Canadian Crime, the Undiscovered Country

by Kevin Thornton

It is a truth almost universally acknowledged that detective fiction started with Edgar Allen Poe. “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” was published in 1841 by Graham’s Magazine and the world suddenly became a better place.

Mystery fiction may predate this. Voltaire’s Zadig of 1747 is seen by some to be a starting point. Crime fiction itself dates back much further. Depending on your religious views, the first criminal tale ever written was either Genesis 4—Cain and Abel—or Herodotus’s tale of Rhampsinitus and the thief.

In Canada, although it is easy to identify moments of crime in fiction dating back almost to the 18th century, common cause has us noting the first great Canadian crime writer to be Grant Allen. Born on Wolfe Island in 1848, he left as a teenager to settle in England and did all his writing there. He was a contemporary of Conan Doyle and although he probably would not have called himself a Canadian writer, we still claim him. Indeed that was once one of the abiding principles of the branding of Canadian writing; however tenuous or tortured the link, there has always been someone willing to note them as beloved offspring of the true North, strong and free.

There have been other examples. One writer in particular who was subject to the same national rebranding was Kenneth Millar, who as Ross MacDonald was one of the “big three” Private Eyes novelists of the golden age of detective fiction. Almost everywhere else he is seen to be as American as his two contemporaries, Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. Millar was educated in Canada and lived here for a while, but his writing is very American. Chandler, although born American and repatriated in time for his greatest works to be recognized nowadays as seminal American Literature, spent much of his formative years in England. Yet the British writing community has felt no need to claim him as one of their own.

Insecurity masked as misdirected identity would seem to be a theme running through much of Canada’s early literary history. Situated historically and emotionally between its former colonial master the United Kingdom and its big brother the USA, much of Canadian culture seems to be an amalgam of these two influences. In comedy, acting and art we are seen to straddle the line between the American new world and the British old school. For many years that was also the case in fiction. Writers were caught in the morass of trying to satisfy the publishing houses of one or the other behemoths as the Canadian market was deemed to be too small. Even today most Canadian authors have at least one story to tell of an agent or publisher critiquing work as being not American enough, or not suitable for the British market.

To our historical chagrin this advice was taken all too often and while there have been many great Canadian writers, there has never been a great genre of crime novel that was uniquely Canadian. The hardboiled P.I. has California as its home, the gentleman detective 221B Baker Street while the cozy sprang from wherever Miss Marple was having her tea. The gritty, wholly Canadian mystery category has not yet been created.

Mountie stories do not count. Rather than being a distinct classification, like the country house mystery or the noir mean streets fable, Mountie fiction straddles the western, the bodice ripper, the police procedural and boys own adventure tales. The only common trait in Mountie fiction is that everything and everyone is more polite. And colder.

Although there were some attempts by local writers to set stories in Canadian scenes, much of the output of most of the 20th century followed the well-worn path of catering to either the British or the American markets. Margaret Millar, the wife of Kenneth and fairly considered a Canadian, wrote crime novels set in Canada in the 1940s and was later rewarded with a Grand Master “Edgar” and the Derrick Murdoch “Arthur” (the Canadian equivalent). Frances Shelley Wees, Margerie Bonner and Janet Layhew were also writing books with hometown settings. During the 1950s David Montrose and E. Louise Cushing each wrote a short series of investigative tales, the former set in Montreal and featuring private investigator Russell Teed, the latter featuring Inspector Mackay of the Toronto Police.

Short stories also had their day in Canadian writing history. The age of the storytellers that straddled the 19th and 20th centuries produced such greats as W.H. Blake, Hesketh Pritchard, R.T.M Scott, Sir Gilbert Parker and others. The pulp years featured R.T. Scott II, H. Bedford Jones, Bertram Brooker and William Lacey Amy. These and many of the time played fast and loose with pseudonyms, and it is often hard to identify who wrote what for which particular pulp magazine.

