May 4, 2022
New Lane Winslow: Framed in Fire
Being ill last week was not without its advantages, among them: a chance to spend an entire Friday in bed reading the new Lane Winslow. Framed in Fire is the ninth title in this detective series set in and around Nelson, BC, in the late 1940s, and throughout the series, author Iona Whishaw has performed the remarkable feat of tying her plots to so many issues relevant to our present-day experience—racism, xenophobia, domestic violence, rape, ideas about women’s independence, and more. And I suppose it shouldn’t be so remarkable to find such stories in historical fiction, these issues being—unfortunately—timeless. But that Whishaw manages to address them without anachronism is what’s really impressive. And while I’ll admit there might be something just a little too good about the people of King’s Cove—the murderers and dead bodies among them notwithstanding—I am not sure such enlightenment is entirely anachronistic either. Because as much as we excuse egregious deeds and ideas of past figures for being “of their time,” it’s also true that there were always people who knew that all people were deserving of rights, that colonialism was barbaric, the women were people. In Framed By Fire, Lane encounters an Indigenous person for the first time since her arrival in Canada, and has her preconceptions challenged that First Peoples were thoroughly of the past. And while other characters do reinforce the racist and colonial mindsets reflective of the population at large, that Whishaw writes others who challenge such ideas is smart and subversive, and why these stories read as so fresh and fascinating.
