Buffalo Jump up ... for an Arthur Ellis Award
Howard Shrier, a guest at the first cross-border Noir at the Bar earlier this year in Toronto, is up for an Arthur Ellis Award from the Crime Writers of Canada for best first novel.Buffalo Jump offers funny and fresh takes on the private-eye novel and not-so-funny trips into scary moral territory. The novel is set near the Canada-United States border and crosses that border to tell a pair of stories that converge to pack a tough and thoroughly contemporary punch.
(Click here for a complete list of nominees. The winners are to be announced June 4.)
© Peter Rozovsky 2009
Labels: Arthur Ellis Awards, awards, Canada, Howard Shrier, Noir at the Bar
posted by Peter Rozovsky at 11:59 PM
12 Comments:
wait, Canada and the US are, like, two totally different countries? whoa. dude.
Oh, so, like, what do you mean you're from Northern Ireland?
Peter
I was in the Safeway supermarket yesterday and the checkout girl had a broad Ulster accent. "Are you from the north?" I asked. "No," she said, "Donegal," which when you look at the map proves how tricky that question is.
Tricky but understandable, that. I remember your amusing meditations on the confusion of identity in Northern Ireland. I imagine it might be worse in the three of the nine Ulster counties that wound up part of the Republic.
Ah but Donegal in particular is so lovely its worth the confusion. Derry to Malin Head is an easy drive and to Lough Swilly even easier.
Wait till you find out that Canada is divided into regions and they're... different. Some of them even speak a different language.
Though, come to think of it, there hasn't been much cross-region crime fiction in Canada. Louise Penny has a series set in a small town in Quebec featuring a French detective, Armand Gamache, that's worth reading and one of the Ferguson brothers (Will or Trevor, I forget which one) wrote a few books under the name John Farrow about a French cop in Montreal, Det. Cinq-Mars. City of Ice was the first.
What I'd really like to see is more Quebec crime fiction translated into English - look at that list of Arthur Ellis nominees for French fiction - there's a lot of crime fiction in Quebec these days, it just doesn't get out much.
Cross-border fiction is all very well but one of my novels, THE CURIOUS EXCHANGE AT KILLAMORE STRAND is a chase adventure novel set in Ireland. You can't get much over the boundary-line than that, eh?
Adrian, this time I might have to rely on an obliging host or a jovial Ulsterbus driver, and scheduling might not allow the time for such a trip. I'd keep it in mind for next time, though. Thanks
John, you mean Canada has regions? Va t'en!/Go jump in the lake!
Giles Blunt does a bit of region/culture-jumping, at least in Black Fly Season, I think. And I, too, was curious about the crime-fiction-in-French nominees. I'd like to see some of them translated (now, there's a worthy project).
I'd agree that's pretty far over the line. Thanks for letting me know about that, Chris.
I'm very sure finding a translator would be a piece of cake. Though, getting Americans to read a translation is a whole different story.
They should stop calling them translations, and call them remakes. It seems to work well in the movie industry.
Buffalo Jump looks good.
Janwillen van de Wetering, who rendered his own work from Dutch into English, called the renderings versions rather than translations. I read one of his novels in Dutch at the same time as in English translation, and he had indeed trimmed some scenes in the English version, along with dividing the chapters slightly differently.
I like the term translation, though, as long as one recognized the problems and imprecision involved.
There a lot of interesting stuff going on in Buffalo Jump, and the book's publisher, Vintage Canada, puts out a fine line of international crime fiction.
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