Investigating Women: Female Detectives by Canadian Writers: An Eclectic Sampler

By Dundurn

Meet some fascinating females:

• Jennie Baxer, 1890s journalist and world traveller
• Nelvana of the Northern Lights, created for comic book-starved Canadians during the Second World War
• the 60s’ Eve Adam, the "Rock Hit of Prague," whose methods violate all the "rules" for detective books
• and, very much of the 1990s, vampire detective Vicki Nelson, whose beat is Toronto’s Queen Street West

As well as the fifteen investigating women in the book, Skene-Melvin’s introduction describes hundreds of female sleuths and their creators in an in-depth analysis of women detective fiction by Canadians.

You will recognize many of the writers included in Investigating Women: Grant Allen, Robert Barr, Marisa De Franceschi, Adrian Dingle, Katherine V. Forrest, Hulbert Footner, Maurice Gagnon, Margaret Haffner, Joan Hall Hovey, Tanya Huff, Medora Sale, Josef Skvorecky, and Betsy Struthers.

For each of the selections a brief note sets the story; bibliographies help readers find other books by the authors featured in Investigating Women.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dundurn
• Release date: Dec 1, 1995
• ISBN: 9781459725430

Book preview

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Preface

Investigating Women is an anthology of stories about female detectives, sleuths, and super-heroines who pursue a quest; are almost killed by curiosity; actually investigate in a forensic sense; are the catalyst in a criminous situation, such as being the classic damsels in distress; or resolve the action even if no deduction is involved.

All of the stories are by Canadian authors, male and female. (Undoubtedly the cry of appropriation of voice will be raised against the presence of male writers; the response to this is to draw the complainant’s attention to the quantity of fiction about male protagonists by female authors. Q.E.D.)

The stories are for the most part contemporary; a small leavening of tales from the late nineteenth century and the 1920s provide colourful contrast.

There are many more female detectives by Canadian writers and several who have appeared only in novels and not short stories. The reader may meet them in the Introduction which follows.

Investigating

investigating women:

A historical survey of female detectives

by Canadian writers

It’s no mystery: Canadians have created some of the most fascinating women in criminous literature. If you have not met them before, I would be delighted to be the first to introduce you. Or do you know them already? Can you name the female protagonist by a Canadian who

• is a sportswriter specializing in baseball?

• was created by a publisher of Czech language literature?

• attends Bath Ladies College?

• appears in a mystery by an Officer of the Order of Canada?

• established a new genre as the first lesbian detective?

• is a violin virtuoso?

• gave her name to a film animation house?

• is also a vampire?

• had a romance with a long-serving Canadian prime minister?

• is the first female detective by a Canadian writer?

Answers are at the end of the introduction – but by then, you’ll know the answers anyway!

A welcome aspect of the proliferation of criminous writing during the last generation is the exponential increase in female detectives by Canadian crime writers, a manifestation of women’s liberation. Yet many of the female sleuths who have entered the field have been merely clones of their American cousins, similar spunky women, sexually independent, usually single and mostly seeking love, in adventures that could as easily take place in Des Moines or Dubuque as in Moncton or Saskatoon – another example of the increase of what Margaret Atwood has termed the coca-cola-nization of Canadian culture.

The American criminous ideal is the private eye as gladiator engaging the villains in physical combat and shooting his way to a resolution, justice triumphing as an undertaker. Canadian crime writing is more subtle, more psychological, more caring. Not for Canadians the anarchistic libertarianism of the hard-boiled private eye carousing while he pursues a career of vigilantism. When our villains are brought to justice, we want the government to do it. Canadians don’t trust entrepreneurs as lawmen; we don’t believe in privatizing justice. The salient feature of Canadian crime writing is its non-violence, its lack of machismo.

Canadian crime writers have tended toward the roman policier or police procedural, with the professional public eye like Eric Wright’s Inspector Charlie Salter in Toronto or Laurence Gough’s Vancouver police officers Jack Willows and Claire Parker. Canadian private eyes are like Howard Engel’s Benny Cooperman, who is, in his creator’s words, soft-boiled – not as a deliberate foil to the American stereotype, but because the Canadian ambience calls for it. Canadian private eyes are usually, like Lauren Wright Douglas’s Caitlin Reece in Victoria, ex-Crown Attorneys, or like Tanya Huff’s Victory Nelson in Toronto ex-policewomen. Amateur sleuths are most likely women with a policeman lover, like Alison Gordon’s sportswriter Kate Henry or Medora Sale’s photographer Harriet Jeffries. Our fiction reflects real life: Canadians tend to rely on professional policemen to protect us from the things that go bump in the night.

