Since moving up the side of a mountain three years ago, I see bears. The first one was at 6:30 one morning, which is not a time you’re expecting to see a bear. It was between me and the bus stop.
“Well,” I thought. “I guess I’m going to be late for work.”
But the bear ambled along, followed by a chorus of shrieking crows, and I was not late for work.
I first became a fan of the novelist Duane Swierczynski when he put a robot named Crumley in a Judge Dredd comic.
His Charlie Hardie trilogy that starts with Fun and Games is blast, fast-paced stuff with a sharp edge.
His latest is California Bear, and it’s a lot. It’s a serial killer novel, it’s a just-got-out-of-prison antihero novel, it’s got a true crime nut angle, it’s got a Girl Detective. It bounces around between multiple characters. It’s really something. It’s a big-hearted book that brings a lot of familiar genre ideas into unexpected places. I read it in two afternoons, one a Sunday, the other a Monday I moved something around to make time.
There is something delightful on just about every page.
Like California Bear, Sam Wiebe’s latest (under his own name) also opens with antihero getting out of prison on the West Coast. Everyone loves a goon trying to make good. Ocean Drive mostly takes place in White Rock, a place not too far from the turf Wiebe staked out with his Dave Wakeland books, which are favourites here at the Code, but far enough to make a difference. Another major difference is that it’s not a one-character book. Balancing jailbird Cameron Shaw’s descent into a sleepy border town’s underworld, Wiebe gives us Mountie Meghan Quick, who is going through her own ordeals, both personal and professional.
Sam Wiebe is a hell of a writer and it’s great to see him take his talent to new places. He has an even newer book out under the pen name Nolan Chase, called A Lonely Place for Dying, that takes place in Blaine, Washington, right across the US border from White Rock. I haven’t gotten to it yet, but I will. He’s also announced the fifth Wakeland will be out next year. Which, if you’ve read all the others, or even just the last one, Sunset and Jericho, you’re gonna be all over this. Sam has his own newsletter, you should be reading that one. He has interesting things to say, often about movies, and/or genre.
My fellow Mevillians will appreciate the cameo by a certain White Rock fish & chippery.
My third and final book recommendation for this week is less emphatic. Any Four Women Could Rob the Bank of Italy is a great title. And I think it’s probably a great book. But I went in expecting a breezy caper and instead, got something quite different.
Ann Cornelisen was an American who spent most of her life in Southern Italy doing anti-poverty work with Save the Children. She wrote several well-reviewed books about poverty in rural Italy. Peter Nichols, in a review quoted in Cornelisen’s New York Times obituary, writes, ''She avoids any resemblance to a sociological report, although she is handling a serious sociological problem.''
So maybe it’s not surprising that instead of tight little heist novel, we have a sprawling meandering novel about American and UK women living in Italy in the late 70s that has a heist at its core the same way some novels might have a wedding or a funeral that brings people together. It’s utterly wonderful. It’s a great counterpoint to the 70s Eurocrime movies coming out of Italy at the time which reflect many of the same realities, but through a violent, often fascistic, always misogynistic, lens.
There is a car chase, though.
Here’s Lyle Lovett, talk later.
Thanks for the mention!