Bootlegger, chicken-plucker, naval cadet, and public speaker—Max Haines has led an interesting life. Long before becoming Canada’s best-known crime writer, Max was a young boy surrounded by colourful characters in his hometown of Antigonish. Watch out for Mother St. Regina, the strict nun who finds fault with Max after a misunderstanding over a piece of candy; beware of Mary Ellen “The Spook,” whose other-worldly powers have all the town talking; catch up with telephone operator Alison, whose eavesdropping and gossiping keeps the whole town informed at remarkable speed, and heed the word of Willie the jailer, who lets his charges roam for the day but threatens to lock them out for good if they don’t make it back by curfew.

Let Max lead you back to the Nova Scotia of the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s. There are no traffic lights, no mail delivery, and no numbers on doors, and if you want to call, Max’s family’s phone number is simply 9. Filled with the larger-than-life inhabitants of a small town (and its occasionally baffled visitors), The Spitting Champion of the World is a lively, funny, and heartwarming collection of stories from a simpler time, told with Max Haines’s signature sparkling humour.

Max Haines’s “Crime Flashback” column made its debut in the Toronto Sun in 1972. Since that time, he has researched more than two thousand murder cases from around the world. Today, “Crime Flashback” appears weekly in the Toronto Sun and is syndicated around the world and in more than forty newspapers across Canada. The column has a weekly readership of more than three million and has been translated into Spanish, French and Chinese. Haines is also the author of twenty-five bestselling anthologies of crime vignettes, including Unnatural Causes, Canadian Crimes, Murder Most Foul and The Collected Works of Max Haines: Volume Four. He lives in Toronto with his wife, Marilyn.

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