Howard Engel: Man of mystery

Writer Howard Engel explains his stroke with characteristic gentle humor: he stepped out onto the porch of his semi-detached home in downtown Toronto to pick up his morning Globe and Mail and discovered it was written “in Serbo-Croatian.” It wasn’t, of course. But the unfamiliar jumble of letters was the signal that something was mightily wrong.

The stroke, which happened while he slept, left Engel with a rare condition called alexia sine agraphia. Damage occurred in the occipital cortex, the visual part of the brain that controls the interpretation of text. So while Engel can write as well as ever, he can’t read his own writing or anything else. Words on a page look unfamiliar, and he easily confuses letters.

Not being able to read is a terrible handicap, especially for someone who has spent his life focused on books and literature. But Engel, 75, displays not a whit of discomfort as he slowly sounds out a piece of text – in this case, his own editing notes in answer to a question about his next novel. Sounding out words letter by letter is a slow process but it gets him where he’s going. “I’ve just got on with things,” he says. “That’s the way I’ approached most things in life.”

In the four years since his stroke, Engel has continued to write his crime fiction with the help of friends and editors who take turns sitting at the aging computer in his book-crowded office, reading his work back so he can make his editing notes. He is currently completing his 12th novel in his detective series. The 11th book, Memory Book, has recently been released. In it, he makes use of his stroke experience by afflicting his main character, private eye Benny Cooperman, with alexia sine agraphia too, although Benny’s condition is caused by a crack on the head by a bad guy rather than a stroke.

To make it more interesting, Cooperman also has some amnesia, which Engel does not. However, Engel does have some memory loss; he has trouble remembering his phone number, for example, and at his front door, he has a list of things to remember – keys, glasses – before he goes out. “The end of my tongue is crowded with things I can’t remember,” he says. 

Setting the stage for a genre
When Engel introduced Benny Cooperman 25 years ago, he broke new literary ground in Canada. Before The Suicide Murders, no crime fiction novel had ever been set in Canada with a Canadian hero. Crime fiction was either American or British. When Engel found an audience for his writing, the floodgates opened for Canadian crime fiction.

“Howard opened the door for probably 200 writers to come after him,” says Globe and Mail columnist Margaret Cannon. Last year alone, 43 crime fiction novels were published in Canada. Since that first novel, Engel has won a slew of awards, including an honorary doctorate and the Matt Cohen Award for lifetime achievement (he was the first crime writer to receive it).

After such a run, it would have been understandable if Engel had decided to send private eye Benny Cooperman into retirement. But that wasn’t ever an option. In the hospital, the first thing he asked his daughter for was a pen and paper (although at that time “probably to remember the name of my doctor rather than any yearning to be artistic”).

The result so far is remarkable and a surprise to many. Memory Book, with its sensitive and often funny portrayal of Benny dealing with brain injury and memory loss at the same time as he’s solving a whodunit from his hospital bed, may be Engel’s best book yet. Beverley Slopen, who has been Engel’s agent since his first novel, didn’t even expect him to finish the manuscript. When he told her he had started, “I thought, ‘Oh, that will keep him busy,'” she says. “And then when he told me he had finished it, I almost cried. I can’t begin to imagine what it took to write it.”

Next page: What keeps Engel writing

Writer Howard Engel explains his stroke with characteristic gentle humor: he stepped out onto the porch of his semi-detached home in downtown Toronto to pick up his morning Globe and Mail and discovered it was written “in Serbo-Croatian.” It wasn’t, of course. But the unfamiliar jumble of letters was the signal that something was mightily wrong.

The stroke, which happened while he slept, left Engel with a rare condition called alexia sine agraphia. Damage occurred in the occipital cortex, the visual part of the brain that controls the interpretation of text. So while Engel can write as well as ever, he can’t read his own writing or anything else. Words on a page look unfamiliar, and he easily confuses letters.

Not being able to read is a terrible handicap, especially for someone who has spent his life focused on books and literature. But Engel, 75, displays not a whit of discomfort as he slowly sounds out a piece of text – in this case, his own editing notes in answer to a question about his next novel. Sounding out words letter by letter is a slow process but it gets him where he’s going. “I’ve just got on with things,” he says. “That’s the way I’ve approached most things in life.”

In the four years since his stroke, Engel has continued to write his crime fiction with the help of friends and editors who take turns sitting at the aging computer in his book-crowded office, reading his work back so he can make his editing notes. He is currently completing his 12th novel in his detective series. The 11th book, Memory Book, has recently been released. In it, he makes use of his stroke experience by afflicting his main character, private eye Benny Cooperman, with alexia sine agraphia too, although Benny’s condition is caused by a crack on the head by a bad guy rather than a stroke.

