Motive: Crime & Mystery Festival takes over Harbourfront

This weekend, for the second year in a row, Toronto’s Harbourfront will become a hotbed of crime, murder and deceit — in the literary sense, at least.

The second annual Motive: Crime & Mystery Festival, an adjunct of the Toronto International Festival of Authors, takes place at Harbourfront Friday through Sunday. Following last year’s inaugural event, one of the first in-person literary festivals after the COVID-19 lockdowns, it repeats the format in its combination of readings, panel conversations and master classes focusing on the craft of writing in the crime genre.

Roland Gulliver, TIFA’s director and the mastermind behind Motive, recalls with a certain frisson the uncertainty coming out of broad COVID restrictions and not knowing for sure if an in-person festival would be possible or if audiences would respond. The first part worked out and, according to Gulliver, the second met or even exceeded expectations.

“There are some really amazing things about it in terms of how we build new audiences,” Gulliver said. “This is something that hopefully a different audience can connect to.”

Any literary festival will encounter challenges with scheduling, getting authors to agree to travel and getting publishers to fund them. If anything, Gulliver suggested, this last factor offered the greatest obstacle in the run-up to this year’s festival. “The challenge in the industry is that people have to work a lot harder to get the budget to do things,” he said.

Despite that, Gulliver and his team have rounded up a stellar slate of authors and presenters for the festival’s sophomore year, including Canadians Linwood Barclay, Margaret Cannon, Maureen Jennings and Sheena Kamal, among many other names from home and abroad.

Here are five highlights to explore at the Motive: Crime & Mystery Festival:

Age of Vice: Deepti Kapur

The festival’s opening day features one of the most buzzed-about books of the first half of 2023. A sprawling gangster epic that the Guardian called “India’s answer to ‘The Godfather,’” Kapoor’s second novel is a furiously paced family epic about greed, corruption, betrayal and murder. The author will appear online in a pre-recorded event during which she will discuss her writing process and the inspiration for her critically acclaimed new novel. This event is free to watch on the Motive website. (Friday, 3 p.m.)

Critical Conversation: Bearing Witness

One of the festival’s most interesting series, “Critical Conversation” looks at trends and currents in contemporary crime with a focus on non-fiction authors and subjects. In this event, two Canadian authors talk about trauma within the justice system. Legal scholar Kent Roach, author of “Wrongfully Convicted,” addresses the reasons why innocent people are sent to prison, and how this disproportionately affects racialized, Indigenous and impoverished members of society. Tamara Cherry’s new book “Trauma Beat” focuses on how journalists cover true crime stories and the potential for revictimizing families and loved ones caught in the media’s lens. (Friday, 7 p.m., Brigantine Room)

Tea, Cake & Murder with Jessa Maxwell and Amy Stuart

Cosy detective stories and high tea seem to go together like peaches and cream; in this event, tea and cake will accompany a presentation of two new works by bestselling women crime writers. American Jessa Maxwell appears with her debut novel “The Golden Spoon,” a whodunnit set in a Vermont mansion. And Canadian thriller writer Amy Stuart returns with a stand-alone novel, “A Death at the Party,” which puts a murderous spin on Virginia Woolf’s classic English novel “Mrs Dalloway.” (Saturday, 3 p.m., Lakeside Terrace)

Newfoundland Noir: The Toronto launch of “Closer By Sea” by Perry Chafe

The Rock becomes the site for mystery and intrigue in the latest novel by author, producer and songwriter Perry Chafe. The former showrunner of the popular CBC series “Republic of Doyle” will repartner with that show’s star and fellow Newfoundlander, Allan Hawco, for a lively conversation about Chafe’s novel, which combines the disappearance of a young girl with a story of family connections and the history of Newfoundland. Billed as a combination book launch and kitchen party, the event will feature music and drink, and surprise special guest appearances. (Saturday, 8 p.m., Brigantine Room)

Global Issues on the Page: Ausma Zehanat Kahn and Kevin Powers

Kobo’s Nathan Maharaj moderates this conversation between Arthur Ellis Award winner Ausma Zehanat Khan and Kevin Powers, whose novel “The Yellow Birds” won the Guardian First Book Award and the PEN/Hemingway Award. Kahn, a dual Canadian-American citizen, and Powers, a veteran of the Iraq War, will discuss their latest novels, with a focus on how crime fiction can help shed light on real-world issues such as racism, police corruption and post-traumatic stress. (Sunday, 7:45 p.m., Brigantine Room)

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