Name John Moss | Role Author | |
Books Grave Doubts: A Quin and, Invisible among the ruins, Still Waters: A Quin and, Reluctant Dead: A Quin and, Patriotic Favorites for Strings | ||
John Errington Moss (born February 7, 1940 in Galt, Ontario, Canada) is a Canadian author. Notable for the Quin and Morgan novels that he began after teaching for many years at the University of Ottawa, he has lectured on Canadian literature in Europe, the United States, Japan, Greenland, and the Canary Islands. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.
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Life
Moss is the second of five children of George Francis Moss and Mary Margaret Clare, both of Preston, now Cambridge, Ontario. He grew up in the village of Blair until age eleven when the family left Waterloo County where their roots go back to its earliest settlement in 1802. After a period in Clarkson and Port Credit, near Toronto, he returned to Preston to complete his secondary education. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Huron College in 1961, a Master of Arts degree from The University of Western Ontario in 1969, a Master of Philosophy degree from the University of Waterloo in 1970, and a Doctor of Philosophy from the University of New Brunswick in 1973, where he was co-founder with David Arnason of the Journal of Canadian Fiction and wrote his first critical book, Patterns of Isolation (McClelland and Stewart, 1974).
In 1965 he married Virginia Lavin and they had two children, Julia Clare Zillah and Laura Frances Errington. Divorced after a lengthy separation, he married Beverley Haun and they had one child, Jack Austen (1999, deceased). He and his wife live in Peterborough, Ontario.
Career
After working in a variety of casual jobs, as an archivist, and studio director for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, along with travel adventures such as working as a stand-in for Peter O'Toole in Lawrence of Arabia and hitchhiking through Scandinavia in mid-winter, he returned to graduate school and settled into an academic career at a series of universities, from Concordia University in Montreal to the University of British Columbia and Queen’s in Kingston, and finally the University of Ottawa for a period of almost three decades, before retiring as professor emeritus in 2005.
In 2005 he was elected as a Fellow of the Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences of The Royal Society of Canada. His citation stated:
John Moss has been a major force in shaping Canadian literary criticism and in advancing the understanding of Canada's literary culture. He has authored or edited 24 books and has written over two hundred chapters, articles, papers, review articles, and reviews. Among his most influential books are Patterns of Isolation (1974), A Reader's Guide to the Canadian Novel (1981; rpt 1987), Enduring Dreams (1994), The Paradox of Meaning (1999), and Being Fiction (2001). Between 1973 and the present Moss has contributed to the crucial transformations that have occurred in the history of our critical thought.
The Quin and Morgan Mysteries
The stories are set in Toronto, early in the new millennium. After ten years working in Homicide together, detectives Miranda Quin and David Morgan are a virtual couple who could not possibly live together, yet are incomplete being apart.