My book launch last week was held in an important place: Gabby’s, the favorite bar of our friend Michael Finlay. Michael was a former CBC radio producer who died in Toronto last February after being assaulted only metres from Gabby’s. While walking down Danforth Avenue, Michael was pushed into a large concrete planter. He suffered broken ribs and a punctured lung, and died a few days later of a heart attack. Police soon named a suspect in the crime, releasing images from security videos. Robert Robin Cropeared Wolf, who is now 44, later turned himself into police. He’s been held in jail ever since, charged with manslaughter.

The date for a preliminary hearing was set not long before I launched my latest novel, Far Creek Road. The hearing will take place from February 12 to 15 in the new courthouse in downtown Toronto. As a reminder, a preliminary hearing is when the Crown presents its case against a defendant. It might result in a guilty plea or a plea bargain, meaning in this case that the Crown might allow the defendant to plead guilty to a lesser charge than manslaughter. It might also mean the defendant pleads not guilty and is sent to trial. 

I’ll be attending the preliminary hearing, although I can’t report on what’s said while the hearing is underway. A publication ban is in effect, although if the defendant pleads guilty, I can write about the hearing then. If the case goes to trial, some of what is said in the hearing might come out in court, at which point it becomes public and I can pass it on then. Once the jury is sequestered—if there is a jury trial—I can write what was said in the preliminary hearing unless the judge seals some or all of the evidence presented. I will be able to write about the case generally after a verdict comes down, again presuming that the judge doesn’t seal any evidence. To honour Michael, I’ll write what I can.

But those are the legalities. I wanted to hold the book launch at Gabby’s because Michael knew about the novel I was writing but didn’t live to read it. Far Creek Road is set on the suburban North Shore of Vancouver, where I grew up and where Michael went to high school. I didn’t know him then, being a few years younger. We only met when I went to work on The Ubyssey student newspaper at the University of B.C. When I showed up at the beginning of my first year, Michael had already served as editor of the paper and moved on to do his master’s degree in creative writing. But he still hung around the newsroom, and in my second year, I moved into a grungy student house where Michael lived with his then-girlfriend, several other student journalists, a mother and baby, and three cats. 

I wrote a tribute to Michael earlier this year, and his wake was held shortly afterwards at Gabby’s, when a great many of us said goodbye. But I wanted to hold the launch there as well to imagine that he was still with us, looking up from the crossword at his favorite table, and saying rather crankily, “What are you on about now, Krueger?” Ask me if I ever expected a friend to be murdered, and only blocks from where I live. It’s a shock that keeps reverberating, the explosions moving out in circles that haven’t yet diminished.

Both Michael and I lived in North Vancouver, but I’ve called the suburb Grouse Valley in the novel, since the landscape is important to me but the characters and incidents are fictional. North Van is on the slopes of Grouse Mountain, and I grew up near Mosquito Creek, which becomes Far Creek in the novel. My main character is a nine-year-old girl, Tink Parker, and the story follows her adventures in the year leading up to the Cuban Missile Crisis. Tink is the uncomprehending witness to neighbourhood affairs and betrayals, blurting out secrets and stumbling on trauma. As the Missile Crisis looms, a witch hunt begins against the leftist parents of her best friend, Norman. And Tink’s world unravels.

Here’s how Tink describes her neighbourhood near the start of the book:

“Our street ran down the mountain parallel to Far Creek, and everyone’s backyards ended in fences. Behind them, the forest marched in high stately fashion down to the creek, high trunks like giant’s legs stepping politely around the huckleberry bushes and salal with berries we thought were poisonous, although it turns out they weren’t. This was in the Vancouver suburb of Grouse Valley in the mountains of the North Shore, our houses set into a temperate rain forest at the far edge of the western world.”

I read that at the launch, and since many of the people there had been at Michael’s wake, I reminded them that this was where he spent several of his teenage years. My friend, journalist Ann Rauhala, asked a few questions after the reading, and made a remark that stays with me. She said that while she understood Grouse Valley as a specific place portrayed at a particular time in history—one experienced by me and Michael and a few others in the pub—it also reminded her of her own suburban childhood in northern Ontario. We all grew up in a specific place and we all had to face universal mysteries. 

As people always have, I agreed.

At his table, Michael might have reacted with one of cynical snorts. “Is that philosophy, Krueger, or have we descended to promo?” 

“What do you think launches are about, Michael?” 

“Beer,” he might have replied, adding more shyly, “There’ll be some sort of book in there, too. Good work, Lester.”

I’ll report on the hearing when I can.