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  • The Raids: The Nickel Range Trilogy, Volume 1 by Mick Lowe
  • John B. Lang
Mick Lowe, The Raids: The Nickel Range Trilogy, Volume 1 (Montréal: Baraka Books 2014)

The Raids is a mystery novel. It has all the ingredients of this genre of fiction – a few murders and attempted murders, a little bit of sex, snappy dialogue, and a plot line that gets one turning the page. It is also an historical novel. Mick Lowe has set his story among the streets, beverage rooms, and mines of Sudbury. Some of the main characters are easily recognized portrayals of historical figures, and a couple of individuals – who are still living – make cameo appearances in the story.

The novel revolves around the character of Jake McCool, a strapping nineteen year old who, in May 1963 (Mick Lowe has set the time line of his novel several years later than the historical occurrences), starts working as an underground miner at the International Nickel Company of Canada’s (inco) operations in Sudbury, Ontario. Jake comes from an extended family of miners who are all staunch supporters of Local 598 of the International Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers which had organized the mines in Sudbury in the early 1940s. Jake’s employment at inco coincides with the commencement of a raid on Mine Mill’s membership by the United Steelworkers of America.

Mine Mill’s roots go back to the turn of the century and over its 70 year history it built a reputation for militantly defending the interests of miners in a notoriously brutal industry. Mine Mill also played a leading role in the advance of industrial unions in Canada starting in the mid-thirties and continuing through the years of World War II. But in the Cold War atmosphere that followed the defeat of Hitler, Mine Mill was labelled a “communist-dominated” union, was expelled from the mainstream of the labour movement, and its jurisdiction handed over to the Steelworkers. Local 598 went on strike against inco in September 1958 and, after over three months on the picket line, agreed to a humiliating settlement which contained no contract gains. This defeat generated dissent and dissatisfaction [End Page 271] among Mine Mill’s members which the Steelworkers were able to exploit.

For myself – and I expect for many readers of Labour/Le Travail – the main attraction of The Raids will not be the intrigue or the character development but rather Mick Lowe’s treatment of the setting in which his novel occurs. Sudbury is Mick Lowe’s adopted home town and he paints a nuanced picture of the complex social and political dynamics that accounted for its unique character – the confidence of a community built by hard rock miners, the extraordinary cosmopolitan mix of its inhabitants, the tension generated by a small petit bourgeois elite maintaining its dominance over a large and relatively prosperous working class, and the manipulations of organized religion, particularly that of the Catholic Church.

I grew up in Sudbury and lived through the raids. I’m even the same age as Lowe’s character Jake McCool – and I play hockey. My father was a miner and was a rank-and-file activist in the organizing campaign which led to Local 598’s certification. I can attest to the fact that the picture of Sudbury that Mick Lowe paints – and the dynamics within working-class families that he describes – rings true. Stompin’ Tom Connors captured that spirit in “Sudbury Saturday Night”. Mick Lowe has made a further contribution.

One also learns a lot about mining in reading The Raids. Utilizing the skills he developed over many years as a journalist, Lowe has picked the brains of numerous men who have spent their lives working underground in Sudbury extracting the ore from one of the richest mineral deposits on the planet. As a consequence, he is able to paint an exceedingly realistic picture of the operation of a mine and the people in it. Of particular interest to me was that Lowe situates the commencement of Jake McCool’s employment as a miner with the introduction of trackless mining, jumbo drills, and other technological innovations...

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