Tuesday, December 19, 2006

Goin' down the road

from CBC.ca:

A murder victim found north of Toronto in 1968 was identified by police on Tuesday as Richard (Dickie) Hovey of New Brunswick.

Ontario Provincial Police made the breakthrough in the nearly 40-year-old case after publicizing a facial reconstruction of the victim and offering a $50,000 reward for information leading to the killer.

[...]

Hovey moved to Toronto from Fredericton in 1966 or 1967 and was working as a musician in the city's Yorkville area, then a counterculture haven, police said.

Investigators say Hovey disappeared in the late spring or early summer of '67, and believe he was 17 at the time of his death.


One question remains: who will be the first to turn this story into a novel? If a mystery writer gets to it first, the result will be a 275-page book full of corny dialogue and undigested research into the era, and with little psychological insight into the Hovey character, but with a storyline that is packed with incident and is expertly paced. If a more literary writer gets to it, the result will be a 450-page book full of corny dialogue and undigested research into the era, and with a storyline that crawls along on its belly, fattened on metaphor and symbol and aphoristic filigree, but starved of incident. In his psychological makeup, the Hovey character will be a near-exact match for the author's own idealized self.

That's my prediction, anyway.

2 comments:

Ognir Rrats said...

For some reason I can't help thinking of my favourite line from Trailer Park Boys.

Ricky:"Fuck this, I'm gonna move to Toronto and become a street person."

fredericton said...

When Dickie hitchhiked from Fredericton to Toronto he was very young but a very talented guitar player. When he left here he KNEW he
he was going to make it in the music scene. Please don't belittle his short life by comparing him to a character from a trashy sitcom.

    A very subtle and funny writer - one I've become obsessed with over the past year - in a decidedly Muriel Spark mood. Imagine The Pr...