OLD CITY HALL
By Robert Rotenberg
Simon & Schuster, 372 pages, $29.99
When I was 20, I worked at a funeral parlour on the Danforth in Toronto with my father, a job that involved picking up bodies from the city morgue. Then, at 27, I testified in an assault trial at Old City Hall. Though unrelated, these two personal experiences vividly came to mind in reading Old City Hall, the crime debut of Robert Rotenberg, a top criminal lawyer and former editor of T.O., The Magazine of Toronto.
Rotenberg delivers our city a rude good morning when his protagonist, Gurdial Singh, arrives at popular radio host Kevin Brace's home to deliver the day's paper, only to find him covered in blood. Brace calmly informs Singh that he has killed his wife, whose body is sprawled in the bathtub. In a gruesomely comic tableau, the police arrive to see the two men having tea in Brace's apartment, whereupon Brace is arrested.
Inevitably, what appears to be an open-and-shut case proves far more complex. What is Brace's motivation for killing his wife? How will the media, for which he works, handle this dirty deed? And how will the Toronto public react to the length or brevity of his sentencing? Rotenberg expertly unveils the answers through witnesses, lawyers, police and family members who step forward and root through the possibilities.
As the Crown builds its case, the story creeps into the crevices of its Old City Hall offices. Rotenberg shines here, in his detailed descriptions that showcase not only his vast legal experience, but his architectural knowledge: "The Hall covered a whole city block. A massive stone structure, asymmetrical in design, filled with curling cornices, rounded pillars, marble walls, smiling cherubs, overhanging gargoyles, and the big clock tower to the left side of the main entrance which topped it off like a gigantic misplaced birthday candle."
The drama deepens when defence lawyer Nancy Parish discovers that her client, Brace, will communicate with her only through handwritten notes. With so much at stake, the reader is absorbed into their dissonant relationship. Brace's reticence to speak reflects the opaque process by which information is gathered in an otherwise uncomplicated case. His mute state - he even gets someone else to speak to his children from jail so his comments can't be used against him - is magnetic and draws attention to all aspects of his character, all the more for his refusal to explain himself.
Rich dialogue adds another layer, this time of gritty authenticity. Parish's wry sense of humour is self-depreciating, almost hip. When visiting Brace in jail, she jokes with a guard, "When you work for yourself, your boss is an asshole." The dialogue is just as potent among other characters: "Once a knife penetrates the surface, there's nothing in the stomach to stop it. It's like going through a feather pillow," one officer tells another.
These sound bites are prevalent throughout the book; rife with forensic intrigue, they deepen the psychological sweat, whether it's in the passive-aggressive Toronto parlance - you know who you are - or describing the not-so-fresh scent of the harbour: "There was a smell to the Toronto harbour which was foreign to the rest of the city. Pungent seagull guano, moist, coiled rope, and the whiff of outboard gasoline."
Rotenberg is also a master at farming personal histories, embedding clues that forebode future actions. His devotion to his characters is unique, in that it's predominantly their flaws that hook readers, as with Crown attorney Albert Fernandez, who was told to work on his empathy skills and sent to a grieving-families seminar. Allowing minor characters to reveal deeper emotional pangs - such as the moody ruminations of morgue attendant Warren Gardner, or Officer Kennicott's meditations on his brother, last seen at that same morgue - are tidy tricks that make this fictional Toronto crime drama feel real.
If the book has one screaming take-away, it's that Toronto stars as itself, personified by the investigators, defence lawyers and homicide detectives who careen and overturn their lives to find - or hide - justice. And with the exception of an ongoing "Toronto Maple Leafs are terrible" joke, the plot is chock full of atmospheric tension. From the sometimes banal police protocol to the haunting, eerie incandescence of the morgue, it's clear that Old City Hall has enough hidden motives and gumshoeing to make it a hard-boiled classic.
Nathaniel G. Moore is co-editor of Toronto Noir and author of Let's Pretend We Never Met. He is an editor at Broken Pencil magazine in Toronto.
