SCENES OF THE CRIME
Unflinching realism in local writers' new novels
Don Macdonald is a longtime Montrealer. Many readers will remember him from his 12 years as a reporter and feature writer at the Gazette, covering a variety of beats until leaving in 2009 for a position with the Business Development Bank of Canada. But the city where he was born and grew up still stakes a claim.
“No knock on Winnipeg,” said the 60-year-old from his home in N.D.G., where he lives with his wife and two kids. “I love the place. But when I was young, I could hardly wait to get away and out into the world.”
That restlessness led Macdonald to leave the city in his early 20s. With distance and time, though, his relationship with his old home — a place he has continued to visit regularly to see family and friends — has evolved.
“I suppose what I feel now is nostalgia, to some degree,” he said. “But I'm also more aware of the richness of the place, historically, culturally and ethnically.”
Having long wanted to write a novel — he cites Graham Greene, Elmore Leonard, Margaret Atwood and Colm Tóibín as influences — Macdonald eventually settled on the crime genre, and on his old stomping ground as a setting.
Omand's Creek (Cordova, 268 pages, $15.99) is a Winnipeg novel through and through, with the exception of a couple of interludes set in the nearby fishing community of Gimli. It's a book steeped in the city's unique prairie qualities: its urban forests, its confluence of four rivers, its extreme seasons (in this case, summer). The title itself refers to a waterway that runs through the heart of the city but is, in places, quite wild.
The old paradox holds true, though: by focusing on something quite specific, Macdonald has achieved something that will resonate wherever it is read. Omand's Creek is the best Canadian crime debut in recent memory.
“You have the more affluent southern parts, like River Heights, where I grew up, although my family didn't have any money,” said Macdonald when asked for a nutshell description of Winnipeg's layout. “Then, north of the Assiniboine (River), you have the more poor and crime-ridden neighbourhoods. My protagonist goes between these two worlds.”
Michael Shelter, the character in question, is a widowed detective. A reflective type, given to existential crises, he finds himself struggling to communicate with his disaffected teenage daughter. In his work life, he deals on a daily basis with a deeply ingrained mistrust of the police from the most vulnerable members of the community he's sworn to serve. When two Indigenous women are murdered in close proximity, that mistrust becomes especially acute, no less so when the trail of suspicion appears to be leading to the city's higher echelons.
“The police I talked to (in researching for the book) feel they get a bad rap, that they're doing their best in a difficult situation,” Macdonald said. “On the other hand, from the Indigenous side, there is a long history of systemic racism that we can't turn our back on. Two sides having equally legitimate points of view makes for an interesting conflict, and I wanted that in the book.”
Presumably Macdonald couldn't have been unaware of the many potential pitfalls that come with addressing First Nations culture from the outside?
“Oh, that was constantly in my mind,” he said. “And also constantly reinforced by reality,
starting with the (2014) Tina Fontaine murder. Then there was the National Inquiry Into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, Idle No More and the cultural appropriation debate. I've been trying to understand what my responsibilities are as a non-indigenous writer writing about this subject. I felt a strong obligation to do it in as respectful, sensitive and realistic a way as possible.”
While early responses from Winnipeg and elsewhere would appear to confirm an accomplished mission, for Macdonald the experience of writing his first book goes beyond marketplace considerations.
“It was a learning journey for me on many levels. And my protagonist is undergoing that process, too. I think a lot of people in Canada are.”
Ann Lambert didn't want to get stuck in the Laurentians.
When the Montreal playwright and teacher's 2019 debut novel The Birds That Stay attracted a lot of readers, there was a certain pressure on her to settle into its cottage-country milieu for a nice long run. But that wasn't going to happen.
“I wanted to write about Montreal, and about what I've seen for the last 30 years (near) Dawson College,” said the 64-year-old, who retired from her English-literature teaching position at Dawson last year.
The Dogs of Winter (Second Story Press, 328 pages, $19.95) follows the fitful romantic progress of CEGEP professor (and Lambert alter ego) Marie Russell and Sûreté du Québec detective Roméo Leduc as a hitand-run death draws Leduc from his St-jérôme base to the area encompassing Cabot Square and Alexis Nihon — and, yes, Dawson College — where many of Montreal's homeless Inuit gather.
It was a learning journey for me on many levels. And my protagonist is undergoing that process, too. I think a lot of people in Canada are.
Having already carved herself a niche in a crowded field, Lambert has effected a further leap. By crime novel standards — indeed, by any standard — The Dogs of Winter is structurally ambitious, deftly sustaining at least four distinct but gradually converging narrative strands. It's also a book that doesn't mind occasionally easing up on genre plot demands in favour of side trips into character nuance and social commentary — the kind of relief, some of it comic, that can come in handy when the core subject is violence against Inuit women.
Lambert also examines what she calls her own “sense of paralysis.”
“In the book Marie calls it `the gauntlet of guilt,' when you're walking through the part of the (Atwater) métro that goes into Alexis Nihon,” she said. “In the old days, going to and from work, I'd stop and give money. But as the years pass, your compassion is kind of eroded. The problem just feels too big — you don't know what to do.
“So the book was a way for me to explore something I didn't understand but want to understand. Where does homelessness — particularly the homelessness of Inuit people, and more specifically Inuit women — intersect with systemic racism and the injustice we see around us?”
The menace in the book isn't confined to any one community, as we see when a Dawson student crosses paths with a predatory TV figure.
“I was thinking of the (Jeffrey) Epsteins and (Harvey) Weinsteins of the world, and a few others who I won't mention, and their procurers,” said Lambert. “I'm hoping readers will come away with a greater understanding of how guys like this do what they do; how young women, even ones who are feminist, become victimized; and how the system as yet doesn't really work to address sexual violence.”
As for the canines of the book's title, they aren't mere symbolic devices. Dogs play an important part in the novel, in ways impossible to describe without straying into spoiler territory.
“For many homeless people, their dogs are absolutely essential, a critically important part
of their lives,” said Lambert. “In many cases, their dog is what keeps them going.”
And what of the other part of the title?
“Well, it's a rich subject, isn't it? The beauty of a Montreal winter, but also the brutality of it.”