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Canadian writers are taking sleuths out of the lab
How do you catch a killer? If you're a television detective these days, you're likely to do so in the lab. If you're a detective in the new crop of Canadian mystery novels, you're more likely to develop the small-town story. Our up-and-coming crime writers -- nearly all of them female -- have traded in gimmicks and gadgets for character-driven tension and sense of place, to great effect. Reading them is akin to turning off the nonstop CSI reruns and tuning in to a nuanced episode of Midsomer Murders: They remind us how satisfying old-fashioned crime writing and procedurals are, no DNA analysis required.
To begin, there's the first in a new series of hardboiled whodunits by B.C. writer Linda L. Richards. In Death Was The Other Woman (St. Martin's Minotaur, with a suitably pulp illustrated cover), Richards introduces the refreshing heroine Kitty Pang-born, a socialite turned investigator's secretary who's broad in the best possible sense, a cross between meddlesome Torchy Blaine and wordly Nora Charles. The girl Friday helps her hapless P.I. boss solve a murder in Prohibition-era Los Angeles.
In Lou Allin's Belle Palmer series, set in Sudbury, Ont., a central character is the violent and wild climate of northern Canada, from swarms of blackflies to power outages and snow days that turn into snowed-in weeks. Lyn Hamilton's archaeological mysteries star antiques dealer Lara McClintoch (think Ian McShane's Lovejoy), and Mary Jane Maffini creates one plucky heroine after another: first Fiona Silk and more recently, Charlotte Adams. (The author has the advantage of milieu: She also co-owns the Prime Crime mystery bookstore in Ottawa.) Litigator Anne Emery's trilogy Obit, Sign of the Cross and the upcoming Barrington Street Blues (ECW Press) follows the cases of lawyer Monty Collins and his Catholic priest pal Father Burke in and around Halifax, where the author herself works as a litigator. The final book comes out in the early spring, which means there's just enough time to catch up before the last instalment.
And of course, there's Louise Penny. Penny, a former CBC broadcast journalist in her fifties, is the author of the critically-acclaimed best-sellers Still Life, Dead Cold and most recently, The Cruelest Month (McArthur & Co.). With so many thrillers set a stone's throw from the latest diagnostic equipment, the Canadian cozy genre Penny is reviving -- exploring the secrets of regular folk and genteel small-town life -- seems practically exotic, which may account for her incredible success. The Cruelest Month, recently earned a rare troika: starred reviews from all three American trade heavies Publishers Weekly, Library Journal and Kirkus Review, as well as from Quill & Quire here at home.
Penny's Surete du Quebec Chief Inspector Armand Gamache is a visiting detective, known to the community but not a part of it, and from that perch explores the tension between French-Canadian and English Quebec cultures in the fictional town of Three Pines. It's St. Mary Mead with a two solitudes angle.
Discovering the next big Canadian crime writer, male or female, is an ongoing investigation, and Crime Writers of Canada, the national organization that sponsors the Arthur Ellis Awards (whose statuette is a wooden hangman) last year added the Best Unpublished Mystery prize, or the Unhanged Arthur, to expressly nurture promising new writers. McArthur & Company, Penny's Canadian publisher, sponsors the prize and has right of first refusal on the winning manuscript.
"In England, they've had it for a while," Kim McArthur, the publisher's president, explains of the Debut Dagger award that Penny won two years ago. It jump-started her career, as Penny landed her agent shortly afterwards, and then her multi-country book deals. In March, McArthur will publish Phyllis Smallman's first novel, Margarita Nights, the inaugural Canadian winner. Smallman's novel features Sherri Travis, a bartender with run of bad luck and an inconveniently murdered ex-husband in small-town Florida.
It's refreshing to read crime stories that take place in a close-knit community, with a limited cast of regular characters who also often become the usual suspects. "Personally … I really respond to this kind of detection," adds McArthur. "I like this idea of an enclosed crime scene that Louise talks about, inspired by Agatha Christie, and the good old inspector coming in. With the city mysteries and lots of possibilities, you can be fooled. I hate it when suddenly, out of the blue, there comes a character you've met once, briefly, and it turns out they did it."
"I think it's great that in Canada we can get that kind of talent out to compete with the Janet Evanovichs," enthuses McArthur. "I can't wait to see who wins for next year." You might say the suspense is killing her.
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