Last year, Greg Rhyno won my heart forever with his (unlicensed) PI Dame Polara, reluctantly solving crimes in an evocatively rendered Toronto. Even better? Who By Fire was the first in a series, which Rhyno has followed up a year later with the just-as-excellent Who By Water, in which the reader finds Dame now as a besotted single mother toting around a two-year-old, which makes moonlighting as a sleuth even more inconvenient than ever. But Dame has no choice once her ex-husband turns up head and it turns out that Dame herself is being framed for his murder.
In our conversation, we talk about how the project of the Dame Polara Mystery series began, what it was like to create a character whose life was so different from his own, his more aspirational (snobby?) influences as a younger writer, and the writers that showed him how to come into a voice that was all his own. We also talk about Rhyno’s affection for postmodern literature and how, via Paul Auster, he fell backward into loving dective fiction, which would bring him to create Dame and her literary world.
After barely surviving her last case, Dame Polara trades her part-time detective gig for the safer — though no less chaotic — life of a single, working mother, picking up toys instead of picking locks, chasing after her two-year-old instead of chasing crooks.
But when her ex-husband inexplicably drowns, and Dame becomes the prime suspect in his murder investigation, she must work alongside the woman who ruined her marriage to unravel the mystery of the man they both loved.
Dame’s sleuthing takes her to dive bars, industrial ports, and eventually, Toronto Island, where her ex spent his final days with a community of secretive and temperamental artists.
As she comes closer to the complicated truth, Dame realizes that in order to clear her name and protect her family, she’ll have to re-examine everything she thought she knew about the people she loved and left behind.
Greg Rhyno is the author of the Dame Polara mystery series from Cormorant Books, including Who by Fire, which was nominated for a Crime Writers of Canada Award of Excellence. His debut novel, To Me You Seem Giant (NeWest Press), was nominated for a ReLit Award and an Alberta Book Publishing Award. He completed an MFA at the University of Guelph and lives with his family in Guelph, Ontario.
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