Reid Bennett

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Created by Ted Wood
Pseudonyms include Jack Barn
(1931-2019)

“Reid Bennett is one of the most interesting series whodunit heroes of the decade.”
— Chicago Sun-Times

Not really a private eye, but like James Lee Burke’s Dave Robicheaux or Chester Himes’ Grave Coffin Ed Johnson & Digger Jones, Ted Wood’s two-fisted REID BENNETT is a police officer who doesn’t act very much like one.

But the influences of Reid, the sole police officer serving the tiny (but surprisingly crime-ridden) vacation hamlet Murphy’s Harbour in the Muskoka region of northern Ontario, go far beyond his simply being a particularly independent-minded cop.

He’s got a quixotic streak that would do Travis McGee or Philip Marlowe proud, a cold-blooded kick-ass pragmatism and hands-on approach to justice that owes a lot to Men’s Adventure paperbacks from the seventies. There’s also  a healthy dollop of Boy’s Adventure books here, given that Reid most trusted crime fighting ally is his prodigiously intelligent German Shepherd, Sam.

The series is full of guns and fistfights and the manly art of a man doing what a man’s gotta do, chockfull of  bush pilots, miners, prospectors, bears, black-hearted villiams, black flies, tourists, canoes and plenty of wandering around in the woods. Clearly we’re deep into Sergeant Preston of the Northwest Mounted territory here; the sort of pandering Canadian stereotypes instantly recognizable around the world—even  in Canada, where they’re  taken with a large sense of campish irony. For hosers of a certain age, think Mike Hammer in Rainbow Country.

The books did fairly well, both in Canada and abroad, and that’s because Wood knew how to keep things moving. They’re a little pulpy, and a lot of fun.

And about halfway through the series, Reid does begin to take on private clients, most notably in When the Killing Starts (1989), where he’s hired to track down a woman’s young son, who seems to have fallen under the spell of a military cult, and in On the Inside (1990), where he agrees to go undercover as a cop in a mining town to sniff out suspected corruption within the force. In Snowjob (1993), he journeys to Vermont to help an old friend out of a jam

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Bennett  appeared in ten novels by Ted Wood, a big name in Canadian crime fiction, being one of the first Canadian crime writers to set his books in Canada. He was born in England, but emigrated to Canada in 1954, where he worked as a police officer for the Toronto police force, and later as a copy writer and creative director for a Toronto advertising company. His first novel, Dead in the Water, which introduced Reid Bennett, was published in 1983, and from 1987 to 1988, Wood served as president of the Crime Writers of Canada, which had only been around for a few years at the time. Under the Jack Barn pen name, he also wrote three thrillers about featuring two-fisted bodyguard/private eye and former SAS expert John Locke.

UNDER OATH

  • “The opening paragraphs of the book hit like a ton of bricks and instantly reminded me of tight-fisted characters from a Max Allan Collins or Mickey Spillane novel,”
    — Paperback Warrior on Dead on the Water

NOVELS

FURTHER INVESTIGATION

Respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith.

Published

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