Female protagonists appear early in criminous fiction in general and in Canadian crime writing in particular. The earliest female detectives in the genre are Mrs. Paschal, who appears in The experiences of a lady detective and The revelations of a lady detective by Anonyma, published in London circa 1861-1864 (bibliographical details are murky, to say the least),¹ and Andrew Forrester’s anonymous The female detective, published in 1864.² The earliest American detectives on the distaff side are Clarice Dyke and Laura Keen.³ The first female detectives who might be called rivals of Sherlock Holmes were Loveday Brooke and Dorcas Dene.⁴

Heroines make their entrance in Canadian criminous fiction in the sensational novels of May Agnes Fleming that began appearing in 1861.⁵ May Fleming was born near St. John, New Brunswick, on 15 November 1840, of Irish immigrant stock; she became an immensely successful writer of popular sensational romances. Occasionally, she used the pseudonyms Cousin May Carleton and M.A. Earlie. Most of her numerous books are set in England with the occasional character from the United States, but with Canadian scenes in homage to her homeland. Fleming was educated locally at the Convent of the Sacred Heart and began achieving publication while she was still in school. By the time of her marriage in 1865 to John W. Fleming, an engineer, she was an established serial novelist. To keep better control of her business interests, she and her husband immigrated to the United States later that same year. May Agnes Fleming and novelist James De Mille were the first Canadians to sit down and deliberately write for money, rather than because they had something to say, and she was Canada’s first best-selling novelist. She wrote forty-two novels in seventeen years, fifteen published during her lifetime and twenty-seven after her death. The books are all unrestrained, highly sensational melodramas, filled with plot twists, mystery, disguise, startling events, murder, evil women, suspense, and true love. The villainous woman – dark, passionate, and exotically foreign, was one of Fleming’s stock characters. Although the novels rely on romantic, sentimental, melodramatic, and Gothic conventions, they are carefully structured with tight complex plots, minimum use of description, good use of dialogue, fast pace, flashes of humour, and interesting or unusual women characters. May Agnes Fleming died in Brooklyn, New York on 24 March 1880.

The first female sleuth by a Canadian writer is Grant Allen’s Lois Cayley⁶ – although she is more of an adventuress than a detective – who came onstage in 1899. A graduate of Girton College, Cambridge, Lois Cayley considers herself a modern woman. In the course of an around-the-world jaunt, she has a series of adventures that include foiling a jewel thief and authenticating a lost will in order to prove the innocence of her fiancé.

An author, philosopher, and scientist, who also wrote non-criminous works as Cecil Power and J. Arbuthnot Wilson, Grant Allen was born on 24 February 1848 on Wolfe Island near Kingston, Ontario, the second son in a family described by historian Francis Parkman in The old regime in Canada as the most truly eminent in Canada. Allen was educated in England at Edwards’ School, Birmingham and Merton College, Oxford, graduating in 1871. After three years as professor of mental and moral philosophy at a new University for Negroes in Spanish Town, Jamaica, he returned to England to pursue a full-time writing career. But success eluded him. His several scientific and philosophical books on evolution and the physiology of aesthetics gave him a reputation for scholarship, but little money. In 1880, he turned to writing the magazine fiction that brought him a large readership. From then on he assiduously published about thirty works of non-fiction and forty mainstream and criminous novels, sometimes as many as four crime titles a year, until his premature death at fifty-one.

Although Allen lived all his adult life in England and never set any of his novels in his native Canada, he is the first Canadian to seriously essay criminous literature professionally, and made a significant contribution to the genre. Allen’s two most important works were literary breakthroughs. The first, The woman who did (1895), created a sensation in late Victorian England and brought Allen notoriety because of its candid discussion of sex. The other, An African millionaire, guarantees Allen a lasting place in the annals of detective fiction: in the opinion of Ellery Queen this Adam of yeggmen – the first great thief on the criminaliterary scene – has been shamefully neglected.⁷

Grant Allen also wrote about another female investigator. When he died in 1899, his uncompleted novel, Hilda Wade,⁸ was finished by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, and published posthumously. Sir Arthur did not do his late friend a favour; despite the efforts of booksellers and other bibliographers of the genre, this collection of short stories is not even barely criminous and is a lacklustre example of the tales of romantic intrigue typical of the period. The only thing that has kept the book from sinking into deserved obscurity is the fame and name of Allen’s friend and neighbour.