To make it more interesting, Cooperman also has some amnesia, which Engel does not. However, Engel does have some memory loss; he has trouble remembering his phone number, for example, and at his front door, he has a list of things to remember – keys, glasses – before he goes out. “The end of my tongue is crowded with things I can’t remember,” he says. 

Setting the stage for a genre
When Engel introduced Benny Cooperman 25 years ago, he broke new literary ground in Canada. Before The Suicide Murders, no crime fiction novel had ever been set in Canada with a Canadian hero. Crime fiction was either American or British. When Engel found an audience for his writing, the floodgates opened for Canadian crime fiction.

“Howard opened the door for probably 200 writers to come after him,” says Globe and Mail columnist Margaret Cannon. Last year alone, 43 crime fiction novels were published in Canada. Since that first novel, Engel has won a slew of awards, including an honorary doctorate and the Matt Cohen Award for lifetime achievement (he was the first crime writer to receive it).

After such a run, it would have been understandable if Engel had decided to send private eye Benny Cooperman into retirement. But that wasn’t ever an option. In the hospital, the first thing he asked his daughter for was a pen and paper (although at that time “probably to remember the name of my doctor rather than any yearning to be artistic”).

The result so far is remarkable and a surprise to many. Memory Book, with its sensitive and often funny portrayal of Benny dealing with brain injury and memory loss at the same time as he’s solving a whodunit from his hospital bed, may be Engel’s best book yet. Beverley Slopen, who has been Engel’s agent since his first novel, didn’t even expect him to finish the manuscript. When he told her he had started, “I thought, ‘Oh, that will keep him busy,'” she says. “And then when he told me he had finished it, I almost cried. I can’t begin to imagine what it took to write it.”

Next page: What keeps Engel writing

Engel met his first wife, Marian, at university in the early ’50s, and they became good friends. “We would cry on each other’s shoulders about our exploits with the opposite sex,” he says. After graduation, they corresponded occasionally and then, in 1961, they both found themselves in Europe – Engel in Paris freelancing for the CBC and Marian in Aix-en-Provence completing post-graduate work. They met in Venice over the Christmas break and, within days, decided to marry.

“Venice had something to do with it,” Engel says now. Before moving back to Toronto, they lived in Cyprus where Marian wrote and taught English and Engel freelanced. In a letter home to her parents, Marian describes herself writing while Howard read The Watch That Ends the Night by Hugh MacLennan, Marian’s mentor. “[Howard] pounces indignantly on me once an hour saying, “There – listen to that! Your book is much better,” she wrote.

Even one writer can be more than enough
Their 17-year marriage eventually faltered on Marian’s need to focus more on writing and less on domesticity. While her husband worked long hours at CBC in Toronto, she fit her writing in around household chores and care of the twins, Charlotte and William, born in 1965. In a letter to Hugh MacLennan, Marian wrote: “The final straw in my marriage was being ordered to make dinner for [Canadian author] Hugh Hood.” Later, she writes about “bloody-mindedly going on writing, no matter what.” Engel himself wasn’t writing yet. “Marian used to tell me that Hugh MacLennan said there could be only one writer in a family. It was a clear warning that I should find something else to do,” he says.

The divorce came at a time – the mid-’70s – when “splitting up seemed to be in the air,” Engel says. And it came at a time when Marian was discovering “a sisterhood of writers.” Her writing was maturing and receiving its highest acclaim. In the couple of years leading up to their separation, she was writing her most famous work, the strange and erotic novel Bear, which won a Governor General’s award for fiction. Marian died of cancer in 1985.

A couple of years after his divorce, Engel married Janet Hamilton, a researcher at CBC. She was also a writer – her novel, Sagacity, was published to strong reviews in 1981 – but Marian’s creed that there could only be one writer in a family was borne out. Except for a later novel she and Engel co-wrote under a pseudonym, Janet didn’t publish anything else.

But now Engel finally decided to try his hand at fiction. Surrounded by writers at home and at CBC, he felt a bit like a “eunuch in a harem,” he says. “I saw the tricks being done everyday and couldn’t do it myself so I decided I’d try to do it.” He wasn’t a crime fiction fan but had been given both The Big Sleep and The Maltese Falcon as Christmas gifts and read them in quick succession. They both stood up as good novels, not just good crime novels. “I decided that I’d like to get into that league,” he says.

Janet helped to usher Benny into the world. She had a friend over and wanted privacy for a chat. She suggested Howard might want to get started on the writing he had been contemplating. A little while later, he returned to the women with the first several pages that would become the opening of his first Benny Cooperman novel, The Suicide Murders.

