The Interview is a new regular feature on Through The Looking Glass, which will spotlight someone in the news. Have an idea for an subject for this feature, send me an e-mail. Today’s spotlight is on journalist Jon Wells, whose book Post-Mortem has been nominated for an Arthur Ellis crime writing award in the nonfiction category.

While working at a weekly paper in Guelph, Ont., Jon Wells would scribble his notes at city council meetings. When the meetings got dry, he would still be scribbling away — but not about proposed zoning changes or license approvals. Instead, Wells was making a list.

Toronto Star.

Hamilton Spectator.

Maclean’s.

A self-proclaimed serial resume submitter at the time, Wells was making a list of where he would leave Guelph for at that moment. National papers he submitted to told him he needed daily newspaper experience. Working at a weekly with a masters of journalism was getting him nowhere.

“I really felt that it could be a long time before I got a shot. I felt if I could just get a shot, I felt I was capable of writing with anyone … but I wasn’t sure if I would get a shot,” Wells says over coffee.

He got his shot — and now may soon be able to call himself an award-winning author, instead of just an award-winning reporter. Post-Mortem, which first ran in the Hamilton Spectator as a serialized narrative before Wells turned it into a book, has been short listed in the nonfiction category for an Arthur Ellis award for crimewriting.

“It’s really cool,” he says of getting nominated for the first time as an author, instead of a reporter.

Wells is also up for a Ontario Newspaper Award this weekend, for a feature he wrote on Ian Campbell, who was killed by a drunk driver in 2006.

But it is his long, narrative series that Jon Wells has become synonymous with. It started with Poison, which told the true crime story of Sukhwinder Dhillion which ran in the Hamilton Spectator in 2003. The idea began nearly two years before the first part of the series ran in print when Wells’ then-editor-in-chief, Dana Robbins suggested he do something “big” on the Dhillion case.

“It was sort of as wide open as that, we need to do something big on the Dhillon case,” Wells remembers, saying he was told to take all the time he needed, was allowed to write as long as he wanted and if need be, he could go to India to get the story.

Wells started working on the story near the end of 2001. The process continued for all of 2002 (with a trip to India that summer), and the beginning of 2003 (when Dhillion’s second trial took place). It ran that February.

“It was a long process, that’s for sure. I don’t get that much time any more to do these kinds of things,” Wells smiles. “Those where the days.”

Poison was not just Wells’ first narrative series, it was his first newspaper series. Period. He had always moved toward feature writing though. He remembers when he was hired at the Spec in 1997, former editor-in-chief Kirk La Pointe had a special feature called the Initiative Rotation where reporters would research and write a story for month, then the stories would run as full-page features the following month.

It was Wells’ goal when he was hired to get on that rotation. He did. And he liked it a lot. But the Initiative Rotation was nothing compared to Poison.

“I remember when Poison ended – I thought It would be a one shot thing. This was my chance to do something big and that would be it … I thought this was my one shot, I better make it good so I pulled out all the stops.”

He remembers that Poison in and of itself was a gamble. Devoting that much space to one series was a risk. But the risk paid off. Circulation numbers rose, the response to the series was good.

“I think people want to have a relationship with their newspaper and one story if it’s told well enough and if there’s enough there. I’m surprised other papers haven;’t tried it in a sense,” he says, pointing that serialized stories have a history in newspapers that goes back to Charles Dickens.

After Poison, Wells admits there was a letdown. His first assignment after the serialized narrative? A weather story.

“I remember just thinking, ‘Ah jeez.’ I sucked up the weather story and that was fine. but I remember going to Dana and Roger (Gillespie) and saying, ‘I want to do another one of these. I feel like I have this hunger to do it again with something else.’ ”

Next was Sniper — the story of James Kopp. Then Wells went off the true crime beat (he still does not consider himself a crime writer) to write Heat — about the Plastimet fire in Hamilton in 1997. Then came a series on an emergency room in the city, then came To the Grave (turned into a book called Vanished) and Post-Mortem. This year another Jon Wells series was published, Witness.

While the series are long, Wells’ writing style makes it easy for the reader to want to get involved in these stories. He tries to write his series like a book he says, so there is a lot of colour and description — something he has always had in his writing, even when he was at weekly papers in “one-stoplight towns.”

“I have fun with my writing if I’m describing … I think it comes from trying to make something out of nothing,” he explains.

While he spends a lot of time polishing his writing, he says usually once he has the opening (“the way into”) a story, the rest “is gravy.” That moment came upon him for Witness early on as he was reading the police transcripts and came across the conversation the detectives had with a three-year-old little boy — the son of one of the murder victims.

Wells still would like to try to write a book — fiction likely (because, he theorizes, if he were to write another nonfiction story, why not do it for the Spec?). Maybe a thriller or a mystery.

While he may not be a serial resume submitter anymore, Wells admits he has wondered about other opportunities in other places. The New York Times, maybe. Maybe as a foreign correspondent. Maybe. But the national newspapers in Toronto do not hold the same lustre they once did when Wells was stuck at a weekly he thought he might never leave.

“I think the short answer is at the Spec I keep getting creative things that I like to do.  Its not about being at a quote-unquote ‘daily.’ I don’t think any of us get in this industry for the money … we’re in it because it’s a passion for what we do.

“While I still wonder about other places out there that give me a rush, you know, the ‘I-can’t-believe-I’m-here,’ a Toronto paper wouldn’t do that for me,” he says.

“For me it’s about the work, and the Spec has given me that, a great chance to create.”

The Arthur Ellis awards will be handed on on May 27.