78. The Knot by Tim Wynne-Jones

I'm happy to have stumbled upon this Toronto-based canlit mystery/thriller, although once again, I can't remember where.  Tim Wynne-Jones is a successful author in the YA and children's picture book field, with a few adult novels earlier in his career.  The Knot is from 1982 and is centered around Toronto's even-then gentrifying Cabbagetown neighbourhood.  I imagine today that it is entirely gentrified and any of the neat characters in this book couldn't sniff a room in a boarding house there.  

The Knot in the story is a gang of errant youths who have been organized under a Fagin-like character called Gob, a seemingly crazy panhandler in a decked out wheelchair who has connections above him to more professional crime figures.  He rules the children with a powerful combination of charisma and fear, using them for petty crimes some that are just creative pranks but more importantly as observers and gatherers of data that will lead to much bigger scores.

There are quite a few characters in The Knot.  Crawford, the cop on disability leave because he got shot in the leg (and suffering psychologically from it) could be considered the protagonist.  He gets only slightly more billing than Crunkscully, the escapee from a psych hospital who is suffering from degenerative alzheimer's and is trying to remember that he is looking for his long-lost son.  Crunkscully lives in a boarding house with a great cast of the urban marginalized that used to make up so much of the character of Toronto. We also follow Stink, a 13 year-old juvenile delinquent who is the best sneaker in the Knot.  These characters lives intertwine around Gob and his plots and plans.

It's quite an enjoyable read.  You want to find out Crunkscully's backstory, who Gob is and what he is up to and you care about the characters, especially the rooming house gang who become a kind of broken and demented street irregulars for the reluctant Crawford.  There is clearly a love for working class Toronto in all its squalor and the transition to yuppiedom is well-captured.  The ending is somewhat preposterous but fun.  This is a nice little slice of Canadian genre fiction that I would recommend.

The last paragraph of the blurb is a bit much