The Landscape of Canadian Women's Crime Fiction

Tag: books

  • 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…

  • Val McDermid’s Silent Bones (Karen Pirie #8)

    Scottish crime writer Val McDermid is prolific as well as extraordinarily accomplished: she writes some of the best crime fiction currently in print, and she continues to challenge herself with more complex plots and characterizations. Karen Pirie, the Historical Cases investigator who is the protagonist of this series, is a good example. McDermid has portrayed…

  • Mothers in Canadian Crime Fiction

    A quick Mother’s Day post, before I return to editing. L.R. Wright’s Mother Love Mothers appear in many of Wright’s psychological suspense novels, which are also police procedurals that use two RCMP protagonists: middle-aged-and-aging Karl Alberg, in a multiple-book series set in Sechelt, and the younger Edwina “Eddie” Henderson, who is featured in just two…