Dennis E. Bolen

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Gritty Terrain by Douglas Hill Books in Canada In Stupid Crimes (Anvil Press, 178 pages, $10.95 paper), Dennis E. Bolen works over some gritty terrain - the life and times of a parole officer in Vancouver - with much skill and insight. The writing is occasionally a bit rough, but it's also unpretentiously vivid, and the voices in Bolen's tightly constructed arrangement of multiple narratives almost always ring true. His hero, Barry Delta, and the ex-convicts he tries to help all talk tough and reveal their inadequacies - humorously, pathetically, frighteningly. This is a no-nonsense, thoroughly fascinating picture that humanizes an underclass most readers will know only from newspaper statistics and television "special reports." We follow Delta through a couple of years with his caseload (which includes a seasoned armed robber, a bungling petty disrupter, and a psychotic serial rapist), and through his attempts to work out and maintain some sort of a personal life. He comes across as a dedicated, inventive, talented man whose professional frustrations drive him, and eventually his lover, toward despair. The characters Bolen creates, the mind-spaces his prose fills in, project an existential futility; the novel as a whole leaves the reader saddened by the wreckage of so many hopeless lives, on the right as well as the wrong side of the law. ©Books in Canada

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