Patrick Bird, the detective at the centre of The Road to Heaven makes plenty of mistakes —enough to fill a whole novel. He’s impulsive, artless, uncouth. He’s out of shape, out of sync, and pretty much out of his mind by the end of the book. He solved the mystery: he found Abbie Linklater, the missing teen at the centre of the puzzle; he found the body at the Edgewater Hotel; and he even found the killer. But solving the mystery seems a product of his flaws rather than a triumph over them.
The Road to Heaven ends, the sun is setting on Queen Street, and the bright light reflects from a plate-glass window opposite; it’s the summer of 1965, and Patrick Bird is twenty-four years old. The world still has a lot in store for the city and its young detective. Time will move forward. Toronto will grow: the Leafs win their last Stanley Cup, suburbs sprawl, Neil Young shares the stage with Rick James in Yorkville, George Chuvalo and Muhammad Ali fight at Maple Leaf Gardens, Caribana parades down Yonge Street, Ontario Place emerges out of the lake, the Spadina Expressway is stopped short in midtown, Canada’s first school shooting shocks quiet Brampton, the Blue Jays start to play ball, and the world’s tallest building shoots out of the downtown railyards and into the sky. And that’s all before 1980.
And what of Patrick Bird? What will happen to him? Do we really think he’s going to give up sleuthing forever after his failures in The Road to Heaven?
What if he did give it up? If he settled down and married his favourite waitress, and they were expecting their first child, living a peaceful life on a leafy street; if one day the phone rang, and it was his mother-in-law and she wanted him to come down to her Ossington Avenue rooming house to help her out because one of the tenants had disappeared into the night without paying the rent. Patrick would want to help, to go and see what he could do to support his family. And what if the missing tenant turned up dead, under a rollercoaster at the CNE; and one of the neighbouring tenants at the rooming house turned out to be James Earl Ray, the fugitive who just days earlier had assassinated Dr. Martin Luther Jr. in Memphis, Tennessee before crossing the border to hide in Toronto?
What if?
It sounds like detective Bird, expectant father, not so young as once was, out of work, out of luck, out the investigating world, might be back in business after all. And in way over his head.
What if the sequel to The Road to Heaven was centred around this little known piece of Toronto history when James Earl Ray lived in Toronto for six weeks in the summer of 1968?
Alexis Stefanovich-Thomson won the 2023 Crime Writers of Canada Best Crime Novella Award. The Road to Heaven is his first novel featuring detective Patrick Bird. He lives in Toronto. Learn more here.