Author: Heidi Darroch
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Ausma Zehanat Khan’s Getty-Khattak Series and A Deadly Divide
Ausma Zehanat Khan is the dizzyingly accomplished author of five novels and a short story featuring the unlikely pairing (in a genuinely innovative take on the trope) of Muslim Canadian senior investigator Esa Khattak and the perceptive and dogged but insecure Rachel Getty. They work together on a unique initiative, a Toronto-based community policing team…
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Lauren Wright Douglas’s The Rage of Maidens
My fall research task was drafting a chapter on lesbian private investigators in Canadian crime fiction. I’m only about halfway there, but it’s been a lot of fun. I discussed Eve Zaremba‘s fiction recently, and I’m reading Liz Bugg, Jackie Manthorne, and Marsha Mildon. Naiad Press was a lesbian publishing house headed by the formidable…
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Eve Zaremba and the Canadian Lesbian Detective Novel
Toronto writer Eve Zaremba passed away last month. She was a major figure in Canadian writing and social justice. Her fictional sleuth Helen Keremos, who made her debut in 1978 in A Reason to Kill, is generally acknowledged to be the first lesbian private eye. (An American book I haven’t yet read, M.F. Beal’s Angel…
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Louise Penny’s The Black Wolf
As The Black Wolf opens, Clara is struggling with the completion of her latest art project, a series entitled Just before something happens, which anticipates one of the key themes of Penny’s latest novel: how to portray the time that precedes a dramatic, or traumatic, event? How, even, to know if one is in the…
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Gail Bowen’s The Solitary Friend
In The Solitary Friend (ECW Press), Gail Bowen revisits themes and characters that have peppered her mystery series over more than three decades.
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Eric Wright and Canadian Academic Crime Fiction
I’ve been researching mystery stories set on Canadian campuses, and that’s directed me to writers I’ve intended to read for years, including the prolific Eric Wright (1929-2015). Wright authored four crime fiction series, and his achievement is especially impressive given his relatively late start as a novelist. The first decades of his career were taken…
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Louise Hegarty’s Fair Play and Ruth Ware’s The Woman in Suite 11
Crime fiction has strict-ish genre conventions, with distinctive expectations for police procedurals, noir-type thrillers, and domestic cozies. In one new novel, a debut author from Ireland has fun–with a serious intent–exploring how mystery conventions can offer reassuring certainty, in the wake of a sudden and unexpected death. And in another, an internationally acclaimed crime writer…
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Ariadne Oliver and Harriet Vane on the Work of Writing
I’ve come around to appreciating Agatha Christie’s fictional crime novelist, Ariadne Oliver. She’s written broadly, as a caricature of Christie herself–a substantial woman in midlife, trailing apple cores. Like Dorothy L. Sayers’s Harriet Vane, a writer of detective novels, Ariadne is a well-regarded author of mysteries who can’t resist dabbling in a few herself. Also…
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Uzma Jalaluddin’s Detective Aunty
Here’s something new and different, and very welcome: a murder mystery (cozy-ish) set in a multicultural Scarborough neighbourhood with a widowed Indo-Canadian woman in her late 50s as the plucky heroine. Uzma Jalaluddin is a Canadian author and journalist who has written acclaimed fiction and one play; this is her first murder mystery. Kausar Khan’s…
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Nancy Taber’s A Sea of Spectres
I tend to steer clear of paranormal mysteries. There’s a whole sub-genre of crime fiction that involves ghosts, psychic phenomena, astrology, or witches. And I love a good ghost story. Rebecca thrills me, and Vertigo is brilliant. But in these instances, the gothic shadings turn out to have very concrete origins. Not so in paranormal…
The Landscape of Canadian Women's Crime Fiction 