Jordan Buchanan, who retired with the rank of Detective Staff Sergeant in 2019 after a 30-year career with the Greater Sudbury Police Service, said he’s always liked writing more than the average cop, as evidenced by his arrest warrants.
“I can remember another officer working with me on warrants back in the 90s, and he kept laughing when he'd read my warrants,” he said.
“He said, ‘You write them like a book, they're like a novel.’ And I said, ‘Well, is that wrong, because that's how I've always done it.’ He says, ‘No, no. I've just never seen warrants like this before.’ … No one had really showed me how to write the warrants. I just wrote them like stories for the judge to read or the justice of the peace to read.”
Buchanan has just come out with his first novel, entitled “Past Ghosts Echoed.” He describes the self-published book as crossing the thriller, mystery and police procedural genres.
The idea for the book, which touches on 100 years of policing, has been percolating for 10 years and when he retired, he was able to give it his attention.
He said he was inspired by examining old ledger books from the Coniston police service back in the 1920s. Those ledger books are now in the hands of the Sudbury Region Police Museum, and one of them is on display.
“All the officers in a station house would write in the same ledger book - the things that they had done during the day, people they had arrested, fines that they'd given out different things that they had done,” Buchanan said.
The book’s plot summary is as follows:
Detective Staff Sergeant Enoch Brown’s life takes an unthinkable turn after a lightning strike during a solo canoe trip. When he awakens, he’s haunted by vivid, fragmented visions, memories that don’t belong to him.
Desperate for answers, he turns to a psychiatrist who, through hypnosis, unlocks an astonishing discovery: Enoch has inherited “echo memories,” vivid recollections passed down from his parents and grandparents, all of whom were police officers in Sudbury, Ont.
Each echo memory opens a window into unsolved cases from his family’s past, stretching across a century of policing.
Driven by a deep sense of justice, and the unshakable connection to his family’s legacy, Enoch reopens these long-cold cases. Using cutting-edge forensic techniques and modern investigative methods, he uncovers truths his predecessors could never have imagined, solving crimes that have lingered in the shadows for decades.
“I wanted to look at a period of 100 years of policing, and I couldn't find a vehicle to really do that,” Buchanan said. “I mean, I even thought about time travel and all kinds of outlandish ideas, until I struck on the idea of these echo memories, which is just an invention of mine.”
He said some of the cases, which take place between the 1920s and 1970s, are inspired by real life, and one is actually a true case, “and I sort of changed a lot of details and names and that sort of thing, because it's a fictional novel.
“But it's all based on policing practices at the time they take place, current policing practices to how the detective solves them today.
“I’m trying to make it as realistic as a police procedural as I can, while at the same time leaving it as a thriller and a bit of a historical novel for people.”
It’s not unusual that Buchanan’s book would look at the idea of cold cases, as he did just that for part of his career, although when he gave us a rundown, it sounds like his career touched on just about every aspect of policing.
One of the cases he worked on was the high-profile 1998 murder of Renée Sweeney, which was cracked 20 years later thanks to advances in DNA profiling technology. Robert Steven Wright was found guilty of her murder in 2023.
Buchanan’s fictional detective also uses DNA profiling technology to crack a cold case.
A book signing for “Past Ghosts Echoed” takes place at the Sudbury Region Police Museum Thursday, May 15 from 3-8 p.m. Refreshments and museum tours will be available. Buchanan said he also has a book signing coming up at Sudbury Chapters in June.
Otherwise, the book is available through his website, Bay Used Books and the Kukagami General Store.
Heidi Ulrichsen is Sudbury.com’s assistant editor. She also covers education and the arts scene.