Howard Engel

Howard Engel CM (April 2, 1931 – July 16, 2019) was a Canadian mystery author and CBC producer who resided in Toronto, Ontario. He was famous for his Benny Cooperman detective series, set in the Niagara Region in and around the city of Grantham, Ontario, mirroring St. Catharines, Ontario, where he was born. He was one of the founding authors of Crime Writers of Canada in 1982.

Personal life From 1962 to 1978 he was married to Marian Engel, a noted Canadian author of literary fiction, who died in 1985. They had two children, The couple have one son, Jacob Engel, born in 1989.

In 2001, he unknowingly suffered a stroke that left him with alexia sine agraphia, a condition that prevented him from understanding written words without a major effort without affecting his ability to write. He was later able to write a new novel, Memory Book (2005), in which his character Benny Cooperman suffers a blow to the head and is similarly affected. He later published The Man Who Forgot How To Read (2007), a memoir of the time he spent recovering from the stroke, with an afterword by Oliver Sacks (who wrote about Engel's reading problems in the book The Mind's Eye), and another novel, East of Suez, in 2008.

In February 2007, Engel was appointed a Member of the Order of Canada, receiving it at the 100th investiture. In 2013, Engel received a Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee medal. He died in Toronto on July 16, 2019, of pneumonia that arose from a stroke, at the age of 88.