A trip to Costco these days carries a bit of a weird feeling for New West author Don Hauka.
That’s because the retail store has picked up his Mister Jinnah novels.
“It’s kind of weird to walk in there and see the produce and everything, and then there’s your book,” he told the Record. “It’s not just one book, it’s all three.”
The series revolves around Mister Jinnah, a politically incorrect, larger-than-life crime reporter (a character not-so-loosely based on Hauka’s former reporting colleague, Salim Jiwa).
The third book, Pizza 911, was published earlier this summer. During this storyline, Jinnah has grown tired of working for the fictional Vancouver Tribune. His bags are packed and he’s headed to Africa to run a burger joint, a write-up states, “that is, until a charred, dismembered body is discovered in a pizza oven. The lure of one last front-page byline is too much for Jinnah to resist – even if it turns out to be his own obituary.”
The decision to base a character on investigative reporter Jiwa was an easy one for Hauka, he said. The pair worked beside each other at the Province for almost two decades.
Hauka recalled meeting him for the first time as a late 20-something temp.
“I walked in and they said you have to sit over there. There was this guy sitting there, … wearing this loud acrylic shirt in polyester pants, he’s got his feet up on the desk and you can smell the amount of sugar and cream he’s got in his coffee, like six of each.”
The two immediately struck up a friendship, Hauka added.
The Air India bombings took place that same year, ultimately laying the foundation for Jiwa’s book, The Death of Air India Flight 182, which Hauka edited.
“He puts up this front of being a bit of a coward but he’s really one of the bravest men I know,” he said of his friend.
Hauka remembered one time when Jiwa got called to a meeting at one of the Sikh temples in Surrey. Surrounded by gangsters not happy about his reporting on the bombings, Jiwa was told to write “something good.”
“If it had been me, I’d say, sure,” Hauka jokingly said. “But Salim, all by himself, confronted with these guys, looked at them and said, ‘Do something good and I’ll write about it.’”
But Jiwa isn’t as melodic as he’s made out to be in the book, nor is he a hypchondriac.
“It’s more inspired by than based on. In any case, I think there’s the Jinnah experience and the full Jiwa as we like to call it,” said the local author.
Pizza 911, published by Dundurn Press, is also available at Black Bond Books at Royal City Centre, and online. It’s not the last of Mister Jinnah, who’ll make an appearance in the U.S. as part of a new series, currently being shopped around in Los Angeles.
“I find when I’m writing, if I’m ever stuck, all I have to think is, well, what would Jinnah do? And the character takes over,” Hauka said.
