A Criminal Lack of Crime Fiction

Over a pint or two yesterday I was chatting to some friends about transit in Hogtown. Then one of them mentioned a tunnel on the Yonge Line. Oh, I said, that's the Ellis Portal. And ever keen to show off, I explained that Ellis Portal is also the name of Rosemary Aubert's protagonist in her excellent mystery series that features a disgraced judge who, when we first meet him, is living in a shack in the Rosedale Ravine.

Then the talk turned from subways to fiction. One member of our gathering was set to start reading Hemingway's Farewell to Arms after finishing a biography of Neil Young - no, I can't see a connection, either. Another had high praise for John LeCarre. I weighed in with further kudos for Rosemary Aubert's books, and as I did it struck me that for a big city Toronto doesn't have much of a reputation for modern crime fiction.

Hugh Garner wrote mysteries featuring a Toronto cop called McDumont, and Eric Wright had a series built around another Hogtown policeman, Charlie Salter. Jack Batten is back this spring, after a long layoff, with Take Five, another entry featuring Crang, his one name only sleuth. Much newer to the crime writing scene are Robert Rotenberg, a criminal lawyer who's published three novels, and real Toronto constable Brent Pilkey, who's had one book published. That's it as far as I know. Of course, the great Howard Engel lives in Toronto but he sets his Benny Cooperman books in Grantham, Ont., or St. Catharines as it's commonly known.

Now compare that lineup with the cops, private eyes, crusading lawyers and amateur sleuths we find in other big cities - London, New York, Los Angeles, Paris. Hogtown is, or should be, a goldmine for a crime writer. We have guns, gangs and a serious drugs trade. There's the Italian mob, the Russian mob, and very likely other mobsters in the largest - or even the smallest - immigrant communities. What about the ethnic or religious animosities that immigrants and refugees bring here from the "old country"? Pick up any newspaper; it's not hard to find compelling evidence of corruption and financial chicanery at every turn.  

All of the elements necessary to write good crime fiction are being served up on a silver platter here in Hogtown, so why aren't Canadian writers taking a crack at it? They may not be interested. Fair enough. Or they may be labouring under the false impression that crime writing can't also be good literature (Hello there, Mr. Chandler). But perhaps it's something else: crime fiction (like other works of fiction) demands that those who write it acknowledge that their society has flaws, serious flaws; that there's as much violence and dishonesty (per head) among their fellow citizens as anywhere else. It's so much easier to pretend otherwise - like the city's need for more transit.