Murder Out There Reviews

Grave Doubts

2009-06-16T15:28:00.007-04:00

By John Moss

Dundurn Press

332 pages

ISBN 978 1 55488 405 6

Like its predecessor Still Waters, Moss’ first novel featuring Toronto police detectives Quin and Morgan, Grave Doubts is a cozy collection of eccentrics cohabiting in the nasty little community of Gothic Ontario. Gothic is all interiors, ironic given that the old farm houses, institutions, relationships and even more intensely personal spaces, were all designed to protect inhabitants from dangers lurking outside, but it’s the others inside who must be watched once the doors have been slammed and the bolts shot. Inside this novel is a claustrophobia-inducing coincidence of cops, artists and academics engaged in various pursuits related to archeology.

Quin and Morgan are led by their reputation for curiosity to an abandoned house in Hogg’s Hollow, once on the northern edge of Toronto, where two headless corpses dressed in period costume and entwined in romantic embrace, have been disentombed from behind a sealed cupboard wall. Initially the mummified remains appear to be of more interest to anthropologists at the UofT (University of Toronto) and the ROM (Royal Ontario Museum) than to detectives with the TPS (Toronto Police Service) but Morgan’s inquisitiveness compels him to dig further into the apparently cold case. It is murder as performance art, which suggests both some psychological characteristics of the actor or actors, and the probability of more engagements.

Early coincidences seem even more strained as they are logically linked to the sub-culture in which the detectives slowly immerse themselves. Now and again curtains are drawn as Morgan and Quin attend to the acts of gang warfare and domestic violence commonly presented in the outside world, but gangs and families are their own, relatively small communities with their own stifling, sustaining cultures driving their inhabitant’s dramas into repeat performances, just as the characters inside the novel repeat theirs. There too the shows must go on and on again. Only one way off this stage, and when the denouement arrives, Moss proves again that he is a thrill-master of detail and suspense, drawing readers into death’s lonely chill.

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Thought You Were Dead

2009-06-03T17:20:00.014-04:00

by Terry Griggs

Biblioasis

217 pages

ISBN 978 1 897231 53 1

Thought You Were Dead is not noir. Beyond the name of a secondary character’s cat, and a keyboard full of existential notes, the novel is much closer to a post-modern A.A. Milne party mix than anything resembling, say, James Elroy’s blood poetry. Author Terry Griggs’ firepower with allusion, illusion and creative word play so joyfully overshadows plot and homogenizes characterization that the book’s failure to hit the mark as satisfactory crime fiction may hardly be noticed.

Thought You Were Dead is farce, in the style of Who is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe?, using some familiar crime fiction conventions to send up Ontario’s literary community, a murderously competitive economic suburb where talent vastly exceeds opportunity. First to go is a literary critic. Who reads literary criticism? Only that tiny smattering of people who claim to be least influenced by it: authors such as Athena Havelock, who is herself “known for her philosophical and linguistically challenging works, and consequently was not much in demand.”

To glom her daily bread, Havelock (who not coincidentally has the same initials as a well-known master of suspense) writes popular fiction, laboring “efficiently and tirelessly in the cultural service industry, supplying enough material to satisfy vast vermin-composters full of bookworms.” Defying experience, she earns enough to hire slacker grocery clerk Chellis Beith to research the arcane minutiae of her literary thrillers and mysteries.

Chellis is the yarn’s detective/protagonist. That it isn’t until about a third of the way into the novel that he does anything resembling research or detection into the death of someone nobody gives a damn about, matters not a whit. However, selecting a page at random reliably leads to booty such as this encounter between Chellis and a traffic cop:
“You in a hurry?”
“Funeral. I’m late.”
“Uh-huh. What’s wrong with your head?”
Interesting. Here was a question Elaine [Chellis’ unrequited love interest] herself had often posed, and for once he had an answer. He touched one of his ailing, bandaged temples. “I have complexion issues.”
“I see. I have quota issues. You were going one kilometer over the speed limit.”

This stuff is so abundant it overwhelms. Well, throw enough literary wit against the wall and some of it’s bound into schtick. Schtick is good. When it comes to schtick, Robertson Davies is and was one hundred per cent delicious, slow-smoked ham. Terry Griggs makes for a mean slice of Canadian back-bacon herself.

