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Sam Wiebe is the award-winning author of the Wakeland novels, an acclaimed detective series in Canada, including Invisible Dead ("the definitive Vancouver crime novel") and Cut You Down ("successfully brings Raymond Chandler into the 21st century"). Wiebe's other books include Never Going Back, Last of the Independents, and the Vancouver Noir anthology, which he edited. Wiebe's work has won the Crime Writers of Canada award and the Kobo Emerging Writers prize, and been shortlisted for the Edgar, Hammett, Shamus and City of Vancouver book prizes. His original film/TV projects have been optioned, and his short stories have appeared in ThugLit, Spinetingler, and subTerrain, as well as anthologies by Houghton-Mifflin and Image Comics. Wiebe is a former VPL Writer in Residence. @sam_wiebe samwiebe.com
*
Wiebe's novel Last of the Independents (Dundurn $17.99) won the 2012 Unhanged Arthur Award for Best Unpublished First Novel, and was subsequently published in 2014. The novel introduces readers to a 29 year-old private investigator, named Michael Drayton who runs an agency in Vancouver that specializes in missing persons. Characters range from a local junk merchant, a crooked private eye, and a drug-addicted car thief to a necrophile and a disreputable psychic trying to bilk the mother of a missing girl.
Wiebe's second novel Invisible Dead (Random House, 2016) introduces PI Dave Wakeland. His big case is the mystery surrounding an indigenous woman, Chelsea Loam, who disappeared eleven years ago. Her trail leads Wakeland to career criminals, powerful men and possibly his own death. SEE REVIEW BELOW
PHOTO CREDIT: MEL YAP
BOOKS:
Last of the Independents (Dundurn, 2014) $17.99 9781459709485
Invisible Dead: A Wakeland Novel (Random House, 2016) $22.00 978-0-345-81627-6
Cut You Down: A Wakeland Novel (Random House, 2018) $24 978-0-345-81629-0
Never Going Back (Orca, 2020) $9.95 978-1-4598257-7-2
Hell and Gone: A Wakeland Novel (Harbour Publishing, 2021) $24.95 9781550179637
Sunset and Jericho: A Wakeland Novel ( Harbour Publishing, 2023) $24.95 9781990776236
Ocean Drive: A Novel (Harbour Publishing, 2024) $24.95 9781990776694
The Last Exile: A Wakeland Novel (D&M, 2025) $24.95 9781998526086
[BCBW 2025]
++++
The Last Exile: A Wakeland Novel
by Sam Wiebe (Harbour $24.95)
Review by John Moore (BCBW 2025)
In Sam Wiebe’s latest Dave Wakeland mystery, The Last Exile, Wakeland returns to Vancouver after an eighteen-month “retirement/exile” in Montreal, where he’d been getting stale as a day-old baguette. An urgent call from criminal defence lawyer Shuzhen Chen, cousin of his former business partner Jeff Chen, shakes the apathy and ennui out of him faster than a feral cat can snap the neck of a Ballantyne Pier rat.
The Chens are “family” in a way his own never was, especially Shuzhen, with whom he has “history,” as former lovers say when attempting to brag discreetly. To rumple the sheets further, Jeff has gone AWOL, leaving his pregnant wife at the helm of Wakeland & Chen Security, about to founder in a sea of debt thanks to a cynical client who refuses to pay, assuming they’ll go under before he has to pony up.
Welcome home, Dave.
Shuzhen’s client, Maggie Zito, a hard-assed take-no-shit Eastside single mom who runs a landscaping firm, has a different kind of history with the Exiles MC, a Vancouver biker outfit patched-over and connected to a major global biker criminal organization. Decades ago, Maggie’s brother Beau, was savagely murdered by Exiles bikers after a beer parlour incident in the town of Hope.
