As poet Robert Service pointed out, “There are strange things done in the midnight sun.” Coates and Morrison, historians and authors of several books on the North, do a fine job of collecting a few of the strangest, highlighting some fascinating aspects of life in the Yukon between the Gold Rush and the Second World War.

The book examines half a dozen murders in detail and briefly outlines several more, each case chosen to illustrate a different aspect of Yukon society at the time. The case of the Nantuck Brothers, for example, was the first murder of a European by a native person; another, that of Fournier and Labelle, the first case of fully premeditated murder for robbery.

The authors demonstrate how each case played on the Yukoners’ fears, prejudices, and the practical necessities of living in such a remote part of the world. Some of the murders were extraordinarily brutal, but their interest often lies not in the grisly details, but in the light they shed on the social history of the Yukon.

Strange Things Done is part true crime and part sociological study. It is a combination that works well, although the extended quotes from judicial summaries occasionally slow the pace. The book’s introductory chapter and conclusion place the idea of murder in the context of the Yukon. The surprise here is how law-abiding and free from “frontier justice” the Yukon was in the Gold Rush era. An appendix gives an historian’s perspective on the study of violent death. Violent death in the Yukon, it turns out, owes less to the stories of Service than the usual, mostly banal, reasons for murder. It is the unusual setting of the closed society that gives these tales a dimension that lifts them above the sensational