Quebec author Louise Penny remembers her first appearance at Toronto’s International Festival of Authors as a “massive shock,” but it wasn’t reading in public that unsettled her. It was the condescension fellow writers displayed once they learned what she had come to read: crime fiction.
“It wasn’t so much painful, because I thought it was a shame for them to be so dismissive and close-minded,” the inventor of now-famous Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Sûreté du Québec said in a recent interview. “But it came as a shock.”
Now it’s the snobs’ turn to be shocked as Penny, fresh from winning the 2010 Anthony Award for best crime novel published in the United States (where her The Brutal Telling beat Stieg Larsson’s The Girl Who Played with Fire), and armed with a bouquet of glowing reviews for her new, already best-selling Gamache mystery, Bury Your Dead, returns to Toronto in triumph. And not alone: With her arrives a whole cohort of internationally famous Canadian writers of genre fiction, heroes of an upstart literature that is humble no more.
This year the Toronto festival – now under way, through Oct. 30 – has not only created an entire program devoted to crime writers and their work, it has awarded its own $10,000 Harbourfront Festival Prize to genre master Peter Robinson for a lifetime body of work that includes almost two dozen Inspector Banks mysteries.
Joining them in the “IFOA Noir” program are such veterans as Giles Blunt, whose half-dozen Detective John Cardinal novels have made a thinly disguised North Bay, Ont., world famous, and newcomer Chevy Stevens, a former Nanaimo, B.C., real-estate agent whose first novel, Still Missing, was published earlier this year to sensational reviews across North America.
Alan Bradley: Last week he toured Germany like a rock star. — The Globe and Mail
Mystery writers have always been welcome in Toronto, says festival director Geoffrey Taylor. “But this year’s an opportunity to wave the flag.” In years to come, he added, such participants will be invited simply as writers, with no adjectives attached.
Before arriving in Toronto to accept the Harbourfront Prize, Robinson shared a stage at Calgary’s Word Fest with Penny and three other notably literary writers: Jane Urquhart, Camilla Gibb and France’s Marc Levy.
“I think it’s a wonderful thing,” he said in an interview. “It’s part and parcel of finally coming out of the cold in little steps.”
Little steps in Canada often mirror giant leaps abroad, especially in Europe. Robinson’s Inspector Banks mysteries routinely top Britain’s Sunday Times bestseller lists soon after publication, and this fall Banks appeared in his first nationally broadcast television show in that country. Robinson balks when asked how many books he has sold over Banks’s 23-year career, but offers one significant detail. “I know I’ve sold over 1.2 million in Sweden,” he says.
For Alan Bradley, whose Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie won the Macavity Award for best first novel at the same San Francisco convention that awarded Penny her Anthony – a first novel that has already been translated into more than 30 languages – Germany is the latest revelation.
Last week he toured the country like a rock star to promote its sequel, The Weed that Strings the Hangman’s Bag, with an entourage that included a full-time personal attendant, a mistress of ceremonies to host the readings, a well-known actress to perform them and a “noted puppeteer” along for dramatic effect.
The author, a career administrator at the University of Saskatchewan who invented girl detective Flavia de Luce as a retirement project, was overwhelmed. “The response after the readings was so warm and touching, I was almost on the verge of tears every evening,” he said in an interview from Malta, where he and his wife have moved while he writes the next four, pre-plotted Flavia mysteries.