Grant Allen’s Lois Cayley was followed in the same year by Robert Barr’s Jennie Baxter.⁹ Both these ladies were amateur and private, rather than public and professional, sleuths.

The honour roll of The Haycraft-Queen List of Detective-Crime-Mystery Fiction; two centuries of cornerstones lists only two Canadian authors: Robert Barr for The triumphs of Eugene Valmont in 1906 and Harvey J. O’Higgins for Detective Duff unravels it, about the first psychoanalyst detective.¹⁰

Born in Glasgow, Scotland, on 16 September 1850, Robert Barr was brought to Canada when he was four. The family eventually settled in Windsor, Ontario, where Barr spent much of his childhood. His autobiographical novel The measure of the rule (1907) records his entry into pedagogy and provides historians of education with a source book on the state of teacher-training in Ontario in the late nineteenth century; it is a serious contribution to Canadian literature. Barr soon abandoned teaching for journalism, taking a job as a reporter on the Detroit Free Press and quickly becoming editor. In 1881 he moved to England, achieving success as a magazine editor, short-story writer, and author of twenty novels. In 1892, in association with Jerome K. Jerome, he founded and was co-editor of the magazine The Idler. Barr died at Woldingham, Surrey, England, on 22 October 1912. His numerous short stories were good, fast-moving tales that were immensely popular with mass audiences.

Canadian crime writers eschewed female protagonists during the Edwardian era and the time of the First World War until at the beginning of the Roaring Twenties Arthur Stringer introduced Theodora Hayden¹¹ and Balmy Rymal.¹² Regrettably, Balmy Rymal appeared in only one novel. She is a professional private detective employed by an agency, an early career woman forced to adopt a gruff exterior in order to mask her true femininity.

Arthur Stringer was born on the 26th of January, 1874, in Chatham, Ontario and grew up there and in London, Ontario. After studying at University of Toronto and at Oxford, Stringer began a newspaper career with the Herald in Montreal, where he attended literary soirées at the home of noted poet William Henry Drummond.

Stringer subsequently moved to New York City with fellow Canadian journalists and crime writers Harvey J. O’Higgins and Arthur E. MacFarlane. He became one the pacesetters of the mystery and suspense story of the underworld, his most important contribution the collection of tales The man who couldn’t sleep (1919).

After his marriage to actress Jobyna Howland, the original Gibson Girl, in 1903, Stringer purchased a fruit farm in Kent County on the north shore of Lake Erie east of Leamington. It was here at Shadow Lawn that he scripted the famous film serial, The perils of Pauline in 1914. His frequent use of Canadian characters and settings, particularly the Far North, contributed to a foreign understanding of Canada. His fine Prairie trilogy about life on a grain farm in southern Alberta secures his place in Canadian literature. In 1921, he left Canada for the second and last time. He moved permanently to the United States, becoming an American citizen in 1937. He died at seventy-six at Mountain Lakes, New Jersey, on the 14th of September, 1950.

In 1922 Victor Lauriston presented readers with the first Canadian feminine detective – as opposed to those sleuths who stumbled on their cases, and discounting May Fleming’s early heroines. Laura Winwright is the protagonist of The twenty-first Burr¹³ set in Maitland Port, Ontario, on the shore of Lake Huron (actually Goderich, Ontario, and not Port Maitland on Lake Erie, as has sometimes been attributed). A contemporary reviewer in Canadian Bookman described it as a clever and fascinating detective story, chiefly Canadian in setting. [It] concerns itself with chauffeurs, detectives and palmists.¹⁴

Victor Lauriston was born in Fletcher, Kent County, Ontario, on 16 October 1881 and was educated at the Collegiate Institutes of Goderich and Chatham and at Osgoode Hall in Toronto. After a spell as a bookkeeper he turned to journalism, beginning his career in Chatham, Ontario, with the News and soon shifting to the Planet in that city. He stayed at the Planet from 1904 until 1913, working as editor from 1908 onward, before leaving to be a full-time freelance writer. He served in the Canadian Expeditionary Force in the First World War. For thirty years Lauriston was very active in municipal affairs in Chatham. A well-known short story writer, between the wars he was a regular contributor to Weird Tales and other American pulps and slicks. For 35 years, he was the Canadian correspondent for the American publication, Oil and Gas Journal.

