Tuesday, October 10, 2017

A City to Visit

Well, this week will be a real short post. Time is short as I pack and get ready for a last day at work before heading to Toronto for Bouchercon. Funny how some cities, through reading and movies, you associate with crime fiction and crime films, and how other cities you don't.  The fact is, sadly, I haven't read enough Toronto set crime fiction, so to this day, in terms of narrative, when I think Toronto and stories I still think mainly about the films of David Cronenberg and Atom Egoyan.  We're talking all sorts of transgressions with these two directors (Cronenberg one of my favorites ever, early Egoyan brilliant and idiosyncratic as well) but not crime stories exactly.  What are the Toronto crime films anyway, aside from Daryl Duke's 1978 heist film The Silent Partner? That's an excellent movie, starting Elliot Gould, Christopher Plummer, and Susannah York, and it uses the city and its streets effectively.  There's an interview the great film writer Kim Morgan does with Elliot Gould about the making of the film that is well worth reading: Gould Interview.

Toronto, like Vancouver, has been used countless times as a location, a city meant to stand in on film for other cities, but it doesn't seem like there are many crime films available that are supposed to take place in Toronto.  I'll have to look into this.



Anyhow, though I've visited Montreal several times and Quebec City and Nova Scotia, I've only passed through Toronto quickly. It was years ago, on a VIA rail cross country trip by sleeper car train from Calgary to Montreal. Basically, I've never spent time in Toronto. I'm looking forward to doing so and of upping my knowledge, outside of the Toronto based writers I know personally, of the city's crime novelists.


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