The Canadian Booksellers Association deemed Timothy Findley Author of the Year in 1996, a sensible choice. Findley does not insult the intelligence of Canadian readers, nor overestimate media-addled attention spans. He publishes often, and each of his two dozen publications offers grateful readers a good story, complex characters, nice words set into deftly punctuated sentences. Occasionally, as with The Wars 20 years ago, he has focused a fuzzy truth in a painful, original, and artful way.

Dust to Dust is Findley’s third collection of stories; these are linked by deaths – murder, massacre, drowning, cancers, AIDS, genocide. Such a book risks gloom, but Findley’s fictional population is mostly writers and moneyed tourists. They are voyeurs, and the effect of this viewpoint is to remove readers from the scene and situate them safely behind a line reserved for those who report or recollect.

Findley fans will recognize some of the actors. Though Minna was already dust in Stones, Findley’s last collection, she and her homosexual husband Bragg return for more wine guzzling and mortality musing. As well, Vanessa Van Horne, the horticultural, elderly detective from The Telling of Lies, is back. These stories, though, resort to fussy melodrama and maudlin responses to death; Minna seems remaindered, not resurrected.

Writers are necessarily egotistical, anti-social, and sour. These qualities allow them to proceed in a critical world, but do they make for compelling characters? Findley writes too often for a community engrossed with itself. “A Bag of Bones,” for example, seems to be an excuse for some slapstick insider revenge. In it, Minna and Bragg attend a Queen Street book launch where doyen-critic Michael Marsden, who everyone reads and detests and who is described as “pin-striped, bow-tied and balding” is humiliated by a cross-dressing trickster in front of the whole Toronto literary crowd.

As well, Findley is careless with the voices in these stories. His baroque violence, bittersweet romance, and light comedy are often slack and forced, as when Bragg gushes, “Jesus, Stuart – I’ve never had my nipples twisted or my ass fingered the way you do. Never. I mean – the other night, I thought: now I know what they mean by ass-ault.”

The short story does not flatter Timothy Findley; the form won’t forgive excess or lapses in authentic dialogue. But those who do generously forgive these trespasses will enjoy Dust to Dust and be glad for Findley’s current productivity.