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Outside The Line

2009-04-15T15:43:00.004-04:00

By Christian Petersen

Dundurn Press
213 pages

ISBN 978 4 55002 859 1

Outside The Line is a dark, slow-moving noir by first time novelist Christian Petersen. He writes of Peter Ellis, a probation officer in a small city somewhere in the dusty interior of British Columbia. Recently separated, Ellis is stuck in an entry-level job with a house he can’t sell in a town so still even the rats have moved to Alberta. His ex has moved on to Southern California with her lesbian lover. Ellis isn’t going anywhere but to the bottom of a bottle. He smokes too much. He shops in the frozen dinner section of the grocery store. He only goes out to work. His next “client” is a one-season NHL wonder on bail for spousal abuse.

The case could be a feminist/Canuck cliché torn from the letters page of a weekly suburban newspaper. The jock is a minor celebrity whose hockey-enforcer buttons are easily pushed. His girl is a hottie with more bruises and brains than the men in her life. Ellis predictably greases his downhill slide by consorting with the victim, a clear no-no in the probations biz. This generates pages of standardized Can-lit interior dialogue from Ellis, a form Petersen has down pat. It becomes quite amusing, revealing absurdities of the criminal justice system when it comes to solving, or even mitigating the messy problems of people suffering familiar emotions. Then it all goes fluey in an explosion of raw violence.

It could be more erotic. Tension could build more consistently. Stick with it for the ending.

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Body Blows

2009-04-07T11:41:00.008-04:00

By Marc Strange

From an Advance
Unedited Manuscript

Dundurn Press
296 pages
ISBN 978 1 55488 390 5

Ex-pug Joe Grundy has been hired to watch the back of a wealthy Vancouver entrepreneur, from what threat exactly he has never been told, even after taking a bullet for the boss. Not that boss-man Leo Alexander is unappreciative. He sets Grundy up as house dick in Alexander’s fancy new hotel, a job for which the once-capable boxer has little skill beyond recognizing how much he relies upon competent staff. Alexander is comfortable hiding out in his roof-top penthouse and comforted knowing there’s a big man downstairs guarding access, while few of Grundy’s fellow employees are ambitious to personally prove the Peter Principle, quite content to let Joe be paid to take responsibility for whatever screw-ups might occur. Occur they do.

When Alexander leaves his aerie on the first date in years, Grundy chaperones in the familiar role of protector. Sensing that the evening might not be unfolding to plan, they hasten home to find Alexander’s live-in maid, a friendly staffer who has been teaching Joe Spanish, lying dead in the middle of a kitchen battle scene, dressed to the nines. There’s a second corpse tangled in the rebar atop a pylon in the unfinished building site next door, spiked like a past-due invoice.

Alexander still isn’t saying much about why he’s felt the need for a body guard, but the police think he knows what’s behind the murders. With the boss under threat and suspicion, Grundy understands he’ll have to investigate, and quickly. The newly opened hotel is already getting cancellations. Staffers may be polishing their resumes. Find the killer and hope it’s not Alexander or their little world collapses.

Body Blows is a subtle blend of hardboiled style and noir sensibility in a satisfying who-done-it. Author Strange skillfully tangles webs of failure and deceit behind the sunny superficiality of familiar Canadian character types, giving them credible personalities. I’m planning a trip to my favourite bookseller for a copy of Sucker Punch, first of the Joe Grundy series.

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Wages of Crime

2009-03-27T17:38:00.004-04:00

Wages of Crime

by R.T. Naylor

McGill-Queen's University Press

Cornell University Press (U.S.)

336 pp,

ISBN 0-7735-2417-7

Turns out crime doesn't pay, at least not much once layers of insulating flunkies and corrupt public officials take their cuts. The real con is law-enforcement PR, scare-monger budget increases and appeals for new laws that further disenfranchise the powerless to make policework easier. Wages of Crime is non-fiction, laying out where the money goes, and doesn't go, in a fear-driven world.