Maggie publicly vowed revenge and she’s the kind of woman whose word you take lightly at your peril. When senior Exiles Budd Stack and his wife Jan are brutally murdered on their False Creek houseboat, the reflex police investigation of Maggie is validated by the discovery of an axe and a machete covered in their blood in her toolshed. Cops and the Crown assume it’s a coffee-and-donuts case that won’t come to trial because Exiles members present at the arraignment make it clear Maggie will miss her day in court due to being shanked in the snake pit of pre-trial jail. Initially sceptical, Wakeland catches the nasty whiff of a frame-up and dives headfirst back into the oil-scummy waters of low tide in Vancouver, where big dogfish eat little dogfish and dream of becoming Great White sharks.
After sixty years of evolving into major drug-and-gun-running organizations, the brotherly veneer of biker culture has worn thinner than an old Sixties denim “cut” whose bold colours have faded to grey. Biker club presidents ride Range Rovers instead of Harleys and spend more time at exclusive golf clubhouses than the MC hangout, but the polo shirts barely disguise men (and women) hardened by half a century of viciousness who have substantial financial interests to protect. Like the generations of hard-boiled private investigators he’s descended from, Wakeland gets a refresher course to remind him that when a poodle noses the backside of a pit bull, the result is likely to be mayhem, maiming or worse.
In four previous wakeland novels and in The Last Exile, Sam Wiebe has shown he has the feet to fill the heel-worn gumshoes of the inventors of modern noir fiction, Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. He’s mastered their method of the “wandering plot” —a reaction against the formulaic murder mystery perfected by Agatha Christie a generation before. Christie understood the power of Aristotle’s “dramatic unities” of time, place and action. In her best novels, all characters/suspects are introduced and confined in a setting—an English country house, on a steamboat on the Nile or on the Orient Express train—where the action unfolds in consecutive time, usually with a surprising twist at the finale.
Hammett and Chandler broke the rules by having detectives pursue more realistic investigations that stumble, stagger and sometimes reel from one clue and setting to another at opposing ends of the social spectrum, encountering characters unlikely to assemble in a drawing room for a Big Reveal where the detective names the murderer. Like Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe and John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee, Dave Wakeland is the domestic version of the morally compromised international spy created by Somerset Maugham and Graham Greene, and refined by John le Carré.
The tone of The Last Exile is deeply elegiac. Though Wakeland has only been away from Vancouver for eighteen months, Wiebe’s narrative is peppered with references to the “lost” city of Vancouver, rapidly being replaced by ruthless money-driven development. It’s like listening to The Skydiggers’ Andy Maize sing his lament for his hometown, Toronto — “My City Is Gone” — on repeat play.
Almost all the characters in The Last Exile are aging out. Even the young biker prospect, Felix Ramos, seems to have second thoughts about a criminal career after hanging out with Wakeland, as if he senses he might’ve pinned his hopes on a stale-dated vision of a future about to be erased by corporate interests who wouldn’t hire him as a doorman.
Is The Last Exile the last Dave Wakeland novel? Let’s hope not. 9781998526086
John Moore reads and reviews books in Garibaldi Highlands. His most recent book, The Last Reel, an historical fiction sequel to the movie Casablanca, was released this year by Ekstasis Editions.
***
Never Going Back by Sam Wiebe (Orca $9.95)
BCBW 2020
In his fourth novel Never Going Back (part of Orca Book Publishers' "Rapid Reads" series for adult readers) crime writer Sam Wiebe introduces us to Ali Kidd, determined to put her criminal ways behind her after spending a year in jail.
Trouble is, Ali is so good at being a thief that there are evil-doers just as determined to get her to continue with her particular skillset. And Ali has vulnerabilities because she comes from a broken family that now includes just her and a brother, Dean.
It's clear that Dean means more than anything in the world to Ali. A crime boss knows this and kidnaps Dean to extort Ali into doing another heist.
Will Ali do it?
In addition to being a master of suspense, as all good crime writers need to be, Sam Wiebe knows how to pack a world of information into a few short paragraphs.
Take his introduction to Ali in the opening soliloquy: "Don't believe what you hear about me," says Ali. "I don't rob people. Robbery means taking something with force. I hate violence, and I've never used a weapon in my life. Besides, I'm too good to need force. If I take something of yours, you won't know until it's gone, and you'll never know it was me.
