What sort of broad generalizations come to mind when you think of Canada? How about a positive one - darn good hockey. That's fine. It's one I'm not that invested in. I don't mind too terribly being dominated by our neighbors to the north, but Crime Fiction? Canadian? If you say Don't make me laugh, John McFetridge is going to make you eat those words.
The Toronto author of Dirty Sweet and Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere released Let It Ride in February and has quickly become my favorite Canadian crime author. (Okay, I'm having a hard time coming up with many, but that shouldn't diminish the praise I'm trying to heap here). Ken Bruen likened him to a cross between Elmore Leonard and Quentin Tarantino, (an enviable blurb if ever there were one).
Perhaps you're unconvinced of the richness of the soil being worked, but with Let It Ride, (not to be confused with Good Vibes by Jay Cronley - the basis for the film Let It Ride starring Richard Dreyfuss), McFetridge brings the goods. You want drug wars? Check. Armed robbery? Check, (with bonus points awarded for the massage parlor). Outlaw biker gangs? Check. Dialogue that, (I'm trying hard not to say "crackles"...) pops and pulses in the manner of Leonard, Tarantino and oh George V. Higgins? Triple Check.
I don't want to sound threatened or insecure in my status as a hardboiled American crime fan, but he's taken all my favorite things from American crime novels transplanted them to Canada. Can he do that? Hey maybe we can start exporting Maple Syrup to them? Or rice to Asia?
And if that threat weren't bad enough, McFetridge is invading American Crime television too. He's a story editor on this summer's new series The Bridge starring Aaron Douglas, (Battlestar Galactica), as the new and embattled president of the police union. It looks to have the feel of great recent police dramas like The Shield and The Wire where the drama was at least as much internal politics of the force as crime solving.
Is McFetridge alone? Are there more great Canadian crime writers out there? Exactly how threatened should I feel?
Jedidiah Ayres writes fiction and keeps the blog Hardboiled Wonderland.
Andrew Pyper was born in Ontario and lives in Toronto and has written a few exceptional crime fiction thrillers. I'd check out The Killing Circle, which came out in 2008. It blew me away. The PW review is below for all those interested:
(Starred Review) In this extraordinary thriller from Canadian author Pyper (The Wildfire Season), Patrick Rush, a lowly TV critic for a Toronto newspaper whose life has been slowly deteriorating since the untimely death of his wife, struggles to remain employed while trying to raise his precocious young son. When Rush decides to join a local writing circle in hopes of pursuing his lifelong dream of being an author, he becomes obsessed with a horrific work-in-progress written by a would-be writer in the group, a possibly autobiographical tale about being haunted by a "terrible man who does terrible things." Rush begins finding connections among the story's supernatural villain, a shadowy serial killer with a predilection for dismemberment that has all of Toronto living in fear, and his own unraveling sanity. Powered by an ingeniously nonlinear narrative and suffused with a tone thick with dread, this is easily Pyper's most ambitious-and absorbing-work to date.
