Pat Capponi’s Socially-Conscious Crime Fiction

Yesterday I walked downtown fairly early in the morning, just after seven.

There was a glorious sunrise. Shades of purple and pink, a veritable Homeric rosy-fingered dawn.

And then, along Pandora Street, where I’d intended to pick up a greasy breakfast sandwich as my reward for an early morning irksome errand, I was daunted by the Dickensian misery of people who are living through a wet, windy winter season in tents.

A fellow holding a long wooden stick followed me for a block and a half, keeping a wary distance, but banging on every street sign we passed and then screaming in a language I didn’t recognize.

A couple who couldn’t have been out of their teens huddled in the doorway of a grocery store built in a luxury condo building, and one of them called out a good morning to me.

The people living on Pandora are, in my experience, friendly, helpful, and kind.

They call out cautions when families are passing through, and drug paraphernalia is cleared from sight. When I used to take cello lessons at the conservatory, people using the bus shelter as, well, a shelter, used to offer assistance as I clambered down the steps, encumbered.

It’s fair to say, I think, that there is a kind of heroism in the community care they provide to one another, much of the time.

Other times are grimmer. Overdoses and an occasional stabbing; assaults and sexual violence.

The fast food restaurant, which is billed as open 24 hours, was closed at 7:55AM. I’d heard that with reduced numbers of temporary foreign workers, various fast food franchises in Victoria were struggling with staffing, but this is also a fraught location. People have ODd in the bathroom, in the parking lot.

The Tim Hortons nearby has closed their dining areas and bathrooms; they do take-out only now.

I should have anticipated this, because over the past year Pandora has become synonymous with a range of social ills. Some of the downtown businesses I visit now keep their doors locked until a customer rings a bell, because theft has been a significant issue. Some small businesses are struggling to stay open, in part because Victoria’s seasonal economy produces a slump for several long winter months.

I had to cross the street at Quadra, because the next block was teeming with emergency responders. Two fire engines, two ambulances, and a police car had pulled in to the bike lane to attend to the crisis in the small set of tents clustered together on the sidewalk.

This past year, the Globe & Mail turned its attention from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside to Victoria’s own blocks of opioid addiction, homelessness, and mental illness, exposing what feels to me like the abandonment of some of our most vulnerable fellow citizens. (And the view countering my own, which claims this as people’s failures of self-responsibility, is, frankly, odious. No one would choose, with any meaningful kind of freedom, this immiseration.)

Here’s the more recent G & M assessment, with an early November update:

“Less than a year out from the next civic election, Marianne Alto seems to be staking her mayoralty on the fate of the Block, as the stretch of Pandora is widely known. She has promised her compassion-weary electorate they will see ‘significant changes’ to the street by December. A high-profile failure there could doom her re-election bid before it truly begins.”

And that’s possibly true, and certainly unfair, because there’s only so much that municipal politicians can do when it comes to “street disorder”: the underlying issues all lie within federal and provincial jurisdiction, and there hasn’t been the money, or the political will, to ensure safe, timely, culturally-appropriate care for people who need it.

Our failures are systemic. They start with disproportionate numbers of children and youth in care from Indigenous communities, because of the legacy and ongoing practice of colonialism, and continue with the under-investment in families and education. There are the failures in health care (good luck getting a pediatrician when you need one–we once waited nine months for a single appointment). And the fact that education funding, while it’s kept pace with inflation and some other cost increases, is probably still not adequate for the needs in many classrooms. Then health care again, because mental health care in my province is provided largely through privately-paid counselling services, with very very few resources in the public system unless it’s a crisis. Support for people with substance use issues is completely inadequate, leaving those who seek treatment in limbo for months, and at significant risk of relapsing while they wait for care.

But now, due to public outrage after a few horrific incidents, the B.C. government is planning for more involuntary care, which raises a host of legal as well as medical issues.

And so the late Pat Capponi, an extraordinarily fierce and determined advocate, is on my mind, and we need many many more people like her.

Toronto activist and writer Pat Capponi (1949-2020) insisted that psychiatric survivors, including those who have experienced involuntary hospitalization, be included in Canadian conversations about mental health. She fought against the medical and social marginalization of people experiencing mental health crises and provided a crucial voice for decades, sitting on boards, helping run nonprofits, and cajoling politicians into trying to understand what it’s like to be deemed incapable of making your own choices.

In her journalism, extensive local activism, and mystery fiction, Capponi connected poverty, housing, and underemployment to the broader disenfranchisement of those living with mental illnesses. Crime fiction works especially well for this, and it it enabled Capponi to explore issues that she’d been writing about in her nonfiction for decades.

Her two Toronto-based novels feature intrepid investigator and psychiatric survivor Dana Leoni. Dana was once a promising English lit student at U of T, but after a life-threatening assault outside her home, she was left with a shattered skull, intense anxiety, and agoraphobia.

When she’s released from in-patient psychiatric treatment, Dana moves to a Parkdale boarding house, near the Queen Street Mental Health Center. As she recovers, she becomes a valued member of a small community of psychiatric survivors who support each other in both material and psychological ways that their medical teams cannot.

In both Last Stop Sunnyside and The Corpse Will Keep, Dana is drawn into the problems of community members who are acutely vulnerable to violence and exploitation.

In the first book, several members of Dana’s boarding house (a notably more humane environment than many, she notes) launch their own investigation when a resident, Maryanne, abruptly moves away without notice, after she received a disturbing visit by two men. Dana learns that another community member has also vanished under similar circumstances. A short time later, the police turn up to inform them that the body of their housemate has been found on the shore of Lake Ontario; after cursory inquiries, the professional investigators seem content to conclude that Marianne’s death, while she was inebriated, was an accidental drowning or suicide.

Unconvinced, Dana and her friends set out to find out what happened. Their search leads them to a seedy scheme: a welfare worker, attracted by steady monthly disability cheques, has been conspiring with his brother-in-law to threaten women with substance and mental health challenges to move into the boarding homes they operate, where they are kept captive–and sometimes die.

Capponi’s second novel, The Corpse Will Keep, has Dana and her friends building on the media attention to their successful first foray into crime solving by starting a private detective agency run out of Dana’s bedroom/office.

Only three weeks into her investigators’ course, Dana is hired by an old university friend to investigate his mother’s peculiar recent behaviour. Mrs. Preston, a straitlaced Rosedale widow who has dutifully undertaken good works out of a sense of noblesse oblige, has recently become involved with her church’s outreach work to the homeless. Her skeptical son is convinced she’s being exploited by the people she wants to help: two of her bank accounts have been depleted.

As in her first novel, Capponi reflects on the community of care built by the socially marginalized, but she also emphasizes their vulnerability to abuse, including the susceptibility of young women to sexual exploitation.

Dana’s case takes her through sharply contrasted Toronto neighbourhoods, as she disguises herself as a street-involved person in order to spend several nights in the church outreach program.

In the lamentably short two-novel series, Capponi’s fiction explores the social class chasm in Toronto, reflected geographically in the city’s neighbourhoods, from Parkdale to Rosedale. She assesses the inadequate support for mental health needs and the post-hospitalization abandonment of psychiatric survivors.

And she casts an acute gaze on the challenges of living a dignified life on welfare or disability payments while also celebrating the fierce pride of people who, while experiencing challenges ranging from learning disabilities and substance abuse to family trauma and workplace accidents, struggle to maintain ties of care and affection in their newfound communities.