Illustrations by Arizona O’Neill (courtesy of Montreal Gazette), Heather O’Neill (J. Artacho)

Metro daily The Montreal Gazette has partnered with celebrated author Heather O’Neill for a Dickensian project with a modern twist – a serialized novel that will unfold in the pages of the newspaper and online at its website.

Mystery in the Metro follows Valentine, a 23-year-old who works at a convenience store at a station in the city’s metro system. The first instalment was published online on May 25, and the story runs online Thursdays and in the newspaper’s Saturday print edition. Each chapter is between 1,000 and 1,700 words, and the story is slated to run for a total of 30 weeks. 

Gazette editor-in-chief Bert Archer, who started in the role in May 2022 (and is a former Q&Q editor), was looking for new ways for the newspaper to cover the city’s thriving arts and culture scene – and potentially activate a new readership. 

He met with O’Neill over lunch and suggested she could write a serialized novel for the newspaper. She immediately agreed.

“I like any kind of challenge,” O’Neill says. “It seemed unusual and it seemed like oh, that can’t be done, so let’s try it. I wanted to see how it would work out.”

The first two chapters were made freely available online, and all subsequent chapters will be available only to subscribers. The Gazette is offering a promotional subscription to the newspaper for all interested readers. 

The serialized novel project is just one in a line of experiments Archer has planned to try to both cover the city’s arts and culture in a more collaborative way and engage readers in a struggling industry.

“The flip side of all the doom and gloom [about journalism] is that everything’s up for grabs, no one really knows exactly what’s going to work,” he says. “We need to create things that people feel are worth paying for … something very specific you can only get at a single paper.”

For her part, O’Neill is enjoying the challenge of writing in a way that is completely at odds with how she usually works. 

“I never write in a linear fashion. I’m never committed to my plots whatsoever, I go back and change them,” says O’Neill, who is currently rewriting the first page of her next novel in the final stages of revision. 

With Mystery in the Metro, however, there are no revisions once something has been printed. Gazette copy editor Jordan Zivitz has been assigned to the project and is what Archer calls “the keeper of the narrative.”

“Once things are introduced, I’m stuck with them,” O’Neill says. 

The chapters are accompanied by illustrations created for the project by O’Neill’s daughter Arizona O’Neill, an illustrator and artist, as well as photographs of Montreal’s subway stations by the Gazette’s photographers.

O’Neill says she has a vague idea of where Mystery in the Metro is headed, plot-wise, but has realized since the first chapter was published that there is room for her to play with scenes and characters that are peripheral to the narrative, and to write the story in response to the connection she feels with the readers.

Whether the story will end up as a traditional novel one day is yet to be determined.

“It’s entirely possible, if I like it,” O’Neill says.

In the meantime, the paper is enjoying a boost to its subscribers – Archer notes there was “a big spike in digital subscriptions” after the first chapter was published. 

That fact surprised O’Neill. “I was like, I don’t want to disappoint you, but nobody is going to subscribe to this newspaper because I’m writing about a crazy girl in the subway,” she says, laughing. “But apparently, they do.”