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Alf Silver was born in Brandon, Manitoba, and grew up in Winnipeg and various other cities and small towns across the Prairies. His secondary education ranged from day-labourer to short-order cook to nude modelling to playing in bar bands, with a few eccentric electives along the way. After two years as Playwright-in-Residence at The Manitoba Theatre Centre, he moved to Toronto for a few years and then to an old farmhouse in central Nova Scotia.
He has published nine novels, including Three Hills Home and The Haunting of Maddie Prue, and three of his stage scripts have been published. More than forty of his radio scripts have been produced by CBC, including the Unnamed Planet tetralogy, The Man Who Thought Ian Tyson Was God, and the Clean Sweep mystery series. He recently recorded a second album of his own songs, They Don't Make 'em Anymore. His definition of "versatile" is "Any gig in a storm."
Winner of the Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Prize and now in his fifties, Alfred Silver is proud to say he's never spent longer than one night in jail or more than two weeks in a psychiatric institution.
Back Roads of Membertou CountyAlfred Silver$19.95 Order this book: Bonnie and Ben Marsden are back - Back Roads of Membertou County picks up where Clean Sweep left off. Forty-something Bonnie Marsden didn't intend to become a professional charwoman or an amateur detective. Both Bonnie and Ben Marsden have lost their steady jobs but manage to get by with Bonnie working as a cleaning lady and Ben as an all-purpose pair of hands and strong back. |
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Ben's methods of employment sometimes involve dealing with people on the wrong side of the law. Ben barely knows Jack Burton, but knows him well enough to explain to Bonnie, "If you play around the edges of the law, you'll sometimes run across a guy who's smart and tough and crazy. All you can do with somebody like that is stay the hell away from him and hope he gets caught or shot before he runs over somebody you care about." But law enforcement will put the squeeze on anybody even remotely connected with Jack Burton, and now even Bonnie's friend, Corporal Kowalchuck at the local RCMP detachment, can't prevent Ben from going to jail.
The complex situation tests the Marsdens' marriage and it looks like they are both about to lose. Bonnie's amateur detecting helps resolve one crisis but lands them in another more dangerous predicament that puts their marriage and their lives in jeopardy.
Clean Sweep: A Murder MysteryAlfred Silver226 pages Order this book: Who knows more about what's been swept under the carpet than the cleaning lady? Forty-something Bonnie Marsden didn't intend to become a professional charwoman, or an amateur detective. But after she gets swindled out of her job as loans officer at The Friendly Village Credit Union in Membertou County, Nova Scotia, she has to find some way to help pay the bills. Once she starts tidying other people's houses, she starts stumbling across things that tweak her overabundant curiosity and sense of right and wrong - things like a five-year-old child lost in the woods, and a retired couple killed in a botched home invasion. |
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AcadiaAlfred Silver360 pages Order this book: As in Alfred Silver's previous historical novels, the most outrageous twists and turns and surprises in Acadia are the documented ones he would never have had the nerve to invent. Acadia is the true story of the blood feud that founded the French colony and the two very different married couples at the centre of it. |
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In the 1640s, the authorities in Paris allowed two men to believe each was the sole Governor of all Acadia. Charles La Tour was a wiry and wily self-made man who lived in Acadia for thirty years. Charles de Menou d'Aulnay was a relative newcomer, son of one of the oldest families in French nobility, and had good reason to regard La Tour as an unprincipled, uncivilized rogue. Jeanne Motin was d'Aulnay's much younger wife. Françoise Marie Jacquelin was the retired Parisian actress whom La Tour inveigled to come marry him in Acadia.
What Jeanne Motin doesn't know is that her aristocratic husband is driving them ruinously into debt. What Françoise Jacquelin doesn't know, at first, is that her husband tends to respond to any perceived threat by drawing his sword. The struggle for Acadia escalates through skirmishes, sea battles, and sieges. The culmination comes when Françoise defends her husband's fort, leading a vastly outnumbered band of ruffians to hold off d'Aulnay's men-at-arms and warships.
"... Pungent characterizations and settings distinguish Silver's engrossing fiction."
Publishers Weekly
"... (Silver) knows how to entertain, how to spin a yarn and how to bring characters to life... Silver has succeeded in melding the ordinary, the psychic, the mythical and the mystical..."
Lethbridge Herald
About Acadia:
"...a rollicking read about the escapades of those larger-than-life characters who dominated the early days of European thirst for dominance in the New World..."
Atlantic Books Today, Summer 2000