Elle Wild Books in Order

If you want the clearest place to begin: Strange Things Done
If you like northern noir and winter-locked towns: Strange Things Done
If you want a journalist-led mystery with dark humor: Strange Things Done

Elle Wild grew up on a farm in southern Ontario, in what she has described as a dark, rambling farmhouse with a lot of open land and a lot of time to imagine trouble. She read Edgar Allan Poe, watched PBS mysteries, and leaned early toward stories with a shadowy edge.

She was also the kind of kid who kept circling the same future jobs in her school journal: writer, detective, cowboy.

That mix of curiosity and unease stayed with her. At Queen's University in Kingston, she began in literature, then moved to history because it seemed like the more practical choice. After that she earned a film degree at the University of British Columbia and later started a master of fine arts program, which she left before finishing when she needed to care for her newborn son.

Before her first novel arrived, Wild spent years telling stories in other forms. She worked in advertising, made award-winning short films, and wrote for radio. She also worked as the writer and host of CBC Radio Vancouver's Wide Awake, experience that taught her how to find the center of a story quickly and reshape it on deadline.

Place matters a lot in her work.

Wild has lived in several countries, and she often writes from the places that get under her skin. A major turning point came in 2007, when she went to Dawson City in the Yukon as an artist in residence, trading film screenings for room and board. She already had family ties to the Klondike and had grown up hearing stories connected to the North, so Dawson did not feel like a random stop. It felt like material waiting for her.

Out of that came Strange Things Done, her debut novel. The book follows journalist Jo Silver, who heads to Dawson City for a fresh start and winds up investigating the suspicious death of a local politician as winter closes the roads and the town turns inward. Readers who click with Wild usually like that mix of bleak weather, offbeat local characters, dark humor, and a lead who is smart enough to ask questions but messy enough to get into real trouble.

The novel had a strong run even before it reached shelves. It won the 2015 Unhanged Arthur for best unpublished first crime novel, then went on to win the 2017 Crime Writers of Canada award for Best First Novel. It was later recommended on CBC's The Next Chapter, which brought more attention to Wild's chilly, funny, tense take on crime fiction.

She has also written short fiction. Her story Playing Dead appeared in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, and California Pure placed second in the 2017 National Capital Writing Contest. Even in shorter work, she seems drawn to pressure-cooker settings, people carrying private shame, and places that look calm until you notice what is moving underneath.

These days, Wild lives on an island in the Salish Sea, not far from Vancouver. She has also been at work on another novel, The Bone Conspiracy, a thriller set in Victorian London and Dorset that was highly commended in the Cheshire Novel Prize in 2023. The settings may change, from the Yukon to Japan to England, but the pull is similar: closed worlds, uneasy people, and the feeling that something is off, even before the trouble fully comes into view.