It took Vancouver-based author Michael Bourne three years to write his second and latest novel, We Bring You an Hour of Darkness, but he knew from the beginning what he wanted to write about.
“I wanted to create a detective story in which the detectives were the reporters at a small-town newspaper,” he said during a recent phone interview. The idea was prompted by his time working in a newsroom in Aspen, Colorado, in the early ’90s—a rich and memorable moment that included interviewing gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson on more than one occasion.
“I didn’t even ski. I just went there for a job,” Bourne said. “And I thought to myself: ‘This place is so ripe for a story. The hot-house atmosphere of the newsroom; this tiny, little newsroom creating a newspaper every day of the week. The hot-house atmosphere of the ski town.’”
So he set the story in 1993, by his reckoning the last year a newspaper could be wholly print-based, before the internet changed media and society forever.
“It’s not a nostalgia thing,” he said. “I wanted to capture what is a bygone world. The rules were different, and the baseline assumptions were different about how things worked. I wanted to capture that in a newspaper where you’re printing the news every day, but it only comes out once a day, not 17,000 times.”
Furthermore, Bourne wanted the old-fashion newsroom to function like a character in the story, with each reporter contributing their individual part to the whole. And finally, he wanted the central character, newspaper editor Tish Threadgill, to be a woman.
“I was surrounded growing up by really strong women,” Bourne said. “There’s a lot of my mother in Tish Threadgill, and there’s a lot of my wife and her strong women friends, who are feminists. But they’re not feminists in the political sense. They’re just about getting stuff done.
“[Threadgill] is a journalist to her fingertips,” he added. “She’s somebody who drank the Kool-Aid of the ’70s and ’80s ethos of being a reporter. You know—they ‘afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted.’”
As his manuscript progressed and the plot evolved to include eco-terrorist attacks loosely based on a 1998 arson incident at the Vail ski resort, Bourne found himself researching Earth First and then the Earth Liberation Front—a much more violent and destructive iteration of militant environmental activism.
“I got really interested in this question, which is what all eco-terrorism and terrorism groups have to face,” he said. “At what point does activism become violent, and at what point is it ever justified to blow up things and potentially hurt people?”
Eventually, the story came to include a book-within-a-book, or rather an eco-terrorism handbook promulgated by the founder of an underground activist group calling itself the Jack Frost Collective. By then, the plot was thick indeed.
Bourne grew up in Mill Valley and currently lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, where he works as a writer/editor. His debut novel, Blithedale Canyon, received rave reviews in Publishers Weekly and other publications.
To find out how his new “gripping story of a town under siege and a newspaper editor who pushes her reporters to the gray areas of the law” plays out, one may purchase We Bring You an Hour of Darkness online or at independent bookstores everywhere.
Catch Michael Bourne in person on his West Coast book-signing tour at Book Passage in Corte Madera at 1pm on Sunday, Oct. 26, or in conversation with local author Anne Belden at Reader’s Books in Sonoma at 6pm on Wednesday, Oct. 29, and at Copperfield’s in Petaluma at 7pm on Thursday, Oct. 30.
‘We Bring You an Hour of Darkness’ by Michael Bourne; release date: Oct. 14, 2025; DopppelHouse Press.
