After 18 years of working in the production industry, Cal Coons is finally making a name for himself as the cocreator and executive story editor of the hit Global Television crime series Blue Murder.

With a long-time ambition to direct, Coons says he has honed and used his writing abilities, as well as a bevy of technical production skills as a means to an end. And, ironically, it is his writing that has garnered the aspiring director his first Gemini nomination, for best writing in a dramatic series.

After graduating from film school at Niagara College in 1984, ‘I wanted to make films, but the structure wasn’t quite there,’ he says. ‘I wrote pieces to get a chance to direct, but I had to make a living, so I ended up doing everything. I was a camera assistant, assistant editor, editor, boom, gaff, grip, dolly…’ All of which led the Peterborough, ON native to directing small corporate and documentary projects, and ultimately setting up corporate video house Cal Coons Productions.

But tired and fed up with the business of corporate videomaking, Coons ended up in 1996 as a director resident at the Canadian Film Centre where he made a well-received short film, Day Pass. ‘I took a major financial hit to get into the world of drama,’ he admits. But once again, the force of circumstance pushed Coons into writing. ‘I couldn’t afford to hire writers to create what I wanted to be working on.’

But it wasn’t too long after graduating from the CFC that Coons met up with pal Steve Lucus (Major Crime). ‘We both liked crime and ended up writing a pilot that eventually became Blue Murder, and here we are.’

In 1999, the pilot script was presented to producer Laszlo Barna of Barna-Alper Productions, an old friend of Lucus’. At the time, Global was looking to replace Traders and was also developing a mystery strand. ‘The whole thing was quite fortuitous,’ says Coons, not discounting the high quality of his pilot script.

Today, Coons is busier than ever, working on the development of every Blue Murder episode and writing at least three a season.

But with a budget of roughly $1 million an hour, he says the production, now shooting its second season, needs a bigger story department. ‘Unlike series like Law & Order, we don’t have writers on set and in post taking part in all phases of production.’ Blue Murder’s story department is made up of four writing talents: Coons, Lucus, David Barlow and Joe Collick. ‘In an ideal world we’d have six writers.’

The budget also forces the writers to be extra crafty. ‘In a mystery show, the characters have to be proactive. They have to go out and get clues. And it’s really boring to watch clues come into the police station,’ says Coons. ‘It’s not an inter-office drama like NYPD. We try to be out of studio as much as possible, which means we have to use locations cleverly given our time and budget restraints.’

Episodes are shot in seven days – five days out of studio, two in.

It takes Coons about three weeks to complete a script – two weeks to break the outline, one week to write.

‘Mysteries are a house of cards,’ says Coons. ‘ If you tinker with the logic in one spot, there’s a whole ripple effect.’

Every scene must further the story, he continues. ‘It’s not a character-piece show. It’s a page-turner in the story.’

But while Coons is so intimately aware of the nuances that make the scripts work, he says there’ll be more directing and less writing in his future.