Recent Research on Canadian Crime Fiction

I’m prepping spring/summer writing courses, and that had me looking up new and interesting sources about Canada-U.S. relations, in the hope that this will be an engaging topic for class members. Serendipitously, one of the first articles to turn up was about crime fiction–Robert M. Timko’s recent article on the first nine seasons of Murdoch Mysteries, adapted from Maureen Jennings’s novels about a nineteenth-century Toronto detective.

Timko’s specific focus is how the television series can be read as “a definitive text on the Canadian psyche, on its cultural identity, and its underlying philosophy.” His article’s in the American Review of Canadian Studies, where I’ve found many excellent articles alongside a number that take a sweeping view of our nation. Perhaps from an American perspective, Canada’s just not that complicated?

But I’m not persuaded that a historical crime fiction series on TV is quite as insightful about the Canadian psyche as Timko suggests here. The binary oppositions he draws are sharp: Canada-as-idealist/U.S.A.-as-pragmatist, and he analyzes these via various snippets of dialogue. Each major character is posited to be symbolic of an aspect of Canadian identity. Timko assesses the portrayal of Prime Minister Laurier, the Boer War, and religious sectarian politics in light of George Grant and schools of philosophical thought: this is a welcome analysis, in that it takes crime fiction (adapted to the screen) seriously, but there’s a risk here of oversimplification. He ultimately reaches conclusions that are uncontroversial–Canadians are invested in law and order and have less patience than Americans for libertarianism, although there are strands of anarchist belief more likely to find favour north of the border.

And a minor quarrel: Timko’s sources are nearly all male and mostly very dated. The selection of sources is conservative, ignoring both Canadian diversity and the ways in which the Murdoch series incorporates commitments to feminism, sexual diversity, and immigration in some rather anachronistic but welcome ways.

My survey of other recent work on Canadian crime fiction, undertaken after locating this article by chance, is more disappointing: with the exception of Pamela Bedore’s excellent book, there’s not much that’s new and interesting, other than a raft of book reviews. Increasingly, these are omnibus reviews, or, really, listings: “30 new Canadian books to read this spring,” etc. The level of analysis doesn’t go much beyond the publisher-supplied book blurb.

Given the paucity of what’s in print, it’s worth noting the excellent 2024 thesis by Sharon Beaucage-Johnson, “The Depiction of Indigenous Women in Crime Fiction Written by Non-Indigenous Authors.” There’s a very good assessment of Bowen’s work, for instance, in this M.A. project from Trent’s Canadian Studies and Indigenous Studies programs. The other author she considers is Brenda Chapman, and I need to spend some additional time on her work today.

And I should note that the paucity of recent critical work on crime fiction as genre fiction is at odds with the ongoing industry on Atwood, including numerous recent assessments of Alias Grace and of the MaddAddam books’ use of crime motifs and structures.

I’m in bad faith in stating this, since I’ve mostly worked on Atwood and Munro, but my sense is that at this historical moment we need much less attention to our most lauded female writers and a great deal more to the authors we’ve largely ignored. That being said, Jackie Shead’s 2017 book on Atwood’s oeuvre and crime fiction is terrific, and I’m also re-visiting that, today.