"I'm a thief. A great thief. Or I was. But right now I was a woman waiting in the rain for her brother."
Right from the get-go, Ali is established as someone with morals. Thievery is an artform to her more than a way of life. Her brother Dean has other talents -- he likes to cook and runs a restaurant. He has offered Ali a job when she finishes her jail time.
"Tonight, for my first meal after getting out of prison, he promised to make me something called cassoulet. I told him a burger and fries would be all right. But like I said, he loves to cook. Me, I'm good at other things."
Ali learned about the security business as a teen when she helped her guardian aunt's boyfriend, Paul, who installed alarms for a security company. Homeowners set their own codes but Ali learns that as a backup, installers set their own codes in case of emergencies. Usually they pick unique numbers. "But installers have bad days too," says Ali. "Some are lazy. Paul liked to get home early, so he would always set the same code. Four zeros.
"I was fifteen when I learned this. For a fifteen-year-old, that was a lot of knowledge."
Being young and bored, Ali practiced getting into homes that had Paul's security company stickers on their windows. "I would practice after school. Or instead of school. Working with Paul was my school.
"At that time I didn't take things. I just liked the challenge of getting into places. I wanted to open any door, defeat any alarm, know every code. That was my fantasy."
Ali learns other things too, like mastering a rock-climbing wall at a gym where she worked part-time at the age of 18. "After cleaning the floors and emptying the trash, I'd practice climbing, building strength and confidence. Soon I could almost walk up walls."
Now, in addition to being able to get past alarms and locks, Ali can scale walls and enter a building in a variety of ways.
Her skills get noticed by local crime boss Lisa Wan who leads Ali into the life of a thief. After seven years, Lisa betrays Ali and gets her arrested and landed in jail.
Ali's only visitor in prison was Dean. He convinces her that she should come work in his restaurant when she is released. That is Ali's intention until Dean doesn't show up to collect her when she gets out. After a bit of sleuthing, Ali figures out that Lisa Wan has kidnapped him. To free Dean, Lisa orders Ali to engage in one of the trickiest, most dangerous heists she has ever attempted.
Will it work? Will Ali get caught? And what about the handsome police officer that takes an interest in Ali? All is revealed in Wiebe's surprising conclusion.
Sam Wiebe's first novel Last of the Independents (Dundurn, 2014) won the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize, an Arthur Ellis Award, and was nominated for a Shamus award. He is also a former Vancouver Public Library Writer in Residence. 978-1-4598257-7-2
***
Sunset and Jericho: A Wakeland Novel by Sam Wiebe (Harbour $24.95)
Review by John Moore (BCBW 2023)
In his fourth Dave Wakeland novel, New Westminster author Sam Wiebe once again proves that eulogies for the hard-boiled private eye are premature. On the strength of his previous Wakeland novels, Invisible Dead (Random House, 2016), Cut You Down (Random House, 2018) and Hell and Gone (Harbour, 2021), he’s been credited with resurrecting the genre epitomized by American 1930-40s crime fiction icons Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. In the more restrictive legal and cultural environment of contemporary Canada, this is no mere party trick.
In Sunset and Jericho, Wiebe shows he learned more from the masters than snappy dialogue and an ironic narrative point of view projected by a cynical idealist whose career choice perversely “enables” his personal flaws. Dave Wakeland might benefit from a few sessions with Vancouver behavioural psychologist Dr. Annick Boudreau, Charles Demers’ fictional amateur detective in Primary Obsessions (D&M, 2020) and Noonday Dark (D&M, 2022). Maybe Wiebe and Demers will collaborate on a series “cross-over” here with Dr. Boudreau treating Wakeland for depression while they work on a case together... but I digress.
