North of 60

MacLean’s Magazine, Canada’s version of TIME and Newsweek, offers up a fairly decent piece on how several Canadian crime writers are looking northward for their bestselling novels:

As if the great Canadian wilderness didn’t
have enough dangers of its own — what with the blizzards, bears and
bugs — crime writers, particularly those with a literary bent, have
increasingly taken to littering its scenic splendour with corpses. And
none more than Giles Blunt, whose new novel, Blackfly Season,
is the third in his internationally acclaimed series about Algonquin
Bay police detective John Cardinal. For Blunt, it was mostly a desire
to come home, fictionally speaking, that led him to set his mysteries
in and around a thinly disguised North Bay, the northern Ontario city
where he’d spent his teenage years. But he fully understands the exotic
appeal of the Canadian bush setting, especially to foreigners. "After
I’d lived in New York for 20 years, North Bay seemed like another
planet, even to me. To New Yorkers or to Britons, it’s amazing that a
place farther south than England can be so cold and snowy."

While
any art director would agree that snow does make a fine backdrop for
splattered blood, climactic extremes have other advantages as well.
There are the outsized locals, for example, both human and animal, who
gravitate to harsh places. This spring alone new Canadian books include
characters like the hard-drinking Grand’mère Osweken, the Ojibwa shaman
who dominates Ilona van Mil’s intriguing Sugarmilk Falls
(McClelland & Stewart), set in an isolated Ontario town. Another is
Miles McEwan, the physically and mentally scarred fire chief of Ross
River, Yukon, in Andrew Pyper’s page-turner The Wildfire Season
(HarperCollins). They’re as much a force of nature as the creatures who
roam the novels. Bears, naturally, are prominent, including the almost
rational grizzly in Wildfire Season. But even Pyper’s ursine terror pales beside the rapacious insects that amount to a single, malevolent character in Blackfly Season, a fit match for the novel’s bloodthirsty murderer.

I’d also add that it isn’t just the cold that makes Northern Canadian settings so attractive — it’s the rhythm, so different from city living, so much quieter and yet so much more sinister. When I vacationed in Northern Ontario last summer, I felt all the city stress slipping away, replaced by a more languid pace. But at night, even in summertime, it would get so cold and dark that I wondered what strange dangers lurked, waiting to emerge. Never saw them, of course, I wondered nonetheless.