There are tons of great places to murder someone in Toronto, and Robert Rotenberg knows where to find them. After nearly two decades as a criminal lawyer, he can list more than a few.
A row of candidates line Little India alone, on Gerrard Street East. Over curry one evening, his son exclaimed how exciting it would be to find a body among the dangling fake chili peppers and paper plates.
While that setting doesn't figure into his first novel, other, equally tantalizing, locales do. And the world is sitting up and taking notice.
Editors and publishers had perpetuated a misconception for decades, that readers prefer London, New York or Los Angeles to the cold anonymity of the Big Smoke as a setting for a murder mystery novel. But if Mr. Rotenberg's book, Old City Hall, is any indication, Toronto can turn pages in at least nine other countries.
"I think with the financial situation being what it is, people aren't as enticed by New York," said Victoria Skurnick, Mr. Rotenberg's N.Y.-based literary agent. "I think a country like Canada, and a city like Toronto, which has the reputation for people who are intelligent and kind and not so narcissistic, seems pretty great to us right now."
The book, published by Simon & Schuster, will be released in hardcover this Tuesday. Its 372 pages are crammed with trivia about the city, its flaws and foibles. And as the narrative jumps among a diverse cast of characters, it sheds light on nuances of Canada's largest city.
Mr. Rotenberg, 55, has handled some of the city's most unusual clients. Highly publicized cases include Thorarinn Ingi Jonsson, the Ontario College of Art and Design student whose fake bomb ended an AIDS fundraiser at the Royal Ontario Museum in 2007, and Charles Bartolo, a man accused of animal cruelty after he was seen "walking" his Rottweiler by dragging the dog behind his car while attached to a chain in 1999.
"I wasn't trying to write about Toronto as the world's most multicultural city or the greatest city. Just Toronto, warts and all," Mr. Rotenberg said. "And the warts are much more interesting than the other stuff."
The first chapter opens with an Indian immigrant named Gurdial Singh, who has left a high-powered engineering job to come to Toronto, where he delivers The Globe and Mail. In the few paragraphs before he happens upon a man in a bathrobe, his hands bathed in blood, Mr. Singh ponders the peculiarities of a city obsessed with an ice-hockey team called the Maple Leafs, rather than the Maple Leaves, and why the inhabitants of a nation blanketed in forests would invest in plastic Christmas trees.
But the characters are largely informed by Mr. Rotenberg's experiences with clients, and time inside Toronto courtrooms, including that of Old City Hall at Queen and Bay.
Upon completion in 1899, the sandstone and terracotta towers of Old City Hall formed the largest municipal building in North America. The hall's thick walls and ornate masonry took more than a decade and $2.5-million to build. Its large, unwieldy façade acts as a clog in the flow of Bay Street, a pinkish departure from the tidy grids and square towers of the city's downtown.
Mr. Rotenberg grew up in North York. He was a schoolboy in 1965 when the current City Hall was built, and the old pink building was nearly demolished to make way for the Eaton Centre. He marks the decision to leave it untouched in all its gargoyled glory as a turning point for Toronto, when the city stopped trying to be New York of the North.
The first time he slipped through the hall's heavy wooden doors, he says, he felt intimidated by the building's grandeur and gothic feel.
But Mr. Rotenberg, a slight man with the soft-spoken demeanour of a keen observer, was taken by the diversity of people converging inside. "That court is kind of like a vortex where all these different classes and elements of society meet," he said.
And the building's architecture matches the melee inside. "It's almost like this mysterious building," he says. "So you think of this city as being sort of stout and functional, and then you look at this building. It's like somebody was on this creative, artistic trip. And it really is, I think, the most important architectural building in the city."
Mr. Rotenberg crossed the Atlantic several times throughout his twenties before settling in Toronto. After studying law at Osgoode Hall, he studied for a year in London, and then worked for a year in Paris as the managing editor of an English-language magazine named Passion, founded by another Torontonian, Robert Sarner.
It was an African cab driver who picked him up at Pearson airport who made him see Toronto as "the end of the rainbow." It was 1983, the Blue Jays were in the midst of a winning streak, and the driver couldn't stop raving.
"And it just occurred to me right then that this was the place for him," Mr. Rotenberg said.
"I think that's the great thing. There's a generation of people that [are]past that insecure stage and, 'How do we compare to others?' and, 'Is this as good or is this as bad...' because it just is, it just is."
He returned to Toronto and co-founded T.O. The Magazine of Toronto in 1984, but struggled to make the venture profitable, and the magazine folded after about seven years.
At the age of 37, after spending most of his adult life trying to avoid becoming a lawyer, he finally began practising criminal law. But he made time for writing. That meant waking up at 5 a.m. for an hour of writing. Or, as his children grew older, stealing a couple of hours to write while they attended a birthday party, or an hour during hockey practice.
Which is fitting because the Leafs feature in the story. As do the Don Jail; the Gardiner Expressway - "the ugly highway built in the 1950s that cut the city off from the lake"; streets clogged with snow carried in by "commuters from the colder outlying suburbs and towns"; the magic of white vinegar in removing pesky winter salt lines from leather boots; and the struggles of new immigrants with the lack of ankle support in ice skates.
Mr. Rotenberg is already working on his next book, also set in Toronto.
"I think that there was a generation in Toronto when I was growing up that was always searching for their Canadian identity, and we wanted to be New York," he said.
But Torontonians seemed to have learned that "this is the place you want to be."
Even if there are tons of great places to murder someone.
Harbourfront Centre hosts Robert Rotenberg, Wed. 7:30 p.m.