A hotbed of crime

Summertime. The time when we read for fun. The time when we don’t squirm if someone catches us reading a John Grisham novel or rediscovering a yellowed Agatha Christie mystery.

But I was a bit confused when, browsing for something of that ilk in the library, I picked up a book published in 2011 by the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History, and printed by the University of Toronto Press, entitled The Lazier Murder. The murder part sounded okay. However, the Osgoode Society publishes such zingers as Canadian Property Law Cases in Context, while the U of T Press laughs all the way to the bank on such entries as Overpromising and Underperforming: Understanding and Evaluating New Intergovernmental Accountability Regimes. Indeed, the cover of the book was a dull-as-dishwater blue-grey line drawing of the Prince Edward County courthouse from 1878. And the biography of the author was pretty brief. “Robert J. Sharpe is a judge on the Court of Appeal for Ontario” is all it said. No photo. No talk of his wife, pets, children, hobbies or previous incarnations. Lots of footnotes—381 of them, by my count. The restraint practically screamed that if I wanted to find the book interesting, I would have to do the heavy lifting myself.

But I picked the darn thing up and, wouldn’t you know it, the book was absolutely riveting. It’s all about a real-life murder that took place near Bloomfield in 1883, for which two men were sentenced to death and subsequently hung in Picton, the last men in the County to be executed. And the author, in his unassuming way—I can’t find a single florid or superfluous sentence in the book—lays out the facts in a logical pattern, starting with the day of the murder and ending with impassioned appeals to an unmoved John A. Macdonald.

The book raises a number of still burning questions. Were the right men convicted? Was the evidence, by the standards of the day, sufficient to convict them? Was the detective work up to snuff? Was the trial fair? Should the jury’s recommendation for mercy have been heeded? Did the community’s reaction to the crime itself, and then to the punishment, play a more significant role than it should have?

I was hooked. The book shows pictures of the gallows in the Prince Edward County jail and a crude but chilling tombstone in the Glenwood cemetery memorializing a man who was “unjustly hanged.” I can’t wait to take one of those Friday and Saturday night guided walks (they leave from the Regent Theatre at 6:30 p.m.) in order to learn more.

In fact, the County is rapidly becoming not a hotbed of criminal activity (undoubtedly due to the massive OPP presence here), but a hotbed of crime writing and settings for crime writing. Old-time County person Janet Kellough has just released her second “Thaddeus Lewis” mystery—set in Wellington. Her first, entitled On the Head of a Pin, was set in Demorestville, and she is working on a third, also to be set in the County. County resident Vicki Delany has published A Winter Kill, an easy-to-read thriller featuring Nicole Patterson, a young probationary OPP constable, and set in the County. Next month she will release More Than Sorrow, set in a contemporary small-scale vegetable farm in the County, but with a plot that invokes the memory of Loyalist settlers. Wellington resident Christine Bennett has published two books in her “Nelson County Wine and Mystery” series, set in a thinly disguised Wellington and played out in County vinyards. She has a third volume in the series coming out shortly as an ebook. Picton resident Robin Timmerman also weighed in recently with The Pity of the Winds, a mystery in which wind turbines to be erected in a fictional place almost identical to the County drive residents to foul deeds. (Jeffrey Round, not a County resident, has released a novel set in the County, entitled Lake on the Mountain: a Dan Sharp Mystery Book: and local author David Carpenter has already published four “Campbell Young” mysteries, set outside the County.)

Add it up, and it seems the County might already be afflicted with “English bucolic village murder syndrome,” whereby the number of sordid fictional murders vastly exceeds both the number of actual murders and the number of bucolic villages in which they could conceivably take place.

Kellough says that County history is such a rich vein because of its length: so many of the country’s bigger stories can be illuminated through the narratives of local families and County events. Bennett says Wellington is a thriving village, which provides a mine of story lines and characters.

The whole subject of writing fiction based on real settings and historical facts will be aired out on Thursday August 16, at a program entitled “A Tangled Web,” to be held at Books and Company at 7 p.m. It will feature Kellough, Delany and mystery writers Ian Hamilton, from Burlington, and Barbara Fradkin, from Ottawa. Tickets are $5, and will benefit County libraries. If you’ve got time to kill….

David Simmonds’s writing is also available at www.grubstreet.ca.