Except the Dying was published by St. Martin’s Press in 1997, introducing Detective William Murdoch — a Roman Catholic detective in a Protestant-dominated Toronto police force, a man whose intelligence and moral seriousness set him apart from his colleagues, and whose cases illuminate the social tensions of 1890s Canada. The novel launched a series that would be adapted into Murdoch Mysteries (CBC, 2008–present), one of the longest-running dramatic series in Canadian television history.
A young woman is found dead in a snowbank in Toronto’s ward district — the poor, immigrant neighborhood. She is well-dressed (too well for the neighborhood), and the investigation reveals she was a domestic servant who had been dismissed — but the reasons for her dismissal, and the identity of the person responsible for her death, lead Murdoch through Toronto’s rigid class structure.
Jennings’s Toronto is meticulously researched: the gaslit streets, the horse-drawn streetcars, the boarding houses, the churches (Catholic, Protestant, each a social world), and the hierarchies (British Protestant establishment at the top, Irish Catholics below, other immigrants below them) are rendered with documentary precision. Murdoch navigates these hierarchies as an outsider (Catholic in a Protestant force, educated in a working-class profession) whose marginal position gives him access to all levels of society.
The title (from Psalm 118: “except the dying”) suggests the novel’s thematic concern: who counts as expendable in Victorian society, whose death matters, and whose is merely inconvenient.
Collecting Except the Dying
First edition (St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1997): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $20–$60
- Signed first edition: $40–$100