Crime in a Cold Climate: An Anthology of Classic Canadian Crime

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

Librarian and crime-fiction scholar David Skene-Melvin has collected 13
stories, an excerpt from a novel, and four poems by 13 Canadian writers,
all popular early in the century and now mostly forgotten. He has
rescued from obscurity samples of what he calls their “criminous”
work and two tales from an extinct subgenre of “railroad” fiction
published between 1888 and 1929. After an informative essay about this
period of our cultural history, the selections are arranged in sequence
of the writers’ birthdates (from 1841 to 1882) and include the first
fictional appearance of a Mountie, “literature’s first
psychoanalytic detective,” and the earliest (and still very funny)
Sherlock Holmes parody. Not all the stories are set in Canada but those
that are are interesting for their background alone, such as the
building of our national railway, prospecting in Northern Ontario, life
on the plains and in late 19th-century Toronto. Each selection is
accompanied by biographical and critical notes that put the work into
the perspective of the popular culture of the time and tell us about
some extraordinary, if sadly forgotten, writers, and is followed by a
bibliography of each author’s works, criminous and other. This
delightful book is attractively produced, historically valuable, and
entertaining.