Reviewed by Wendy Hawkin
Anne Emery dedicates this latest book in the Collins-Burke Mystery Series to "those who survived and those who died in my Halifax neighbourhood, the Devastated Area, on December 6, 1917"—a sentiment that makes this story more personal than others. “Those who died and those who survived” have descendants today, possibly still living in houses that were blasted to their cement foundations and rebuilt.
To put the explosion in perspective, Emery begins with a Prologue in which Oppenheimer tells his team that his weapon (the atom bomb) will be “more powerful” than the Halifax explosion that killed two thousand people and injured thousands more. His listeners are shocked. Pre-Oppenheimer, this was the largest and most devastating experience the world had ever experienced. The cause: the collision of two ships in the harbour, one of which was “a munitions ship, carrying a huge cargo of flammable and explosive materials: TNT, picric acid, benzol, gun cotton” (8.)
Ironically, and perhaps to lighten the gravity of such horror, Emery tells the story through the eyes of the children at Father Brennan Burke’s choir school who, in September 1993, write a two-act play about the tragedy. Oppenheimer’s speech is the opening act. So, we have a mystery set in 1993 that hearkens back to 1917—historical fiction relaying historical fact and fancy through theatre.
Lawyer, Monty Collins’ ten-year-old daughter Normie, is the instigator of it all and takes a prominent place in solving the 1993 mystery. When her parents buy a rental in Richmond, an area greatly affected by the explosion, Normie befriends an elderly neighbour, who’d been blinded at age six by the explosion. Blinding by shattered glass seems to be a common injury resulting from curiosity—staring out the window at the horror. This kind woman shares her memories of the blast and allows Normie and her friends to search the house for remnants of the past. They discover notes in the attic written by two young men—Mike and Lauchie—who feature as stars in the kids’ play. The most exciting thing for these two rather goofy schoolboys before the blast is that the house next door is a brothel. After, drama escalates, and Mike sees a masked man in a fancy car remove a body from outside the brothel.
Into this complex setup, Emery throws threats aimed at the children and Normie is followed. Someone wants the play’s performances stopped. And then, of course, Emery tosses in a body. A twenty-three-year-old woman is strangled, and the suspect is a young hockey-playing friend of the children’s. Naturally, Monty Collins rushes to defend him, and links between 1917 and 1993 are forged.
Structurally, the novel is divided into chapters that include scenes featuring several point-of-view characters— named and dated for clarity. Differing personalities among the main characters provide comic relief. Mike and Lauchie, with their Catholic-Protestant banter, are charmingly dorky. “Ha, ha. You’re a clown, Mike. You Catholics aren’t the only ones who are pals with God. We Protestants have an inside track.” This reader found these teenage fellas rather immature and wondered if this was Emery’s way of revealing how naivety and innocence has disappeared in our contemporary world.
Emery’s career as a lawyer is apparent in her clear, no-nonsense writing style. At times, it feels like there is an omniscient narrator providing the facts and keeping us on track. This contrasts with the childish speech of Normie, the Irish banter between Father Brennan Burke and his mysterious IRA father in dialect, Monty’s legalese, and Mike and Lauchie’s goofy diary entries and chats.
Anne Emery, who is one of Canada’s national treasures, never fails to impress with her talent for concocting a suspenseful murder mystery and bringing it to a satisfying conclusion. She is the recipient of several awards including Crime Writers of Canada Awards of Excellence for Best Novel and Best First Novel, the Dartmouth Book Award for Fiction, and a silver medal from the Independent Publisher Book Awards.
Counted Among the Dead is published by ECW.
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