Soft border, Soft-boiled: Cultural and Environmental Crime in Howard Engel’s Niagara Frontier Detective Novels

Abstract

This paper reads Howard Engel’s novels Murder on Location (1982) and Dead and Buried (1990) through border theory and as a form of border theory. Engel uses a soft-boiled comic Canadian variant of the hard-boiled American detective novel to explore sites, situations, and symbols of national sovereignty and examine cross-border cultural and ecological flows across the ‘soft border’ between Canada and the United States along the Niagara frontier, where Engel sets his Benny Cooperman series (1980–2018).