By HEATHER IBBOTSON, EXPOSITOR STAFF
Brantford Expositor April 2, 2009

Soon after assuming his new post as an infectious disease specialist at Brantford General Hospital in 2003, Dr. Ross Pennie learned of two local cases of a deadly and particularly frightful brain disease. The cases “gripped me with terror,” Pennie said. He and his colleagues were awash in an “emotional chill” until it was learned that the two cases were naturally occurring forms of the disease and not a brewing public health nightmare.

Afterward, Pennie, already a budding author working on a non-fiction memoir of his two years practising medicine in the South Pacific, realized that the potential of an unexpected and frightening epidemic in small-city Ontario would be “a good premise for a novel.”

That idea has finally come to fruition, after years of writing and rewriting, in the form of Pennie’s fast-paced debut novel, Tainted: A Dr. Zol Szabo Medical Mystery. Taintedfeatures fictional medical sleuth Szabo and a cast of cohorts who race against time and battle bureaucracy to identify the cause of a deadly brain disease threatening to become epidemic in southwestern Ontario.

The notion of sleuthing and solving plague outbreaks fascinates medical professionals and the public alike.”Everyone loves it,” said Pennie, 57, who is the medical director of the laboratories at BGH, the hospital’s infectious disease specialist and a part-time professor at McMaster University.

Although medicine is Pennie’s profession and passion, he embraced writing as a youngster when, at the tender age of 10, the fledgling scribe diarized a four-day solo train trip from Medicine Hat, Alberta, to Vancouver. Decades later, he turned to a computer screen rather than pen and paper to set down a memoir detailing the medical challenges he faced as a CUSO volunteer working in the jungles of Papua New Guinea when he was fresh out of med school. The Unforgiving Tideswas published in 2004 to critical acclaim and has sold about 3,000 copies. “I enjoyed it so much, I didn’t stop writing,” Pennie said.

Another stroke of good fortune fell Pennie’s way when he met international best-selling mystery author P. D. James while on a cruise. “I sat down with her and she was so encouraging,” Pennie said. “Her eyes lit up” when he told her he was both a doctor and a writer, he said. James imparted a piece of advice that is simple but critical for any would-be writer. “She said, ‘You have to set aside time to write,’” Pennie said. Pennie took the advice to heart and embarked on a strict writing schedule. Seven days a week, he rises at 5:45 a. m. and is at his computer by 7 a. m. for two hours of writing.

The dutiful early morning writing sessions are not a chore for Pennie. Instead, he said he is “pumped and excited when I come to work. I feel terrific.”

Pennie spent the better part of four years crafting the novel, from plotting it in 2004, through two years of rewrites to its completion in 2008.
During that time, he took a brief hiatus from writing when his first book came out. On Jan. 1, 2006, he returned in earnest to his writing ofTainted.
The first draft was completed in a couple of months, but the rewriting took two years, he said.

The setting of Tainted is a combination of the real and the fictitious, Pennie said.The story is set in Hamilton, using real street names and descriptions of the escarpment and surrounding area. However, the names of stores, offices and institutions are fictitious.

The novel immediately caught the eye of editors at ECW Press — the first publisher he sent it to — and Pennie has been signed to a three-book deal.
Because it takes a year from acceptance to seeing a book in print, Pennie has already been long at work on the second Dr. Szabo novel and said he hopes to hopes to finish it by midsummer.

“It’s much easier this time,” he said. Readers who gobble up Tainted will want to know what the second book in the series has in store, but all Pennie will say is that it is set in a retirement residence “where nasty things are happening.”