The Landscape of Canadian Women's Crime Fiction

Tag: fiction

  • Pamela Bedore’s Routledge Introduction to Canadian Crime Fiction

    I’ve been drafting a sometimes sprawling book project, adding and subtracting chapters too frequently. It’s been such a big help to have a model and guide for my work, in the form of Pamela Bedore’s 2024 book on Canadian crime writing. In a crucial way, I’m writing in dialogue with Bedore–and with a few other…

  • Murder Ballads and Alice Munro’s “Open Secrets”

    I’m initially veering a little off topic again, the topic being Canadian women’s crime fiction, to speculate about an intriguing musical genre that makes an odd appearance in Alice Munro’s story “Open Secrets.” A murder ballad is a sung story about violent death and its aftermath, including the execution of the murderer. Some of my…

  • Jean Paetkau’s Victoria-Set Breakwater Series

    My Christmas holiday reading has been the second book in local indie writer Jean Paetkau’s Breakwater series, which opened with Blood on the Breakwater last year. In Victoria it was a bestseller, and the author did a tremendous job promoting her self-published work. That must be one of the most onerous tasks for a writer…