TORONTO — David Adams Richards is ready for his close-up.

The grizzled New Brunswick author who writes hardscrabble novels about Miramichi workers scarred by poverty, violence and drunken squalor is gamely performing marketing duties in uptown Toronto for the release of his first "real" movie, The Bay of Love and Sorrows. Based on his 1998 novel of the same name, and co-written by Richards himself, the movie is about a spoiled rich kid, Michael Skid, who triggers a chaotic bloodbath by slumming with criminals and shack-dwellers in a New Brunswick backwater in the early 1970s. It opens Friday in Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver.

The film's doomed heroine, Karrie (Elaine Cassidy), casts aside a poor farmer, Tom Donnerel (Zachary Bennett) for the pretentious Skid (Jonathan Scarfe).

She is unaware that Skid's thrill-seeking involvement with a mescaline-peddling ex-convict (Peter Outerbridge) will drag not only herself but also Tom and his mentally challenged brother Vincent as well as a promiscuous neighbour, Madonna Brassaurd (Joanne Kelly), and her drug-addicted brother into a tangled web of murder and suicide.

The Canadian film industry being what it is, the promotional campaign for The Bay of Love and Sorrows, which is directed and co-written by Tim Southam (Drowning in Dreams), does not feature glossy Vanity Fair fashion spreads of the moody writer pouting shirtless into the camera with his hair blowing about melodramatically in a fan-propelled breeze.

On this cold Toronto morning, the marketing drive consists of a photo shoot and interview in a half-empty Starbucks on Yonge Street.

Not exactly Entertainment Tonight. But the pot-bellied 52-year-old writer, who blasts pampered Toronto elitists in his novels and op-ed pieces, feels obliged to register at least a token resistance to the creeping southern Ontario foppishness of it all.

"Wait a minute. I don't want the Starbucks label to show," says the unshaven author, quickly shifting his coffee cup away from the photographer's camera. "I'm more of a Tim Hortons kind of a guy."

Richards is grinning when he says this. He is not grinning when he points to the homeless people silently freezing on the street outside the cafe window.

"I went around with my son the other day seeing what we could do. It's terrible," laments Richards, who moved from New Brunswick to Toronto in 1997 and recently published a memoir about his own early battles with poverty and alcoholism.

A similarly divided tone emerges in Richards' discussions of novel-writing and screenwriting. The former is a serious matter, weighted with imposing references to Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Hardy, Conrad and James. Screenwriting is a much more casual affair.

"Scriptwriting and production is so much fun because you're involved with so many people," says Richards, who started writing TV screenplays based on his novels and short stories in the early 1990s. He began with Small Gifts in 1994 and followed up with TV versions of For Those Who Hunt the Wounded Down in 1996 and Nights Below Station Street in 1997.

"Scriptwriting is also a way to offset poverty. And I enjoy doing it. It's a different process. It's not entirely your own, but it's a lot of fun. I don't find it as taxing as writing novels," says Richards, whose family operated a movie theatre in Newcastle, N.B., where he grew up.

To date, Richards' screenwriting has proved almost as prize-friendly as his fiction writing and reportage, and he has picked up two Geminis to add to his two Governor General's Awards and his 2000 Giller.

Newspaper critics, however, have not always shared the judges' enthusiasm for Richards' TV work, and advance critical reaction to the movie version of Bay of Love and Sorrows has also been mixed.

The script features "a level of grimness that starts to become almost funny as it piles tragedy on tragedy in a way that lessens the impact of each one," wrote a Halifax Daily News reviewer in November.

Richards insists the film does in fact do justice to his book.

"You've got to realize this is an approximation. The script is an approximation of the book."

In any case, says Richards, he's not planning on giving up his day job anytime soon.

"I think I'm a born novelist. I really feel that's where my strengths lie."