Law & Literature.

• Date: 01 September 2019
• Author: Normey, Rob

The White Angel: An excursion from Chinatown to posh Shaughnessy Heights and back

John MacLachlan Gray is a celebrated playwright who penned the immortal masterpiece Bitty Bishop Goes to War. Having not seen any new plays from Gray for many years, I had wondered whatever had become of him. Not to worry. It turns out that in recent years he has reinvented himself as a mystery novelist. His latest work is The White Angel, a novel to be embraced by lovers of both suspense and literary fiction.

In this novel, Gray offers us a panoramic look at Vancouver circa 1924, when the city is at least momentarily distracted from celebrations of the British Empire in favour of the exciting investigation into the hard-to-fathom death of a Scottish nanny. The official investigation concludes that the young woman committed suicide. This narrative unravels quickly though, as the police force proves incapable of backing up its elaborate but rather clumsy theories. Quick to reach the conclusion that murder, not suicide, was the likely cause of death, is our engaging protagonist: the poet turned sensationalist journalist Ed McCurdy. As McCurdy digs deeper, the authorities reluctantly designate the death as a murder.

Gray has drawn significantly on one of Vancouver's most famous cold cases--the mysterious death of Scottish nanny Janet Smith. And during...