Morley Callaghan's Strange Fugitive (1928), Canada's first urban novel, is a refiguration of the discourses that defined Toronto as an urban space. Narrative tension results in an ambiguous model of the city as Callaghan interlaces realist literary modes of crime and corruption with the domestic and secure place of "Toronto the good." The inevitably ambiguous depictions of Toronto that arise out of this coupling call attention to the representational strategies that modernist writers used to construct visions of the modern city and bring it under conceptual control.