The next female detective created by a Canadian crime writer was Hulbert Footner’s Madame Rosika Storey.¹⁵ Footner was born in Hamilton, Ontario, 2 April 1879, and educated at evening high school, New York City. He worked as a journalist in New York City and in Calgary, Alberta before he became a full-time freelance writer. Footner lived most of the latter part of his life in the State of Maryland. He became a highly respected local historian of the Maryland tidewater, which he described in Maryland Main and the Eastern Shore. He made his home in a seventeenth-century mansion that he lovingly restored and described in Charles’ gift; salute to a Maryland house of 1650. His piece on Rivers of the Eastern Shore; seventeen Maryland rivers appeared in the prestigious Rivers of America series. Footner died in his well-loved Maryland home on 25 November 1944.

Prolific is an apt descriptor for his output; in the late 1920s and early 1930s he often produced three books a year. Most of his mystery stories have nothing to do with Canada, being set in New York City where he was one of the literati, hob-nobbing with writers like Christopher Morley in the Roaring Twenties. He did make a minor contribution to the fiction of the Canadian Northwest, setting his early tales of adventure here, beginning with Two on the trail in 1911. The novel was based on a 1,200-mile trek he had made through this region, which he recounted in New rivers of the north; a yarn of two amateur explorers on the head waters of the Fraser, Peace River, the Hay River, Alexandra Falls.

Despite his considerable body of work, Hulbert Footner did not make a lasting impression on the criminous literary scene. What slight reputation he does have rests on his tales of the exploits of Madame Rosika Storey, a practical psychologist - specializing in the feminine. In these stories he created an admirable feminist role model, a woman making her own way on her own terms in a man’s world.

Although the protagonist is a bright young man, mention must be made of Ruth Massey’s The crime in the Boulevard Raspail; set in Paris, France, it also features a talented Canadian girl.¹⁶ The novel is valuable for its abundant information about painters and their work. Ruth Massey (Mrs. Harold M. Tovell) (1889-1965) was the sister of Denton Massey and the first cousin of brothers, Vincent, one-time Governor General of Canada, and Raymond, the famous actor, and also of Charles Albert Bert Massey Junior, whose murder is fictionalized in Master and maid by Frank Jones. Of the Massey family Canadian editor and littérateur B.K. Sandwell wrote, In Toronto/There are two classes/The Masseys/And the masses. A native of Toronto, Ruth Massey was educated at Havergal College and abroad. She lived on the model farm of her father, Walter Massey, named Dentonia Park after her mother Susan (Denton), in the east end of Toronto. She had a special interest in the social history of Flanders, into which she conducted extensive research. She died in Toronto’s Wellesley Hospital on 22 September 1965.

During the Depression The Dana Girls series began. The author is listed as Carolyn Keene, the way the Nancy Drew series is credited. The books were actually written by members of the Stratemeyer Syndicate; Canadian writer (Charles) Leslie McFarlane (1902-1977), wrote the first three books and another volume for the series. McFarlane was born in 1902 at Carleton Place, Ontario, in the Ottawa valley, and brought up from the age of ten in Haileybury, Ontario, where his father was the principal of the elementary school. On graduating from high school, he gained journalistic experience with the Sudbury Star, but by 1926 had decided to try his luck as a freelance writer. McFarlane wrote the first Hardy Boys novels for the Stratemeyer Syndicate under the assigned house-name of Franklin W. Dixon, as well as titles in the Dave Fearless series as by Roy Rockwood. He also wrote one Western in The X-Bar-X Boys series under the name James Cody Ferris. A prolific short-story and novella writer during the heyday of magazines from the 1920s through the 1940s, he was a crime novelist in his own right, and film, radio, and TV scriptwriter. McFarlane spent fourteen years with the National Film Board of Canada from 1943 onward and headed the drama script department of the CBC for three years. He recounted his life in his autobiography, Ghost of the Hardy Boys.¹⁷

In the 1940s, only one female sleuth appeared in a novel by a Canadian author: Agatha Lawson, in 1941’s Crazy to kill. The writer was Ann Cardwell, the pseudonym of Jean (Makins) Powley of Stratford, Ontario. James Reaney’s opera of the same title, based on the novel, premiered in 1989. Jean Powley wrote one other mystery novel, Murder at Calamity House.¹⁸

During the years of the Second World War, the greatest of all Canadian super-heroines entered the lists of Canadian popular culture. Cartoons and, later, comic strips had long appeared in magazines and newspapers, particularly the Sunday supplements. In 1937, a new form of visual entertainment appeared in the United States of America: the comic book. It drew upon the Sunday supplement comic strips for its heroes. In the cultural spill-over to which Canadians are accustomed, these comic books flooded the Canadian market.

