Eric Wilson

Traveling by train across Canada, young Tom Austen gets a chance to be a detective involved in a full-scale crime investigation when a fellow passenger is murdered.

Murder on the Canadian

Maggie Gordon

I spotted this rerelease of Murder on the Canadian and immediately had flashbacks to some enjoyable afternoons in my youth. I used to love the Tom and Liz Austen mystery series! Stories like those from Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys, but with Canadian siblings who explore various places in Canada? Yes please! It's so rare for Canadian kids to read stories happening in our country that it was exciting to see places that I could actually go or had been being featured. Plus the books tended to deal with interesting issues, such as environmentalism and international politics. They were a uniquely Canadian experience!

So... how well do they hold up? Admittedly, I do not think I actually read Murder on the Canadian when I was a child, and the portrayal of Tom doesn't quite jive with my memories. This might be because he changes throughout the series, or perhaps I just put my own spin on his character in my youth. However, he's quite the jerk! He's quite mouthy with adults and not very kind. He's precocious, but definitely over the line of tolerable for me at times. 

The story is fast-paced, starting with a fake bomb threat to get readers' hearts pounding. Tom is on a rail trip across Canada to visit his grandparents, and when a murder occurs on the train, he decides he needs to solve it! I appreciated that, despite his love of detective stories, Tom didn't actually solve this mystery. The clues were there, but he didn't put them together. He's not a genius 12 year old that outsmarts the adults, but he certainly gets in a lot of trouble. Poison, stabbings, and shoot-outs are all part of this book, so parents should think about the level of violence they want their kid exposed to. 

Content note: Nothing was changed in this 40th edition, and there is a series of jokes called the "little moron" jokes. That's not cool and while I understand many of the arguments against changing literature just because values have shifted, this is a book for young kids and that language is definitely not okay. 

Overall, the book is nostalgic, but showing its age. The plot is quite readable, the setting is true to the Canadian train, but Tom's jerk level is a bit high, and there's definitely some value shifts that parents should unpack with their kids. I am definitely curious to see how the books in the series that I actually read stand up and whether Murder on the Canadian just suffers from first book syndrome.

Murder on the Canadian

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