Laundryman, The

The Laundryman
by Dwayne Brenna
Published by Shadowpaw Press
Review by Brandon Fick
$26.99 ISBN 9781998273522

If you’re looking for a fast-paced historical crime novel, presenting a cross-section of frontier life and a region on the brink of massive changes, then The Laundryman is for you. What Dwayne Brenna achieves in his third novel is twofold: a mystery with twists and turns and two protagonists of differing but complementary personalities; plus, like most worthwhile historical fiction, he touches on issues we still deal with today, including racism, corruption, and the nature of justice. This might sound like a heavy story, and while solving murders is at the heart of The Laundryman, Brenna’s work is more along the lines of Agatha Christie than the ruthless westerns of Cormac McCarthy.

The Laundryman focuses on two North-West Mounted Police Officers: Corporal Belvedere, a hard-drinking, laudanum-using officer with five years of experience, and Surgeon Virgil Montgomery, a strait-laced recruit haunted by mistakes in his previous medical practice. They are sent from Battleford to investigate the murder of a Chinese laundryman in Prince Albert in the fall of 1883. But what initially seems to be a one-off murder over a disagreement or racial prejudice expands into a wider conspiracy of crime. Belvedere and Montgomery end up staying in Prince Albert until the spring of 1884, as their investigation runs into dead-ends, deception, bad weather, wrong suspects, slow mail service, and Prince Albert’s officious commanding officer, Sergeant Slade. Some of the novel’s lighter, slightly romantic moments come from Belvedere and Montgomery’s interactions with their landlady, Mrs. McLaughlin, “the wife of an Anglican clergyman,” a “fine-looking woman, tall and lithe,” who initially “cloak[s] her femininity in a drab black dress” and has her “auburn hair… pulled back in a severe coiffure.” Issues with Mr. McLaughlin come to a dramatic head at one point, further complicating the work of Belvedere and Montgomery. The two officers and Mrs. McLaughlin, as the most developed characters, each struggle with flaws or fears, but since this is a fast-paced crime novel, Brenna demonstrates this through action rather than prolonged interiority or backstory.

In this story is a wide assortment of frontier types: loggers, millworkers, drunks, pious churchgoers, Chinese café owners, Eastern farmers, lawyers, judges, a cobbler, dentist, undertaker, liveryman, newspaperman, and Métis and Indigenous people. Brenna subtly shows the change coming to the North-West Territories, the colonialism the Métis and Indigenous people are facing, which will culminate in the North-West Resistance of 1885. Montgomery, sensitive and artistic-minded, at one point treats a gravely ill Indigenous boy, leading to a tentative connection with a group of Sioux, who he returns to visit and sketch. Through Montgomery, Brenna shows what more widespread, respectful relations could have been: “An Easterner born and bred, I viewed the West as a place to be tamed, teeming with savage Indians in need of the saving graces of Christianity and modern medicine. What I saw that day in the Sioux encampment was not a coven of savages but a community of families that had learned to co-exist with nature, not to tame it.” Prince Albert at this point is barely a town, ragged yet “bustling with activity,” a place where buckboards “rattled through the long main street that ran parallel to the river,” and a “ragtag band of canines patrolled the riverbank, some looking housebroken and others looking mightily feral.” Belvedere, who “served under Wolseley on the Gold Coast of Africa” and “fought in the third Ashanti campaign,” suffering a hip wound, is just the type of rough-and-ready officer to solve a crime in a rough-and-ready town. One criticism of The Laundryman is that Montgomery, the first-person narrator, is sometimes relegated to reporting Belvedere’s assertive actions. Yet in the end, Montgomery comes through when it matters most – an earlier shooting lesson proves to be vitally important.

It’s clear that The Laundryman’s chief goal is to tell an entertaining story, and at this it succeeds. Dialogue is the engine of the story, and Brenna is adept at capturing the voice of settlers and officers without falling into overly put-upon diction. Themes of colonialism – seen through farming, land speculation, the coming railroad and telegraph – and the frailty of justice don’t loudly proclaim themselves, but they’re there. I was struck by a reflection of Montgomery’s – “A policeman’s work, I had found, was ninety-nine percent boredom and one percent utter terror” – and a snippet of dialogue from Belvedere: “There are different kinds of justice… one for the rich, and one for the very poor.” The humdrum, day-to-day work of NWMP officers, suddenly erupting into violence and death, is captured very well here, as is the muddiness of justice. That, perhaps more than anything else, is what I’ll take away from The Laundryman. The muddiness of justice that we still see today, and that certainly existed in the Prince Albert of 1883-1884.

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