ABSTRACT
This chapter uses John McFetridge’s Eddie Dougherty series (2014–2016) as a case study of Canadian crime fiction that investigates the history and legacies of French/English relations in Canada. McFetridge’s novels are set in the 1970s and use philosophical anachronism to highlight the trajectory of tensions that led to referenda on Quebec sovereignty in 1980 and 1995. McFetridge interrogates Hugh MacLennan’s classic metaphor of English and French Canada as “two solitudes,” instead using the concept of liminality common to crime fiction to locate in Eddie Dougherty an optimism that resonates with the Canadian history of representing the police figure as an ultimately positive force.
