Michael Slade

Michael Slade is the pen name most closely associated with Jay Clarke, born in 1947, a Vancouver lawyer who developed the identity in the early 1980s together with fellow lawyers John Banks and Richard Covell as they turned to writing fiction outside their legal careers. According to Clarke, the name was coined spontaneously by his wife, meant to suggest a figure both sensitive, as a biblical Michael, and tough, as someone 'slade.' Drawing on the trio's combined decades of criminal law experience, Slade's Special X series follows a fictional Royal Canadian Mounted Police unit investigating serial killers across fourteen novels published between 1984 and 2009, beginning with Headhunter and continuing through titles including Ripper and Swastika. Slade has been described as Canada's first internationally successful mainstream horror novelist.