At 03:07 AM 07/09/2004 +0100, you wrote:
>So - in the spirit of the upcoming Bouchercon -
could
>anyone please recommend some of Toronto's
crime
>fiction? It would be nice if we could come up with
a
>nice little reading list. Despite it's size,
T.O.
>doesn't seem to have a body of hardboiled or
noir
>writing comparable to even medium-sized
American
>cities... or am a wrong?
Sorry to be late on this. Death in the family has kept me
preoccupied.
I don't think anyone mentioned Brad Smith's "All Hat" and
"One Eyed Jacks". All Hat is more of a country noir, taking
place in the horse-racing community west of Toronto,
penetrating the good city itself as far as Woodbine Raceway
in the north-west corner. One Eyed Jacks is set in the 50's,
and gets downtown, recalling (for me at least) the era of the
bank-robbing Boyd Gang. Boyd died in a hail of police bullets
at an intersection in the city's west end.
Morley Callaghan wrote a dandy little noir novella in the
70's, but I cannot recall the setting. Maybe later. And
there's a television series on now (something about Poor Tom,
I've just chucked the paper so I haven't the details) based
on a historical series of mystery novels that uncover the
city's Victorian underbelly. The preview applied the noir
monicker to that, though it may only be noir in the Jim
Doherty sense (HA!)
They did mention that the books present the community as
socially repressed, even for those repressive times. Upper
Canada (Ontario) was run by an oligarchy of Scottish
merchants and railroad robber barons into the turn of the
20th century. People knew and kept their places. What our
American friends consider to be the boringly polite Canadian
character is really a remnant of this repression. We value
our "peace, order and good government," overlooking the fact
that the quality of governance is so frequently defined by
those in political power. Torontonians are only now coming to
grips with the possibility that their police might be as
corrupt as in any other big city force. The result is a
tendency by authors to write bemused cozies. Underneath, the
place seethes and I think that was best captured by Robertson
Davies, though he was by no means a crime writer.
I would like to suggest, however, and in all false humility,
Sap by John Swan, at least half of which takes place in
Toronto's Beaches neighbourhood. Also, Vern Smith's The
Gimmick is a noir short published in Hard Boiled Love, which
I edited over a year ago with Peter Sellers. Peter himself
writes low-down noir shorts and some are clearly located in
Toronto. His collection is titled Whistling Past the
Graveyard. And finally
(and again,) 1978, a hilarious punk-noir by Daniel Jones set
in Toronto's Annex neighbourhood (next to UofT), and
published posthumously by Rush Hour Revisions.
Best Kerry
------------------------------------------------------
Literary events Calendar (South Ont.) http://www.lit-electric.com
The evil men do lives after them http://www.murderoutthere.com
------------------------------------------------------
------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor
--------------------~--> Make a clean sweep of pop-up ads.
Yahoo! Companion Toolbar. Now with Pop-Up Blocker. Get it for
free!
http://us.click.yahoo.com/L5YrjA/eSIIAA/yQLSAA/kqIolB/TM
--------------------------------------------------------------------~->
RARA-AVIS home page: http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/
Yahoo! Groups Links
<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/rara-avis-l/
<*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email
to:
rara-avis-l-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com
<*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to:
http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 13 Sep 2004 EDT