Dr. Sean Haldane's The Devil's Making (Stone Flower / Red Tuque, 2013), set in 19th century Victoria, B.C., is the winner of the Crime Writers of Canada 2014 Arthur Ellis Award for Best Crime Novel. He did the research for it while living in Victoria in the 1980s, having lived in B.C. from 1980 to 1987, then again from 1990 to 1994. Set in Victoria in 1869, it follows the adventures of a newly-arrived policeman from England, Chad Hobbes, who must discover why the mutilated body of Dr. McCory was found in the woods. The apparent murder victim was an American 'alienist' whose methods included phrenology, Mesmerism and sexual-mystical 'magnetisation'. One of the murder suspects is Wiladzap, a Tsimshian medicine man, Wiladzap, who is immediately arrested. But the 'savagery' of the Aboriginals is all too easily blamed, and Hobbes must look deeper into the society and himself. Darwin wrote that the difference between the savage and civilized person is 'the difference between a wild and a tame animal.' But how much does so-called civilization serve as a guise for savage natures?

Dr. Sean Haldane of London, England, is Director of Raon Press Limited, Lee View House, South Terrace, Cork, Ireland CRO no.510786. Haldane holds a BA from the Royal Belfast Academical Institution, University College, Oxford and a Ph.D. in Psychology from the Saybrook Institute, San Francisco. Various job titles he has held include lecturer, part-time farmer, small press publisher, psychotherapist and consultant clinical neuropsychologist.

www.seanhaldane.com

BOOKS:

Time / No Time: The Paradox of Poetry and Physics (Parmenides Books)

The Devil's Making: A Victorian Detective Mystery (Stone Flower Press, 2013) $21.95 978-0-991-90730-4

[BCBW 2013]