Requirements: ePUB reader, 2.7 MB
Overview: John MacLachlan Gray, OC (born John Howard Gray; 1946) is a Canadian writer-composer-performer for stage, TV, film, radio and print. He is known for his stage musicals and for his two seasons as a satirist on CBC TV’s The Journal, as well as an author, speaker and social critic on cultural-political issues.
Gray abandoned the theatre in favour of the novel – in a series of thrillers set in post-modern Vancouver, mid-19th century England and the United States before the Civil War. Gray casts an ironic contemporary eye on imagined historical events.
Genre: Fiction | Mystery/Thriller
1. The White Angel
Vancouver is in an uproar over the death by gunshot of a Scottish nanny, Janet Stewart. An almost deliberately ham-handed police investigation has Constable Hook suspecting a cover-up. The powerful United Council of Scottish Societies is demanding an inquiry. The killing has become a political issue with an election not far away.
The city is buzzing with rumours. Miss Stewart’s fellow nannies have accused the Chinese houseboy of murder, capitalizing on a wave of anti-Chinese propaganda led by the Asian Exclusion League and enthusiastically supported by the sensational press–not to mention the Ku Klux Klan, which has taken up residence in upperclass Shaughnessy.
The White Angel is a work of fiction inspired by the cold case of Janet Smith, who, on July 26, 1924, was found dead in her employer’s posh Shaughnessy Heights mansion. A dubious investigation led to the even more dubious conclusion that Smith died by suicide. After a public outcry, the case was re-examined and it was decided that Smith was in fact murdered; but no one was ever convicted, though suspects abounded–from an infatuated Chinese houseboy to a drug-smuggling ring, devil-worshippers from the United States, or perhaps even the Prince of Wales. For Vancouver, the killing created a situation analogous to lifting a large flat rock to expose the creatures hiding underneath. An exploration of true crime through a literary lens, The White Angel draws an artful portrait of Vancouver in 1924 in all its opium-hazed, smog-choked, rain-soaked glory–accurate, insightful and darkly droll.
2. Vile Spirits
Overview: Alcohol is once again legal in Vancouver after the failed experiment of prohibition, but pro-temperance sentiments remain strong. Politicians attempt appeasement by establishing the Liquor Control Board, which oversees supply, from the lofty circles of power down to bleak public drinking factories called “beer parlours”. Then the Attorney General is found deceased, an empty martini glass at his side. Soon after, the wife of a prominent bureaucrat, falls dead after an afternoon book club meeting. Is it pure coincidence that the deceased were both drinking the same brand of “tonic”? Or is it a spillover from American prohibition, where deliberately tainted booze is killing thousands? In this spellbinding follow-up to his 2018 mystery The White Angel, John MacLachlan Gray again captures the spirit of Vancouver in those gritty, gin-soaked days, as the city was remaking itself between the wars. Set against the turbulent global backdrop of the Spanish influenza epidemic, Gray has created a vivid portrait of the era when temperance activists, the Ku Klux Klan and the Liquor Control Board clashed on the mean streets of Vancouver—a rough little city on the edge of empire.
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Raincoast Noir #3: https://forum.mobilism.org/viewtopic.php?f=1294&p=11181554#p11181554.
