Author: Heidi Tiedemann Darroch
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Mystery News Round-Up
Nevada Barr’s Anna Pigeon Sometimes being Canadian feels ironic. There’s a new TV adaptation of American crime writer Nevada Barr’s series that features a Canadian actor, Tracy Spiridakos, as park ranger Anna Pigeon. It’s for the USA Network, and their trailer isn’t available to view in Canada, but it’s also posted on Rotten Tomatoes and…
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The Helplessness of Grief and the Trauma of Academia: Maria Adelmann’s The Adjunct
As I was reading Adelmann’s campus novel, I was thinking about one of the most brilliant and personable labour organizers I’ve ever met, the late Miranda Merklein. I miss her. Like this novel’s protagonist, Merklein had realistic expectations of a middle-class life as a college teacher: not a cossetted existence, but decent health insurance and…
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Vancouver Crime Fiction’s Sense of Place and a May 21 Event
Several years ago, as I was starting a Creative Writing program at U of T, I took a crime fiction course with Vancouver writer Sam Wiebe; I’d taken a previous course on mystery writing with Gail Bowen. The two courses were completely different in delivery mode and approach, but both were terrific–and transformative. They made…
