Wrong Side of the Law: True Stories of Crime

Ellis Award–nominated Butts (The Desperate Ones) offers a dozen proofs that Canadians are not an inherently law-abiding people, although if these histories are any indication, Canadians do seem to be profoundly deficient in the art of getting away; however, foreign criminals trying their hands in Canada do not fare much better. From bootlegging to kidnapping, from smuggling to common murder, from orchestrated bank robberies to car theft, no crime seems beneath the criminal element in the Dominion of Canada, or beyond its ambitions, as revealed by Butts’s book. The author writes about obscure criminals and those who made the FBI’s most-wanted list, crooks of depressingly plebeian ambition and those whose connections reach into the loftiest offices of the nation. Butts’s prose is unremarkable but serviceable, and his focus on criminals who got caught—including some, like habitual escapees Rivard and Buckowski, who get caught several times—lends the narrative a reassuring “justice served” tone. One gets the sense that Butts could compose any number of these studies, maintaining a laudable level of competence that his subjects so often failed to achieve. (Aug.)