Crime Writers of Canada Podcast
Scott was recently the guest on the Crime Writers of Canada podcast!
Check out the full episode HERE:
Scott was recently the guest on the Crime Writers of Canada podcast!
Check out the full episode HERE:
Crime Writers of Canada (CWC) is pleased to announce the Shortlists for the 2024 Crime Writers of Canada Awards of Excellence in Canadian Crime Writing. Since 1984, Crime Writers of Canada has recognized the best in mystery, crime, suspense fiction, and crime nonfiction by Canadian authors, including citizens abroad and new residents.
On behalf of CWC, Hyacinthe Miller, Board Chair, wishes to congratulate all the finalists. Winners will be announced on Wednesday, May 29th, 2024.
Maureen Jennings is this year’s recipient of the 2024 Grand Master Award.
Established in 2014, the Grand Master (GM) Award recognizes a Canadian crime writer with a substantial body of work that has garnered national and international recognition.
Maureen Jennings is not only just about the best crime novelist in Canada, she’s among the best writers anywhere – a national and international treasure. —LONDON FREE PRESS
Maureen Jennings, a long-time Crime Writers of Canada member, is a prolific author of non fiction, short stories and book series featuring Christine Morris, Detective Murdoch, and D.I. Tom Tyler. The Detective William Murdoch television series, set in Victorian era Toronto, was optioned in 2003 by Shaftesbury Films. Murdoch Mysteries are shown in over 120 countries and feature innovative crime-solving techniques, social justice subplots and surprise guest appearances.
In 2011, she was awarded the Grant Allen award for her on-going contribution to Canadian crime writing. Maureen has received eight Award of Excellence nominations from CWC for best novel and short story. In 2014, the 180th anniversary of the city of Toronto, the Toronto Star named her one of 180 people whose influence has raised the city’s profile.
Published by Cormorant Books, her latest project The Paradise Café series is set in Depression-era Toronto and features Private Investigator Charlotte Frayne.
She is an exceptional talent, a generous mentor and strong supporter of Canadian crime and mystery writers. CWC is proud to honour Maureen Jennings with the 2024 Grand Master Award.
THE 2024 AWARDS OF EXCELLENCE SHORTLISTS
The Peter Robinson Award for Best Crime Novel sponsored by Rakuten Kobo, with a $1000 prize
Robyn Harding, The Drowning Woman, Grand Central Publishing
Shari Lapena, Everyone Here is Lying, Doubleday Canada
Scott Thornley, Middlemen, House of Anansi Press
Sam Wiebe, Sunset and Jericho, Harbour Publishing
Loreth Anne White, The Maid’s Diary, Montlake
Best Crime First Novel, sponsored by Melodie Campbell, with a $1000 prize Jann Arden, The Bittlemores, Random House Canada
Lisa Brideau, Adrift, Sourcebooks
Charlotte Morganti, The End Game, Halfdan Press
Amanda Peters, The Berry Pickers, Harper Perennial
Steve Urszenyi, Perfect Shot, Minotaur
The Howard Engel Award for Best Crime Novel Set in Canada, sponsored by Charlotte Engel and Crime Writers of Canada, with a $500 prize
Gail Anderson-Dargatz, The Almost Widow, Harper Avenue/HarperCollins Renee Lehnen, Elmington, Storeyline Press
Cyndi MacMillan, Cruel Light, Crooked Lane
Joan Thomas, Wild Hope, Harper Perennial/HarperCollins
Melissa Yi, Shapes of Wrath, Windtree Press
The Whodunit Award for Best Traditional Mystery sponsored by Jane Doe, with a $500 prize Gail Bowen, The Legacy, ECW Press
Vicki Delany, Steeped in Malice, Kensington Books
Vicki Delany, The Game is a Footnote, Crooked Lane Books
Nita Prose, The Mystery Guest, Viking
Iona Whishaw, To Track a Traitor, TouchWood Editions
Best Crime Short Story
M.H. Callway, Wisteria Cottage, Wildside Press (for Malice Domestic)
Marcelle Dubé, Reversion, Mystery Magazine
Mary Keenan The Canadians (Killin’ Time in San Diego), Down & Out Books
donalee Moulton, Troubled Water, Black Cat Weekly (Wildside Press)
Zandra Renwick, American Night, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine
The Best French Language Crime Book (Fiction and Nonfiction)
Jean-Philippe Bernié, La punition, Glénat Québec
Chrystine Brouillet, Le mois des morts, Éditions Druide
Catherine Lafrance, Le dernier souffle est le plus lourd, Éditions Druide
André Marois, La sainte paix, Héliotrope
Jean-Jacques Pelletier, Rien, Alire
Best Juvenile/YA Crime Book, sponsored by Shaftesbury Films with a $500 prize (Fiction and Nonfiction)
Kelley Armstrong, Someone is Always Watching, Tundra Books
Cherie Dimaline, Funeral Songs for Dying Girls, Tundra Books
Rachelle Delaney, The Big Sting, Tundra Books
Clara Kumagai, Catfish Rolling, Penguin Teen Canada
Kevin Sands, Champions of the Fox, Puffin Canada
The Brass Knuckles Award for Best Nonfiction Crime Book sponsored by David Reid Simpson Law Firm (Hamilton), with a $300 prize
Josef Lewkowicz and Michael Calvin, The Survivor: How I Survived Six Concentration Camps and Became a Nazi Hunter, HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.
