A psychopath who tortures his victims and abandons them alongside a disemboweled cat. An obstinate journalist desperate to make the front page. An investigator haunted by his demons. Combined with the incisive writing of the former journalist of Press Michèle Ouimet, all the ingredients were there to make The man with cats a ruthless thriller and impossible to let go.
We meet her in her apartment in Mile End, a century-old building where the silence that is so dear to her to write reigns, and we find her unchanged since her departure from Press, three years ago. Always so clear in its objectives.
Michèle Ouimet had known for a long time that she would start writing once she retired; the opportunity presented itself sooner than expected, after shoulder surgery, in 2012, six years before she bowed out of this newsroom where she had spent more time than at home over the years. last three decades. Coming back from a long walk, she sat down to write what would become the first chapter of her first novel, The promise (published in 2014 by Boréal). After Purple hour, in 2017, The man with cats is already his third novel, but the first to navigate the dark waters of the thriller.
“Writing a novel, I loved it because you don’t have a deadline. And I don’t make a contract [avec l’éditeur] because if I find it bad, I have the freedom to throw it away. I’ve had pressure all my life, it’s not true that I’m going to put myself under pressure when I write novels, ”she says with this determination that gives her an almost rebellious air.
It is this same determination which moreover pushed her towards journalism when, as a teenager, at the mention of Dr Schweitzer and her work in Africa or the journalist Pierre Nadeau, she only dreamed of one thing: to leave. What she did tirelessly, for 29 years at Press, and recorded in an essay published in 2019 by Boréal – Leave to tell. Rwanda, Afghanistan, Syria, Iran, Pakistan, Egypt …
If I wrote something so dark, maybe it was because of everything I saw – the refugee camps, the dead, the war, the madness of man … [Dans L’homme aux chats], madness is in the head of one man, my psychopath, but it’s a bit like a digest of “my God, man can be that bad”.
Michèle Ouimet
The journalist is never far away
Even when she writes, it is the field journalist who leads the way. To build the character of the serial killer in The man with cats, Michèle Ouimet wrote to nine murderers imprisoned in the country, hoping that they would agree to speak to her. Paul Bernardo, Robert Pickton, Russell Williams, Luka Magnotta… they all refused. But she did not let herself be taken down; she met the Dr Jocelyn Aubut, psychiatrist and former director of the Pinel Institute, in order to identify the spirit of a murderer. Also former investigators and senior executives at the Montreal Police Department. “The pleasure of writing books is doing what you want with reality. […] But it has to be credible, otherwise the reader will drop out. ”
PHOTO ALAIN ROBERGE, THE PRESS
Michèle Ouimet
She also spent two weeks with investigators from the Longueuil police. “I had access to everything. All. They integrated me as if I were part of the team. What I wanted to see is how it works, the daily life of the investigators, what do they do in the morning, what they say to each other around the coffee machine, it is what, the jokes between them, the dynamics. I learned a lot of things. I realized that there were a lot of women, whom it was sacred like carters, ”she says.
And to imagine the reporter Marie Pinelli and her colleagues, she used certain quirks specific to journalists and made them fat; the heroine of The man with cats is “an ambitious ready for anything, even to sell her mother and to crush the toes of a colleague to make the front page”, she writes, implacable, anxious not to show any complacency towards this profession which she has exercised and cherished.
Writing The man with cats was demanding, she admits. But it is not for this reason that there will be neither sequel nor next thriller. “I want another universe. ”
His next book? She hesitates between novel and essay. Think of something that would be a mixture of the two, like The adversary, Emmanuel Carrère, or Notebooks from Homs, by Jonathan Littell. But she will take her time, let live The man with cats, during a visit to the Rimouski Book Fair in early November, then to another at the Montreal Book Fair three weeks later. Take time for herself, too, and spend it with her grandson while waiting to immerse herself, with as much passion as ever, in her next project.
In bookstores on November 2
The man with cats
Michèle Ouimet
Boreal
256 pages