In 1940, when Canada was at war but the USA was not, the import of non-essential items was banned; the ban included comic books. But a market had been formed, and there was now a vacuum. Successful marketing involves discerning a need and filling it; several Canadian entrepreneurs jumped in to satisfy the perceived need of comic books for Canadian kids. One of the most successful was Cy Bell. These Canadian comics were purposefully Canadian and had a patriotic attitude toward the Second World War, to which they were indebted. There was one other distinguishing feature of the Canadian comic books: they were printed in black-and-white, since colour inks were unavailable. The original comic books had created and developed the super-hero, the crime fighter of supernatural origin and powers, not merely someone with access to futuristic high-tech, but a man or woman transformed by some chemical process or alien beginnings to have strength and power above and beyond that of mere mortals. The Canadian comic books were no different, and the most Canadian and most enduring super-hero to come out of the black-and-whites of the 1940s was Nelvana of the North. Created by the famous Canadian artist Adrian Dingle, Nelvana moved to Cy Bell’s stable soon after her inception.

Adrian Dingle was born at Barmouth in North Wales in 1911 and came to Canada in 1914, where his parents settled in Port Credit, Ontario, now absorbed into Mississauga to the west of Toronto. Dingle went to art school and became a respected and well-known illustrator and painter. He died in Toronto of cancer on 22 December 1974 at the age of sixty-three. He was a member of the Arts & Letters Club of Toronto, where he was acquainted with the Group of Seven who spent much of their time sketching in the Arctic. It was from Franz Johnson, a member of the Group, that Dingle heard stories about the Eskimo goddess Nelvana. Nelvana was a pretty gruesome character in Eskimo legend, Dingle recalled, so I made her into an attractive doll by slipping her into a miniskirt. With the end of the Second World War, American comic books returned to Canada and by the end of 1945 this fledgling aspect of Canadian popular culture had died. But the legend of Nelvana remained, and is now enshrined in the name of one of the major animation houses in world cinema today.¹⁹

Three more female sleuths by Canadian writers came aboard in the 1950s. Two were home-born Canadians: Helen (Brown) Graham (Mrs. Steven) in 1954 in M’Lord, I am not guilty, set in Toronto and Mapleton Ontario, and Elizabeth Doane, newspaper columnist, who appeared in 1958 in Where is Jenny now?, set in Toronto, and in The country of the strangers, set in Vancouver and Moscow, USSR. All were written by Frances Shelley Wees.²⁰ The other was Englishwoman Jane Cardew, in the 1956 novel Spies in amber; set in Paris, France, the book was by Anthony Armstrong, the pseudonym for George Anthony Armstrong Willis.²¹

Frances Shelley Wees was born on 29 April 1902 in Gresham, Oregon, USA, where she attended elementary school. Although she remained an American citizen all her life, she was married to a Canadian, lived in Canada, and travelled on a Canadian passport. Her family moved to Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, when she was a teen-ager and she attended the Saskatoon Normal School in 1923. Wees taught for seven years in Saskatchewan and toured with the Chautauqua educational and entertainment shows. In 1924, the year she married, she was named the Director of Canadian Chautauquas. Her husband, Dr. Wilfred Rusk Wees, was a Vice-President of W. J. Gage & Co. Publishing in Toronto for which his wife wrote a series of primary readers. Besides writing, she worked as a public relations officer in Toronto from 1931 onward. The general theme of her novels was the damsel in distress. Until her death Wees lived in Stouffville, Ontario, northeast of Toronto in a home named Lost House after the title of her 1938 novel, the royalties from which helped finance its building.

