Basil Guinane

The Biblical tale of Cain and Abel is the original true crime story. Murder ballads were once quite popular throughout Scandinavia and the British Isles. Victorian penny dreadfuls, with their grisly chronicles of wrongdoing, often sold millions of copies. Magazines from The New Yorker and Vanity Fair to True Detective…

About halfway through Wayne Arthurson’s new novella, The Red Chesterfield, the reader learns that the protagonist, M, is Indigenous. The reader then comes to see that this fact is entirely irrelevant to the story. In a way, that’s the whole point: that the protagonist’s race is incidental. It has nothing to do with the actual…

This is a review of a mystery novel. That’s right, a mystery novel reviewed in the pages of the Literary Review of Canada — even though mixing the words “literary” and “mystery” in the same sentence breaks with a widely held view that genre fiction is artistic slumming and not worthy of serious…