By Dahl Botterill
Thomas King is an award-winning writer who grew his fame with stellar literary fiction before expanding into nonfiction, children’s literature, poetry, and more. In the early 2000s, he delved into the mystery genre under the pseudonym of Hartley Goodweather, penning two funny and well-received detective novels to very limited fanfare, and for a decade or so, that seemed to be all we would ever see of detective-turned-photographer-turned-reluctant-detective Thumps DreadfulWater. Those two books were republished without the pseudonym shortly after The Back of the Turtle and The Inconvenient Indian made King a household name, and they found a much broader audience. Thomas King returned to the DreadfulWater mysteries and has to date given us four more; Deep House is the sixth mystery novel starring Thumps, and the series is going strong.
King’s strengths have always made his writing something special. His writing is playful and recognizes the value and beauty in everyday lives and events; King’s humour is kind and his characters so very real. Such traits made his early works stand out, but also serve his mystery writing to great effect. The setting of Chinook is a smallish town that feels more lived in with every book. Characters and locations change and grow from title to title, and the reader is drawn in by this familiarity. Characters who in so many books might be cookie-cutter placeholders providing clues or moving the plot along are instead thinking, feeling individuals that breathe life into the setting and make every little moment matter.
Deep House continues this grand tradition. It isn’t likely to be a book that changes a reader’s perspective of the world, but it will certainly draw them in and make them feel like they’re a part of what’s happening in Chinook. The mystery starts small, with an abandoned, burned-out van, and grows over time. As it grows, its many threads touch on so many aspects of Thumps’s life as to make it unavoidable, and this sense of something unseen growing is mirrored somewhat in the town, where its businesses and community are awakening and changing in the aftermath of the pandemic. Chinook is a town filled with people, and King introduces his reader to many of them. The degree to which one gets to know everybody that exists even tangentially to Thumps DreadfulWater, and the fact that he knows people just about everywhere he goes, builds up a sense of community that permeates the setting. Both the dialogue and DreadfulWater’s inner narrative are engaging and fun to read, and really set the book apart.
The mystery is teased out effectively, keeping everybody guessing while providing a momentum that ensures the reader will always want to read just a few more pages, but there is more to this book than a mystery. Were the mystery excised entirely from Deep House—no vandalism, no murder, no intrigue at all—it would still be an entertaining read about the relationships between the diverse individuals that make up a community. It would still be Thomas King.