Novelist creates a fit and fearless Jewish detective

By Shlomo Schwartzberg

Benny Cooperman, move over.

There’s a new Jewish detective in town, and he’s not quite the laidback sort of sleuth we’re generally used to in crime fiction featuring Jewish characters.

Howard Shrier’s debut novel, Buffalo Jump (Vintage Canada), is the well-written, smart, keenly observed, often funny and utterly suspenseful tale of Toronto investigator Jonah Geller and what happens when hit man Dante Ryan comes to him for help in getting out of a job because one of the intended victims is a five-year-old boy who reminds Dante of his own son.

Jonah, who’s still recovering from a gunshot wound sustained in an undercover operation gone wrong, and hurting from subsequently being dumped by his girlfriend, is suspicious at first but gradually becomes drawn into aiding – and befriending – Ryan, especially when it turns out the hit is tied to an investigation Jonah’s firm is conducting, one that eventually comes to revolve around large-scale smuggling of Canadian pharmaceuticals into the United States.

From the time the 51-year-old Shrier first conceived of the novel, five years ago – “[I was] up at a cottage, ran out of books, had nothing to read, so I started scribbling some notes…” – he was determined that Jonah’s character would be a departure from the best-known intellectual Jewish shamuses, notably Howard Engel’s smalltown Ontario sleuth Benny Cooperman and Harry Kemelman’s Rabbi David Small.

“I wanted somebody who had both sides to him,” says Shrier, over coffee in Toronto’s Annex neighbourhood, “[somebody] who’s smart, who’s clever, but who is fit [and] somewhat fearless, although he voices his fears. He’s capable of stepping up. It’s not a character that’s common in Jewish literature – essentially they’re not physical specimens, they’re not fighters, and I wanted Jonah to be [one] and that was one of the hardest parts of writing the book: finding the character, a Jewish character who had some of my sensibility but who also had training in martial arts, had been in the Israeli army, had experiences that had made him tougher.”

Readers of Buffalo Jump will become aware of that early on in the novel when Jonah forcefully deals with an anti-Semite who’s grabbed a streetcar seat that he intended to go to a frail old woman.

“I’ve had a few people call me or e-mail and say, ‘Oh man, that was satisfying, I’ve always wanted to be able to stand up when someone’s behaving that way and say shut up’ and Jonah does.”

Shrier also emphasizes Jonah’s belief in the classic Judaic concept of tikkun olam, “repairing the world,” with Jonah memorably adding, “one asshole at a time.” Says Shrier, “I think Jonah is looking for a little bit of a progressive Jewish vision in his life, the idea of tikkun olam, because he feels that he’s made some mistakes in his=
past, especially during his time in the army, and he has things to make up for.”

Buffalo Jump is a Toronto-centric novel, but one set in a Toronto that’s not quite the Toronto the Good the tourism brochures would have it be.

“One of the things that Anne [Random House’s Anne Collins, who edited his novel] said to me at my first meeting with her [was] ‘this is a Toronto that we don’t see in books, a Toronto that has panhandlers, garbage, graffiti, more dangerous areas, guns, guns that are sometimes blazing on Yonge Street.’

“This is a bit of a different Toronto, and I think part of it is that the city has changed. I moved here [from Montreal] 25 years ago. You didn’t see a piece of litter
and you didn’t see graffiti, and the TTC ran [well]. It was New York run by the Swiss [as actor Peter Ustinov famously declared]. It is different now.”

Shrier’s second Jonah Geller novel, High Chicago, which will come out next June, will deal, in part, with the city’s envy of other metropolises, like Chicago, whose magnificent pristine water front puts its own to shame.

The success of Buffalo Jump – its reviews have been almost unanimously laudatory – vindicates Shrier’s decision to leave a good job at the LCBO, after 11 years as a senior communications consultant there.

“I wrote the annual report, speeches, a lot of stuff like that, millions of words. [But] it was becoming the same old, same old.” After discussing his options with his wife, Harriet Wichin, the manager of cultural arts at the Miles Nadal Jewish Community Centre (the couple has two children), Shrier left his job in October 2005.

“I wanted to get a book deal by my 50th birthday and my agent [Helen Heller] walked into my party the night I turned 50 with my contract from Random House. That was the best 50th birthday present anyone got me.”