David MontroseRecensioni

1951 Canadian hard-boiled noir mystery starts off a bit like the Big Sleep, and Montrose is definitely channeling Raymond Chandler in his writing style, but he manages to make the same type of observations Chandler does without annoying the reader. A nightclub owner is murdered, and the search for the killer takes the private detective to a few Montreal landmarks and includes a run-in with a French-Canadian police inspector. The plot is complicated, as suits the genre, but Montrose manages to weave it together fairly well at the end. I was engaged all the way through and enjoyed the ride enough that I'll seek out the other two books in the series.

This is the second book in the Russell Teed series, set in Montréal during the 1950s. Teed is sent to New York City, where he’s immediately given money and a plane ticket back to Montréal. His client, Anne Wedgewood, has never known who her father was, but she does know he will be on that plane, and she wants Teed to figure out who he is. The flight’s a bumpy one, and one of the passengers ends up dead before they get back to Dorval Airport. But was that Anne’s father? Teed’s work is only just beginning, and it’s only going to get more violent as he gets closer to the truth…

This book is better than the first, Crime on Cote des Neiges, but not as good as I remember The Body on Mount Royal to be. The story moves along more quickly than the first book, and I always get a kick out of the 1950s setting. And the fatal flight had me practically bouncing in my chair with glee, because I was nerding out over the old-school commercial airline. However, there is a breathtakingly sexist sentence in this book that really had no business being there, and some of the remarks about black characters were cringe-inducing. The publisher does provide a disclaimer at the beginning of the book (this is a reprint of the 1952 edition), saying that they’ve removed typos but retained the attitudes of the period because that’s what happened. And yet there were a lot of typos. If that’s them “removing” typos, I’d hate to think what an uncorrected version looked like.

This book does mention events in Crime on Cote des Neiges, so if you like to read series in order, you may wish to start there.

I had moderate hopes for this book, after having read and enjoyed another Montrose novel, The Body on Mount Royal. However, The Body on Mount Royal is much better. This novel is a noir tale of a criminal kingpin who's been murdered twice -- an interesting premise that quickly devolves into the PI, Russell Teed, running around and around and around Montreal, retracing his steps and trying to figure out who killed either or both of the men purported to be the kingpin. I lost interest in finding out whodunnit and would not necessarily encourage others to pick up this book, unless it's for the novelty of seeing a PI work the mean streets of 1950s Montreal. And even then, The Body on Mount Royal, being a later Montrose novel, is better.½

Pourquoi avez-vous choisi ce livre ? S’agit-il d’une lecture de loisir, obligatoire, suggérée ?

Pendant mes recherches pour mon premier livre. J’ai eu une discussion avec la bibliothécaire de référence de ma bibliothèque de quartier. Voyant mon premier livre, celle-ci m’a suggéré celui-ci en raison de son point en communs avec le premier. Les deux sont une traduction d’un livre écrit depuis longtemps et se passent plus ou moins à la même époque. Elle croyait que je devrais également l’aimer, qu’une enquête pour meurtre me permettrait de lire un autre genre de roman pour ce travail. De plus, il était accessible en ressource électronique. Ce qui correspondait également à ce que je recherchais.

Un aspect qui vous a plu :

J’ai aimé que l’histoire se déroule à Montréal, pendant les belles années du Red light. Une période où les boites de nuit, le jeu et le crime organisé sont très présents. Une période parfaite pour un roman policier ou des meurtres doivent être résolus et que les complots sont multiples. De voir les personnages évoluer dans des endroits connus à contribuer à mon appréciation du récit. De plus, des notes en bas de pages signifiaient le nouveau nom des endroits qui avait changé de nomenclature ou encore qui n’existait plus. Comme j’aime les faits historiques, cela était intéressant à savoir.

Un aspect qui vous a moins plu :

Bien que j’ai apprécié le style de l’auteur. Celui-ci s’étend souvent sur une description détaillée de la scène qui s’offre a lui. Il fait la même chose pour la description des objets qui l’entourent. Cela est très utile pour une scène de crime ou encore au moment de franchir un nouvel endroit. Mais dans certains cas, comme le fauteuil vert de son appartement ou sa voiture. Il en parle de façon détaillée plus d’une fois. C’est mineur, mais parfois j’en étais un peu lassé et il me semblait que le récit en était alourdi.

