Return to the Same City

Everyone in Vancouver threatens to quit this city for Montreal. Dave Wakeland actually did it.

After four books of being knocked around on the West Coast, after the tough ending of Sunset & Jericho, Sam Wiebe’s private eye walked away. Who could blame him? No surprise though that it didn’t take. An old flame cashes in a favour and he’s back at it, looking for justice in a city that stubbornly resists ideals.

I’ve praised Sam Wiebe before and I’ll do it again, idgaf. He’s the real deal.

I lost some of my heart for crime novels, especially local crime novels, a couple years back when I read two back to back that used almost identical language to describe goings on in the Downtown Eastside. Just lazy throwaway lines as characters had their perfunctory brush with street life before getting back to otherwise just fine crime fiction plots. If I’d read these books with more space between (they were published about five years apart) maybe it wouldn’t have bothered me so much. I don’t need art to constantly reflect my own views—in fact, I think that’s a dead end. And I appreciate that genre fiction, especially genre fiction, will sometimes shortchange some aspects, deal in types and archetypes, to keep the focus on genre stuff. To be clear, the problem was me. Those books are fine, the writers are fine. But the coincidence hit a sour note for me. So I broadened my reading habits. No regrets.

So you know, when I turned a page and saw that The Last Exile not only mentions CRAB Park, but mentions it with the proper capitalization as an acronym, I was like, right on. Then I turned the page again and Wiebe actually talks about what the acronym stands for and gives a flash of context and meaning, and I’m like, this is what I’m talking about.

While Wakeland was sipping London Fogs on St-Denis, Wiebe published three non-Wakeland books (Ocean Drive and two novels as Nolan Chase). There’s a new Wakeland coming out this month, Guns Across the River.