Giles Blunt was born in Canada to English parents. As he tells it, “they had colorful accents and amusing habits and never allowed themselves to be influenced by Canadians. Consequently I lived in England at home and Canada at school.” Regardless of the schism – or maybe because of it – Blunt learned how to write. Very well. He is one of the few crime writers to be nominated for the Dublin IMPAC award.
Blunt’s Detective John Cardinal novels have been turned into a TV series. I’m not a fan of the series, but I don’t blame Blunt. The TV offerings don’t deliver the vibrancy and depth of the Cardinal novels, a prime example of the general rule that books are better than the movies/series based on them. Of course, every rule has its exceptions (Movies vs. Books).
Back to Blunt. The Cardinal novels are set in Algonquin Bay, a thinly disguised version of North Bay, Ontario. OPP (Ontario Provincial Police) Detective John Cardinal is a down-to-earth yet complex man. Blunt doesn’t hide Cardinal’s faults. The detective is not a particularly social animal (like many a detective; to wit, Connelly’s Bosch and Rankin’s Rebus). Although Cardinal bears psychic scars, he is humane, humble, and likable.
The Cardinal plotlines demonstrate that crime novels can be personal, with “literary” character development. They don’t need to be all crime all of the time. If you have interesting detectives like Cardinal and his partner, Lise Delorme, you can deliver whodunits with depth. Of course, it helps if the criminals aren’t one-dimensional. Blunt doesn’t fall into that trap. He gives us nuanced perps. As Cardinal hunts them down, the reader walks both sides of the thin blue line.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giles_Blunt
A few excerpts from the Cardinal opus ….
Blunt delivers “literary” prose:
“The Planet Grief. An incalculable number of light years from the warmth of the sun. When the rain falls, it falls in droplets of grief, and when the light shines, it is in waves and particles of grief. From whatever direction the wind blows — south, east, north or west — it blows cinders of grief before it.”
Advice if you get lost in the Canadian woods:
“Panic will kill you faster than any wolf, faster than any bear.”
North Noir 