PROMISING DEBUT A SLICK THRILLER, BUT MISSING SPARK
Jo Silver is the new editor of the ironically titled Dawson Daily — which comes out weekly — in Dawson City, Yukon. She’s moved North to recover from a careerlimiting event in her work as a journalist in Vancouver, and arrives to take over the local paper in Dawson as the small community is absorbing news of a mysterious death in its midst. Within 24 hours she’s immersed in a torrent of intrigue that explores the conflicted motives, petty jealousies and thwarted ambitions found in small towns everywhere, with murder, desire and plot turns aplenty. The ethics of big business, media collusion and police corruption are also intertwined in this thoughtful and well-constructed narrative.
Strange Things Done is a highly readable, slick and professionally executed thriller, one that sustains the reader’s interest well throughout its 300-plus pages. There’s much to admire here, not least the effective use of the North’s desolate landscape and the advent of the big winter freeze both to drive the narrative and as atmospheric detail. The plot moves at a good pace, maintaining consistency of time, place and character, and Elle Wild demonstrates a keen eye for sensuous detail, those smells, sights and sounds that hook readers into a story — as well as possessing the skills as a writer to capture such details with economy. A female bartender has “a malt whisky voice and nicotinestained fingers”; a local municipal office smells of “wet wool and burning dust,” and throughout we’re aware of the shortening days and plunging temperatures that both play a role in and help to amplify the story’s climax.
Wild can write tight, sometimes witty dialogue, and characters are adroitly imagined, from local RCMP sergeant Johnny Cariboo, who uses bandages to hide his tattoos, to Jo’s roommate Sally, a barroom dancer not above earning a little more on the side via the oldest profession on the planet. Deliciously, Wild also evokes the whispering campaigns and gossip of small-town life as a plot device; following Jo Silver’s questioning of the attractive, enigmatic artist Christopher Byrne in his pickup truck at night after the bars shut, it’s assumed by several of the townsfolk that they are an item. While that may not be the case, the whispering campaign itself sows doubt in the reader’s mind and serves to heighten the atmosphere of uncertainty — to say nothing of the whiff of sleaziness — that surrounds Dawson City. Any more detailed description of the plot would risk giving away its denouement: Suffice to say that the payoff is worth the wait, and hinted at just enough throughout the book to be plausible when it comes.
If there’s any downside to this well-written debut, it may lie in its own polished achievement. Despite ticking every box one might look for in a thriller — mysterious deaths, events that foreshadow menace, characters that deceive, romantic subplots, finely executed prose, dream sequences and neatly observed detail — the reader is still left looking for what the poet Hart Crane called the “hot root,” that spark that lifts highly accomplished works into a different, unforgettable category.
Since Strange Things Done seeks to transport the “Scandinavian noir” genre to Canada’s frozen North, it’s perhaps not inappropriate to recall that Stieg Larsson originally wanted to name his first novel The Man Who Killed Women before the novel was given the more poetic, less violent and misogynistic title The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo before publication. A change of name notwithstanding, Larsson’s work still delves into the dark nexus between sexual longing and death, between cowardice and the compulsion to reveal truth, with a bravery that gives added impetus to his narrative. Larsson carried the torment of being a teenage witness to sexual assault with him for 30 years before that torment found expression in the trilogy which brought him posthumous fame.
Without descending to the clichéd saw of asking a creative artist to “write what you know,” one nonetheless finishes Strange Things Done wondering what this talented writer might do with a subject perhaps somewhat closer to her heart. Having taken great pains to hone her craft and demonstrate her capacity to execute a plot, paint characters and evince mood and atmosphere in this promising debut, we should look forward to what Wild might do with subjects that arouse more passion in her and, by extension, her readers.