Const. Benton Fraser and "Rose Marie" don't tell the whole story...

books:

	• Best Mounted Police Stories The University of Alberta Press, 1998 - 258 pages average customer review:based on 1 review view larger image
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Const. Benton Fraser and "Rose Marie" don't tell the whole story...

If these the *best* short stories about the RCMP, I'm thinking there's not much competition. It goes to the Canadian's (and others, for not all of these stories are written by Canadians) attitudes about the West and Mounties, that many of these stories are more than 100 years old. Mounties stories, says Harrison in the introduction, are typically solved non-violently, as the villian is a fugitive and therefore not a serious threat to life and property. The Mountie is defending the law, "maintaining the right," not townspeople, as in an American western. Additionally, the Northern and Western environments can be a source of conflict in itself: can our hero/ villain make it through the winter? Unlike most of the stories in this volume, "The Detachment Man" by H.J. MacDonald is set in the present in a small Sasketchewan town. "Jack Willow was, in the idiom of the RCMP, a "detachment man." Detachment is the name the force gives its posts or police stations. Since it acts as the provincial police..., several hundred detachments can be found in the small towns throughout western Canada, many of them having only one or two men." The story goes on to tell of the minutia of Willow's day, dropping the cruiser off at the garage, filling out forms, how his wife is "unpaid second man on the detachment," that the town that is dying, economically, which has foreshadowing at the story's end.

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The Mountie always gets his man. He asserts the law not by using violence but by denying it. He is a uniquely Canadian figure in the great stories of the West. Dick Harrison has collected 22 classic adventure stories by Wallace Stegner, Rudy Wiebe, Ken Mitchell, Ralph Connor, and 18 others.