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Five Things Literary: Baldwin Village, Chinatown and More, with Lee Lamothe
Submitted by Grace on February 6, 2014 - 1:28pm
As part of our mapping of literary Ontario, we're highlighting five things about literary life in communities throughout the province. What do our neighbourhoods have to offer writers, readers and the curious? Follow Five Things Literary to find out. Today's feature on literary life in Toronto was contributed by Lee Lamothe, whose newest book Presto Variations (Dundurn) brings his popular detectives Ray Tate and Djuna Brown back to the page. This time, the pair finds themselves hot on the trail of international drug smugglers and a madman of a kingpin. Lee tells us about life near the Baldwin Village area of downtown Toronto, from mobsters to police surveillance and much more. _________________________________ Five Things Literary: Baldwin Village, Chinatown and MoreIn my neighbourhood there’s no literary stuff, but it has everything that I need for my writing. I live in the important zone for me as a crime writer: police headquarters is a couple of blocks away, the Crown Attorney’s office is even closer. The courthouses are all within fifteen minutes. All those places contain old pals with tales to tell. The massage racks and the geography of extortion in Chinatown are a short and tasty walk away; Little Italy, where my touchstones as a long-ago working newspaperman — mostly mob murders and bombings — is a brisk twenty minute stroll. Some of those old bad guys remember me, but there’s no hard feelings and we talk, mostly about food. One of them, one day, took me into the kitchen of his restaurant and had the chef show me how to make veal saltimbocca.
There’s an office building sitting on prime real estate that’s owned by a waiter at a nearby restaurant who works every lunchtime and looks like a slob.
There’s a half-dozen Chinatown buildings, all connected by knocked-out cellar walls and where gambling clubs are prolific. Once, back in the 1960s, an RCMP wire team went into one of the cellars and found, covered in two inches of dust, a pair of huge headphones laying on a desk. Wires led to holes in the wall. An old surveillance operation that someone forgot about or simply walked away from when the money ran out or the priorities changed.
A short walk from my apartment takes me into Baldwin Street when one of the restaurants, owned by a Chinese gentleman who was described to me as looking like a Chinese Charles Bronson, serves good cheap food, mostly because the operator doesn’t need, or necessarily want, to make a profit. He just needs the paperwork. He joined us and talked about the bad old days of the late 1950s and 1960s in Chinatown. The wars. The battles. How he might have been less than a good soul then, but now everyone knew he was a good man in the community. It was a strange conversation: I’d spent a lot of time in Chinatown when I was a teenager. We were about the same age. He told the story about being arrested after getting in a fight with the evil white boys who came along Dundas Street mocking the locals, sparking some discontent and even violence. It turned out, we found, that I was one of those evil white boys; in fact we sort of remembered each other. My wife was amazed. I like amazing my wife. If I can amaze my wife, I can amaze anyone. Many years later someone leaked a CSIS report on Chinese organized crime to me and there he was, someone who played both sides of the street. So, while I regret the lack of authentic bookstores in my neighbourhood, and while I actually don’t know a single writer at all, and only a single poet, I don’t need the literary world or predatory bookshops to bring me the literary. I know crooks and cops and journalists and lawyers and that’s the world I mine for my writing. If I need a spark of creativity, I only have to walk along Bay Street or College Street or Dundas Street or University Avenue and I bump into someone and I’m back on my game.
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