The Whodunit file is closed.
Jack Batten, the Toronto Star’s long-time crime fiction reviewer, has typed -30- after his final Whodunit column. After nearly 24 years of reviewing crime novels for the newspaper, he bade his readers goodbye today.
During those 24 years, Jack has been a pillar of the Canadian crime fiction community. As well as writing hundreds of review columns, he’s penned seven of his own crime fiction novels—his Crang mystery Straight No Chaser was a finalist for the Arthur Ellis Award for Best Crime Novel in 1990—and dozens of non-fiction books. He has also been accessible to crime writers and readers, speaking at mystery conferences, Sisters in Crime meetings, and other events.
My greatest thrills of the past decade were Jack’s reviews of my four Pat Tierney mysteries. I walked on clouds for days after they appeared in the Star.
He was also supportive of the Mesdames of Mayhem, the collective of Canadian crime writers that compiled five short fiction anthologies in recent years.
Thank you, Jack! We wish you more successes in your coming adventures. And we hope that our paths will cross again.
