Former Toronto Sun reporter pens 'crime-noir' novel set in Scarborough
· Toronto Sun
Once a newsman, always a newsman.
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Former Toronto Sun reporter Ian Harvey (1979-2001) has taken some of those experiences and characters, covering everything from murder to politics to robbery to cocaine smuggling, and put them in his self-published first novel, the South Scarborough-set Prisoners of Circumstance , whose genre he describes as “crime noir.”
“I live right where the book is set,” said Harvey, 69, down the line recently from a holiday in Puerto Morelos, Mexico, near Cancun.
“I’ve lived there for 45 years. You and I — I still consider myself a journalist — we tell other people’s stories and I always wanted to tell a story of my own making. When I was a kid, I got bullied a bit and so I used to go to the library and read young persons adventure novels and I’d curl up in the corner. And so I’ve always wanted to do that, but never had the time or the opportunity to put something together.”
Journalism career inspired story
Harvey, who previously co-authored a non-fiction book on Terry Fox and ghost-wrote another about the founding of the Labourers Local 183 in Toronto, said it took about a year and half to write the 224-page novel after his freelance writing business dried up during the pandemic.
“I thought, ‘Well, what am I going to do with my life?'” he said. “Well, what do you do? I write, so that’s what I do. So I just started sketching this idea out and I starting writing it.”
Harvey said there wasn’t one particular story or character during his time at the Toronto Sun that inspired the book, but rather many stories and many characters.
“I covered crime for a long, long period and I can drive around places and go, ‘Oh, yeah, there was a good murder in that one. They shot her in the stairwell.’ So in my own neighbourhood, I can point out there were a couple of murders basically over the 45 years that I’ve lived there, not necessarily directly related to anything in the book, and characters would appear and things that go on in the neighbourhood that most people would know about and I felt, ‘Well, you might add it to the story.’”
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Novel set in author’s neighbourhood
The novel is set in South Scarborough, circa 2019, and follows a reformed alcoholic journalist who returns to his old neighbourhood to solve the murder of a beloved local variety storekeeper, while a double-dealing crime hustler pits Greek gangsters and ruthless Albanian drug dealers against each another.
“Against that setting, (the journalist) doesn’t necessarily find justice but he does find love and redemption, which frees him,” said Harvey.
“He’s no longer a prisoner of his circumstance. In fact, all of the characters in the book are prisoners of their own circumstance, as many of us are.”
More books on tap?
And, no, the journalist isn’t based on him.
“It’s a combination of all the journalists that we’ve ever worked with,” said Harvey, whose a fan of such crime novelists as Elmore Leonard, Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett.
“You know the ones that put their life on hold to chase a story? The kind of doggedly determined one who built a reputation and contacts. So he has that going for him even though he moved out of crime. He fell into bad times, but then when he sobered up he started covering city hall. The model of the outlet he works for is an online publication and it’s modelled on Blacklock’s (Reporter), you know, the one out of Ottawa?”
Harvey said he has ideas for two more novels, the first being a science-fiction story involving some characters from Prisoners of Circumstance and the second one about tracking a serial killer whose victims are on cruise ships and in ports of call.