George Willis, OBE, MC, (1897-1976) was born in Esquimalt, BC, on 2 January 1897, the son of a Royal Navy officer, but was educated in England at Uppingham and Trinity College, Cambridge. He served in the Royal Engineers as a Lieutenant during World War One, (Military Cross, 1916), and with the RAF from 1940 to 1946, for which he was awarded the OBE. As well as his crime fiction, several historical novels, stories of country life, and many humourous works, he wrote extensively for the theatre, both three-act and one-act plays, and was a regular contributor to Punch as A.A. Willis died in England on 10 February 1976.

Three female sleuths by Canadian writers appeared in the 1960s. One was Julie Warner in 1961 in The ravine, set in the New England states, by Kendal Young,²² the pseudonym of Phyllis Brett Young. Young was born in Toronto but lived for a time in Geneva, Switzerland. She also published mysteries under her own name.

In 1964 came native Canadian Laura Dean in Morgan’s Castle, set in the fictitious village of Greenwood in a Niagara Peninsula in Ontario that development has rendered extinct. The author was Jan Hilliard, the pseudonym of Hilda Kay Grant, (1910-). Now, why is Daphne Du Maurier so well-known when our own Jan Hilliard is not? Morgan’s Castle is a witty delight, populated with real people. Hilliard also wrote one other mystery, the delightful Dove Cottage, set in Toronto and based on the author’s own house outside the city.²³ A Canadian humourist and novelist and a Bluenoser transplanted to Ontario, Hilda Grant won the prestigious Stephen Leacock Award for Humour for her first book, The salt box, which was about Nova Scotia, where she was born in 1910. She attended Yarmouth Academy in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, and Grand Central School of Art in New York City. Latterly, she lived in Kleinburg, Ontario, northwest of Toronto.

The third of the 1960s group was Eva-Lis Wuorio, whose suspenseful espionage novels received international acclaim.²⁴ Typical of her books is Z for Zaborra, set in post-war Europe, in which former British intelligence agent Toria Walden, now fat, forty-something, and gone to seed, is lured out of retirement and inveigled into a return engagement. Eva-Lis Wuorio was born in Viipuri, Finland, in 1918; she came to Canada, where she was educated, around 1929. She worked on the Toronto Evening Telegram and the Globe and Mail; latterly she was an assistant editor for Maclean’s. In addition to her adult novels she was a prolific writer of children’s books.

There must have been something in the air of Montreal that inspired female authors there to write about damsels in distress in that city. One such was Janet Gregory Vermandel. Born in Buffalo, New York, Vermandel grew up in Fort Erie, Ontario and worked as an advertising copywriter in Montreal before retiring to Florida. In 1968, she began a set of six novels all set in Montreal, one of which, Dine with the Devil, published in 1970, featured Jonina Jones.²⁵

With the 1970s, the number of female sleuths created by Canadian writers exploded, with fifteen appearing in print for the first time during the decade. Granted, many of these were once-ers, appearing in only one novel; however, a few survived in either a sequel or even a series. Increasingly, these women were Canadians doing their investigating in Canada and not foreigners on some foreign strand.

The catalogue of female protagonists in Canadian crime writing in the 1970s begins with the re-creation of a Québécoise femme fatale, Elisabeth (d’Aulnières Tassy) Rolland, in Anne Hébert’s roman à clef Kamouraska.²⁶ The story was based on an actual love-triangle murder committed in Quebec in 1840. Anne Hébert was born in Sainte-Catherine-de-Fossambault, Quebec in 1916, but since 1969 has lived in France. An invalid for many years, she was educated by her parents. She has written poetry, short stories, novels, plays, and film scripts and is considered to have single-handedly produced a revolution in French-Canadian poetry.

Canadian littérateur Ronald Sutherland was born on 10 November 1933, in Montreal, Quebec and educated at the Montreal High School. He took both his BA (1954) and MA (1955) from McGill University, attended the University of Glasgow, and received his PhD from Wayne State in Detroit, Michigan in 1960. He has taught English since 1959 at the University of Sherbrooke in Sherbrooke, Quebec; he was Chairman of the English Department from 1962 to 1974 and is Head of the Graduate Department of Comparative Literature that he founded in 1963. In addition to his academic works, he has written two thrillers, both set in Montreal: Lark des neiges (Snow lark), which features Susy (MacDonald) Laflamme, and Where do the MacDonalds bury their dead?²⁷

In 1972, Montrealer Patricia Power published the first of her two novels, both set in Montreal, of young women threatened: This deadly grief, featuring interior decorator Daphne Wilder, followed the next year by The face of the foe with Nicky Nugent as the distressed damsel.²⁸ The two ladies are interchangeable.

