About Me

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Melfort, Saskatchewan, Canada
I am a lawyer in Melfort, Saskatchewan, Canada who enjoys reading, especially mysteries. Since 2000 I have been writing personal book reviews. This blog includes my reviews, information on and interviews with authors and descriptions of mystery bookstores I have visited. I strive to review all Saskatchewan mysteries. Other Canadian mysteries are listed under the Rest of Canada. As a lawyer I am always interested in legal mysteries. I have a separate page for legal mysteries. Occasionally my reviews of legal mysteries comment on the legal reality of the mystery. You can follow the progression of my favourite authors with up to 15 reviews. Each year I select my favourites in "Bill's Best of ----". As well as current reviews I am posting reviews from 2000 to 2011. Below my most recent couple of posts are the posts of Saskatchewan mysteries I have reviewed alphabetically by author. If you only want a sentence or two description of the book and my recommendation when deciding whether to read the book look at the bold portion of the review. If you would like to email me the link to my email is on the profile page.

Friday, April 8, 2011

Gordon W. Dale Autobiography

Tonight's post is an autobiography of Gordon W. Dale. The post concludes four posts this week involving Gordon and his book, Fool's Republic:

I was born in Winnipeg, more or less by accident. My parents lived in a small town nearby and, as a result of complications, my mother was transferred to a maternity ward in Winnipeg for my birth. My father was a school teacher, then principal, then superintendent. My mother had been a teacher also, but was forced to retire when she married my father. In rural Manitoba in those days, it wasn’t considered appropriate for a married woman to continue teaching, and thereby occupy a job that could be held by a man.

I had a magical childhood, spent running wild in small towns, mostly in rural Manitoba. We spent two years in Malawi, in Central East Africa, after which I attended high school in a small town at the edge of the Whiteshell Provincial Park in Manitoba. We had boats and snowmobiles and I spent most of my time either in the woods or on the water. I’ll always be grateful to my father, who had a kind of wanderlust, for exposing us to so many different locations and cultures, and to my mother who was mad about all things literary.

At seventeen, I moved to Winnipeg, where I took a Commerce degree from the University of Manitoba. I worked in Aerospace for several years after that, eventually becoming an independent consultant with clients in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and across Canada. I moved to California in 2005, where I completed an M.A. from San Francisco State University. As a day job, I currently design corporate online and instructor-led training programs. In 2007, I was a finalist for the British Crimewriters Association Debut Dagger Award, and my novel, Fool’s Republic, was awarded honorable mention (general fiction category) by the 2011 San Francisco Book Festival.


3 comments:

  1. Bill - Thanks very much for this week of focusing on Gordon Dale. I'm sorry that I haven't taken the time to comment, but I've read and enjoyed very much your in-depth focus on Dale and his work. I think it's a fascinating idea to take a week and really focus on one author. It gives one the opportunity to "get to know" that author well, and I hope you'll do it again.

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  2. Margot: Thank you for the encouragement. I have found it a good way to develop an assessment of an author. I do expect to have multiple successive posts on an author again.

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  3. Worked with gordon, he is a cool guy and a lot of fun

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