Wiebe borrows Chandler’s go-to plot device, used in The Big Sleep (1939) and The Long Goodbye (1953) lifted straight from the generic source, Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes: point the stink-finger at “respectable” wealthy and powerful clients who hire private investigators because they’re being blackmailed or extorted by more extreme means like kidnapping and want some jaded moral janitor to mop up the mess their odious actions have made without damaging their public image. Their sense of entitlement, of being “above the law,” makes the hoods and gangsters of crime fiction seem like regular guys. In Sunset and Jericho, Wakeland is tasked with finding the Mayor of Vancouver’s wastrel “wasting away in Margaritaville” younger brother, who has mysteriously disappeared.
Part of Wiebe’s success in “bringing Raymond Chandler into the 21st century” is achieved by not making Wakeland some shady shamus working out of a seedy office on the Downtown Eastside. These days, no PI working solo could make the rent on the cheapest flea-trap in Vancouver. Wakeland is realistically partnered in a private security firm whose core business is providing security guards for corporate properties and construction sites. Only senior partners, mainly Wakeland, undertake private investigations. The firm’s size, local presence and connections explains why the Mayor would contact them to discreetly find her errant brother rather than the Vancouver Police Department.
In true Chandler fashion, Wakeland’s half-hearted sleuthing on a job he regards as doing a local politician’s soiled laundry sucks him into a labyrinthine plot that gets deeper, darker and fouler at every turn. Random events like the near blinding of a Transit Police officer with “jailhouse napalm” (boiling sugar water) and theft of her pistol, the appearance of strange new graffiti tags in the city and two murders eventually lead Wakeland to a group of social justice warriors turned terrorists whose real target is a local high-profile property developer. Set in a city where homelessness and the inflated cost of housing are problems soaring out of control, Sunset and Jericho hits the “hot button” with a bulls-eye.
Wiebe’s plotting is superb: he’s a master of the twist-on-the-twist. The reader’s brain feels like a soft pretzel during the final chapters. Film directors should be waving options at him if they aren’t already.
Bringing the emotionally hardened private eye into the 21st century milieu of political correctness and cancel culture is a tall order. Jim Christy solved the problem by setting his trilogy of Eugene Castle noir novels, Shanghai Alley, Princess and Gore, and Terminal Avenue (Ekstasis), in the Vancouver of the 1930s and early 40s, when men were hard-boiled, women were over-easy and you could pick up a pistol for a double sawbuck at any pawn shop. Like Christy, Wiebe has had to dance the tango in a minefield, since the writers and genre characters he admires, Chandler especially, frequently used misogynist, homophobic and racist slurs in the dialogue and narrative of their works. That Sam Wiebe manages to do homage to Hammett’s Sam Spade and Chandler’s Philip Marlowe without turning Dave Wakeland into an anachronistic parody is nothing short of a literary tour-de-force. 9781990776236
John Moore has written three novels, a poetry collection, and most recently Rain City: Vancouver Essays (Anvil Press). He lives in Garibaldi Highlands.
*
Wiebe's novel Last of the Independents (Dundurn $17.99) won the 2012 Unhanged Arthur Award for Best Unpublished First Novel, and was subsequently published in 2014. The novel introduces readers to a 29 year-old private investigator, named Michael Drayton who runs an agency in Vancouver that specializes in missing persons. Characters range from a local junk merchant, a crooked private eye, and a drug-addicted car thief to a necrophile and a disreputable psychic trying to bilk the mother of a missing girl.