Michael Lista, The Human Scale, Véhicule Press
David Rabinovitch, Jukebox Empire, Rowman & Littlefield
Bill Waiser and Jennie Hansen, Cheated, ECW Press
Carolyn Whitzman, Clara at the Door with a Revolver, UBC Press, On Point Press
Best Unpublished Crime Novel manuscript written by an unpublished author Tom Blackwell, The Patient
Craig H. Bowlsby, Requiem for a Lotus
Sheilla Jones and James Burns, Murder on Richmond Road: An Enquiry Bureau Mystery Nora Sellers, The Forest Beyond
William Wodhams, Thirty Feet Under
Winners will be announced on the Crime Writers of Canada website on May 29th, 2024. CWC is grateful for the support of Our Award Sponsors
Toronto-based Rakuten Kobo Inc. is one of the world’s fastest-growing e-Reading services, offering more than 5 million eBooks and magazines to millions of users around the world. It also offers a variety of e-Readers and top-ranking apps, enabling people to read more—on any device they choose.
Shaftesbury is an award-winning creator and producer of original content for television, film, and digital. Building on a library of award-winning children’s programs, Shaftesbury has an extensive slate of new child and family programming.
David Simpson, a lawyer in Hamilton and the Districts of Brant, Halton, Haldimand and Niagara, has a tradition of over fifty years of legal services. He sponsors “The Brass Knuckle” Award for Best Nonfiction Crime Book in memory of true-crime author Robert Gordon Knuckle (1935-2019).
Melodie Campbell is the author of 17 books, 60 short stories, and is the recipient of ten awards, including the Crime Writers of Canada Award of Excellence. She has taught fiction writing since 1992 and maintains a special interest in encouraging new writers.
Jane Doe chooses to remain anonymous.
The Globe and Mail lists Middlemen in their list of 10 thrillers to read this summer! Here’s what they’ve got to say about it:
“Let’s just say it: Scott Thornley’s fifth mystery featuring detective superintendent MacNeice is terrific. Each scene takes place in identifiable southern Ontario sketched by an author who loves this place.
We begin with a terrible scene: MacNeice’s friend Jack found injured by the roadside, covered in blood and bone fragments. Something awful has happened but what and where? Following the trail of blood, MacNeice and his team find the scene of a crime and evidence of two deaths but no bodies. Just what happened?
While the obvious signs of crime are present, that’s not really what this book is about. The title is a clue. What is a middleman? When there’s more than one, who is the top man? Thornley moves us through a series of related crimes and makes it all completely clear. Definitely not to be missed.”
by Jamie Portman
(Appeared in Ottawa Citizen, Calgary Herald, Montreal Gazette, Saskatoon StarPhoenix, Vancouver Sun, Regina Leader-Post, Windsor Star, Edmonton Journal, The Beacon Herald)
Bestselling novelist John Irving once famously observed that whenever he starts a new book, he always writes the last sentence first.
That leave late-flowering Canadian crime novelist Scott Thornley gob smacked.
“My god, I can’t handle that.” he remembers telling himself. So he, a definite novice – compared with the revered Irving, decided to ignore the masters dictum. He prefers not to know where the story he is writing will take him.
In the process, he has delivered a uniquely different series of thrillers set in the fictional Ontario city of Dundurn, which actually is his hometown of Hamilton affectionately, re-tweaked.
His latest novel Middlemen, is another high-wire act that early on confronts his intrepid cop, Detective Superintendent MacNeice, with evidence of two murders – but no bodies.
Authors can paint themselves into a corner with a tantalizing opening like that one, but for Thornley – who only turned to fiction after decades running a respected graphic design business in Toronto – challenging himself is part of the thrill of the chase.
“I don’t know where a book is going when I start writing it,” he tells Postmedia. “I don’t want the reader to know what’s happening, so why the hell should I know? I don’t want to know how all the balls are going to fall.”
Thornley’s five novels show no deficiencies when it comes to adroit plotting and memorable set-piece moments, some of which reflect the gruesome dark-comedy sensibility of a Coen brothers movie. But for Thornley, it’s ultimately his characters that count. He shows a particular zest when it comes to creating unforgettable villains.
“It goes beyond enjoy” he confesses. With Middlemen, he took great delight in serving up for the reader’s delectation a nondescript pint-sized fixer named Clarence Blow whose specialty is lining up hit men at the behest of an un-named client. There’s something ludicrous about Clarence – he nurses a childlike dream of a future new life in Polynesia – but he’s also deadly enough to dissolve his enemies in an acid bath.
Yet there’s nothing two-dimensional about Clarence. He’s – well – complicated.
Thornley doesn’t go for stock villainy. “For example, it’s interesting to create a killer who has compassion in the midst of all the horrible things he does.” He cites two hired hitmen, introduced in the book as One and Two, who may willingly commit murder, yet feel bound by a code of honour.
