Power Q & A with Will Ferguson
Q: That dreaded question: Where do your ideas come from?
A: When authors get together to gripe, they often gripe about this: people asking, ‘Where do you get your ideas?’ It’s posed at dinner parties and public readings and even in media interviews. I knew one particularly prickly writer whose standard reply was ‘I subscribe to Ideas Monthly.’ But I’ve never understood why this question would bother anyone. True, we often don’t know exactly where our ideas come from. It could be a newspaper article read in passing, it could be the sound of a horse carriage on cobblestones, it could be the taste of a madeleine cake dipped in tea. Ideas can take years, even decades to percolate through our subconscious. In the case of Officer Shimada and the Disappearing Girl, a mystery set in the southern islands of Okinawa, I can trace the first inkling back to a lost camera lens and an island at the end of Japan. This was thirty years ago. I had been island hopping across Okinawa and had reached the very last one in the chain: Hateruma. My travelling companion and I had camped on a beach and hiked into town. Hateruma had a single village, a population of 500 people on an island scarcely five square miles. Along the way, I’d misplaced my camera lens cap. Retracing our steps from beach to noodle stall to public park, I was told by a lady at the local bento shop to check in at the police station. Police station? Yes, Hateruma had its own station with a single officer posted there, the most remote police station in all of Japan. He checked the lost and found, no lens cap, alas. And as I left, I passed a posterboard out front, the kind found at any Japanese police station or police box, featuring mugshots photos of Japan’s MOST WANTED, a rogue’s gallery of scowling yakuza faces. And I thought, What would this lone police officer do if any of those violent criminals actually showed up on this sleepy isle? That’s where stories so often begin, with the question, What if…? Thirty years later, I would create the character of Officer Shimada, a policeman based on this very island, who is called upon to solve an impossible crime. When people ask me where the idea for this novel came from, I can pinpoint the exact moment it first tugged at my sleeve. It was an idea that took thirty years to come to fruition.
Officer Shimada and the Disappearing Girl by Will Ferguson
More about Officer Shimada and the Disappearing Girl by Will Ferguson, Goose Lane Editions September 15, 2026:
Officer Shimada and the Disappearing Girl is a gripping literary mystery from the Giller Prize–winning author of 419. Bringing atmosphere, character, and puzzle together, Ferguson delivers a story that is as emotionally resonant as it is suspenseful—a brilliantly compelling mystery and a nuanced exploration of loneliness, exile, and human connection.
Based on a true crime, the novel follows Kaito, a young inspector still haunted by his sister’s disappearance more than a decade after she vanished from a closed elevator. Desperate for answers, Kaito travels to a sleepy island in Okinawa to track down Mr. Shimada, a senior officer who once solved a similarly impossible elevator crime.
Hauntingly set in Okinawa and Nagasaki, Officer Shimada and the Disappearing Girl combines the intricate pleasures of a seemingly impossible mystery with a taut psychological drama. As Kaito pursues the truth about his sister, Ferguson moves through Japanese cultural and spiritual terrain while examining memory, unresolved loss, and the human need for connection. Elegantly written and tightly plotted, the novel offers readers an endearingly persistent investigator and a mystery designed to keep them riveted to the final page.
Will Ferguson is a bestselling author whose work spans fiction, travel writing, history, and humour. His literary thriller 419 won the Giller Prize in 2012, and his novel The Finder received the 2021 Arthur Ellis Award for Crime Fiction. He is also a three-time winner of the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour. Will lives in Calgary.