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

2. Canadian Crime Writing in English

19 CHAPTER 2 CANADIAN CRIME WRITING IN ENGLISH David Skene-Melvin E. K. Brown in his seminal essay “The Problem of a Canadian Literature” pointed out that “a great art is fostered by artists and audience possessing in common a passionate and peculiar interest in the kind of life that exists in the country where they live” (40). Unfortunately, it is just that audience interest that Canada has lacked. As Margaret Atwood so vividly imagines, a writer of prose fiction … in the twenties, thirties, forties, or even fifties of this century … looked around and found himself in a place where people read, it’s true … but most of the books … were imported from England and the States.… Usually he found that his own work would be dismissed by sophisticated Canadian critics as “second-rate,” “provincial,” or “regional,” simply for having been produced here.… In some decades he might have been mindlessly praised for being “Canadian,” in other decades just as mindlessly denounced for the same reason. The situation in either case was impossible. He discovered that the outlets for his work were few … not many publishing companies, and those few did a lot of distribution for foreign companies and were notoriously unwilling to take risks on anything new or “experimental,” or anything else for that matter. If he was lucky enough to acquire an American or English publisher he might get some attention from the Canadian “literati” and thus from a more widespread audience; but in order to do that he would have to squeeze his work into shapes that were not his, prune off anything “they” CHAPTER 2 20 might not understand, disguise himself as a fake American or Englishman. At this point he either gave up in disgust … and left the country and headed for one of the “centres of culture”—London, New York or Paris—or stayed and tried to follow his own vision as best he might, knowing that he could expect, at the very best, publication in a slender edition of five hundred copies for poetry and a couple of thousand for novels; at the worst, total oblivion.… He experienced full force … what it means to be living in a cultural and economic colony. (181–82) Canada had its chance to develop a unique culture, a “Canadianism,” but sold its patriotism (not to be confused with cheap nationalism) and subjugated itself to the cultural and economic domination of the United States. Small wonder then that the Mountie novel was more the product of foreigners than of native-born writers, understandable that Benny Cooperman is a klutz, Charlie Salter problem-ridden, and Reid Bennett, although Canadian, a veteran of a purely Yank war. It would be too much for the Canadian psyche to have a homegrown Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe or Sherlock Holmes or Roderick Alleyn or Steve Carella who was competent and well adjusted and successful. This explains why so much Canadian crime fiction by Canadians was, and is, if not merely anonymous in locale, set in either the United Kingdom or the United States, or in some other even more exotic locale. Canada hasn’t lacked the artists, but it has lacked the audience without which the artist is talking to himself in an otherwise empty room. It is the purpose of this essay to rescue some of those early Canadian crime fiction writers from that oblivion. Early Canadian crime literature falls into five periods: from the earliest begetters to 1880; 1880–1920; 1920–1940; 1940–1980; and 1980–1996. The decade 1970–1980 is one of transition in which the genre, as a truly Canadian expression of national consciousness, begins to find its feet. Canadian crime fiction began with the broadsides published in 1783 and 1785 recording speeches and confessions of convicted criminals about to be hanged for murder and theft. Alas, only the advertisements of these ephemeral issues survive; the documents themselves are part of the dust of history. Had we them at hand, they probably would not differ from similar publications that were popular in Great Britain at that time. CANADIAN CRIME WRITING IN ENGLISH | DAVID SKENE-MELVIN 21 THE FIRST PERIOD: UP TO 1880 English-Canadian ballads and songs are a significant expression of life in early Canada. Some tell of riots, others of murders, the Birchall murder case of 1890 being one example. The earliest crime novel on the Canadian literary scene is Walter Bates’s...