Book Reviews

New Canadian Mysteries

T. F. Banks (Author)
The Thief-Taker: Memoirs of a Bow Street Runner. Delacorte Press
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John Brady (Author)
A Carra King. MacArthur
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Ann Diamond (Author)
Dead White Males. DC Books
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Peter Sellers (Author)
Whistling Past the Graveyard. Mosaic Press
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Reviewed by Elizabeth Hodgson

It would be hard to find a more eclectic group of works than these, all categorized as "mysteries," which is a good sign for Canadian aficionados of fictional death; whatever you're looking for, you can find a home-grown version.

Under "fantasy," see Peter Sellers. Sellers, the editor of the Cold Blood anthologies, has created in Whistling Past the Graveyard a mini-anthology of his own stories, some previously published and some new. The short-story genre has of course illustrious gothic roots (Poe, Jackson, et al), and Sellers exploits the genre's use of atmosphere and shocking plot devices in his own collection of macabre tales. The most engaging of these is perhaps "Advertising Hell," with its cleverly constructed modern take on the original Faustian bargain. "Dead Meet," with its deftly drawn rivalry, also has a pleasantly economical dry wit. "Dents" participates in the revenge-of-fhe-oppressed theme so predominant in horror fiction, while several stories invoke the woman-as-sexual-predator topos with just enough amused disinterest to avoid endorsing that particular cultural fantasy. While I find this mode of fiction fairly limited, Sellers certainly knows the language of his medium and handles it with considerable verve.

Under "fantasy," don't see Ann Diamond— that is, unless you're already a fan of her work. Dead White Males is the BC writer's third novel, and it stars David Dennings, hairdresser and private detective with a sink and blowdryer sitting alongside his Raymond Chandler desk. Dead White Males is a paean to postmodernism, with its elaborate pastiche of texts, narrators, hallucinatory fragments, dream visions and echoic episodes, with characters ranging from a Haitian soothsayer and a mermaid to a talking cat and a possibly dead lab technician. While such a work could be carnivalesque, like Garcia Marquez's magic realism, or dystopian, like Atwood's fiction, it has trouble hanging together long enough to create the sustained mood or mode of either of these styles. There are, nonetheless, some very powerful moments in the work: Diamond's picture of academic hippies in decline is all too apt, as is her depiction of the domestic nightmares that can follow from being stupidly nice to the wrong people.

Under "historical mystery," see T.F. Banks. The Thief-Taker, Banks's first work in the genre, inhabits the world of Regency London and the Bow Street Runners, the constables of London before there was a regular police force. Henry Morton, who enforces the law by day and dallies with a star of the London stage by night, is the protagonist. His search for the murderer of Halbert Glendinning, a respectable gentleman found dead in a most disreputable place, involves him a complicated tangle of aristocratic violence, corruption, and sexual rivalry. The hazardous position of the Bow Street runners as law-enforcement entrepreneurs proves a challenge (and sometimes a danger) to Morton's conscience and to his person. The novel gradually builds a satisfyingly realistic glimpse of the layers of humanity in the London of the early nineteenth century: the politics of thievery, the codes of honour, the fault-lines between official femininity and what women could really do, the hypocrisies and psychologies of mobs and clubs and cliques. The hints that Lord Byron himself is lurking in the background of the plot are of a piece with its suggestive energy. Banks promises a continuing series, which is a good sign.

For hard-boiled detective fiction, definitely see A Carra King, by John Brady. Brady's hefty novel is the sixth in his series starring Matt Minogue, a detective with the Dublin police force. Brady's determinedly authentic Dublin-speak takes some getting used to, as does his terse, laconic style, but the novel is definitely worth the effort. A Carra King is intelligent, sophisticated in its plotting and prose, intensely atmospheric and detailed, and packed with characters whose individuality and humanity are richly satisfying. If a novel is a work of fiction which brings a world to life, A Carra King definitely deserves to be considered a novel first and "detective fiction" second.

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This review originally appeared in Canadian Literature #179 (Winter 2003), Ivan Coyote. (pg. 110 - 111)

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