The Golden Age of Canadian Mysteries?

It’s a good question to ask, consdering that there are a number of writers — Peter Robinson, Giles Blunt, Linwood Barclay, and Howard Engel, just to name a few — who have had or will have reasonable publishing success in the US and other countries. The Globe and Mail’s Rebecca Caldwell makes a convincing case for the idea:

“There’s been a lot of growth if you track it over the last five

years — there have been ups and downs, but it’s been increasing

overall.” says Barbara Fradkin, the Ottawa-based creator of the

Inspector Green mystery series and the president of the authors’

association Crime Writers of Canada.

She notes that 40 per cent more mystery novels were published this

year than the year before, and there has been a 50-per-cent increase in

juvenile mysteries. And the number of nominations for the Arthur Ellis

Awards, the CWC’s annual mystery prize, has spiked dramatically. This

year 67 novels were submitted to the fiction category, 43 for best

novel, and 24 for debut works.

“That’s phenomenal, to have 24 new [mystery] novels being picked up by publishers,” says Fradkin.

Not surprisingly, the growth is also reflected in the number of manuscripts submitted to local publishers:

“If you look back 10 years ago, it would be really hard to name more

than a handful of Canadian mystery writers. Now there are so many, even

though not all of them are stars, but they deserve to be,” says Barry

Jowett, the editorial director at The Dundurn Group, who publishes

favourite Eric Wright, the creator of the internationally renowned

prize-winning Charlie Salter series, and relative newcomer Sylvia

Warsh, whose book Find Me Again won a 2004 Edgar Award.

“We get more manuscripts that we want to publish than we can

actually publish,” Jowett says. “I don’t think a lot of people are

aware of how good some of these mystery writers are. I don’t know if

people may dismiss it as genre fiction, but we have writers such as

Alex Brett and Jim Hawkins, who if people who don’t normally read

mysteries read them, they’d probably become regular readers.”

But to my mind, this new presence is only the first step for Canadian crime writing; what needs to happen next is to have a more streamlined culture where readers and writers are active in a way that’s happened for a long time in the US and UK. One Canadian mystery writer told me not long ago that the scene here is on par with Canadian literary fiction 30 years ago — promising, but still a long way to go to catch up to other countries.

Still, it’ll be interesting to see how many more writers get more exposure and presence in the next 10 years. I do believe it’s upward motion from here on in.