George Elliott Clarke begins George & Rue with a disclaimer: Though based on several actual persons and one actual crime, this novel employs facts not found in mere trial transcripts - the scratchy songs, the mouthed bits from blues.

The crime was the 1949 murder of a Fredericton cab driver by George and Rufus Hamilton, cousins once-removed of Clarke's and executed years before he was born.

Details of the deed came from the trial transcripts. But the oral testimony of those who knew the brothers or were connected to their trial and hanging was most important. The texture came from local legends, published accounts of the period and a close reading of the Fredericton Daily Gleaner.

The news pages covered the trial closely and noted that 10,000 people thronged the streets of Fredericton on execution day. But there were also stories of condemned blacks in faraway American cities, reinforcing the stereotype of the "dangerous, lazy Negro," says Clarke. Even the advertisements revealed the public mood.

"The day after the Hamiltons were found guilty of murder, a men's clothing store in Fredericton ran an ad with the heading 'Found Guilty? Of Wearing Bad Clothes?'", says Clarke, who is the E. J. Pratt Professor in Canadian Literature at the University of Toronto.

Clarke was honoured with the Trudeau Foundation Fellows Prize this year. He has also been recognized for his scholarly writing, novels, poetry and opera libretti both at home, with Nova Scotia's inaugural Portia White Prize and a Governor General's Literary Award for Execution Poems, and internationally as a Bellagio Center Fellow of the Rockefeller Foundation.

Scholarly research and creative writing live side by side in Clarke's world. While researching the libretto for his first opera, Beatrice Chancy, he published an article about the parallels between slave narratives and a revenge drama by Percy B. Shelley. George & Rue led to articles on the treatment of executions in African-Canadian literature.

If Clarke's research is sometimes unorthodox, his language always is. Only "blackened" English would do for George & Rue - a blend of standard English and the talk Clarke heard in the small Africadian (African-Nova Scotian) settlement where he was born. His lush language will be pared to the simplest English for his current project, "a book-length narrative poem of unrhymed couplets, titled I & I."

- Janice Walls