Mystery Stories

Mystery Stories is inhabited by absence: strange truancies (with equally strange arrivals), missing friends, lost lovers. The survivors are left behind to navigate the pitfalls of memory while trying to make sense of lives built by people no longer present. There is the young neighbour of Reuben Sachs, an artist, who shot himself only weeks after painting an image of a hanged man. There is Reverend Graham Lund who wonders about his family's future after visiting the deathbed of a hundred-year-old woman, a woman who once was a courageous journalist. A man, blinded by war, revisits the beauty of Venice in his dreams, while a story about graffiti and lost hats turns Montreal into one of the dream cities. Men and women, both faithful and unfaithful, reflect on the past in their slow march towards mortality.

'Helwig is a member of Can Lit's old guard, one of half-a-dozen writers in this country who can regularly turn out stories that are brilliant, thick with detail, plot twist and resonance, almost casual in their technical mastery:–Douglas Glover, Introduction to Best Canadian Stories: 05

Each of these stories is a case study in loss and recovery. The characters and the times change but the mystery explored in each remains constant: What is this life that I have lived, and where have those people gone? Mystery Stories adds to Helwig's already large canon of rich, thoughtful stories populated by densely real people.