Love Hemorrhage.

Matt Hartman is a freelance editor and cataloguer, running Hartman Cataloguing, Editing and Indexing Services.

One doesn’t know whether or not to treat Lorne Shirinian’s detective novel, Love Hemorrhage, as a parody. To do so would certainly account for its stock characters: the two “damaged” cops, George and Lenny, the latter brain damaged (remember Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men?); another cop gone “dirty”; the gorgeous, sexy blonde murder victim. Whether Shirinian, a comparative literature professor at the Royal Military College in Kingston, intended this is not clear. He has made his reputation writing poetry, plays, and essays about the Armenian genocide and the resulting diaspora in Canada and throughout the world. This novel has nothing to do with that, though, inexplicably and unrelated to the plotline, George and Lenny turn out to be Jews whose parents were victims of the Nazi Holocaust and who say the occasional Hebrew prayer. Go figure. Shirinian’s character naming provides more evidence of his ironic intent. How else explain Nolan Scrub, the obsessive-compulsive janitor, or sexy nightclub singer Heidi Boa, the first murder victim? Even the cop who goes bad, Lou Taggart, is straight out of Mickey Spillane.

The cities of Kingston and Toronto come in for their share of mapping. Streets, even shopping malls, are meticulously named. Intersections are pinpointed. These bits of verisimilitude do nothing for the plot except provide some local colour.

Is Love Hemorrhage a parody of the overheated detective story? Read it and see.