Review | Toronto writer Sam Shelstad breaks every trope in the book in his new novel ‘Citizens of Light’

Unlikely detective figures have been known to lend a sheen of originality to crime plots dealing with murder, missing persons and inheritance schemes.

Doc Sportello, the paranoiac protagonist from Thomas Pynchon’s “Inherent Vice,” could not stop himself from unwittingly solving cases through a hash haze and, in the process, revitalized the stagnant figure of the California gumshoe. In “Groucho Marx, Master Detective,” which positioned the eponymous pratfaller as a PI between jammed-in film productions on the Paramount studio lot, Ron Goulart brought off this amalgam of the crime and showbiz genres to smart effect.

Toronto-based author Sam Shelstad is now making his own contribution to this parodic tradition of genre makeovers with his debut novel “Citizens of Light.” Call-centre operator Colleen Weagle is a recently widowed Mimico resident who dreams of writing spec scripts for CBC television dramas and sitcoms. She leads a humdrum life looking after her mother and playing an aimless video game in which she explores a desert landscape as a foot-stamping reindeer; the only wrinkles in her mild-mannered life are the short months she spent in the clutches of a death-worshipping cult called the Citizens of Light and the fact that her husband Leonard’s body was found floating in a bog under ominous circumstances.

After discovering that a man who attended Leonard’s funeral lied about his relationship to the recently departed plastics factory worker, Colleen begins chasing down leads using nothing but resourcefulness and an impressive knack for solving puzzles. With her beauteous work colleague Patti in tow, Colleen develops into a kind of Jessica Fletcher of “Murder, She Wrote” fame, perhaps the world’s foremost widow turned mystery writer.

Shelstad’s lucid writing ensures that the book’s balancing act of tones, which pirouettes between raucous humour and high-wire tension, never becomes a morass of unconsolidated elements. Patti has a bout of ill-timed diarrhea at a critical moment in the ladies’ investigation, forcing Colleen to tail a suspect through the dusky streets of Niagara Falls by her lonesome. When the suspect later discovers the would-be sleuths breaking into his home, Shelstad settles into the taut, gripping prose customary of a dime store page-turner.

These two events do not appear incongruously out of place in the book because they originate in the actions of oddball personalities and suspects dotting Colleen’s harum-scarum investigation; her sedate disposition grounds the book in the same unflappability that defines her life after surviving the horrors of cult-membership with the deranged Father Woodbine, and becomes the unifying force merging murder mystery, dirty realism and the comic novel.

In a toe-curling scene near the novel’s finale, Colleen is forced to recite the principles of the Citizens of Light, which she has carefully suppressed over the years: “Death and pain and chaos are not bad things,” she says perfunctorily. “We use hierarchies to make sense of the world and order things in our mind, but … nothing in nature is better than or less than anything else in the eye of the God-Spirit. Stepping on a rusty nail is essentially the same as, like, eating birthday cake.”

These words might as well be describing the ingenious combination of genres in “Citizens of Light,” which not only demonstrates their durability, but the recombinative potential of pairing subjects at opposite ends of the narrative spectrum — it only requires a dab hand at the helm and an inclination toward using every creative tool at their disposal.

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