Buffalo Jump is a great debut novel from Montreal-born Torontonian Shrier, and it introduces PI Jonah Geller in what is certainly going to be a fine series. The plot is tight, the characters engaging, and this one even has a believable - and sympathetic - bad guy. The story opens with Geller, a consultant with Beacon [...]
Guns, knives, bats, and the Don. Welcome to the menacing world of Howard Shrier’s Toronto! Welcome to Buffalo Jump. There’s even a Mafia Don or two thrown in, to balance out the threat of the river. Jonah Geller is a nice Jewish boy who can’t seem to live up to the promise his mother sees in him. [...]
My obsession with crime fiction began while I was still at Concordia University. In 1979, I wrote a weekly column in the student newspaper called “Ooze and Oz” and one day, on deadline and out of ideas, I banged out a private-eye story set in Biblical times. The unnamed shamus tries to figure out if Lucifer [...]
I was more than an avid fan of Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer series. Like many a crime writer I know, I consider him my greatest influence. Travelling in California in 1980, I decided to look up Macdonald in Santa Barbara. It didn’t work out quite the way that I planned as you'll see in this memoir, [...]
When I get serious about an author, I collect everything I can. And Elmore Leonard is the best there ever was. When Elmore Leonard died in August, shortly after suffering a stroke at age 87, tributes flowed fast and furious in newspapers, on blogs and other media. Some were from writers you would [...]
From a Toronto Star series on Lake Ontario called H2Ontario On the waterfront: The Star took this photo for an essay it commissioned on Lake Ontario. I spent the first half of my life in Montreal, an island city defined by the river that flows around it. Wherever you travelled, there were dark waters [...]
Howard Shrier’s private eye, Jonah Geller, is as hard-boiled as they come. This latest book in a series about a Canadian secular Jew, trained in the Israeli army, proves that not even the need to recuperate from a serious concussion can keep a tough guy at home in Toronto. Geller is hired to search for a [...]
Boston Cream is Howard Shrier’s third novel featuring PI Jonah Geller, but a first read of this Arthur Ellis award-winning Canadian author for me. It definitely won’t be the last. Geller is just back to work, still feeling the effects of a severe concussion, earned on his last case. If Ron Fine wasn’t a family friend, [...]
A warm welcome to Howard Shrier as our latest victim. This award-winning author leaves no stone unturned. He has done it all, from journalism, many kinds of media, theatre and television, sketch comedy and improv. Teaching creative writing at University of Toronto and the author of the Jonah Geller suspense novels. Jamie: Thanks for being here [...]
Years ago, Elmore Leonard, one of the all-time originals in crime fiction, published his ten rules of writing in the New York Times. They were both fun and instructive, the best of all being the last (“Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.") The abridged versions follow; the full versions were [...]
Howard Shrier is a two-time winner of the Arthur Ellis Award, Canada’s highest prize for crime fiction. The author of the acclaimed Jonah Geller series and other works, he publishes new stories and helps emerging authors finish their books, all on this site.
