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‘Law and Order Toronto’ Creator Tassie Cameron Takes a Page From Virginia Woolf
The award-winning screenwriter also names Jane Austen, Agatha Christie and Ernest Hemingway among her favourite authors / BY Shinan Govani / February 22nd, 2024
Dun dun duuuun! With the Feb. 22 premiere of Law & Order Toronto: Criminal Intent – the first time an international Law & Order franchise has been made with original scripts – all eyes turn to Canada’s largest city. And, with that, the spry woman behind the series, showrunner Tassie Cameron.
She grew up talking about crime and punishment around the dinner table – her mother is noted Canadian crime reporter and investigative journalist, Stevie Cameron – and has been a fan of everything created by Law & Order writer-producer Dick Wolf as long as she can remember. The television pro, who previously steered the shows Rookie Blue and Flashpoint, teamed up with her sister, Amy Cameron, to found Cameron Pictures and make award-winning TV series like Mary Kills People and Pretty Hard Cases. Tassie finds inspiration everywhere, including books, and recently filled us in on her favourite writers and literature.
What’s the best book you’ve read this year?
I haven’t read as much as I usually do this year because of work, but I really enjoyed Pineapple Street by Jenny Jackson. It was the perfect blend of escapism (the lives of the very rich in Brooklyn), satire and family drama. As my teenage daughter would say, it was “giving” Edith Wharton, in a very dry and very modern way.
What book can’t you wait to dive into?
Anything new by Montreal author Heather O’Neill. She is one of my favourite writers. Her prose defies description (although watch me try): it’s magical, sexy, evocative, honest, human and full of metaphors that will break your heart and change your way of looking at the world. I’ve adapted her novel The Lonely Hearts Hotel into a limited series, and now I just need someone to give me a zillion dollars to make it.
What’s your favourite book of all time?
That is a terrible question. That is like asking a parent to pick their favourite child (although I only have one child, so that is easy). But a few books that leap to mind: Persuasion by Jane Austen; The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford; The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway; and On the Farm, a true-crime story written by my incredible mother, Stevie Cameron.
What book completely changed your perspective?
A few “how-to” books, including Save The Cat – a back-to-basics screenwriting book by Blake Snyder, and a book I turn to regularly when I’m stuck – and Younger Next Year (which basically tells you to exercise six days a week, a lesson I’m still pathetically trying to learn). But, I suppose, ultimately it would be A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf. I read that book in my early 20s, and it gave me two rules to live by that I have followed ever since: I need a room of my own to disappear into, and I need enough money of my own to support myself.
If you could have dinner with any author, living or dead, who would it be?
I’m afraid I would have to book a table for three, so that I could invite both Jane Austen and Agatha Christie. I have so many questions for both of them – as women, as storytellers, as smart, funny, wry observers of human nature – and I’m pretty damn sure we would have a great time together.