From the end of World War II the writing changed as the country moved onwards from a vast frontier to a unified country built on the sacrifices in 1914–18 and 1939–45. No longer Empire traditionalists, Canada had become a collective whole. The distinctions of geographically based fiction changed. Maritimers, Upper Canada Loyalists, Prairies residents and West Coasters all began to embrace the idea of Canadian writing. Sadly the one distinct division still in the country, the split between French and English fiction, is still sometimes linked unfairly to the much larger political issue of Quebec separatism within the Canadian confederation.

Nevertheless both the quality and quantity of Canadian crime fiction was on the rise. The founding of the Governor General’s Awards marked the first time that the country had looked within itself and seen that there was much to be lauded. Many crime novels were considered for these literary awards since their inception in 1937. Some even won, though less so more recently, when the divide between popular and literary seems to be an ever-increasing chasm. There is indeed a delicious irony that the founder of the GGs was Lord Tweedsmuir. Under his real name, John Buchan, he was a master writer of spy and adventure stories, including one of the greatest ever, The Thirty-Nine Steps.

This increase in crime writing talent warranted, as David Skene-Melvin says in his work Canadian Crime Fiction, an organization to boost and maintain the popularity of the writing and writers.

Skene-Melvin has the founding of the group dating to 1981. The anthologist, editor and short story writer Peter Sellers claims it was 1983, in a pub called Dooley’s. Regardless, both happily blame the Globe & Mail critic Derrick Murdoch for the idea. And so the Crime Writers of Canada (CWC) came into being. Murdoch was awarded the first Chairman’s Award for Lifetime Achievement, whereupon it was renamed in his honour.

The focus that the CWC introduced has helped crime fiction to become one of the dominant literary forces in Canada. This is not to say that the potential was not there. Crime fiction, along with romance, are typically the two most popular types of stories in many countries. The resurgence of interest in detective novels, cosies, suspense thrillers, police procedurals and other criminous tales had already begun in the two big English language markets. In the late seventies and early eighties writers like Robert B. Parker were doing for the P.I. novel what McBain had done for the police story, while the thriller was having one of its purple periods, with Jack Higgins, Alistair MacLean, Robert Ludlum and Wilbur Smith leading the charge of many great writers. The advent of an organization focused on the promotion of such stories was a major factor in the start of this new golden age of crime writing in Canada.

Suspense thrillers sitting alongside detective tales? Where’s the mystery? The trouble with generalizing literature is that it is not designed to be put in boxes. Yet to have an organization, one needs a definition.

So what is crime writing, according to the CWC? Their website states that it is a category that in broader terms includes any book-length work, novella or short-story that features crime or mystery as a central element. Which leaves a lot of room for manoeuvering, as it goes on to say that this includes crime, detective, espionage, mystery, suspense, and thriller writing, as well as fictional or factual accounts of criminal doings and crime-themed literary works. Crossover novels and short stories such as romantic suspense and speculative thrillers are also considered part of the genre, as is SF and fantasy. It seems like the only category that is missing is political biographies, almost always criminal enough to qualify, but rarely entered for awards.

What this has done is encourage a writing school that is the next undiscovered country. There are over 350 members of the CWC, most of whom are published writers, some of whom are not easily recognizable as Canadians. Peter Robinson, Giles Blunt, Sean Chercover, Owen Laukkanen, Howard Shrier, Robert Rotenberg and Rick Mofina line up quite comfortably next to Louise Penny, Phyllis Smallman, Gail Bowen, Alan Bradley, Maureen Jennings and Chevy Stevens. If they aren’t enough to whet your literary palate, go to crimewriterscanada.com and see for yourself.

Crime writing in Canada has broken out of its colonial neurosis and has no need to claim other writers as its own anymore. The Scandinavians might have the current lock on cold clime crime, but the new cool crime is definitely Canadian.

Kevin Thornton was shortlisted six times for the Crime Writers of Canada best unpublished novel. He never won, they are all still unpublished and now he writes short stories. He lives in Canada, north enough that ringing Santa Claus is a local call and winter is a way of life. He is former Air Force, once a military contractor and now a Husband, Father and owner of a perfidious beagle.

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