The English-born Canadian citizen William Stevenson is best-known for A man called Intrepid, ostensibly a biography of Sir William Stephenson but so riddled with inaccuracies and inventions that it is best classed as fiction. The Intrepid fraud is exposed in David Stafford’s article, A myth called Intrepid,²⁹ as well as John Bryden’s Best-kept secret; Canadian secret intelligence in the Second World War,³⁰ which provides a documented debunking of the Stephenson myth. Sir William Stephenson is a character in A lost tale by New Brunswick novelist Dale Estey.³¹

In 1972 Stevenson published Emperor red, set in China and Hong Kong with Simon Wingate and Michelle T’ang as the central characters.³² The central focus is on China’s attempts to control the weather, a theme also explored in Canadian spy-novelist Frank Smith’s Dragon’s breath.³³

Stevenson was born on 1 June 1925 in London, England. During World War Two he was a Royal Naval Air Service carrier fighter pilot in the Far East with the rank of Lieutenant-Commander. After the war, he attended Ruskin College at Oxford, graduating in 1948. He entered journalism and covered the Korean War for the Toronto Star. Later he was that paper’s foreign correspondent in China and South-East Asia, covering the final French defeat. Latterly, he has been a freelance journalist and TV reporter.

Also in 1972, readers were introduced to one of the best-portrayed female private eyes in the genre, Eve Zaremba’s Helen Keremos, in A reason to kill. The character is still going strong as demonstrated by The butterfly effect published in 1994.³⁴ Eve Zaremba was born in Poland and moved to Canada in 1952. She was one of the first authors of detective fiction to introduce a lesbian, Helen Keremos, described by Margaret Atwood as a cross between Lily Tomlin and Philip Marlowe, as the primary character. Canada can justly lay claim to some of the best practitioners in the sub-genre of the lesbian detective/mystery as evidenced by the output of later writers Lauren Wright Douglas, Katherine V. Forrest, Marion Foster, and Jackie Manthorne. Zaremba has also written Privilege of sex; a century of Canadian women.³⁵

The 70s were an age of permissiveness, stemming from the flower-child ethos of the 60s which marked the beginnings of the increasing laxity of moral standards. The mixture of pornography and female detectives was a natural. It was a man, the unidentifiable James Moffatt, who mixed them, with The Girl from H.A.R.D. series.³⁶ If you have to ask what these are about, you’ll never understand the answer. The Man from U.N.C.L.E. has a lot to answer for, considering some of his relatives. Moffatt also created a character named Johnny Canuck. So much for originality.

In contrast, the highly original nightclub singer Eve Adam was introduced in 1973 in Josef Skvorecky’s brilliant Hrïchy pro pätera Knoxe (Sins for Father Knox),³⁷ set in Prague and other cities around the world; Eve also appears in others of Lieutenant Boruvka’s cases.

Josef Skvorecky is a Czech emigré author, born in Nächod, Bohemia, Czechoslovakia, on 27 September 1924; he sought refuge in Canada in 1969 after the Soviet invasion of his country and became a Canadian citizen in 1976. He obtained his PhD in Philosophy in 1951 from Charles University in Prague, Czechoslovakia, and served in the Czech army from 1950 to 1953. Currently he is professor of English at Erindale College, University of Toronto. He and his wife, the novelist Zdena Salivarova, keep Czech literature alive through their Czech-language publishing house, 68 Publishers. In 1980 Skvorecky won the Neustadt International Prize for Literature and in 1984 a Governor-General’s Award for The engineer of human souls. The story Humbug in The end of Lieutenant Boruvka won a Crime Writers of Canada Arthur Ellis Award for the Best Criminous Short Story published in 1989. In 1992, Josef Skvorecky was appointed a Member of the Order of Canada in the field of arts/writing.

Reymoure Keith Isely, a broadcasting executive and radio actor turned Saskatchewan farmer, published A strange code of justice in 1974 set in the US Northwest with female sheriff Justine Marshal.³⁸

The reclusive Ingrid Betz was born in Montreal and grew up in the Laurentians; she was educated in Germany, and currently resides on a farm near London, Ontario. Betz has written two excellent thrillers with female protagonists, well-drawn, quite separate characters. The mourning of the dove, published in 1976, set in Meadowford, a fictional small town near London, Ontario, has Morna Ireland; The girl from Finer Trading, published