Jared Bland, former Globe and Mail and House of Anansi editor and one-time publisher at McClelland & Stewart, confesses that all through his time working behind the scenes in publishing, not once did he consider writing from a literary vantage point.
“I wrote a lot of emails when I was the head of M&S,” he told the Star, “but I didn’t write creatively at all. It wasn’t on my mind then.
“When I left (M&S parent company) Penguin Random House Canada,” he continued, “I had to rebuild my life. I was recovering from some pretty serious health problems and was thinking through how to live a life differently.”
Perhaps the most momentous results of this new direction are two books set to be released in the span of a year: a literary novel called “The Harmony” will land on bookshelves in August 2027, while a debut crime novel (written under the pseudonym “Alex Spring”) is available now.
The first in a planned series of novels about a reluctant detective figure, “Lower City” (Random House Canada) introduces readers to 26-year-old steelworker Danny Clarke, living a humdrum life in Hamilton under the shadow of his dead and disgraced father, an RCMP undercover officer who went rogue.
When a group of masked citizens orchestrate kidnappings of high-profile Hamilton figures in a bid to overcome their feelings of “white working class economic anxiety” — the mayor’s wife and a mafioso’s son are abducted in broad daylight — Clarke gets accidentally tangled up in the investigation when he witnesses the kidnapping of his CFO at the Braden Steel plant.
A tale of two authors
Bland says the germ for “Lower City” was a desire to move away from the high literary sensibilities he was cultivating while working on “The Harmony” (hence the pen name), which was completed before he even began devising the world of Danny Clarke.
“I wanted to write something very fun and suspenseful and fast-paced after finishing ‘The Harmony,’” Bland said. “I’m a lifelong reader and lover of crime novels, so I mostly wrote ‘Lower City’ for myself. I knew while writing it that it would have to be a little bit faster and bend some rules in terms of how slow and deliberative publishing tends to be.”
Verbally pitching to Penguin Random House Canada publisher Sue Kuruvilla, Bland was able to write a film-style treatment that laid out the themes, setting and plot of the proposed series; he then met with various PRHC departments — publicity, marketing, editorial, design — to solicit feedback and ideas for building an ambitious facsimile of Steeltown that was, paradoxically, a cross between HBO’s “The Wire” and “Scooby-Doo.”
Writing under an accelerated timeline — Bland describes the process as being analogous to the way a short-order cook would “reach up and take a ticket (that I had written myself) before preparing the meal” — Bland commenced work on “Lower City” in October 2025 and completed a draft in a 39 days.
Society’s children
The book’s sequel, “Delta West” has already been announced, and will be written in a comparable timeline, which affords Bland opportunities to be topical and write about subjects that are foremost in the minds of Canadians.
“I need to actually know what the world feels like in order to create a story that resonantly explores it,” said Bland, about his decision to write “Lower City” against the backdrop of a then looming trade war, economic instability and Donald Trump’s tariffs.
“I was thinking about S.A. Cosby’s ‘All the Sinners Bleed,’ specifically the way he writes about the American Deep South in a way that uses setting to explore class and race issues or societal tensions, as well as Louise Penny’s Armand Gamache books. I remember how wonderful it was to read about a radiant decency and compassion at the heart of a genre that’s full of people doing bad things.”
Once Bland had the parameters of his story in place — working-class Hamilton in 2025 and a Gen Z detective with a heart of gold — his mind turned to the elements that made “Nancy Drew,” “The Hardy Boys” and other young-adult media franchises such cultural touchstones.
“I wanted to explore the types of stories that put younger, idealistic people in conflict with the world,” Bland said. “What does it mean to be in your mid-20s at this moment? Danny is world-weary, adrift, and lost in a lot of ways, but he’s starting to contemplate the enormity of the suffering of the world in front of him. Younger people and the world that they’re colliding with is really inspiring to me.”
Danny may be white and working class, but while his co-workers are increasingly becoming disaffected and swayed by conservative podcasts that blame certain economic realities on immigration and other socio-political factors, he is able to preserve a healthy dose of skepticism.
Danny’s cousins Kabir and Priya are mixed race, and growing up within a South Asian household with his aunt Rupinder has ensured that Danny can at least rebuff racist sentiments privately. But when his ex-girlfriend Sam writes Danny an impassioned letter about the reasons for their breakup, he decides to make a change in his life and pursue the kidnapping case with the assistance of Kabir, Priya and their jerry-rigged AI-engine that they dub “Nancy.”
“Sometimes it’s like you think you’re a bystander in your own life,” Sam writes Danny. “You don’t take action. You don’t make decisions. You don’t follow through. Like, if you see someone say something sh—ty or racist or ugly or just mean to another person, you’ll shake your head and sigh, and then complain about it later. But you won’t stand up in the moment and try to stop it.”
‘Spectrum of immorality’
Bland believes this kind of inaction in the face of dog-whistling xenophobia and racist public policy are symptomatic of a much bigger societal problem.
“One of the things that I was consciously trying to do was to use Hamilton as a microcosm of things at play in the broader Canadian cultural ether,” Bland said. “The book does live in this semi-real, dream version of the city — there is a history of Mafia activity in Hamilton, for example — but there’s also this rage and masculinist, alt-right adjacency stuff that you see everywhere right now.
“It’s something that I felt tired of witnessing,” he continued. “I wanted to try to put some thoughts on paper about that phenomenon. But I wanted it to be multi-dimensional too and have an allowance of empathy for certain people.”
The kidnappers represent what could be called a “spectrum of immorality”: there are the dyed-in-the-wool bigots, the misguided malcontents, and then of course the young and impressionable outcasts who merely want to experience belonging. Bland believes that this distinction is an important one, and moreover that social commentary in fiction is perfectly valid, but remains an empty gesture if counterfactual thinking does not lead to any kind of moral conclusion.
“I wanted the space to critique, but my way of critiquing is to offer an alternative,” Bland said. “By the end of the book, Danny learns to meet disaffection, anger, hatred and resentment with connection, love, care and compassion.
“If I’ve done my job well, there’s empathy to be had for most of the people in the book, but perhaps not all.”
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