Vancouver Noir

When Fact Meets Fiction: Sam Wiebe’s Vancouver

by Eve Lazarus on September 18, 2020

Sam Wiebe is the award-winning author of the Wakeland novels, a detective series set in Vancouver that includes Invisible Dead and Hell and Gone.

“When poet-turned-screenwriter Paul Ling goes missing, his teenage daughter hires Vancouver P.I. Dave Wakeland to track him down. To the shock of his family and colleagues, Ling’s body is found within days in the home of a stranger, killed by a drug overdose—and Wakeland suspects foul play. Did Ling have a secret life that finally caught up with him, or did his search for creative material for his writing take him down a dangerous path? In the world of bad television and cutthroat competition, Wakeland will need his wits about him to sort friend from foe.”—Sam Wiebe’s Hollywood North.

Sam Wiebe just released Hollywood North as a thank you to his newsletter subscribers. And I’m grateful because it’s a terrific story that’s set in Vancouver and continues on from his two Dave Wakeland crime novels Invisible Dead (2016) and Cut you Down (2018). Wakeland is a former Vancouver Police officer turned PI and his character is intrinsically involved with the city, so much so, that Sam tells me that Vancouver became a character in his books.

DTES:

And it’s not the glossy, international playground of the tourist brochures. Wakeland’s Vancouver is often the gritty streets of the DTES. Sam’s PI comes right up against the social issues of the day, whether that’s homelessness, drugs, sex workers or the missing and murdered Indigenous women.

One idea that turned up in Sam’s story Wonderful Life in Vancouver Noir (a 2018 collection of crime fiction that he edited) came from a story that Aaron Chapman wrote for the Vancouver Courier about the H Squad several years ago.

Vancouver Confidential:

Sam’s says he’s also inspired by Vancouver Confidential, a non-fiction book by John Belshaw featuring stories by writers such as Jesse Donaldson, Lani Russwurm, Aaron Chapman and me.

In Hollywood North, Sam tackles the vacuousness of the American film industry in Vancouver. And, I was excited to find two of my favourite heritage buildings in his story.

Royal Bank Building:

Wakeland’s office is in the Royal Bank Building on West Hastings, which also turns up in my new book Vancouver Exposed (the Royal Bank has the last elevator operator in the city).

“I just fell in love with the building and I thought if I was an up and coming PI that’s where I would shoot for,” he says. “I also liked that it was on Hastings street, because Hastings Street was so synonymous with the narrative of poverty and drugs and all that stuff and people forget that 90 percent of Hastings is either part of the financial district or bleeds into Burnaby and the suburbs. It’s a very vibrant street so I thought putting it there was important.”

The Canada Post building on West Georgia also has a role in Hollywood North and it’s part of Vancouver Exposed. Where Sam uses the building as a metaphor for bad American television and business practices, I talk about it through its art, its tunnel and its roof.

Canada Post building in 1960. Courtesy JMABC

Want to read Hollywood North? Sign up for Sam’s newsletter and enjoy!

And look out for his new novella Never Going Back which will be out by the end of the month.

Tags 675 West Hastings Street, Canada Post building, Cut you Down, Hollywood North, Invisible Dead, Never Going Back, Royal Bank Building, Sam Wiebe, Vancouver Confidential, Vancouver Exposed, Vancouver Noir

Vancouver Noir

by Eve Lazarus on July 11, 2012

Definition of “Noir” from the Free Dictionary: “Of or relating to a genre of crime literature featuring tough, cynical characters and bleak settings. Suggestive of danger or violence. Of or relating to the film noir genre.”

When I wrote At Home with History, the 1930s Strathcona seemed a natural place to start. I talked to people who had lived through that era, had parents who bootlegged to survive, knew the girls from the local brothels, and many of the cops who enforced BC’s crazy liquor laws. That chapter soon morphed into a second and a third on rum runners and liquor barons who lived on the west side of town, and who by their vast wealth remained relatively untouched by a largely corrupt police force.

I took Will Woods Forbidden Vancouver tour last month, and I recently finished Vancouver Noir, a book that covers a 30 year period through the lens of a camera.

Authors John Belshaw and Diane Purvey believe that Noir-era values are found in the gritty black and white police and newspaper photographs of the day. Shot by the Speed Graphic camera—a invention of the late ‘20s—the photos feature hard-nosed detectives, murder scenes, bullet-ridden cars, riots and rain slicked streets lit by neon signs.

“What appeals to us about the period 1930-1960 is that there isn’t a lot in the way of progress, in fact, there’s an overall collapse,” says Belshaw. “It’s an era of failure.”

It was a city that produced Walter Mulligan, the top cop on the take, serial Mayor L.D. Taylor, Joe Celona–Vancouver’s own Al Capone, and fruitless wars on vice, racism and poverty.

“What we tried to do with Vancouver Noir is show Vancouverites a city with big brass balls. A place where gambling joints were everywhere, cops were on the take, and you could get a decent steak dinner and hear some great music anywhere from Hogan’s Alley through the Mandarin Gardens to The Cave,” he says. “This was a city without global ambitions—it was a hard-boiled port town where even the Chief of Police wrote like he was Dashiell Hammett.”

Belshaw and Purvey argue that it was a period of one moral panic following another. Values were in flux and the growing middle class tried to squash what they saw as deviant behavior.

“We wanted to show that the battle against deviance was a serious business. It took out whole neighbourhoods, justified murders, deported its enemies—this was no imagined confrontation—it’s bare-knuckled stuff,” says Belshaw.

It’s a long way from the glossy tourism photos of English Bay and Grouse Mountain, and it’s a side of Vancouver that will likely surprise most Vancouverites. But it’s as much a part of our make-up as the stories of Gassy Jack and the CPR, and one that I’m betting we’ll be hearing more about from a whole new wave of writers.

For more information see the authors’ blog and Anvil Press.

Tags Diane Purvey, Hogan's Alley, Joe Celona, John Belshaw, LD Taylor, Speed Graphic camera, Vancouver Noir, Walter Mulligan

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