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All Hat

2009-03-27T17:32:00.004-04:00

All Hat
by Brad Smith
Penguin Canada
Henry Holt & Co. (U.S.)
320 pp,
ISBN 0-8050-7217-9

Structurally similar to Smith's last book one-eyed Jacks, All Hat is a tough, seamless tale about living on the edge, figuratively and literally, of a sprawling urban complexity. Ray Dokes returns from a prison stretch to the horse-racing community working the gaps between sub-divisions west of Toronto. He has debts to pay, and scores to settle. An up-to-date country noir from a first-rate storyteller.

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The Walkaway

2009-03-27T17:26:00.005-04:00

The Walkaway
by Scott Phillips

Ballantine Books
294 pp,
ISBN 0-345-44020-X

Gunther Fahnstiel walked away from Ice Harvest with a bag full of money. Here, the semi-cognizant Fahnstiel walks away from his nursing home to find the buried loot, touching off a frantic search by relatives, and his memories of a post-war case when, as a young patrolman with Wichita police, Fahnstiel tried to protect a young woman from her vengeful husband. Phillips' direct prose renders a complex, tightly intertwined, fact-based story with the dark humour and chilling detail characteristic of an established master of the genre.

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Ross Macdonald, A Biography

2009-03-27T16:53:00.004-04:00

Ross Macdonald
A Biography
by Tom Nolan

Poisoned Pen Press
ISBN 1 890208 54 X

For true noir fans it's impossible to read too much about Ross Macdonald and the advances he made writing the genre, but if you want to start at the top, Tom Nolan has the definitive biography. More about Macdonald's origins in Puritan Ontario. More about how it affected his writing. More insight into the achievements and tragedies of one of the three most influential voices in the genre.

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Iceberg Slim

2009-03-27T16:42:00.004-04:00

Iceberg Slim, The Life as Art
by Peter A. Muckley

Dorance Publishing Co., Inc.
ISBN 0805954236

Iceberg Slim's life is revealed through a critical literary analysis of his work, what Slim himself deliberately avoided with his legendary street style. The mission is to correct popular misconceptions and take Slim's art seriously. These alone make the book worthwhile.

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George and Rue

2009-03-27T16:16:00.006-04:00

George & Rue
by George Elliott Clarke

Harper Collins Publishers Limited
223 pages

ISBN0 00 225539 1

George Elliott Clarke develops the story begun in Whyla Falls, of his first cousins, once removed, who slaughtered a friendly cab driver in Fredericton New Brunswick during a robbery that netted approximately $180. The experiences of George and Rufus Hamilton, told in a vivid, rhythmic language, reveal the failure of violence to transcend a world of limited educational and economic opportunity, and the hypocrisy of Canadian multicultural mythology.

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Depth of Field

2009-02-25T15:20:00.021-05:00

By Michael Blair

Dundurn Press – A Castle Street Mystery

332 pages
ISBN 978-1-55002-855-3

Following a couple of adventures with the relatively taciturn Joe Shoe, author Michael Blair returns to Vancouver for the third appearance of Tom McCall, the commercial photographer whose life is interrupted by the more frequently than probable criminal doings of unanchored characters living and working near his Granville Island houseboat.

As Blair has described it, the place is port for artists, tourists, retirees, freebooters and assorted flotsam that many in the rest of Canada imagine populates the entirety of Lotus Land. McCall is an overloaded punt himself consisting of businessman, divorced father, ex-husband, brother, lover, employer, neighbour and homeowner, like most of us continually trying to find our legs on pitching seas.

The first two books were romps through narrowly avoided disasters despite mounting can’t-get-any-worse pile-ups, showing off Blair’s ironic wit and break-neck pacing. In Depth of Field, Blair ships some of his more erratic characters overseas (daughter spending a year in Oz, sci-fi sex-adventure television star and romantic interest shooting a TV show in Germany) swaps eccentric neighbours for a violently schizophrenic street bum, and puts photo-assistant Bobbi into a coma for much of the book after she’s nearly killed on assignment shooting a nearby boat. McCall was supposed to do the job, so he’s feeling guilty, natch, especially after the client disappears, natch. For his everyday sampling of shake-your-head human behavior he’s down to his hectoring sister, a nudie fundraising-calendar shoot, the on-again/off-again cataloguing of a client’s breast-art collection and moving the office from downtown Vancouver to Granville Island.

