Slade Bio
BIOGRAPHY OF MICHAEL SLADE
Photo by Oraf
Michael Slade is the pseudonym of Vancouver criminal lawyer Jay Clarke and his collaborators. Clarke has written with his law partners, John Banks and Richard Covell; his wife, Lee Clarke; and currently writes with his daughter, Rebecca Clarke.
In real life, Slade has acted for both the defense and the prosecution in more than 100 murder cases, many involving issues of insanity. He argued the last death penalty case in the Supreme Court of Canada.
A Slade novel is best seen as a three-ringed bull's-eye. Tricks and puzzles at the center (whodunit, locked room, dying message, etc.), ringed by psychological horror, ringed by police and legal procedure.
Each novel comes out of some event in history. History was Slade's undergraduate field of study.
Slade's Special X thrillers involve the psycho-hunters of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
CRUCIFIED - his 13th novel - launched a new series about New York lawyer Wyatt Rook.
WHY SLADE WRITES WHAT HE WRITES
In the beginning, there was the myth of the Mounted Police. "The Mounties always get their man."
SINGLE HANDED by Charles M. Russell (1864 - 1926)
Michael Slade was born in Lethbridge, Alberta in May 1947. Historically, that was part of the Blackfoot Confederacy, and where the Blackfoot fought their last battle with the Cree. There, in 1869, American whisky traders established notorious Fort Whoop-Up.
Fort Whoop-Up
After the whisky-fueled Cypress Hills massacre of Assiniboine natives in 1873, the Mounted Police were formed and dispatched on the Great March west from Fort Garry in Manitoba to Fort Whoop-Up in Alberta to stop the whisky trade and establish law and order across the Canadian prairies to the Rocky Mountains.
When Slade was four months old, his parents moved from Lethbridge to Fort Garry in Winnipeg (see the story behind HEADHUNTER). So, in the first year of his life, Slade lived at both ends of the Great March that forged the Mounted Police.
In 1875, the Mounties established Fort Calgary - Gaelic for "clear, running water" - at the junction of Alberta's Bow and Elbow Rivers.
Fort Calgary
George Murdoch was born in Scotland in 1850. He came to Canada when he was four. After learning the trade of saddle and harness maker in Chicago, he worked there until Mrs. O'Leary's cow kicked over a lantern in 1871 and destroyed the city - along with everything George owned - in the Great Chicago Fire.
In 1883, George arrived in Winnipeg: "The worst place for drinking I ever saw!" From April 17 on, he kept a diary that's now in the Canadian Archives. After purchasing a wagon and team - an ox and a mule hitched together - he loaded them on a train and traveled to the end of the line: Maple Creek, Saskatchewan. On May 4, he set out alone for Fort Calgary.
George was trundling across the plains when he was overtaken by a band of Indians. They scared him with "the unearthly noise they made." Through sign language, they asked about tea and tobacco. He had none, so off they rode. Later that day, the band came thundering back. He thought he would be scalped. Instead, they gave him tea and tobacco from their camp.
On May 13, George reached the fort. "The view of the Rockies is beautiful tonight. They seem about 10 miles off, but are 45." The next day, he built a shack outside the Mounties' stronghold, and hung a business sign: Harness Maker. His customers were the Mounted Police. By living among the Blackfoot, he taught himself their language. They called him "Leather Man."
Among the settlers, James Adams was a popular fellow. The night of February 8, 1884, rumor spread that Jesse Williams had murdered Adams in McKelvie's store. Settlers tracked him through the snow to a shack at Shaganappi Point, and hotheads were all for stringing him up. "There will be no lynching here," George said. "Jesse Williams will have a fair trial." A trial was held, and Williams was hanged according to law.
George circulated the petition and raised the $100 that got the town of Calgary incorporated on November 12, 1884. The election that followed had more fistfights than speeches. When the dust settled, George was the first mayor, and they carried him shoulder high around the town in a torchlight parade.
As well as mayor, George became a justice of the peace. He presided over crimes like reckless buggy driving. His diary records a trial: "A strange sight, civilians, military, and Indians in paint looking in at the windows." He refused to enforce the law banning consumption of alcohol. He wrote it would be "suicidal." And that's how he ran afoul of Jeremiah Travis, the federally appointed magistrate bent on enforcing the law to the letter.
George vs. Jeremiah was an epic battle. A town councilor got arrested during a liquor search. Jeremiah sentenced him to six months of hard labor. George chaired a meeting of angry settlers, and led a delegation to Ottawa to protest to Parliament.
Jeremiah accused the court clerk and the editor of the Calgary Herald of being drunk on the job. He accused George of being involved in a "Calgary whisky ring." On a charge of corruption, he disqualified George from the next election, and banned him from holding office for two years. George ran for mayor anyway, and won a landslide. Jeremiah accused him of tampering with the voters' list, removed him from office, fined him $200, and appointed a new mayor.
To satisfy the fine, Jeremiah ordered an auction of George's personal possessions. No one would bid. The new mayor couldn't govern due to lack of public support. Town government ground to a halt. Jeremiah appealed to Sir John A. Macdonald, Canada's first prime minister. A judge from Winnipeg was appointed to investigate. His report recommended Jeremiah be fired for unjust, arbitrary, and perhaps illegal actions. The liquor law was repealed.
So thanks to George, a thirsty soul can now get a decent spirited drink in Alberta.
Michael Slade is George Murdoch's great-grandson. Every summer, his parents took him to the Calgary Stampede. His earliest memory is of sitting in the saddle with a redcoated Mountie, surrounded by feathered Blackfoot, Blood, and Peigan in full warpaint. Both parents were history buffs, so Slade grew up on the history of where he lived, where he had lived, and the pioneer stories in George Murdoch's 235-page frontier diary. In one, recorded on the day George arrived at Fort Calgary, the Mounties rode into an Indian camp to arrest several braves. A swarm of irate squaws made it so hot for them that they were forced to retreat - unlike in SINGLE HANDED above - without "getting their men."
Over the years, Slade absorbed the straight-arrow myth of the Mounties. He read comics about Sergeant Preston of the Yukon and his trusty dog, King, and watched them on TV.
He saw ROSE MARIE cradled in the arms of a Mountie crooning "Indian Love Call"; and Randolph Scott and Shirley Temple in SUSANNAH OF THE MOUNTIES; and Gary Cooper in Cecil B. DeMille's NORTH WEST MOUNTED POLICE; and Alan Ladd in SASKATCHEWAN; and Jack Nicholson and Marlon Brando in MISSOURI BREAKS; and DUDLEY DO-RIGHT, the cartoon...
None of which seemed to capture the tough flesh-and-blood Mounties in Slade's upbringing, nor those he later encountered as a criminal lawyer in hundreds of real-life courtroom battles.
A downturn in the economy in the early 1980s resulted in the legal aid budget shrinking by fifty percent. To fill the resulting gap in government-funded criminal cases, Slade set to work on writing a hardboiled thriller about the Mounted Police that would draw on his family history and use his many contacts in the RCMP, the morgue, and the forensic lab. Since then, the Mounties have taken him out on patrol, invited him to the Red Serge Ball, and asked him to speak at regimental dinners.
First published in 1984, the Special X novels are now in their third decade.