John Swan, aka Kerry J. Schooley in civilian life, elsewhere wrote (with Peter Sellers) about Canadian noir: "This is noir from an ice-hard world where the mantra ‘Peace, order, and good government’ means, ‘Shut up and do as you’re told or you’ll get what’s good for you.’"
Well, in this adventure, John Swan does a lot of things, but what he’s told isn’t among them.
Swan gives us a unique voice in PIs. He is an overweight, aging, bumbling, possibly alcoholic investigator who, despite his cynicism and his hard-edged ways, does have principles of a sort and a refusal to put up with the phoney. In his ability to get into preposterous and very funny situations, mostly depending on the amount of alcohol imbibed, Swan is reminiscent of Guy Gilpatric’s Chief Engineer Colin Glencannon of the old tramp steamer, Inchcliffe Castle. He never strayed far from his beloved Duggan’s Dew o’ Kirkintilloch, a case of which he kept under his bunk for emergencies which occurred about every ten minutes. In Swan’s case, it’s Heaven Heather, but the modus operandi is the same.
In SAP, Swan wanders around Toronto and environs, keeping next door to falling-down drunk for most of the journey. A diaper deliveryman is found murdered next to Swan’s car in a hotel parking lot and Swan is off and running, well, stumbling, keeping ahead of the police and accompanied most of the time by Meg Maloney, who seems like a female version of Swan, only better looking and with more money, which isn’t saying much.
Their ramblings get them into more scrapes than a schoolboy’s knees. But with drunken luck and the odd alcohol-inspired insight, they keep ahead of the law, and in the end come up with the bad guy who receives what is indeed rough justice.
A delightfully ribald and funny romp. If this is Canadian noir, then give us more of it, John. Or Kerry. Or Meg. Or whoever’s in charge there.
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| Mimi Luse, McGill Daily, December 1, 2003 |
John Swan thinks he's a stiff-mouthed storyteller with a riveting mystery-noire to impart to his readers. In classic hard-boiled style, his book Sap (named after the blunt policing weapon) has a crime-driven plot riddled with tough talking, morally ambiguous characters. However, unlike the classic hard-boiled narrative, this book is a chore to read. Hackneyed prose dims the whole of it, which is mercifully short at 188 pages. The writer is crass, and his thinly-veiled desire to shock the reader is cheap.
Set in the bleak area of Hamilton, Ontario, or "the Hammer" as he calls it, Sap is narrated Swannee, a badly behaved ex-cop. The reader is then stuck with him as he embarks on a murder investigation, scoping out claustrophobic betting circles, dingy parlors, and ill-conceived raves.
If it is a tone of gritty realism Swan intends to convey, it is barely achieved by his awkward use of descriptors: "Here in the pisser, water sounds meant the automatic toilets had flushed." And while one could attribute the crude language to the sloppy protagonist's narration, signs hint that such sloppiness is general - Swan's style par excellence - as he makes no effort to mediate between his point of view and those of his creations.
It seems that Swan's reluctance to distance himself from his characters comes from his need to take personal credit for their romanticized vulgarities. First-off, the author has no problem naming the main character after himself. This is no coincidence - if it was, there would be more descriptions of Swanee picking gristle out of his teeth, and fewer useless wise-cracks (which serve only to flaunt that the author's slang is "au courant").
For example, to inform the reader that he is not in the market for another space in which to do his work, Swanee internalizes, "I needed an office like I need another asshole." Gorgeous. An abundance of self-gratifying clichés like this one is precisely why this novel fails as a good mystery.
These clichés also reduce Swan's characters to tired stereotypes. For instance, Swanee's sidekick, Meg Maloney, is the "bad girl" because she exhales her cigarette, "not bothering to direct it away from my face." The rest of her personality is limited to descriptions of her eyes as "liquid pools" and her lips as "succulent." All aspects of the story succumb to this kind of descriptive field, which Swan seems to feel is revealing enough to inform the readers of murder suspects' motivations. Barely rendering the characters, he forgets to stir up our suspicions.
Swan has also forgotten to create a plot of intrigue: it would be a stretch to say that the narrative's fragmented chronology adds suspense. The actual revelation in the story (a money-laundering cover-up) leaves the reader indifferent. Besides, the logistics of this murder mystery take second place to the whiskey drinking and the bar fights, which are the more interesting parts of the book. No excuses: boohoo to Insomniac Press for picking this guy up.
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| Joan Barfoot, The Free Press (London), November 2003 |
Apparently Hamilton novelist John Swan's other, possibly more real name is Kerry J. Schooley, which makes it either more or less confusing that John Swan is also the name of Sap's protagonist, a 50ish, 300-pound ex-cop bulldozing his way through a murderously seedy east Toronto.
Apparently also, novelist John Swan and protagonist John Swan have teamed up to try to create something called "Canadian noir", of which Sap is a result.
What kind of result? Well, if it's "very funny, very twisted," as one of its back-cover blurbs says, it's funny and twisted in ways that would be unrecognizable to the elegantly hard-boiled Yankee noir writers of the mid-20th century.
Which is maybe a Canadian kind of thing. Or maybe Sap is a slight imitation of the real thing, or a play on it. Whatever it is, it's light and silly, which might be deliberate or might be a flaw, hard to say (though it shouldn't be hard to say, and that really is a flaw).
Anyway. John Swan the protagonist, a recent widower, is set up with recent widow and excellently endowed blonde Meg Maloney. He immediately suspects her of killing her husband for cash.
Never mind. Seeking to share his underclass world with her, he takes her off to the area of Toronto that used to border the old Woodbine racetrack, now being developed for housing. The upscale middle classes are moving in, but there's still a lot of gambling, drug and extortion money around.
There's a pair of gay criminals, a delinquent teen who's the granddaughter of a developer and daughter of a gambler seeking custody of her, there's a nasty, dumb cop and a squeegeekid and a rave and dark streets and a few fist-fights - and there's John and Meg, in town for the weekend.
One person is murdered, then another. Swan, who looks like a suspect, tries to put the pieces together while vainly imagining sleeping with Meg, who has her own plans.
Whether Sap is funny or not may be, like wit and humour in general, a matter of taste. The novel does become oddly beguiling after a while, but as "Canadian noir," it's really only a few pale shades of grey.
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review by Mary Welk
