“Home Sweet Havoc”: Howard Engel’s Niagara in Print and Film

Abstract

In “placing” his homespun detective Benny Cooperman in “Grantham,” Ontario, Howard Engel creates a Niagara that is far more than a tourist destination informed by the spectacular natural phenomenon that is Niagara Falls. Rather, Engel’s Niagara is a cultural nexus in which power and power relations, especially as they relate to the politics of exclusion, are explored with a mordant eye and a critical awareness of the consequences when small cities and fertile agricultural regions are left to the political devices of unrestrained hegemonic interests. After exploring Engel’s fiction in light of contemporary theories of place, space and post-coloniality, this essay examines a made-for-television film adaptation of The Suicide Murders and asks whether the film retains the complexities and moral vision of the novelistic original.