That, believe it or not, barely fazes our guy so he frees up time to investigate Bobbi’s beating, contemplate quantum physics (alternative universes, human identity, imagination and perception included) and take a quick aside into six-degrees-of-separation theory. Not quite as funny maybe as Overexposed and If Looks Could Kill but what can you expect? Crime fiction has always been the locale for characters that are not as they first appear. Characters like McCall’s incognito client; a determinedly dull politician; his stern wife; a philandering yet boring art dealer and his many sad and disappointed lovers.

Ever the romantic, McCall is nonplussed by the amount of sexual activity going on in his neighbourhood. He’s more than willing to look at all the angles before jumping to conclusions, making Depth of Field a thoroughly entertaining read. If reading about it isn’t enough though, rest assured that Blair kills off enough characters to open up some interesting Vancouver real-estate opportunities.

Darwin's Nightmare & Still Waters

2008-10-27T14:23:00.027-04:00

I’m never sure, when I come across an engaging book from an unanticipated source whether it’s the work that has developed or that I’ve finally become sufficiently open minded to recognize what’s been there all along. Maybe I should just learn to enjoy the discovery. A couple of interesting noir reads have popped up recently in Canadian crime fiction.

Darwin's Nightmare
by Mike Knowles

ECW Press
183 pages
ISBN 13 978 1 55022 842 7

First is Darwin’s Nightmare by rookie Mike Knowles, whose publisher, ECW Press, specializes in mucking through varied pulp forms and conventions. What we have here is a homo-erotic thriller of a hardboiled variety familiar before it became safe for Dicks who love dicks to come out and shoot. But Wilson, the narrator/protagonist, is no Dick. He’s more like a low-level thief who works on assignment for mobsters but when an assignment puts him between competing criminal gangs his shoot-‘em-up skills far overshadow his light-fingering. What’s certain, and so important that much explanation goes to establish Wilson’s professionalism in these matters, is that our boy is no goody two-shoes.

He is raised by a funny uncle who isn’t afraid to smack the little monkey, something Wilson considers training and asks for more. Antagonists are mostly an endless series of big men, as in big men who carry big guns. It isn’t giving away too much to reveal that Wilson eventually pulls out his own gun and it is, of course, the biggest gun in the book. Action takes place in washrooms, hallways, cramped spaces and narrow passages often guarded by squads of men eager to treat Wilson to a brisk frisk before entering. But these guys are hirelings and Wilson is only moved when working for the man. Foreplay consists of overheated exchanges of blood-curdling threats. The few women encountered in Darwin’s Nightmare are victims, one the wife of a bar owner who is Wilson’s favourite wing man on forays into mayhem, and vice-versa.

The setting is Hamilton, Ontario, loosely interpreted to fit the plot, but that is established more by addresses than description. Wilson’s old, pseudo-beater Volvo is never slowed by one-way streets, potholes or entire neighbourhoods of road construction, for instance. That’s as it should be in this type of fantasy. Like Knowles I tread these mean streets but I don’t think you have to be a native to find the read a jolly romp of a kind once described as camp, before that too became a cottage industry and faded away. Familiars and initiates alike can give Knowles a pat on the bum for this nostalgic first effort.

