Smoke Detector: Eric Wright

Smoke Detector is the 2nd Charlie Salter mystery, set in Toronto, Ontario. Salter is a member of the Metropolitan Police, but has not been given any interesting cases in the last year or so as a result of political changes in the department. In this story, he is assigned to an arson / homicide case because everyone in Homicide is too busy.

Cyril Drecker was the owner of an antique store who died when the building burned down. The investigation is probably much more realistic than most in crime fiction, with Charlie hunting down clues, interviewing persons involved with the man who died, and sending his sergeant to follow up other leads. Not a lot of action or tension. The suspects are all very interesting: Drecker's current girlfriend, Drecker's wife, his assistant in the antique business, and several people he had done business with recently.

There were many facets to this book. This is as much a book about Charlie Salter the man, husband and father, as it is about a murder investigation. He and his wife have two young sons, an 11-year-old and a 14-year-old; his wife has just started working outside the home and he feels threatened. Charlie has a follow-up medical test necessitated by a recent annual exam, which has him worried. This is a story about a real-life policeman.

I also learned about the internment of Japanese Canadians in Canada after the attack on Pearl Harbor. A side story features one of the suspects, an elderly Japanese gentleman, Gene Tanabe, who has disappeared after the murder. He was interned during World War II and had left a box of Japanese prints with a friend who held them for him for many years. This box (pictured on the front cover of my edition) then turned up in Drecker's shop and Tanabe had purchased it from Drecker shortly before the fire (minus the prints).

This novel features nice characterization and an interesting story that pulls you in, even if it moves a bit slowly. The setting of Toronto in the early 1980's is also well done.  Trying to figure out who the culprit was, I was divided between two suspects, and then it turned out to be someone I had not considered... but the solution made sense, it did not come from out of left field. There are eleven books in the series, and I will be reading the third one, Death in the Old Country, which won the Arthur Ellis Award for Best Novel in 1986.


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Publisher: Signet, 1986; originally pub. in hardback, 1984
Length:  252 pages
Format: mass market paperback
Series:  Charlie Salter #2
Setting: Toronto, Canada
Genre:  Mystery, Police Procedural