‘Enough of an answer’
Guns Across the River
by Sam Wiebe
Madeira Park: Harbour Publishing, 2026
$24.95 / 9781998526550
Reviewed by Ryan Frawley
*
Vancouver has its noirish aspects. Probably all cities past a certain size do. But it’s amplified here by the glittering glass towers, silent and patient as many-eyed spiders, that look down on the dark alleys, always wet, where the shopping carts rattle and clank. This is a city that makes the rich feel poor, the poor feel helpless, and the helpless disappear completely. A city where, even when the clouds part, you rarely see the stars.
Persian poets maintained that of all the pains of hell, the worst was the absence of the voice of God. And the memory of that voice was what sustains the damned in their dungeons. In the same way, as in the LA stomping grounds of Philip Marlowe, Harry Bosch, and Easy Rawlins, the sight of those heart-stopping mountains from the level of the dirty streets makes the chiaroscuro city fertile ground for crime fiction.
As a young man, back in the days when the license plates still proclaimed BC the Best Place on Earth, I tried writing my own Vancouver noir, a dreary tale of violence and sexual exploitation on the Downtown Eastside. Time may yet prove that my greatest service to Canadian literature was throwing the half-finished manuscript in a dumpster behind the Grand Union Pub.
Sam Wiebe (The Last Exile), on the other hand, has made a career exploring the darkest sides of Vancouver through the eyes of cynical yet morally upright detective Dave Wakeland. And in Guns Across The River, we get the latest adventure of this intrepid gumshoe as he explores the low side of life in Rain City.
In this instalment, Wakeland is no longer a private eye. Instead, he and his partner Jeff Chen make a living as international security consultants, advising big companies on how to protect their assets from a range of threats, from cartels to terrorists. When he’s not doing that, Wakeland finds time to court Eden Laing, the multi-millionaire model he half-loves.
But Wakeland doesn’t do contentment. And when a new case lands almost in his lap, in the form of a 14-year-old girl plunging from the Burrard Bridge just above Wakeland’s floating home, the ex-PI knows as well as we do that he’s not going to be able to keep himself from getting involved.
“Something had caused her to do this,” he reflects, “I asked myself if I could live with not knowing what.”
The first mystery Wakeland has to solve is who the girl is and where she comes from. But it isn’t long before he finds that he’s not the only person looking for answers. When his home is visited by a highly-capable and well-armed woman and, a little later, by a Ukrainian giant, Wakeland finds himself once again in the thick of things.
His efforts to uncover the girl’s identity take him outside of the city, into the Fraser Valley. It’s here, among the dairy farms and real estate offices, the gun shops and ghost towns, that Wakeland starts to piece together the puzzle: the girl, why she matters, and why everyone seems to be interested in her.
As McGuffins go, the girl is not a passive victim to be passed around like a trinket to be won; she has her own agency, her own desires, and her own part to play in a plot that moves along at a cracking pace. The action never flags, and as Wakeland put the pieces together, it’s almost impossible not to keep turning the pages.
Wakeland is our first person narrator, and we see everything he does and almost nothing he doesn’t. His Lower Mainland becomes ours, and his trademark PI cynicism is quickly revealed to be a fairly unconvincing shell that hides a soft heart. “Justice was meaningless, politics a game, love fleeting and compassion misspent, and money easy to find if you were willing to crimp your soul into the right shape,” he concludes. But Wakeland also gives us his own personal credo: “Do a job the best you can. Hold up your end of things. Listen more than you talk. Give what you can and look out for the little guy. Maybe all that made you was a sucker.”
Still, it’s hard not to see a hint of the author self-insert here. Wakeland’s literary bent—he’s read enough Nabokov to have a surprising opinion on the relative merits of Lolita and Bend Sinister—and eclectic taste in music (he likes the Dirty Three and Roseanne Cash) feel at times less like a deep exploration of the central character and more like a tour through the author’s own collection. All on vintage vinyl, of course.
Another character is described by Wakeland as “absorbing the principles of security the way a chess prodigy absorbs the Ruy Lopez.” In case we were in danger of forgetting he’s read a book or two. He uses “whom.” And he quotes Walt Whitman, only to follow it up with an apologetic, “you know you’re at loose ends when you start quoting poetry.” So why do it?
Other characters are hit and miss. There’s something icily disturbing about the Romankos, an immigrant family living on Marston Island in the Fraser River—a real place that I nevertheless had to look up, an almost forgotten part of the ever-growing city. Still, less important characters veer at times dangerously close to stereotype. Harry the British ex-serviceman and pub landlord, for example, who had visions of opening a proper pub, with heavy and bitter on tap and a snooker table. Straight out of the account of a USAF pilot stationed at RAF Duxford circa 1943. At least we’re spared a comic relief drunken Irishman.
Does this matter though? Other characters come and go, but it’s Wakeland’s narration that has to sustain our interest in the novel, and he manages that handsomely. Wakeland feels at times like he’s trying a little too hard to impress us, but he certainly has his moments of insight. “He saw no contradictions within himself,” he remarks of another character, “We never do.”
Wiebe’s gift for description is part of the appeal of the Wakeland books, and it’s in evidence here, too: “The sky had turned the colour of a bruised eyelid”; “a woman with a face like a broken-in catcher’s mitt.” The Downtown Eastside is rendered memorably as “the bent-backed catatonia of the lotus eaters,” while “the towers in Yaletown laid a bright hatching of fluorescence on the black water.” Mostly, Wiebe manages to avoid cliché on this well-worn, cynical-PI-with-a-heart-of-gold path, though the occasional clunker does slip through (“No more blood. I was tired of blood”).
Wiebe also knows how to end on a cliffhanger. The final twist, in a story intriguingly full of them, is one I genuinely didn’t see coming, and it sets us up for another instalment of this character with, perhaps, even less to lose this time.
“When you come down to it there is no why, or else there’s a why so impossibly vast, we can’t apprehend it. What we’re looking for is enough of an answer to stop us from asking,” Wakeland remarks. But Wakeland is never going to stop asking. He couldn’t live any other way. It’s this counterpoint, between his legitimate cynicism and his obsessive desire to do the right thing, that makes him a character worth staying with.
*
Ryan Frawley is a novelist and essayist whose short fiction has won numerous awards in BC and across Canada. He is the author of a novel, Scar, and a travel writing collection, Towers Temples Palaces: Essays from Europe. He also writes essays on medium.com and can be contacted at ryanfrawley.com. [Editor’s note: Ryan has reviewed recent books by Glenna Turnbull, Richard Wagamese, Marilyn Bowering, Marina Sonkina, Dennis E. Bolen, Don McLellan, Vijay Khurana, and Cynthia LeBrun in BCR.]
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The British Columbia Review
Interim Editors: Trevor Marc Hughes (nonfiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction and poetry)
Publisher: Richard Mackie
Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.
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