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or Still Waters by John Moss Dundurn Press 343 pages ISBN 978 1 55002 790 7 John Moss' Still Waters is a Castle Street Mystery, a Dundurn Press line devoted to Canadian crimewriting, but not especially to noir or hardboil, so the fact that this is probably the densest, darkest dip I’ve had from this source is a pleasant surprise. A professor emeritus at the University of Ottawa, Moss spent most of his career writing the type of literary criticism that makes most fans of genre fiction gnash their teeth and wail “but I just want to enjoy the story.” Well good news. If it takes a career in academia to write such grittily complex, genre-jumping fiction, our education tax dollars have not been wasted. For starters it’s a cosy, with a small collection of unlikely characters drawn to a Rosedale (Toronto) mansion: a nosy neighbour, an aloof mistress, her daughter, a pet shop owner, two police detectives and the medical examiner. The occasion is the death of the mansion’s owner and sole resident, discovered blissfully circling a backyard fish pond face down. Hold on, aren’t cops supposed show up at a murder scene? Of course, but this bunch are as eccentric as a meerschaum pipe. The back-cover blurb says the “Toronto detectives, David Morgan and Miranda Quin are like a married couple except for the sex.” That’s understatement. Their relationship is well beyond anticipation, each knowing the other’s interests, inclinations, experiences and thoughts, as much as they know them themselves, making for a lot of witty and insightful banter and affecting the investigation of the case. In fact, one of Morgan’s recent hobbies has been the study, but not the cultivation of koi, so he knows which of Toronto’s many pet-shop owners to call upon to maintain the deceased’s valuable sushi. Slowly it becomes clear that it is such past, seemingly random associations that have called all these specific characters to the mysterious mansion for their weekend of mayhem, as surely as a Christie-like written invitation, and that includes the detectives themselves. Like a lot of Canadian noir, the story, if not the narrative, begins in a brooding, watchful countryside, tracing the fateful decline from summer idyll, through the metaphorical cross-roads and into the heart of the city. It’s Ontario Gothic a la Robertson Davies with catacombs and dark passages every bit as foreboding as the familiar rain-slicked streets. Moss does noir Canadian style with coppers pursuing corruption through their own do-good ambitions, saving the manipulative classes a lot of baksheesh. We’ve always sold ourselves cheap up here in the provinces. Like Davies, there’s enough Jungian psychology and Freudian banter in Still Waters to fill a decent textbook, with ample opportunity to consider the nature of memory, loss and the role of the subconscious in fateful decisions. Even more chilling is that, like Ross Macdonald, Moss visits the sins and crimes of his characters onto their children, ensuring the doom of succeeding generations, but if you don’t like thinking such thoughts and prefer mysteries as entertaining escapes, Moss provides all the bells, whistles and satisfying endings appropriate to the happiest of Canadian crime fiction. That may be what I find most chilling of all in this dank little tale. Order your personal copy of Still Waters from:or

The Blue Cheer

2007-06-14T14:07:00.009-04:00

The Blue Cheer
by Ed Lynskey

PointBlank Press
209 pagesISBN 0 8095 5667 7

Reviewed by Kerry J. Schooley
from an Advance Reader Copy

Readers be warned. The Blue Cheer is a rocket, primed, aimed and ready to fire before you've even cracked the cover. Step aboard page one and Ed Lynskey sparks the jets. You are puffed wheat my friends, shot from guns so quick you'll have to reach behind for back-story like it's your hat left dangling in a Looney Tunes cartoon. And damn if it isn't every bit as funny, assuming you're not the type to turn up your nose at gunplay and gore.

P.I. Frank Johnson has snugged into the West Virginia mountains to escape the literally murderous pace of his earlier, Virginia-based practice. He has put up his boots. Cast a line. Befriended a neighbour. Together they drink Wild Turkey from the neck. What's to worry?

Only thing to disturb the peace and quiet around the steel-town of Scarab, West Virginia is Stinger missile practice at the local Blue Cheer chapter, an up-and-coming domestic terrorist militia. Like any good P.I., Frank pokes his toes into the rubble. He gets hit on the head. He gets his tires slashed and his gas tank sugared. He gets upset, but not nearly so much as when the bad guys torture and hang Jan, wife of Old Man Maddox, the ex-CIA neighbour and aforementioned, freshly minted, Johnson best buddy.

Metaphorically it's a confrontation between philosophies, the kinds that require considerable planning and enforcement versus that of your free-spirited, live-in-the-moment good ole boy. Not that Johnson and his colleagues are given much to contemplation. They're sentimental drunks, more likely to go windmilling after tilted causes. Usually guessing wrong, these ex-military honchos shoot first and drink away regrets later.

If at times it's hard to separate the hallucinogenic hyper-reality from the surreal nostalgia, don't fret it. Lynskey's in control of the levers. Trust him, though his stylistic mix is as volatile as the white lightening that used to hot rod from these West Virginia hills.

Pour yourself a shot and hold tight.

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