Ed Starkins

New Edition as part City of Vancouver's Legacy Book Project, with foreword by historian Daniel Francis Who Killed Janet Smith? examines one of the most infamous and still unsolved murder cases in Canadian history: the 1924 murder of twenty-two-year-old Scottish nursemaid Janet Smith. Originally published in 1984, and out of print for over a decade, this tale of intrigue, racism, privilege, and corruption in high places is a true-crime recreation that reads like a complex thriller. We are pleased to be reissuing this title as part of the City of Vancouver's Legacy Book Project.
This new edition features a Foreword by historian Daniel Francis. Praise for Who Killed Janet Smith? ". drug traffic, Roaring Twenties hedonism, official corruption, cutthroat competition among newspapers, a public taste for occultism, etc.-and entrust the whole works to a good storyteller, and you have one terrific political history of Vancouver." (Geist Magazine) "Starkins has written an engaging and well-crafted popular social history of Vancouver in the ostensibly hopeful, materially buoyant 'flapper era' between the end of the slaughter of the Great War and the onset of the Depression.
He reveals the serious fault-lines and profound anxieties of a community emerging in this decade from both its recent frontier past and a costly war into becoming a settled North American city.