’s unique history; something, Clarke quickly realized when he first set out on this journey, he knew less about than he had first thought.
“I was under the impression I was fairly knowledgeable, but when I started this project it was eye opening and humbling because I realized I really didn’t have a clue!”
Clarke set out on this journey in the early 1990s, inspired by a passion for Western Canadian history and a chance meeting with Alberta publisher Mel Hurtig in Tęte Jaune Cache, B.C.
Clarke said he asked Hurtig, publisher of the Canadian Encyclopedia and a number of books on Western Canada, why he didn’t publish adventure stories featuring the Canadian West.
“Why don’t you start finding people who write adventure stories on western Canadian content? We read all these stories by Zane Grey and Louis L’Amour and they take place down in the States or Mexico and I babbled on for a while and he listened for a while and said ‘why don’t you?’” Clarke said, adding Hurtig reached out and poked him in the chest three times after each word of his response.
Hurtig then suggested Clarke write an outline for a story and send it to him and he’d see if it could work.
Clarke tried to take Hurtig up on his offer, but discovered he couldn’t write an outline; instead, he wrote 500-plus pages of what would eventually lead to the first Trig Carlyle book, published by Clarke in 1999.
And now that he has accomplished what he set out to do, Clarke said he is coming closer to retirement. The writing and the publishing may be finished, but Clarke’s journey is hardly done. He’s got plans to hit the road to sell the book and the series. And like Trig he’ll probably be out there in Alberta somewhere searching out adventures in book selling.
Alberta 1905, Book 7 of the Trig Carlyle series, is available at The Viewpoint in Banff and Lake Louise for $8.95. Boxed editions of all seven books will also be available.
