Author of seven books is a lover of the outdoors and enjoys canoeing, skiing and traveling. Among other things. He’s lived at various times in the Dordogne in France where his book Harvest is based.
He began writing when taking a year off between high school and university to work on a small city daily. First job? Writing obituaries. With his formal education behind him, he tackled reporting for a larger daily; everything from the police beat to the monthly meeting of the library board.
What Clarke enjoyed was writing features about life, real people in and around the city. This in turn took him to a national weekly magazine in Montreal. When a writer in the adjoining cubicle actually published a book, it struck him that if Trent could do it, why not Wallace?
Travel is important to him, researching firsthand in such diverse locations as a morgue in Washington D.C.; skiing down the Mer de Glace glacier, Mont Blanc. Time spent in a penitentiary working up material for a film, The Morning Man, (Un Matin, Une Vie). I pitched it this way: A guy breaks out of prison, giving himself a year to go straight. It worked, finally.