L’objet numérique : (ici, vous devez faire l’analyse des attributs et des fonctions liés à la lecture en format numérique, selon leur pertinence, voire leur absence :

Le logiciel utilisé pour la lecture représentait le document en imitant la présentation d’une version imprimée. Une couverture, une page titre, un avant-propos, etc. Le texte est bien aéré et la typographie utilisé agréable. Ce livre n’a pas d’illustrations sauf sur la couverture. Les fonctions d’affichage permettent certains changements, mais le document étant un emprunt numérique. Plusieurs fonctions du logiciel étaient verrouillées. Il était impossible de copier ou de coller du texte. Surligner ou prendre des notes directement au texte était aussi impossible. Le document est un emprunt d’une bibliothèque. Il s’agit probablement d’une mesure de protection du droit d’auteur. Il reste que ces limites sont contraignantes. La taille des caractères pouvait être modifiée, une bonne aide de lecture. La police ne l’était pas et la présentation s’ajustait automatiquement. L’utilisation des flèches du clavier simplifiait la manière de parcourir les pages. Il était également possible de le faire en utilisant les icônes de l’interface.

L’index rétractable à gauche de l’écran rendait possible la navigation d’un chapitre à l’autre. Sa deuxième partie était une liste des marque-pages ajoutés au texte modifiable. C’était la seule façon de prendre des notes. Les mots contenant une référence de bas de page possédaient un renvoi interne vers celle-ci. Parfois, la note de bas de page était sur la page suivante et cela donnait une façon plus rapide d’y parvenir. Aussi, les liens pour les ressources externes permettaient d’accéder au site de l’éditeur et à d’autres ressources comme le compte Facebook de la maison d’édition.

Don't walk alone on Mount Royal at night. A good rule to follow in 1950s Montreal, where this story is set. As you can guess by the title, a body is discovered on the mountain and private eye Russell Teed is on the case… sort of. He's initially not interested, but after much persuasion, his journalist friend MacArnold puts him on the trail. Joined by James Montgomery, who discovered the body, MacArnold and Teed investigate the murder and become embroiled in underworld doings while drinking dry what seems to be every tavern and dépanneur in Notre-Dame-de-Grace and the Town of Mount Royal.

Teed's voice is likeable and earnest, and while he's not afraid to be violent when necessary, he is also capable of great sympathy toward the victims of the crimes he's investigating. The pace was smooth throughout, and while there were a lot of "summing up what we know so far" moments, for the most part they were handled quickly. The only thing I found really annoying was the rendering of Detective Sergeant Framboise's "very 'eavy French Canadian hac-sent". Specifically, the rendering of "these" as "t'ese", "them" as "t'em" and so on. All the apostrophes made my eyes cross. Also, strangely, I don't recall many mentions of the Montreal Canadiens in the narration. This was the 1950s, when the Habs were in very glorious days indeed and the Rocket Richard riot was just around the corner. They would have been everywhere. Although to be fair, being shot at by violent thugs is a much more pressing concern than the hockey scores.

Overall, I enjoyed this book as an evocation of Montreal and hard-boiled detective novels and would gladly read more of Teed's adventures.

The Crime on Cote des Neiges, by David Montrose, was originally published in 1951, and was reissued in 2010 by Vehicule Press in Montreal. Squarely in the vein of noir, it tells the story of Russell Teed, an anglo private investigator living in Montreal and primarily making a living doing high-flying work for mega-corporations. But when the rich Westmount mother of a childhood friend asks Teed to find out what has happened to her daughter's husband, who has not been seen for five days, he is willing to take on a different kind of detective work. It doesn't take long for him to realize that the man is dead, and from there on in the bodies just start piling up, one after another. Who is behind the murders? Could it be one of the three women apparently linked to the dead man? Or some of his business partners who are tired of his high-handed ways? Or perhaps the drug ring that has more uses for a remote cabin than one might think.... Quite dark and rather odd, this book presents Montreal in a very different light to the way the city is now (I live in Montreal, so I can say that with confidence). For one thing, Montreal in the novel appears to be almost entirely Anglophone, with the only French character being Sergeant Framboise ("raspberry"), who is hyper-alert, yet plodding and slow, and whose English is portrayed as very heavily accented and grammar-free. For another, the street names are almost all different now; most have been renamed using French terms or people, whereas in Montrose's day, many street names were English. For example, what is now Rene Levesque Blvd. was once Dorchester Street, and our hero spends a lot of time traveling on that Anglophone road. The women in the book are all scheming and slinky; the men are happy to use their fists, knives and guns any time at all. Oh, and our hero starts drinking (usually beer, sometimes rye or whiskey) from the moment he rolls out of bed, and carries on until he finds said bed once again. Montrose apparently wrote two other books featuring Teed, Murder Over Dorval (1952) and The Body on Mount Royal (1953), and I hope Vehicule Press reissues those two as well. Definitely not for people with tender sensibilities concerning the violence, sexism and racism that was part of the social fabric of the time, but recommended if you're a fan of 1950s pulp!½