Wiebe's second novel Invisible Dead (Random House, 2016) introduces PI Dave Wakeland. His big case is the mystery surrounding an indigenous woman, Chelsea Loam, who disappeared eleven years ago. Her trail leads Wakeland to career criminals, powerful men and possibly his own death. SEE REVIEW BELOW
PHOTO CREDIT: MEL YAP
BOOKS:
Last of the Independents (Dundurn, 2014) $17.99 9781459709485
Invisible Dead: A Wakeland Novel (Random House, 2016) $22.00 978-0-345-81627-6
Cut You Down: A Wakeland Novel (Random House, 2018) $24 978-0-345-81629-0
Never Going Back (Orca, 2020) $9.95 978-1-4598257-7-2
Hell and Gone: A Wakeland Novel (Harbour Publishing, 2021) $24.95 9781550179637
Sunset and Jericho: A Wakeland Novel ( Harbour Publishing, 2023) $24.95 9781990776236
Ocean Drive: A Novel (Harbour Publishing, 2024) $24.95 9781990776694
The Last Exile: A Wakeland Novel (D&M, 2025) $24.95 9781998526086
[BCBW 2025]
++++
The Last Exile: A Wakeland Novel
by Sam Wiebe (Harbour $24.95)
Review by John Moore (BCBW 2025)
In Sam Wiebe’s latest Dave Wakeland mystery, The Last Exile, Wakeland returns to Vancouver after an eighteen-month “retirement/exile” in Montreal, where he’d been getting stale as a day-old baguette. An urgent call from criminal defence lawyer Shuzhen Chen, cousin of his former business partner Jeff Chen, shakes the apathy and ennui out of him faster than a feral cat can snap the neck of a Ballantyne Pier rat.
The Chens are “family” in a way his own never was, especially Shuzhen, with whom he has “history,” as former lovers say when attempting to brag discreetly. To rumple the sheets further, Jeff has gone AWOL, leaving his pregnant wife at the helm of Wakeland & Chen Security, about to founder in a sea of debt thanks to a cynical client who refuses to pay, assuming they’ll go under before he has to pony up.
Welcome home, Dave.
Shuzhen’s client, Maggie Zito, a hard-assed take-no-shit Eastside single mom who runs a landscaping firm, has a different kind of history with the Exiles MC, a Vancouver biker outfit patched-over and connected to a major global biker criminal organization. Decades ago, Maggie’s brother Beau, was savagely murdered by Exiles bikers after a beer parlour incident in the town of Hope.
Maggie publicly vowed revenge and she’s the kind of woman whose word you take lightly at your peril. When senior Exiles Budd Stack and his wife Jan are brutally murdered on their False Creek houseboat, the reflex police investigation of Maggie is validated by the discovery of an axe and a machete covered in their blood in her toolshed. Cops and the Crown assume it’s a coffee-and-donuts case that won’t come to trial because Exiles members present at the arraignment make it clear Maggie will miss her day in court due to being shanked in the snake pit of pre-trial jail. Initially sceptical, Wakeland catches the nasty whiff of a frame-up and dives headfirst back into the oil-scummy waters of low tide in Vancouver, where big dogfish eat little dogfish and dream of becoming Great White sharks.
After sixty years of evolving into major drug-and-gun-running organizations, the brotherly veneer of biker culture has worn thinner than an old Sixties denim “cut” whose bold colours have faded to grey. Biker club presidents ride Range Rovers instead of Harleys and spend more time at exclusive golf clubhouses than the MC hangout, but the polo shirts barely disguise men (and women) hardened by half a century of viciousness who have substantial financial interests to protect. Like the generations of hard-boiled private investigators he’s descended from, Wakeland gets a refresher course to remind him that when a poodle noses the backside of a pit bull, the result is likely to be mayhem, maiming or worse.
In four previous wakeland novels and in The Last Exile, Sam Wiebe has shown he has the feet to fill the heel-worn gumshoes of the inventors of modern noir fiction, Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. He’s mastered their method of the “wandering plot” —a reaction against the formulaic murder mystery perfected by Agatha Christie a generation before. Christie understood the power of Aristotle’s “dramatic unities” of time, place and action. In her best novels, all characters/suspects are introduced and confined in a setting—an English country house, on a steamboat on the Nile or on the Orient Express train—where the action unfolds in consecutive time, usually with a surprising twist at the finale.
Hammett and Chandler broke the rules by having detectives pursue more realistic investigations that stumble, stagger and sometimes reel from one clue and setting to another at opposing ends of the social spectrum, encountering characters unlikely to assemble in a drawing room for a Big Reveal where the detective names the murderer. Like Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe and John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee, Dave Wakeland is the domestic version of the morally compromised international spy created by Somerset Maugham and Graham Greene, and refined by John le Carré.
