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twentieth century, wrote under their own names and set their fiction on Canadian soil, including Morley Callaghan, who set
StrangeFugitive
(1929) in Toronto, and Leslie McFarlane, who set
Streets of Shadow
(1930) in Montreal. By the 1940s, SkeneMelvin argues, crime fiction in Canada was typically set in urban locales - Margaret Bonner’s 1946
The Shapes That Creep
in Vancouver, Janet Layhew’s
Rx for Murder
in Montreal -with detectives linked to particular cities - Toronto for E. Louise Cushing’s Inspector MacKay and Montreal for David Montrose’s detective Russell Teed, for example. Long before the watershed appearance of Howard Engel’s Benny Cooperman in 1980, Canadian writers were exploring the potential of crime fiction and experimenting with the appeal of Canadian characters and settings to audiences at home and abroad.
    We use the term “writers” here, rather than “crime writers,” because some of Canada’s most enduring crime fiction was written by authors who moved between genres and aimed their work at a wide variety of audiences from general readers to scholarly audiences. Sheila Watson’s
The Double Hook
(1959), long recognized as both a pivotal example of Canadian modernism and a challenging read on any standard, is one of the novels included in Skene-Melvin’s chronological index as a work of Canadian crime fiction. Other well-known and respected texts set in Canada include Malcolm Lowry’s
Under the Volcano
(1947), Timothy Findley’s
The Last of the Crazy People
(1967) and
The Butterfly Plague
(1969), Marie-Claire Blais’
L’Exécution
(1970), Robertson Davies’
Fifth Business (1970)
, Anne Hébert’s
Kamouraska
(1970), and Rudy Wiebe’s
The Temptations of Big Bear
(1973) and
Where Is the Voice Coming From?
(1974). With the exception of
The Butterfly Plague
, all are set in Canada.
CANADIAN CONTEXTS
    Phyllis Brett Young used the opportunity of the earliest media interviews for her successful first novel to underscore Canada’s potential as both the setting for literature and a context for the emergence of talented writers. But, since she insisted that Canadian writers should advocate for their own country andon Canada’s remarkable potential for a fictional setting, why is she reluctant to identify specific locales in
Psyche
, her first novel? Like many other writers of her day, in the decades prior to the institutionalization of Canadian literature and a sense of confidence in Canada as a viable setting for literature, not to mention as a country able to nurture and support Canadian writers, Young establishes a balance between the particular and the general. At one level, then, Young’s intentions and her content are in opposition: although the Ontario setting is clear to anyone familiar with the slag heaps of Sudbury, for example, the specific locale is never mentioned. Her second novel,
The Torontonians
, is explicit not only about its urban Canadian locale but also about the socio-historical context of its pre-Betty Friedan era setting. Young’s advocacy for Canadian content is consistent with the Massey Commission that, in 1951, signaled the need for a national literature, and argued that “to be truly national, [a literature] must be recognized as characteristic of the nation by other nations, and that it must in consequence have the human appeal and the aesthetic value to awaken the interest and sympathy, and to arouse the admiration of other peoples.” 47
    The Massey Commission cites a number of factors behind the lack of a national literature in mid-century Canada, including the isolation of Canadian writers. The response to its report was not only the establishment of funds and mechanisms to support Canadian author travel abroad but also the shipment of Canadian books abroad and, in the longer term, a recasting of Canadian studies as a vehicle for cultural diplomacy. As Robert Fulford points out,