The Suicide Murders was published by Clarke, Irwin in 1980, and it introduced Benny Cooperman — the Jewish private investigator from Grantham, Ontario (a fictionalized St. Catharines) who would become one of Canadian crime fiction’s most beloved characters. Benny is the anti-noir detective: he doesn’t carry a gun, he doesn’t drink whiskey, he eats chopped-egg sandwiches from his mother’s kitchen, and he solves cases through patience, observation, and a mordant wit that deflects the violence around him without trivializing it.
The novel concerns a series of apparent suicides that Benny suspects are murders. The investigation takes him through the social strata of Grantham — from the wealthy families on the escarpment to the working-class taverns downtown — and Engel uses the detective formula to explore the class structures, ethnic tensions, and hidden secrets of small-city Ontario.
Engel’s achievement is to transplant the American private-eye novel to Canada without either imitating the American model slavishly or producing a pale, polite Canadian imitation. Benny is genuinely different from Marlowe or Spenser: he is unromantic, physically unimpressive, and Jewish in a way that is culturally specific rather than tokenistic. His Jewishness informs his perspective — an outsider’s eye, a tradition of verbal wit, a certain skepticism about authority — without defining him.
Collecting The Suicide Murders
First edition (Clarke, Irwin, Toronto, 1980): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $40–$100
- Without jacket: $10–$25
- US edition (St. Martin’s, 1985, as A City Called July): $15–$40