Next page: The creation of a character

In Benny Cooperman, Engel purposely set out to create a new kind of detective character. Up until then, mysteries either followed the British tradition with their eccentric detectives – think Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot – or the American tradition with tough-guy sleuths single-handedly saving the day – think Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade. Engel borrows from both moulds to create Benny. His small-town setting suits the British style and his snappy dialogue is more American, but as a character, Benny is all-Canadian.

Engel designed his detective to be the opposite of everything hard-boiled detectives like Sam Spade represent. Benny is from the fictional small-town of Grantham (modelled on his hometown St. Catharines), he’s Jewish like Engel, he shuns violence and doesn’t carry a gun. And despite the cold-blooded way he was created, Benny “didn’t take his first breath like some Frankenstein monster” but spoke with his own voice from the beginning. And Benny is still good company, Engel says. “I haven’t felt the need to push him off a cliff as Conan Doyle did with Sherlock Holmes.”

Benny is gentle and funny and single-minded, much like his creator. On his way to solving the case, he makes time to visit his parents or stop for egg salad sandwiches at his favourite diner. He spends more time in witty banter with his fellow characters than chasing bad guys. Engel’s editor at Penguin Group Canada, Cynthia Good, says, “Benny Cooperman is always accepting of people’s foibles. He’s a character who has an enormous acceptance of otherness, which makes him very Canadian.”

In Engel’s 12th novel, Benny’s inability to read is less problematic: Engel has conveniently set the novel in a fictional Southeast Asian country where Benny couldn’t read the language anyway. It’s a typical Engel solution to getting on with things. Engel is having fun taking Benny out of his comfort zone of Grantham and “seeing what trouble the fellow can get up to.” 

When Benny can’t keep up with all of Engel’s interests in literature and film, Engel has to find another outlet within the novel for his whimsy. In Memory Book, Cooperman’s tablemates in the rehab hospital dining room are three stroke victims – a retired engineer, an art curator and a World Bank financier – who have wide-ranging conversations about the great tables of Europe that let Engel include arcane references to “Cyrano’s friend Raguenea, the pastry chef in the play” and poke fun at the snobberies of foodies. While the three debate, Benny makes wisecracks to himself at the other end of the table.

Recognition for Engel’s novels – and crime fiction in general – has come slowly. Winning the Matt Cohen Award was a major breakthrough – the first time a crime fiction writer had been recognized. Engel says he’s not without praise in his own country, but it clearly rankles that crime writers are treated as second-class writers. Now that he’s won the Matt Cohen, “Maybe I’ll be invited on Imprint [the TVO show about authors],” he says, “but I have half a mind to turn them down after 25 years and no invitation.”

Engel’s writing is now less a solitary pursuit. He still writes alone on his computer, using his own hunt-and-peck system, usually for a couple of hours in the morning and an hour in the afternoon. He can read the text as it appears on his screen but to reread it later for editing, he needs help. Don Summerhayes and another close friend, Grif Cunningham, coincidentally both retired professors from York University, come to his home once a week for a few hours to read his work back to him so he can pick up any repetitions or rough spots. Either he dictates a change immediately or he refers to his handwritten notes later and, with the help of the computer search function, makes corrections. When the manuscript comes back from his editor, his helper will read him the questions or suggestions, Engel will decide what changes to make and then dictate them. Occasionally, Engel asks for his reader’s opinion. “Sometimes, he wants to hear from me whether I agree with the bloody editor,” Cunningham says.

Both men obviously relish their contribution. Cunningham was thrilled when he held Memory Book in his hands. “I’m experiencing novel creation,” he says. Since he has recently begun to suffer from some memory loss, he jokes it can be tough when Engel can’t read and he can’t remember the names of the characters. But so far, their respective difficulties are complementary, he says.

Most sessions end with the friends walking down Bloor Street around the corner from Engel’s house to lunch at Dooney’s Café or the local Indian or Thai restaurant and a stop at Book City. And if the helper is Don Summerhayes, who is a poet and photographer as well as a retired English professor, the session will also include some time spent talking about Ernest Hemingway, a mutual passion that can preoccupy the two men for hours. For the last year, they’ve been trying – without much luck – to stop talking about Hemingway, Summerhayes says, because “it just takes over.”

Diane Turbide, editorial director at Penguin Group Canada, which publishes Engel’s novels, says one of the reasons Engel has managed to continue writing is that he has such a wide circle of friends and colleagues who enjoy his company, his quirky sense of humour and his wide-ranging interests. Using the Yiddish expression for an especially likable guy, Turbide says, “He’s a mensch.”