Finding Mysteries North of the Border

I recently began reading the best-selling How the Light Gets In by award-winning Canadian mystery author Louise Penny. It's another entry in the Chief Inspector Armand Gamache series set in the Quebec village of Three Pines; this time, Gamache comes to the tiny town as a personal favor to look into the disappearance of a once-famous woman, only to find himself stalked by the same evil that turned her village sanctuary into a deadly trap. Since Penny is one of my favorites, I began to think about other Canadian mystery writers to explore. One place to start is the list of winners of the Arthur Ellis Award for Canadian crime fiction (named after the nom de travail of Canada's official hangman). The award is given annually to authors residing in Canada (regardless of original nationality) as well as Canadian-born authors. The 2014 Ellis winner for best crime novel is The Devil's Making by Sean Haldane, a psychotherapist/neuropsychologist and poet. The mystery's protagonist is a young English-immigrant policeman in Victorian-era British Columbia, who seeks to solve the murder of an American "alienist" (archaic term for psychiatrist) while navigating the tensions between Native American, British and American residents in the colonial outpost of Victoria. Two more Ellis Award honorees are Giles Blunt, author of the 2013 Ellis crime fiction winner Until the Night, which is part of his popular John Cardinal series set in fictional Algonquin Bay, Ontario, and Peter Robinson, the English-born Canadian resident who produced the popular Inspector Alan Banks series set in the villages of Yorkshire, which spawned BBC's "DCI Banks" TV series. Beyond the Ellis awards, there is Man Booker Prize finalist Emma Donoghue, an Irish-born Canadian resident, whose new mystery Frog Music follows the efforts of a French burlesque dancer in 1876 boomtown San Francisco to solve the murder of her friend, a notorious and secretive young woman, in a "lyrical tale of love and bloodshed." Even though she is a U.S. writer, I think personal favorite Kathy Reichs deserves a place among the Canadians when her forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan mysteries (basis for the "Bones" TV series) are set in Quebec and based on her actual experience with the Laboratoire des Sciences Judiciaires et de Médecine Légale of Quebec province. For more top-notch Canadian crime fiction, see the Arthur Ellis Award finalists and winners at http://www.stopyourekillingme.com/Awards/Ellis_Awards.html