Strange Fugitive

Strange Fugitive, Callaghan’s first novel, was originally published in New York in 1928. We can now see it was a prototype for the “gangster” novel in America. The story is set in Toronto in the era of the speakeasy and underworld vendettas. Harry Trotter, the “hero,” is a man who cannot check his predilection for brutality. Incapable of reflection, it would never occur to him that he has become a thug. He is all feeling. He wants to feel good, successful, important. If he feels good, things must be right. Given this, as Robert Weaver has argued, “there is a prophetic strain in Strange Fugitive.” Harry reminds us “of the anti-hero of The Stranger, the novel by Albert Camus . . . and he has a link with something as contemporary and as subject to argument as the movie Bonnie and Clyde.”

Also, Strange Fugitive appeared as Stephen Leacock, in Sunshine Sketches of a Small Town, announced that small-town life was little more than a Mariposa of dreams. Strange Fugitive announced the coming of the urban novel.

James Dubro is a crime writer, television documentary film producer and bookseller. He is working as executive producer and researcher for a CBC television documentary on the purge of gay men and lesbians in the military and the RCMP.