Giles Blunt

Who is Giles Blunt?

Giles Blunt is a Canadian novelist and screenwriter born in 1952 in Windsor, Ontario. His first novel, Cold Eye, was a psychological thriller set in the New York art world, which was made into the French movie Les Couleurs du diable.

He is also the author of the John Cardinal novels, set in the small town of Algonquin Bay, in Northern Ontario. Blunt grew up in North Bay, and Algonquin Bay is North Bay very thinly disguised — for example, Blunt retains the names of major streets and the two lakes that the town sits between, the physical layout of the two places is the same, and he describes Algonquin Bay as being in the same geographical location as North Bay.

The first Cardinal story, Forty Words for Sorrow, won the British Crime Writers' Association Silver Dagger, and the second, The Delicate Storm, won the Crime Writers of Canada's Arthur Ellis Award for best novel. The 2010 John Cardinal novel Crime Machine was described as "a richly plotted work by one of Canada's best mystery novelists."

He also has written No Such Creature, a "road novel" set in the American southwest, and Breaking Lorca, which is set in a clandestine jail in El Salvador in the 1980s. Twice nominated for the Dublin IMPAC award, his novels have been compared to the work of Ian Rankin and Cormac McCarthy.