The following was sent in by a Beach resident;
"Could you please let the community now about a great murder mistery book entitled, Beach Strip, by John Lawrence Reynolds of Burlington.
It is published by Harper Collins 2012. We found it a very enjoyable read since it takes place near the canal and has many references to the local that we remember very well."
Posted with permission from the Hamilton Spectator
_________________________________________
Jeff Mahoney
Fri Oct 12 2012 10:34:43
The Beach Strip: An enduring fascination
By Jeff Mahoney
Our beach strip, that colourful, ever evolving micro-culture germinating in the shadow of the Skyway, is the kind of place where anything might happen, and often does. Good and bad.
Such a mix of contrasts and tone, menace and beauty. The 7-kilometre-long sleeve of land across the water has sported a varied embroidery over the decades.
Resort cottages and, more recently, high-end condo developments. An amusement park, biker gang headquarters, a swingers’ club (the building is now occupied by a church run by a clairvoyant), a rail line and the legendary Brant Inn — all of them gone. Way back, it served as an Indian trail.
Not a peninsula nor even a spit, it’s a slender geographical tendon — a sandbar, to be exact — linking Burlington and Hamilton and separating the harbour from the lake.
It’s the string in our bow, with lore as remarkable as the geography. Incredible characters, the Dynes Tavern, raging fires, storms. And lake accidents, including a ship running into the lift bridge.
Now, finally, the strip is the setting, very vividly drawn, of a novel (what took so long?). It’s by award-winning author John Lawrence Reynolds and called (self-descriptively enough) Beach Strip.
“It always fascinated me,” says John, who as a teenager sold candy bars on the SS Lady Hamilton ferry.
“Ships from all over the world are welcomed into our harbour through here. In the past, lake freighters, tramp steamers. I dated a lovely girl and she’d wave to the ships in her T-shirts and tight pants and their responses were often non-Platonic.”
That detail appears in the book.
Beach Strip came out this past summer, a year after another excellent book, Memories of The Beach Strip, edited by Gary Evans.
Two books in one year. Not bad.
I took a walk along the strip recently with John, touring the many area landmarks that make an appearance in the novel.
We stopped at the Dieppe War Memorial. And at the stylish housing complex where the Dynes used to be. (In the book the Dynes is called Tuffy’s.)
“The Dynes was designated heritage but the developer tore it down just the same and paid the fine — I think it was $25,000, a pittance against what these units go for,” says John.
The rules never seem quite to apply in the beach strip, not as they do elsewhere.
John tells me about one of the old cottages in the area once owned, he thinks, by one of the Voortmans of Voortman Cookies. The owner kept a helicopter on the porch. There’s a house in the novel with a helicopter out front.
“It sat there for about a year — an armoured personnel carrier,” says John. “No one batted an eye.”
That’s the beach strip.
He shows me the house where his old friend Wayne Ewing used to live. The house of the novel’s protagonist, Josie Marshall (a truly marvellous creation), is modelled after it, though the fictional house is moved closer to the canal bridge for plot purposes.
Ah, yes, the lift bridge. John and I walk under it, by the immense, coral-coloured clench of machinery — hydraulic jacks, counterweights, drive motors — that make it work.
“It’s a masterpiece of engineering,” John says.
This is where he envisioned one of the murders in his deliciously sinuous and inventive novel. A ship passes, and the victim has his head crushed between the steel pads of the refrigerator-sized concrete fittings that meet as the bridge descends.
What can we say? It’s the beach strip.
In contrast to that imagined horror, out at the end of the pier, as John and I walked along it, a father and his two boys fished from the pilings at the very edge of the known world, before it gives off to the oceanic expanse of Lake Ontario.
Yes, the beach strip.
jmahoney@thespec.com
905-526-3306
"Could you please let the community now about a great murder mistery book entitled, Beach Strip, by John Lawrence Reynolds of Burlington.
It is published by Harper Collins 2012. We found it a very enjoyable read since it takes place near the canal and has many references to the local that we remember very well."
Posted with permission from the Hamilton Spectator
_________________________________________
Jeff Mahoney
Fri Oct 12 2012 10:34:43
The Beach Strip: An enduring fascination
By Jeff Mahoney
Our beach strip, that colourful, ever evolving micro-culture germinating in the shadow of the Skyway, is the kind of place where anything might happen, and often does. Good and bad.
Such a mix of contrasts and tone, menace and beauty. The 7-kilometre-long sleeve of land across the water has sported a varied embroidery over the decades.
Resort cottages and, more recently, high-end condo developments. An amusement park, biker gang headquarters, a swingers’ club (the building is now occupied by a church run by a clairvoyant), a rail line and the legendary Brant Inn — all of them gone. Way back, it served as an Indian trail.
Not a peninsula nor even a spit, it’s a slender geographical tendon — a sandbar, to be exact — linking Burlington and Hamilton and separating the harbour from the lake.
It’s the string in our bow, with lore as remarkable as the geography. Incredible characters, the Dynes Tavern, raging fires, storms. And lake accidents, including a ship running into the lift bridge.
Now, finally, the strip is the setting, very vividly drawn, of a novel (what took so long?). It’s by award-winning author John Lawrence Reynolds and called (self-descriptively enough) Beach Strip.
“It always fascinated me,” says John, who as a teenager sold candy bars on the SS Lady Hamilton ferry.
“Ships from all over the world are welcomed into our harbour through here. In the past, lake freighters, tramp steamers. I dated a lovely girl and she’d wave to the ships in her T-shirts and tight pants and their responses were often non-Platonic.”
That detail appears in the book.
Beach Strip came out this past summer, a year after another excellent book, Memories of The Beach Strip, edited by Gary Evans.
Two books in one year. Not bad.
I took a walk along the strip recently with John, touring the many area landmarks that make an appearance in the novel.
We stopped at the Dieppe War Memorial. And at the stylish housing complex where the Dynes used to be. (In the book the Dynes is called Tuffy’s.)
“The Dynes was designated heritage but the developer tore it down just the same and paid the fine — I think it was $25,000, a pittance against what these units go for,” says John.
The rules never seem quite to apply in the beach strip, not as they do elsewhere.
John tells me about one of the old cottages in the area once owned, he thinks, by one of the Voortmans of Voortman Cookies. The owner kept a helicopter on the porch. There’s a house in the novel with a helicopter out front.
“It sat there for about a year — an armoured personnel carrier,” says John. “No one batted an eye.”
That’s the beach strip.
He shows me the house where his old friend Wayne Ewing used to live. The house of the novel’s protagonist, Josie Marshall (a truly marvellous creation), is modelled after it, though the fictional house is moved closer to the canal bridge for plot purposes.
Ah, yes, the lift bridge. John and I walk under it, by the immense, coral-coloured clench of machinery — hydraulic jacks, counterweights, drive motors — that make it work.
“It’s a masterpiece of engineering,” John says.
This is where he envisioned one of the murders in his deliciously sinuous and inventive novel. A ship passes, and the victim has his head crushed between the steel pads of the refrigerator-sized concrete fittings that meet as the bridge descends.
What can we say? It’s the beach strip.
In contrast to that imagined horror, out at the end of the pier, as John and I walked along it, a father and his two boys fished from the pilings at the very edge of the known world, before it gives off to the oceanic expanse of Lake Ontario.
Yes, the beach strip.
jmahoney@thespec.com
905-526-3306