The tone of The Last Exile is deeply elegiac. Though Wakeland has only been away from Vancouver for eighteen months, Wiebe’s narrative is peppered with references to the “lost” city of Vancouver, rapidly being replaced by ruthless money-driven development. It’s like listening to The Skydiggers’ Andy Maize sing his lament for his hometown, Toronto — “My City Is Gone” — on repeat play.
Almost all the characters in The Last Exile are aging out. Even the young biker prospect, Felix Ramos, seems to have second thoughts about a criminal career after hanging out with Wakeland, as if he senses he might’ve pinned his hopes on a stale-dated vision of a future about to be erased by corporate interests who wouldn’t hire him as a doorman.
Is The Last Exile the last Dave Wakeland novel? Let’s hope not. 9781998526086
John Moore reads and reviews books in Garibaldi Highlands. His most recent book, The Last Reel, an historical fiction sequel to the movie Casablanca, was released this year by Ekstasis Editions.
***
Never Going Back by Sam Wiebe (Orca $9.95)
BCBW 2020
In his fourth novel Never Going Back (part of Orca Book Publishers' "Rapid Reads" series for adult readers) crime writer Sam Wiebe introduces us to Ali Kidd, determined to put her criminal ways behind her after spending a year in jail.
Trouble is, Ali is so good at being a thief that there are evil-doers just as determined to get her to continue with her particular skillset. And Ali has vulnerabilities because she comes from a broken family that now includes just her and a brother, Dean.
It's clear that Dean means more than anything in the world to Ali. A crime boss knows this and kidnaps Dean to extort Ali into doing another heist.
Will Ali do it?
In addition to being a master of suspense, as all good crime writers need to be, Sam Wiebe knows how to pack a world of information into a few short paragraphs.
Take his introduction to Ali in the opening soliloquy: "Don't believe what you hear about me," says Ali. "I don't rob people. Robbery means taking something with force. I hate violence, and I've never used a weapon in my life. Besides, I'm too good to need force. If I take something of yours, you won't know until it's gone, and you'll never know it was me.
"I'm a thief. A great thief. Or I was. But right now I was a woman waiting in the rain for her brother."
Right from the get-go, Ali is established as someone with morals. Thievery is an artform to her more than a way of life. Her brother Dean has other talents -- he likes to cook and runs a restaurant. He has offered Ali a job when she finishes her jail time.
"Tonight, for my first meal after getting out of prison, he promised to make me something called cassoulet. I told him a burger and fries would be all right. But like I said, he loves to cook. Me, I'm good at other things."
Ali learned about the security business as a teen when she helped her guardian aunt's boyfriend, Paul, who installed alarms for a security company. Homeowners set their own codes but Ali learns that as a backup, installers set their own codes in case of emergencies. Usually they pick unique numbers. "But installers have bad days too," says Ali. "Some are lazy. Paul liked to get home early, so he would always set the same code. Four zeros.
"I was fifteen when I learned this. For a fifteen-year-old, that was a lot of knowledge."
Being young and bored, Ali practiced getting into homes that had Paul's security company stickers on their windows. "I would practice after school. Or instead of school. Working with Paul was my school.
"At that time I didn't take things. I just liked the challenge of getting into places. I wanted to open any door, defeat any alarm, know every code. That was my fantasy."
Ali learns other things too, like mastering a rock-climbing wall at a gym where she worked part-time at the age of 18. "After cleaning the floors and emptying the trash, I'd practice climbing, building strength and confidence. Soon I could almost walk up walls."
Now, in addition to being able to get past alarms and locks, Ali can scale walls and enter a building in a variety of ways.
Her skills get noticed by local crime boss Lisa Wan who leads Ali into the life of a thief. After seven years, Lisa betrays Ali and gets her arrested and landed in jail.
