Author Talk & Signing at Wasaga Beach Public Library, WASAGA BEACH, ON. 120 Glenwood Drive. Directions | Website
Author Talk & Signing, Wasaga Beach Library, Wasaga Beach, ON. Monday August 12, 6:00 PM
Tag: Mystery
Yorkshire Noir – The Inspector Banks Series
English-born Peter Robinson crossed the pond for a new life in Canada. However, his Inspector Alan Banks novels are set in the UK. The police procedural and forensic details turn on detective work in the Yorkshire Dales. And those details are spot on.
As the series opens, Banks has recently left London Metropolitan Police and the big city, seeking a quieter life in Yorkshire. He doesn’t find it. The Dales may be a long way from London (by English standards, not Canadian), but they are teeming with fictional murder and mayhem. Banks is a busy sleuth, a divorcee who loves women, but has no luck finding true love.
Robinson deploys multiple narrative points-of-view, featuring criminals plus various detectives, mainly Alan Banks, Annie Cabbot (a former Banks love interest) and Winsome Jackman. The novels are expertly plotted and delivered with a descriptive eye. The early books in the series are cozier in tone, while the later books are harder, an Eight out of Ten on the Noir Scale, with Ian Rankin being a Nine-point-Five.
Although Robinson is known for his police procedural details, if you dig deeper, the main element in his writing is human psychology (cop and criminal). As an aside, I’d say that psychology is the main element in most crime writing, if not all. The difference between the crime subgenres is mainly due to the way that characters are portrayed – both cops and criminals – as well as the bloodiness of the killings. A cozy is soft and humane, and, at the other end of the subgenre spectrum, a black crime novel is at times almost inhuman.
Robinson doesn’t shy away from descriptive prose. His plots are firmly set in place and time. A deep sense of grounding makes his fiction appear to be fact, which is what all crime novels need.
When I want a winning combination of police procedural details, detective personality, and descriptive prose, I turn to Peter Robinson. As alluded to above, he’s not as noir as Ian Rankin. Nor is he as cozy as Agatha Christie or P.D. James. He hits a sweet spot in between.
Postscript: Standby for reviews of individual Banks novels.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Robinson_(novelist)
A few excerpts from the Banks opus ….
On the optimum time window to solve a murder:
Traditional police wisdom is that if a case doesn’t yield leads in the first 24 hours, everyone is in for a long haul. That time period could run to 30, 36 or 48 hours. That’s the problem. When do you scale down your efforts? The answer: You don’t.
A short “history lesson,” delivered by an ex-copper Banks knows [I’ve shortened the quote]:
“The first detectives came from the criminal classes. They were equally at home on either side of the law. Jonathan Wild, the famous thief-taker, for example. Half the time he set up the blokes he fingered. And back then, the days you’re asking about, I think we were a bit closer to our prototypes than the office boys we seem to have on the force today, if you’ll pardon my criticism. Now, I’m not saying that I was ever a crimo myself, but I lived close enough to the line at times to know what a thin line it is, and I was also close enough to know how they thought. I could think like them. I could’ve easily used my street smarts for criminal purposes ….” He let the sentence trail.
North Noir Defined
“What is North Noir?” In short, it’s detective fiction set in Northern USA and Canada.
The North element refers to the location of two detective series, one set in New England and the other in Ontario. The police work is close to the ground. There are no extended car chases, helicopter missions, or gun battles – no over-the-top clichés.
The Noir element refers to a tradition of crime writing linked to film noir, to movies such as The Maltese Falcon, which was first a novel. Noir fiction doesn’t dwell on characters’ feelings. Similarly, the female protagonists in North Noir are not sentimental, although they are empathetic and intuitive.
The crime/mystery genre turns on whodunit puzzles. Readers expect to be both challenged and entertained. The North Noir novels deliver more than puzzles and blood and guts. I always embed – very deeply (no preaching) – an existential conundrum in my novels. The majority of murders hinge on money. In a word, greed. In The Color Red, the main murderee is killed because of his renunciation of money, his anti-greed. Readers will get a baffling puzzle; they’ll also find a deeply buried ethical message. For me, all novels – even whodunits – should have an existential core.
PS: The first three North Noir novels – Bay of Blood, The Color Red (Bourque Book One), and Silver Moon Rising (Bourque Book Two) – are available in stores and online; click here for full details.
Author Talk & Signing, Port Elgin Library, Port Elgin, ON. Thursday July 25, 2:00 PM
Author Talk & Signing at Port Elgin Public Library, Port Elgin, ON. 708 Goderich St. Directions | Website
North Bay Noir – Giles Blunt
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 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.
PS: Blunt’s Cardinal novels have been turned into a TV series. In my view, the books are more beguiling than the series. The TV offerings don’t deliver the depth of the novels, which echoes my general observation that movies/series tend to be inferior to the books they’re based on. Of course, every rule has its exceptions (Movies vs. Books).
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 