Review of One or The Other by John McFetridge (ECW Press, 2016)

Montreal, 1976. A year of discontent. The Olympics are due to take place in the summer and after the terrorists attacks in Munich the authorities are taking no chances. Public sector unions are threatening industrial action. A Brinks truck is been hijacked and the police keep shaking down criminal gangs in the hope of catching the thieves. The suspicion is the stolen money is being used to flood the city with drugs. Eddie Dougherty is also out of sorts. He wants a permanent appointment as a detective but always seems to be seconded on an interim basis and to the fringes of a case. He’s thinking of popping the question to his girlfriend, but can never find the right time. When a teenage couple are found on opposite sides of the river he is paired with a francophone port cop to investigate. The pair are soon marginalised, however. Neither is happy with the outcome, especially when it’s ruled a murder-suicide rather than a double murder. Defying their bosses, the pair keep unofficially plugging away at the case over several months.

One or The Other is the third book in the Eddie Dougherty series set in Montreal in the 1970s. In this outing it’s 1976. The two big events in the city are a major armed robbery and the Olympics. Dougherty is at the fringes of both, but is out of sorts at work and home. He wants to be a detective but is only ever temporarily assigned and the case he’s working – the death of two teenagers – is taken away from him and in his view mis-investigated, and his relationship with his girlfriend seems to have reached the point where they make a longer term commitment. The tale is stretched out over the year, tracking Dougherty’s unofficial investigation undertaken with a port cop of the teenage deaths. In many ways, this is a bold move. The armed robbery and the Olympics would have been much bigger hooks, but both are largely skirted. Instead McFetridge concentrates on the mundane – everyday policing and the slog of office politics, the ordinariness of crime and a potential miscarriage of justice in a case that is little cared for, and a slightly unsettled home life. On one hand it gives a kind of hyper-realist account of policing, and on the other it leaves the tale somewhat flat and insubstantial. The result is a book that feels like a bridging tale, a filler-episode, as Dougherty’s life transitions. Nonetheless, it’s an interesting police procedural of a case tangential to the key action in the city.

Review of A Little More Free by John McFetridge (ECW Press, 2015)

Montreal, Labour weekend, 1972.  The Canadians and Soviets face each other in the ice hockey summit series.  A nightclub is set on fire killing thirty seven people.  The Museum of Fine Arts is robbed.  And a US Army deserter, David Murray, is found dead.  Constable Eddie Dougherty, a beat cop who dreams of becoming a homicide detective, finds himself the first responder on each case.  While the nightclub murders are easily solved, and the museum robbery seems to have mafia connections, the death of Murray is more of a mystery.  Eager to impress Detective Carpentier of Homicide, when he’s not working his shift Dougherty freelances on the case trying to identify the killer.  However, since Murray was an illegal immigrant and he was active in anti-establishment networks few of his associates are willing to cooperate with the police.  Nonetheless, Dougherty keeps plugging away hopeful of solving the case.

A Little More Free is the second outing for Constable Eddie Dougherty, an anglophone cop working in the largely francophone city of Montreal.  The story has two real strengths.  The first is Dougherty who is a fairly ordinary cop from a working class background who’s likeable and dogged.  The second is the historical contextualisation and sense of place – McFetridge places the reader in the city during the famous Canadian-Soviet ice hockey series and the tail end of the Vietnam war.  While the tale has three central cases - the mass murder of thirty seven people, a major heist, and the murder of an army deserter – the telling is somewhat low-key, focusing on the mundane, everyday grinding out of an investigation.  The result is an engaging story that spits and sizzles rather than boils and explodes.  It’s an interesting tactic, but one that works well, imbuing the tale with a sense of realism and drawing the reader into Dougherty’s world.  I’ll certainly be reading the next in the series, One or the Other.

