Sudden Blow

Trevor S. Raymond is a teacher and librarian with the Peel Board of Education and editor of Canadian Holmes.

To the now-crowded gallery of Canadian sleuths, add tough-talking
leftist investigative writer Jane Yeats. She abhors “moralists of any
stripe,” lives in a bohemian flat, drives a Harley motorcycle, and
owns “only two dress outfits,” both of them dated. The plot,
narrated by Yeats, gets under way quickly. Because of her knowledge of
white-collar crime at high levels (she wrote an “exposé of insider
trading on Bay Street”), she is hired to investigate the murder of a
Canadian tycoon. This happens on the third page, but what follows does
not move at such a brisk pace. Too much of the early part is padded with
self-indulgent digressions in which the narrator tells us about herself.
That the narrator suffers from what a friend describes as a “flippancy
addiction” is not necessarily a bad thing: the best fictional private
eyes delight us with pithy comebacks and observations. Those of Jane
Yeats, alas, often come at paragraph length, as does much of the
conversation, leaving the reader plodding though the page. The
characters are stereotypical, and, in the case of the narrator’s
mother, simply cartoonish. The climactic revelation of the murderer
occurs under circumstances that seem forced and melodramatic. Almost
midway through the book, Yeats says, “I still didn’t have a clue who
[the murderer was]—and I still didn’t give a damn.” This feeling
may be shared by readers who get that far in this indifferent fiction
debut by a Toronto editor.