

Witness This Woman, by Gardner F. Fox (Gold Medal, 1959). Cover illustration by Barye Phillips.
There’s good news for fans of Canadian crime and mystery writing. From May 24-28 some of Canada’s top mystery writers will be gathering for the first ever Virtual Canadian Mystery Conference. The idea for a Canadian conference has been brewing for years, ever since the demise of Bloody Words, a fabulous meet-up of writers and fans. Out of the ashes of the old comes the Maple Leaf Mystery Conference. This year on Zoom and next year … one can only dream.Scottish novelist Ian Rankin and Toronto’s Maureen Jennings (Murdoch Mysteries) are among the invited guests. Register online here.
Dean Street Press is republishing the works of golden age crime novelist, Alice Campbell, beginning June 6th. They’ll be reissuing the first ten of her mysteries initially, with the remainder to follow next year. As the publisher noted, the novels are “not merely excellent detective stories, but atmospheric works of suspense, many set in France.” This is [the] first time these novels have been in print for over seventy years, and are prefaced by an introduction from crime-fiction historian Curtis Evans.The aforementioned Mr. Evans offers the covers from Dean Street’s first 10 Campbell reissues here, plus this look back at classic Campbell dust jackets. A decade ago, he also reviewed her sixth crime novel, Desire to Kill (1934), for Mystery*File. If you’d like to sample Campbell’s work yourself, Juggernaut is due for release on June 6.
Campbell (1887-1955) came originally from Atlanta, Georgia, where she was part of the socially prominent Ormond family, before she moved to New York City at the age of nineteen and quickly became a socialist and women’s suffragist. She later moved to Paris, marrying the American-born artist and writer, James Lawrence Campbell, and ultimately to England just before World War One. Campbell wrote crime fiction until 1950, though many of her novels continued to have French settings. She published her first work (Juggernaut) in 1928 and published nineteen detective novels during her career.
The book centers around the theme of immigration and the plight of the group of people known as “Dreamers,” who came to the United States as children but do not have citizenship. The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement's aggressive searches for undocumented immigrants loom in the story.The FOM released this list of runners-up for the 2022 Spotted Owl:
“The police are stymied because this is the immigrant community and they really don’t want to talk to the cops. All the undocumented people were scared to death. Since they won’t come forward they trust Cal, and he goes forward to solve the case,” Easley said. “In fiction it’s all about walking around in someone else’s shoes. In this book you’re walking around in shoes you may not have walked in before.”
One thing is sure: the quality of these books is pretty damn consistent. If you like one of them, you’ll probably like all of them. That made ranking them less than ideal. I was pretty sure about my favorites, and my least favorites, but it gets a little slapdash in the middle. When ranking, I thought about the flow of the story, the scariness of the bad guy, the complexity (or lack) of the heroine, and the quality of the writing (always very high). What I didn’t think about while ranking was the casual sexism and racism that pervades these books, and that I see more as an expression of the time than what seems like any real hostility or agenda on the author’s part.I wasn’t so aware of the incidental racism and sexism back when I was a college student first sampling the McGee tales. Decades later, however, both are rather evident, standing in contrast to modern norms. I like to believe the tendency of people today to presume guilt on the part of a Black man, simply due to the color of his skin, is less commonplace than it might’ve been during MacDonald’s heyday. And though there are still far too many white males living under the misapprehension that women exist principally to provide them with base amusements (“Grab ’em by the pussy!”), or that women need to in some fashion be saved or protected by men, that’s not the predominant viewpoint in early 21st-century America.
Travis loves women, and there are some good, strong female characters in these books. But Travis also loves to save a damaged damsel, so that many of the females that show up are victims for Travis to put back together. He is a white knight, a man beholden to no one, constantly swept up into great adventures, and into the arms of fascinating bedmates. In other words, a male fantasy.
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