Review of Black Rock by John McFetridge (ECW, 2014)

Montreal, 1970, and the city is on the frontline of bombs and hoaxes by the Front de libération du Québec (FLQ), a somewhat anarchic terrorist group.  Constable Eddie Dougherty is the son of a French mother and an Irish-Canadian father, and has only been a cop for a couple of years.  Somewhat out of place amongst his French speaking colleagues, Dougherty works as a patrolman out of Station Ten, responding to bomb alerts and trying to keep the peace.  Also at work in the city is the ‘vampire killer’, who has murdered three women.  When a fourth woman disappears in Dougherty’s old neighbourhood he is drawn into the periphery of the investigation.  As more and more cops are pulled into the task force to deal with the FLQ, the murder investigation stalls and Dougherty steps in to fill the gap determined to try and bring the perpetrator to justice. 

There’s much to like about Black Rock, a historical police procedural set in Montreal in 1970 -- attention to historical detail, the sense of place, the intersecting story lines, and the characterisation.  McFetridge bases the story around two real cases -- the ‘vampire killer’, a serial killer operating in the city, and the Front de libération du Québec (FLQ), a separatist terrorist movement that left hundreds of bombs across the city before moving on to kidnapping two high profile officials -- placing his central character, rookie cop, Eddie Dougherty, on the periphery of both cases.  Dougherty is still trying to work out his place in the city, and on the force, both of which are increasingly dominated by Francophones.  He’s a regular cop, competent but not exceptional, but since he knows the family of the fourth 'vampire' victim he becomes determined to try and help solve the murders when the investigation is put on the back burner to concentrate on capturing the key members of the FLQ.  His problem is he only has one clue to go on, the sighting of a white car with a black top that was seen near to where the latest victim was discovered.  It’s a slim lead and he’s not really sure how to pursue it.  By focusing on Dougherty and his stuttering, hesitant investigation and not one of the lead investigators of either the murders or FLQ actions, McFetridge stifles the potential tension somewhat, the story simmering along without ever really boiling over, but that’s actually one of the reasons I liked the tale so much.  The story focuses on the everyday, mundane policing in exceptional circumstances; on trying to grind out a result with limited resources and experience.  Moreover, McFetridge does a great job of placing the reader in Montreal in 1970.   The result, is a slice of social realism that I imagine would translate into a great television series.

Review of Dirty Sweet by John McFetridge (Harcourt, 2006)

Roxanne Keyes is a real estate agent who’s in a bind, her credit over-extended and afraid of losing her unaffordable life-style. Then one morning she witnesses a murder – a man shot dead in traffic in broad daylight – and an opportunity presents itself to work herself free; an opportunity that has high risks given that the driver of the getaway car is a Russian gangster, Boris Suliemanov, who runs an upscale strip club and smuggles women, high-end cars and drugs to and from Eastern Europe. All she needs to do is lie to the police and find a safe way to blackmail the Russian. Then Vince Fournier, who rents out space in one of Roxanne’s buildings where he runs an online porn business, not only provides a safe route to the Russian, but also a means to make all three of them a lot of money. The only problem is that the police don’t believe Roxanne’s initial witness statement and a rival gang have their eye on Boris' business.

There’s a lot to like about Dirty Sweet. The characters and plot were entirely plausible. The dialogue was mostly excellent, although I did lose the thread in a couple of places. The moral ambiguity of all the characters, including the police, was realistic. McFetridge's knowledge of Toronto shines through and the story comes with its own soundtrack. And yet, what had the potential to be a five star review fell a little short for me. I think there are two main reasons. First, because the three main characters were morally dubious, self-centred and shallow, and there was nothing much appealing about the police officers, there was no-one to root for or will on. Second, the pace and tension remained relatively sedate, instead of being gradually ratcheted up. Whilst this was probably true to the story it meant the book never quite became the page-turner, edge of the seat read that it could have been. That said, McFetridge writes well and hooks you in early, and he does a good job of exposing the moral ambiguities we all face – how people get themselves into trouble, in spite of their best intentions, and then slide into another life on the promise of a quick solution; how greed, ambition and the frisson of risk provide fresh temptations from which it’s difficult to backtrack. A lot of promise here and the short, teaser excerpt of Everybody Knows this is Nowhere at the end of my copy does its job - I'll be keeping an eye out for it.