Thornley was 67 when his debut thriller, Erasing Memory, was published in 2011. Writing about it in the National Post, critic Phillip Marchand applauded its originality, noting that it gave us a killer who “if not a superior twisted mind, is a first-class jerk and we love to see such people get their comeuppance.”
In addition to favourable reviews, Erasing Memory also attracted attention in the bookstores because of a cover illustration depicting a nude woman whose private parts were concealed by a violin.
Thornley designed the cover himself – and why not? He had years of experience creating graphics for his own Toronto-based creative branding agency, in the process picking up some 150 international awards for design. However, in late middle age he was also realizing he had a natural fluidity when it came to the printed word. Even so, a book didn’t happen until he started having nightmares.
“I had a series of dreams that went on for seven or eight months – nightmares related to my late wife who had died years earlier,” he says. Initially he didn’t share them with his current wife, Shirley, but he did start writing them down in a journal by his bedside. Eventually, when she did read them, she suggested there wqas material there for a novel – and that’s how Erasing Memory came to happen.
There are elements of Scott Thornley in MacNeice, the brilliant police detective at the centre of all the novels. He’s a widower, haunted by the death of his wife Kate, and plagued by nightmares about his loss. He has a taste for the potent Italian beverage grappa and for music, both jazz and classical. This prompts Thornley now to talk about jazz greats Charles Mingus and Thelonius Monk, and how they might be “pumping through my skull” as he writes.
So where did MacNeice get his name with its unusual spelling? Well, it seems that revered Irish poet Louis MacNeice was a friend of Thornley’s much-loved uncle, and Thornley couldn’t resist borrowing an unusual surname for his fictional cop. “I liked the quirky spelling of MacNeice’s name – where the ‘e’ comes before the ‘I’ instead of after, as is the custom.”
All the novels are odes to Hamilton, altas the fictional city of Dundurn. The name change occurred because of a problem with the first novel. It dealt with a death at a lakeside cottage that in the real world would be outside MacNeice’s jurisdiction. “I knew that many of the men I grew up with would be on my tail if there was a single false note,” Thornley says with a laugh. His solution was still to create a lake – but it would be close, not to Hamilton, but to this fictional city called Dundurn.
“I wanted to signal to my friends, as well as the reader, that this is a work of fiction where every word is true,” Thornley says. He altered the name of a couple of othet landmarks. McMaster University became Brant University, and Stoney Creek became Secord. “I grew up never liking Stoney Creek as a name,” he confesses. But I loved the story of Laure Secord – to me it was pure magic – so for the books I renamed it Secord.”
Still, for any one who knows Hamilton, it’s clearly recognizable in the novels. “So many aspects of Hamilton from the first book onward are by a Hamiltonian writing about that city.”
Indeed, growing up in a place like that offered releases from a troubled childhood. “My father came back from the war severely damaged and as a result did a lot of damage to the family. It was never a happy home. It was shattered many times.”
For the young boy Scott, the city itself provided healing. “Hamilton is a fantastic city for being outside. All the places I write about are places I would cycle to or hike to. I know them really well – including Hamilton’s famous mountain. And coming over the Skyway and seeing the harbour – there’s always this terrible beauty. I’ve always felt that.”
So there you have it – the importance of landscape as character. But there’s one other person Thornley wants people to remember. It’s an engaging dog called Jack who the reader first meets under terrifying circumstances.
“A dog in my own life – Murphy the Wonder Dog – is very much the inspiration for Jack,” Thornley says.
So much of an inspiration, in fact, that you’ll find Murphy’s photo at the end of the book.
“With each MacNeice book, Scott Thornley takes the reader deeper into the forest of the human soul. These are, yes, detective stories, but they are also novels about a detective. For MacNeice, nearly every action undertaken in pursuit of perpetrators of horrible murders opens up vistas: of his psyche; of his love for his late wife with whom he periodically communicates; of sentient nature, dogs, birds, actual forests; and of the explicable and inexplicable in the always-slightly-glimpsed souls of his colleagues and of each criminal, down to every minor character whether a caring nurse or a gangster’s stooge.
In this, Thornley’s writing is virtuoso, as it also is in his descriptions of modern technology, forensics, and the crimes themselves which are described with such hyper-realism that they seem almost dreamlike. Would that they were. These horrors are what the human mind is capable of devising and, sometimes, of doing. Thornley uses poetry well – ‘well’ means near-invisibly – to handle soul-unknowables. One killer says, ‘Shuffle the letters of veil and you have evil.’
The motor of detective fiction is cause-and-effect. Thornley honours that in his intricate puzzle of a plot, then goes on to depict, character by character, cause-and-effect as the least of it. That is the mark of memorable literature. Middlemen is literature.”
Richard W. Halperin,
Irish-American Poet,
Paris, 4 July 2023
Germany, Austria, Switzerland–get ready!
The MacNeice Mysteries coming your way 06.04.2020!
Waterloo Public Library has featured the MacNeice series in their blog called “Check it Out”.