Crow Lake and Agatha Christie

The Last Exile is nominated for the Ethel Wilson prize, given out by the BC and Yukon Book Awards for best literary fiction. I don’t know how many crime/mystery novels have ever been nominated for this, but it’s a tremendous honour.

And Guns Across the River continues to arrive in bookstores. Consider picking up a copy!

I’m not even going to pretend there’s any sort of framework for these brief book reviews, other than to say I enjoyed reading them.

Crow Lake by Mary Lawson was a recommendation from Brent Butt, about four children in rural northern Ontario whose parents are killed. The oldest two are sons, with different ideas about how to keep the siblings together and ensure most promising among them get to go to college. This is the past; in the present, the second youngest daughter, now a professor, reflects on an upcoming trip home to see her brothers. Both storylines hinge on a terrible crime which occurred at a neighbor’s farm. Crow Lake is finely written and the characters are well drawn.

Daddy Cool by Donald Goines is about as nasty a crime novel as you could want. The title character is a Black hit man, an expert with a knife, whose daughter falls under the spell of a pimp. It’s brutal and rancid in that Jim Thompson way.

Poirot Investigates is a collection of short stories. I like and admire Agatha Christie, but I don’t think the short story format fits the rhythms of a Poirot investigation very well.

If He Hollers is a lit novel by Chester Himes, more personal and psychological than his Harlem crime novels. It’s about a shipbuilder ground down by racism and the power held over him by his white bosses and coworkers. Any mistake will land him in jail or the army. There’s a lot of nice detail about wartime Los Angeles and the different Black communities.

A Good Hanging, a story collection by Ian Rankin has great moments, but as with Poirot Investigates I prefer Rankin’s novels. In Christie’s case it’s because the rigours of her plots demand a certain amount of room, but with Rankin it’s more about the character and the city of Edinburgh.

The day after I did a book event with Robyn Harding, her newest thriller Strangers in the Villa showed up. It’s about a wife travelling in Spain, trying to patch up gher marriage to her adulterous husband, who is soon murdered. Harding knows how to write a thriller, and Strangers deftly ties into current events around trafficking, power and accountability.