Bøker av Vern Smith

Set in pre-9/11 Toronto, detective noir Scratching the Flint takes place over twelve days during the spring of 2001. Smith's two-tone anti-fraud team of Alex Johnson and Cecil Bolan are back in their first full-length novel to investigate a vintage car theft ring à la MacGyver. When witnesses end up mocked and murdered, proof becomes a relative term to Cecil. Racked with guilt while the system sputters, he covertly assumes the role of not just investigating officer but also that of crown attorney, judge, and executioner, driving the case to a conclusion as brutal as the future.

Set during the production of an out-of-control television comedy in 1989 Toronto, Under the Table is a snappy heist novel that will keep 'em guessing. Much like the sketch show that it portrays, Under the Table entertains with dark humor, quirky characters, and celebrity appearances, while poking fun at the absurdity of societal constructs. Quippy and smart, Smith's prose is electric and crackles across the page. Wickedly funny, you'll laugh even though you know you shouldn't.

“Vern Smith is a phantasmatic presence hovering over hard luck debacles and muted urban theater, colloquy consisting of full-bodied gestures captured in the word, messy lives tangled at the root, twisting misshapen into bloom. He haunts the North American literary canon with a salt-of-the-earth journalist’s ear for the unspoken and unspeakable. There is an uncanny violence to these selections, as if there before the fact, now willed into expression in lean, muscular, lockstep cadences that model with sobering, unsentimental reverence and radical, stethoscopic clarity the raging interiority of the North American animal/everyman/mammal. With preternatural stylistic range, Vern Smith renders the ineffable with documentary devotion. It is poetic realism with exacting, brutal command of the minimal. Nothing less than ink, pulp, and blood amalgamated with sinew and synapses.” – Manuel Marrero, author of Not Yet