Book Review of The Walker on the Cape by John Baglow

Book Review of The Walker on the Cape by well-known Ottawa writer and blogger (Dr. Dawg’s Blog)

Crime writer Mike Martin imports a Cree RCMP officer into Grand Bank, a Newfoundland outport: how could the ensuing story not hold our interest?

Sergeant Winston Wildflower is called to investigate the death of an old man, Elias Martin, found dead on the path from the village to the Cape, where he liked to go for daily walks. Wildflower has a hunch that it wasn’t a heart attack, and the story flows from there.

The characters tend to be sketched, not drawn, but they aren’t caricatures. There is McIntosh, his hostile superior; the eager Constable Tizzard; his flame Sheila, who serves him cheesecake with coffee or tea at the Mug-Up diner; the wealthy and unaccountably furious Harvey Brenton and his abused wife; Dr. Vijay Sanjay, doing his best to pick up the Newfoundland language; the officious mayor of Grand Bank—and a host of others. 

The story is deftly plotted, and bounces along in fifty short punchy chapters plus an epilogue. Martin, from Newfoundland himself, gives us a good feel of the place where the drama plays out. The writing is not particularly stylish, and Martin could have used a copy-editor to weed out the typos and the occasional solecism, but the atmosphere and the pace keep the tale lively and engaging.

What is striking about the text, however, is that it almost seems to be the wrong medium for the story Martin has to tell. The main characters and the dialogue suggest a more serious version of Corner Gas, one in which murders and assaults are committed and serious police business is to be attended to, but, at the same time, where lesser intrigues and daily interactions have their own considerable comic potential.

Thanks to Martin, one has the sense that several of his characters have more stories to tell, and the setting—a Newfoundland outport in the present day—offers countless possibilities in itself. Whether Martin chooses to press on with more novels, as he hints in this one, or turn his hand to the discipline of drama (he has a good ear for dialogue), he has opened the door to some interesting folks, and they seem bent on staying a while.

John Baglow