Detecting Canada: Essays on Canadian Crime Fiction, Television, and Film ed. by Jeannette Sloniowski and Marilyn Rose (review)

This volume presents nine essays on a number of Canada’s best-known crime writers plus a further three on crime television and film. Apparently – this comes as a surprise – the genre is ‘under-investigated’ in Canada and the editors’ hope is that the collection will mark the beginning of greater scholarly engagement with this type of popular narrative. Amongst the writers discussed are several with whom readers this side of the Atlantic will be familiar: Thomas King, Peter Robinson, Margaret Atwood. The insightful piece on Thomas King’s detective novels revealed, I confess, a side to the author of Green Grass, Running Water of which I was unaware. His Dreadful Water Shows Up and The Red Power Murders – which parody the hard-boiled detective and simultaneously examine issues to do with Native identity in North American culture – are now definitely on my ‘must read’ list. I imagine most devotees of Peter Robinson’s Inspector Banks novels and the ITV series based on them will be surprised to learn he is considered one of Canada’s most distinguished crime writers. Jeannette Sloniowski’s very readable essay on Robinson’s In a Dry Season briefly discusses how Canadian it is, but is particularly significant for its analysis of the way the novel tackles issues of gender in two different eras. Atwood’s Alias Grace, although something of an odd bedfellow here, is discussed by Marilyn Rose in a piece that neatly argues it is a postmodern anti-detective novel. The essays on television and film include astute analyses of the memorably gritty Wojeck series from the sixties and of the more recent, emotionally gripping Durham County. In an essay that is especially potent, Lindsay Steenberg and Yvonne Tasker bring out how Durham County exposes the misogynistic violence that permeates ice hockey, Canada’s national game, and Canadian society as a whole.

In truth, all of the individual essays have much to recommend them. However, the volume as a whole has a serious defect. It is astonishing – and also rather troubling – that no room has been found for Franco-Canadian/Québécois crime writing. Here is a book that seeks to demonstrate ‘the reach and range that characterizes Canadian crime fiction’ (p. xiii). A book that (quite properly) includes essays on Native writing, immigrant writing, feminist writing, gay writing. A book whose editors (again, quite properly) insist on ‘the heterogeneous nature of Canada as a nation’ (p. xii) and ‘the diversity of Canada’ (p. xiii). And yet this is a book that ignores the rich complementarity of the Québécois tradition. Any number of potential candidates for inclusion come to mind: Yves Thériault (whose collection of detective stories L’Etreinte de Venus demonstrates his versatility as a writer), Monique Lepage, Francine Picard, Jacques Bissonnette, the wonderful Anne Hébert, Chrystine Brouillet. (The last two names do actually get a mention but – the irony of it! – it’s in David Skene-Melvin’s historical survey of Canadian crime writing in English.) Above all, perhaps, there should have been some sort of place for Monique LaRue’s Copies conformes, her multi-layered, highly subversive reworking of Dashiell Hammett’s famous The Maltese Falcon.