Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere by John McFetridge

Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere Reviews

• 
  Adam

  John Mcfetridge has crafted three (to date) interwoven novels set in modern Toronto a city filled to the brim with numerous ethnic groups, corruption, gentrification, and organized crime. The latter represented mainly by the Hell’s Angels (thinly disguised here) who have in recent years seized violent control of Canada’s rackets. Mcfetridge writes these novels as a dead pan documentaries moving from character to character (some appearing once, some as ongoing characters) from cops to crooks to create a patchwork of a city at work. Woven through each of these books is a variation on a classic Elmore Leonard style caper and each has a standalone plot, but they are better read as one long going novel. Lots of repetition here some good and some didn’t work (I never want to hear about bikers in golf shirts again) and dead pan humor and irony. Which one to start with, Dirty Sweet is the least essential, but the most fun so start there.
• 
  Paul

  4*
• 
  Cybercrone

  Reading this gave me headaches. I can't put my finger on exactly what it was about the writing style,
  but I found it truly dreadful to read.
  
  The story wasn't that good either, to compensate, and the characters were neither well nor fully drawn.
  
  I found it just a complete waste of time.
• 
  Corey

  Kelli relaxed. She'd seen the inside of a lot of Beamers and Mercs and, hell, even Land Rovers since coming to Toronto a month back. She looked at the guy, cheapskate biz boy in his thirties, and thought he wasn't so bad, really, just acting tough. It was always good to get the first one of the night out of the way.
  She looked up and saw a man's face, floating, hanging in the sky. He looked her right in the eye.
  Then he smashed into the windshield.
  The cheapskate screamed like a girl.
  And Kelli just stared at the face on the spiderweb of broken glass. The blood and bits of brain and bone. He must have fallen the full twenty-five floors.
  From Everybody Knows This is Nowhere
  
  After the publication of his debut novel
  Dirty Sweet, the parallels between John McFetridge and that master of crime fiction
  Elmore Leonard were readily apparent. Both novelists concern themselves with criminals slightly less smart than they put on, and police slightly smarter than they let on. Both imbue their primary settings (Leonard has Detroit, McFetridge, Toronto) with a heady grit and coarseness that elevates the status of the cities above that of narrative backdrops to that of major characters. Both write deliciously crunchy dialogue which sting the reader with their own unique urban patois.
  
  Now, upon reading McFetridge's second, Everybody Knows This is Nowhere, it is apparent McFetridge is no mere clone of Leonard. Dirty Sweet was entertaining, but McFetridge could have settled at that point into a nice career as a second-rater with flashes of brilliance (read:
  Tim Dorsey). Everybody Knows showcases a writer coming into his own. Granted, the parallels with the master (what else could you call Leonard at this point in his career?) are still present, but McFetridge had broadened the distance between the two, creating a Toronto as dangerous-cool as Leonard's Detroit, yet somehow sharper, more angular. Leonard's Detroit is a grungy yet somehow loveable creation; you could see yourself living there, enjoying the dingyness. McFetridge's Toronto is permeated with grime and murk, both physically and morally. While his overall style may be closer to Leonard's, McFetridge's Toronto is far more malevolent in tone, closer to the bleakness of
  Ed McBain's fabled city of Isola in his 87th Precinct series [sidenote: Please read McBain, everyone. No better American writer of the police procedural has ever been produced.]. This Toronto is not a family-friendly city, but a metropolis of cynicism and spite; "[No] one noticed. Or no one cared. After all,it wasn't keeping people away from downtown shopping or bringing down real estate values. Toronto built its ghetto way out in the burbs, never thinking it was a growth industry."
  
  McFetridge crafts a labyrinth and distinctly cinematic crime drama with Everybody Knows, flipping back and forth between drug dealers and police officers as they go about their daily routines. There's the detectives Armstrong and Bergeron, staking out a possible grow-op while embroiled in a missing child case; Bobbi, a woman with a faulty electronic tracking device on her ankle and a chance on making serious cash with her grow-op; Nugs, a thug with more smarts than you could guess; and more characters than can be easily accounted for. When you add in the mob, mcguffins, backstabbings and reversals, and dizzing subplots, you get one hell of a delicious read.
  
  Plot-wise, Everybody Knows is a bit of a shaggy dog, with loose ends dangling everywhere, but that's part of its allure; these are a few days in the lives of its characters, where there is not so much a mystery as there is a confluence of circumstances that draws everyone together at different times. Where McFetridge really shines, much like as Leonard, is in his atmosphere, created by a narrative style so condensed and stark and frosted over by winter's chill it threatens to recast Leonard's already pared-down prose as overtly purple.
  
  McFetridge is fast becoming the noir writer of the Canadian urban landscape (yes, there is too a Canadian urban landscape). Dirty Sweet hinted at the talent; Everybody Knows This is Nowhere stops hinting, and smacks you in the jaw.
• 
  Michael

  The action spreads quickly in this dialogue friendly novel. A man falls from or is thrown from a high rise, a 10 year old girl is abducted and rescued, a torso is found, immigration issues are brought out and drug deals are everywhere.
  
  Gord Bergeron is a detective in Toronto. He's back on the road after a period of desk duty while his wife was fighting a losing battle with cancer. His partner is Det. Armstrong.
  
  Sharon MacDonald is a dealer who wants Richard Trmeblay to front her 4 lbs of weed but he has a condition. There's a new competitor on the scene named Ray. He's offered a large quantity of week. No one knows about him. Richard wants Sharon to find out about him and make sure he's not a cop.
  
  Richard is part of a drug dealing group that worked out of Montreal but relocated to Toronto. He wants more control and to raise the price of his product.
  
  Sharon and Ray become friendly and discuss partnering and moving away from Toronto. Ray offers to sell his organization to Richard. However, Richard has other ideas that are deadly.
  
  Except for Gord, there isn't much character development but the dialogue is snappy. It is reminiscent of Elmore Leonard's writing and it zips across the pages and tells a pleasant story.
  
  Recommended.
• 
  Robin Spano

  He got me from page 1. I knew I liked McFetridge's style because of some clips I'd read on his website. He's honest and dark and understands how people work. The book was better than I'd hoped; sexier, grittier, and somehow more emotional. Here's why:
  
  1.The immediacy. I felt like I was walking through the book, inside the characters' heads, seeing, feeling, even tasting the Scotch they were drinking.
  
  2.The plot. I live a stable, conservative life, free of crime and intrigue. Because I felt like I was riding along in the cop cars and seeing the insides of sleazy massage parlors, I felt cool. Way cooler than I am.
  
  3.The dialogue. God, did it ever sound natural. Not boring natural, how people really talk, but boiled down to the gritty essence of how we would talk if we could edit ourselves for redundancy.
  
  4.The end. It left me somewhere different from where I started. I can't say more, because I recommend that you read this book.
  
  John McFetridge gets compared to Elmore Leonard a lot. I've never read Leonard's books, but I've just bought one because of the comparison.
• 
  Adam McPhee

  Really liked it. Pulp fiction set in the condohell of Toronto. A lot of shady characters you can picture existing: a crooked cop, shady masseuse, drug dealer mom on house arrest, bikers relocating from Montreal and an immigrant artist turned forger. The ending is a bit too quick, but otherwise a great novel. Will definitely read more from this author.
• 
  Brandon Nagel

  Another winner. Highly recommended. SWAP is next.