Slain and Abel

While sitting at his desk, a Toronto detective, Jamieson Abel, muses on his colleagues. “There are essentially three kinds of cops,” he thinks. “There is the guy who does everything by the book, who most of the station thinks is a useful idiot to send out to schools, do PR, ride-alongs with journalists. Then you have the Real Cops, who don’t believe in rules, who do whatever needs to be done. In between these two poles is the Wise Officer, who understands the essential hypocrisy of the organization and finds some balance between the need for formal rules and the need to get things done.”

Don Gillmor’s Cherry Beach is a story told from the perspective of a Wise Officer. Abel works the beat of St. James Town, a small, dense quarter stacked with high-rises, multicultural communities, and some of Toronto’s most economically disadvantaged residents. In an echo of Chicago’s failed Cabrini-Green Homes project, which bordered the affluent Lincoln Park and Gold Coast neighbourhoods, it begins a single subway stop east of the tony Yorkville district. When two teenage girls are found brutally murdered — one Black, one white — in a residential tower, Abel knows that, based on optics alone, these killings won’t disappear beneath the fold. The city is facing a lawsuit alleging “systemic racism, sexual harassment, and Islamophobia” within the police department; the case couldn’t have arrived at a worse time. It’s the kind of murder that will be discussed in concerned tones by upscale shoppers over expensive lattes. “This had the potential to haunt the news cycle for weeks,” he correctly predicts.

Investigating homicide isn’t easy, and being fifty-two, single, and disliked by almost every cop in 51 Division doesn’t help. (Gillmor once profiled the real 51 Division for Toronto Life.) Delroy Staples, the twenty-one-year-old boyfriend of one of the victims, emerges as a prime suspect. The orders from up top are to bring him in for questioning. His arrest will make the headlines go away. From the jump, though, Abel believes the murders are a small part of a more complex conspiracy involving the redevelopment of the gentrifying neighbourhood. Nobody wants to hear it, especially his partner, Davis, who gets shoved into the role as the public face of the investigation because she’s “young, female, and Black.” Davis is “someone to point to when the word diversity” comes up. She can’t rock the boat, because she can’t afford to. It’s easier for Abel to play fast and loose because no one is watching him.

Gripping and beautiful, Cherry Beach recalls the best of Ed McBain’s seminal 87th Precinct series, coupled with the grimy urban reality of Richard Price’s crime novels and screenplays. Just as the misdeeds in McBain’s books provide a conduit to explore the boroughs of the fictional city of Isola (a stand‑in for New York) and its denizens, this novel paints a palpable, tangible picture of contemporary Toronto. Abel navigates a world of graffiti artists and real estate agents, sex workers and politicians, journalists and high-end boutique salespeople. The violence that emerges — sudden, vicious, unequivocal — recalls the stark depictions in Price’s work. Set during a steamy summer of heat waves, it vividly portrays the Big Smoke as a city that has as much ugliness as it has beauty and potential.

Written with a street-level sensibility, Gillmor’s vision of his city as politically rotted and ruthlessly capitalist could come only from someone who also loves it. Someone who sees the magic of Trinity Bellwoods Park “filled with couples pushing strollers, groups of people in circles on the grass” or the casual wonder as “a parade of tattooed, pierced, wild-haired citizens” walk by as you eat a Cuban sandwich on a patio. This is Abel’s view when he’s off duty. It’s a life that those in St. James Town aspire to — and the reality he’s putting on the line as he moves away from the easy narrative surrounding Delroy Staples. As the plot progresses, he keeps moving toward a truth that is more complicated, nastier. One that involves an attempt to push the voiceless out of St. James Town in favour of condo developers. One where real estate portfolios are worth more than people. This is also Toronto.

As Abel works the case, rubbing shoulders with racists, shady lawyers, and dirty cops, he takes refuge in food. It’s rare that a crime novel could be called mouth-watering, but Cherry Beach offers a feast. The pages where he cooks a number of deliciously detailed meals would make a pretty good recipe chapbook. “I poured a large glass of one of the cheap Bordeauxs,” he says, “then scaled and gutted a red mullet, cut red and yellow peppers into strips, and heated olive oil in my heavy expensive pan. I added onions and coriander seeds and let them brown for a few minutes before adding the peppers, garlic, bay leaves, curry powder, and cherry tomatoes.” He shares these details like a television chef:

I added brown sugar, vinegar, salt, and pepper and cooked for five minutes. I covered the fish in a beaten egg and rolled it in flour and fried it in a separate pan, then added it to the vegetables and let it simmer for twelve minutes. I was supposed to put it in the oven but decided to stay strictly stove-top. I poured more wine, then arranged the mullet and vegetables in a shallow bowl and sat down in front of the television.

If only solving a case were as orderly as making dinner. Eventually, Abel winds his own way toward justice, taking a path that leaves a pile of dead bodies in his wake on Cherry Beach, five kilometres south of St. James Town, with blood soaking the sand. Such is law and order as the Wise Officer sees it. For him, to serve and protect means putting his hands on the arc of the moral universe and pointing it in the direction where he needs it to go.

“There is no just society. Justice is a fantasy, the place where the falling angel meets the rising ape,” Abel says. He literally gets away with a murder. In doing so, he provides a temporary corrective to a corrupt police department and gives the public a killer served up on a platter, inside a coffin. It’s not the whole truth of the matter, but it will suffice. Abel will get his pension, the headlines will disappear until the next crisis, and Yorkville and the rest of Toronto will feel some measure of comfort. However, the people of St. James Town, and the families of the murdered girls, will continue to pick up the pieces in silence.