Detecting Canada: Essays on Canadian Crime Fiction, Television, and Film

4. Northern Procedures: Policing the Nation in Giles Blunt’s The Delicate Storm

83 CHAPTER 4 NORTHERN PROCEDURES: POLICING THE NATION IN GILES BLUNT’S THE DELICATE STORM Manina Jones In each of Giles Blunt’s popular mystery novels featuring Detective John Cardinal of the Algonquin Bay, Ontario,1 police force, the violent bodily trauma to an individual generically constitutive of crime fiction is connected with questions of personal and collective identity, memory, loss, recovery , and responsibility. So, while these books are all initially set in the environs of a small northeastern Ontario city, and the crimes contained within them fall under the authority of local law enforcement, each novel complicates, extends, and internalizes the jurisdiction for which Blunt’s police officer hero is ethically and professionally responsible. For example, in Forty Words for Sorrow (2000), the first novel in the series, Cardinal’s curw rent police work is shadowed by a parallel criminal investigation into a transgressive moment in his own personal history, an investigation of affairs internal to his department and to his moral sensibility. This excursion into morally ambivalent territory also grounds Cardinal’s character in an outsider position more typical of hard-boiled fiction than the police procedural , the genre into which Blunt’s series most obviously falls. In Black Fly Season (2005), in order to tell her story a victim/witness must attempt to recover from amnesia induced by traumatic injuries, raising questions about the affective disruption and testimonial reconstitution of the “whole truth” of the past that are central to the formal processes of the detective story’s recursive narrative. The intersection between retrospection and CHAPTER 4 84 introspection at a site of violence that is both intimately and publicly generated and negotiated is perhaps nowhere more dramatically conveyed than in By the Time You Read This (2006), a novel advertised in Britain under the title The Fields of Grief, in which Cardinal’s investigation of a suspicious f f death is conflated with his personal narrative of loss and mourning. At one moment in that novel, a commonplace exchange with his daughter about the differences in personality between Americans and Canadians erupts in Cardinal’s thoughts into a comparison between the apparent suicide of his own wife and the American national trauma precipitated by the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001: “I’m acting … I’m acting like a man having a conversation. This is how it’s done: you listen, you nod, you ask a question or two, but I’m not here. I’m not even alive. I’m as gone as the World Trade Center. Catherine is dead. My heart is ground zero” (58). Cardinal’s alignment of America’s shocking confrontation with “homeland terrorism” and the personal domestic trauma of the unexpected death of a spouse, not to mention his character’s fascination with the cultural differences that divide Canadian from U.S. culture, is unsurprising, given Blunt’s earlier and much more elaborate representation of the policing of imperilled Canadian geographical, historical, and symbolic space in the second instalment in the John Cardinal series, The Delicate Storm (2003). This novel not only references 9/11 itself (62), but engages philosophical questions around just what constitutes Canadian “national security.” In so doing, it extends the scope of the police procedural novel from considerations of how public safety might be guarded to questions of how the survival of the Canadian state itself might be secured against perceived cultural, political, and territorial threats from both inside and outside its borders. David Skene-Melvin contends that because a national police force was established very early in Canada’s history, Canadian crime writers have seen the police procedural as a more constructive response to crime than authors elsewhere (cited in Knight 159). This novel’s procedural plot is conditioned by Canada’s own experience of so-called domestic terrorism , gesturing toward questions about how such threats to the integrity of the individual and the state are institutionally and personally regulated at a variety of national, international, and local levels—and indeed, how the popular genre of the police procedural novel may itself be a device for reckoning with troubling cultural moments and unstable political circumstances in Canada. Neil McCaw’s examination of English author Caroline Graham’s novel The Killings at Badger’s Drift and its television adaptation argues that these ft NORTHERN PROCEDURES | MANINA JONES 85 productions “police Englishness,” using “the locality of the fictional Badger ’s Drift and its incumbent personalities to...