John Farrow Books in Order

John Farrow is the crime-writing name of Trevor Ferguson, a Canadian novelist born on November 11, 1947, in Seaforth, Ontario. He was taken to Montreal as a small child and grew up there, which matters because so much of his fiction, whether literary or criminal, feels shaped by the city's weather, divided loyalties, rough humor, and street-level energy.

Before he published books, Ferguson did the kind of work that leaves marks. In his mid-teens he headed into Canada's northwest and worked on railway gangs, and at night, in bunkhouses, he started writing.

That mix of hard labor and private ambition never really left the books.

In his twenties he traveled and worked across Europe and the United States, then came back to Montreal determined to make a writing life. For a stretch he drove a taxi at night and wrote by day, holding the whole thing together until High Water Chants appeared in 1977. That first novel was followed by Onyx John and The Kinkajou, books that helped establish the territory he works so well: outsized families, drifters and hustlers, comic strangeness, and people trying to keep their footing in messy moral weather.

He kept pushing in that direction with The True Life Adventures of Sparrow Drinkwater, a restless quest novel that sends its oddball hero roaming through Montreal and far beyond. Then came The Timekeeper and The Fire Line, both rooted in railway life, rough work, and hard country. The Timekeeper won the Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction and was later adapted for film. Much later, The River Burns returned to Quebec for a tense story about a small town, a bridge fight, two brothers on opposite sides, and a community edging toward violence.

The John Farrow name arrived when Ferguson turned to crime fiction. He has said the pen name joined his own first name with Farrow, the surname of a hood from The Fire Line. Under that name he introduced Sergeant-Detective Émile Cinq-Mars in City Of Ice, then carried the character through Ice Lake, River City, The Storm Murders, Seven Days Dead, Perish the Day, Ball Park, Roar Back, Lady Jail, A Patient Death, and Bright Shining As the Sun. Readers tend to come for the murders, then stay for the larger world around them: Montreal politics, organized crime, bad weather, history, and the stubborn intelligence of a detective who does not think like everybody else.

Even when he writes a puzzle, he rarely thinks small.

Across both names, Ferguson circles some of the same human ground. He writes about workers, cops, operators, loners, damaged families, and people who are forced to choose under pressure. Railways show up often. So do border places, underworld economies, moral compromise, and characters who are not pure heroes but still try to do one decent thing before the lights go out.

He has also written plays, and his career has moved back and forth between literary fiction and crime without much concern for the fence between them. After many years in Hudson, Quebec, he later settled in Victoria, British Columbia. The setting has changed, but the books still carry the same stubborn interest in place, class, work, and conscience that was there at the start.