Ali's only visitor in prison was Dean. He convinces her that she should come work in his restaurant when she is released. That is Ali's intention until Dean doesn't show up to collect her when she gets out. After a bit of sleuthing, Ali figures out that Lisa Wan has kidnapped him. To free Dean, Lisa orders Ali to engage in one of the trickiest, most dangerous heists she has ever attempted.
Will it work? Will Ali get caught? And what about the handsome police officer that takes an interest in Ali? All is revealed in Wiebe's surprising conclusion.
Sam Wiebe's first novel Last of the Independents (Dundurn, 2014) won the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize, an Arthur Ellis Award, and was nominated for a Shamus award. He is also a former Vancouver Public Library Writer in Residence. 978-1-4598257-7-2
***
Sunset and Jericho: A Wakeland Novel by Sam Wiebe (Harbour $24.95)
Review by John Moore (BCBW 2023)
In his fourth Dave Wakeland novel, New Westminster author Sam Wiebe once again proves that eulogies for the hard-boiled private eye are premature. On the strength of his previous Wakeland novels, Invisible Dead (Random House, 2016), Cut You Down (Random House, 2018) and Hell and Gone (Harbour, 2021), he’s been credited with resurrecting the genre epitomized by American 1930-40s crime fiction icons Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. In the more restrictive legal and cultural environment of contemporary Canada, this is no mere party trick.
In Sunset and Jericho, Wiebe shows he learned more from the masters than snappy dialogue and an ironic narrative point of view projected by a cynical idealist whose career choice perversely “enables” his personal flaws. Dave Wakeland might benefit from a few sessions with Vancouver behavioural psychologist Dr. Annick Boudreau, Charles Demers’ fictional amateur detective in Primary Obsessions (D&M, 2020) and Noonday Dark (D&M, 2022). Maybe Wiebe and Demers will collaborate on a series “cross-over” here with Dr. Boudreau treating Wakeland for depression while they work on a case together... but I digress.
Wiebe borrows Chandler’s go-to plot device, used in The Big Sleep (1939) and The Long Goodbye (1953) lifted straight from the generic source, Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes: point the stink-finger at “respectable” wealthy and powerful clients who hire private investigators because they’re being blackmailed or extorted by more extreme means like kidnapping and want some jaded moral janitor to mop up the mess their odious actions have made without damaging their public image. Their sense of entitlement, of being “above the law,” makes the hoods and gangsters of crime fiction seem like regular guys. In Sunset and Jericho, Wakeland is tasked with finding the Mayor of Vancouver’s wastrel “wasting away in Margaritaville” younger brother, who has mysteriously disappeared.
Part of Wiebe’s success in “bringing Raymond Chandler into the 21st century” is achieved by not making Wakeland some shady shamus working out of a seedy office on the Downtown Eastside. These days, no PI working solo could make the rent on the cheapest flea-trap in Vancouver. Wakeland is realistically partnered in a private security firm whose core business is providing security guards for corporate properties and construction sites. Only senior partners, mainly Wakeland, undertake private investigations. The firm’s size, local presence and connections explains why the Mayor would contact them to discreetly find her errant brother rather than the Vancouver Police Department.
In true Chandler fashion, Wakeland’s half-hearted sleuthing on a job he regards as doing a local politician’s soiled laundry sucks him into a labyrinthine plot that gets deeper, darker and fouler at every turn. Random events like the near blinding of a Transit Police officer with “jailhouse napalm” (boiling sugar water) and theft of her pistol, the appearance of strange new graffiti tags in the city and two murders eventually lead Wakeland to a group of social justice warriors turned terrorists whose real target is a local high-profile property developer. Set in a city where homelessness and the inflated cost of housing are problems soaring out of control, Sunset and Jericho hits the “hot button” with a bulls-eye.
Wiebe’s plotting is superb: he’s a master of the twist-on-the-twist. The reader’s brain feels like a soft pretzel during the final chapters. Film directors should be waving options at him if they aren’t already.
Bringing the emotionally hardened private eye into the 21st century milieu of political correctness and cancel culture is a tall order. Jim Christy solved the problem by setting his trilogy of Eugene Castle noir novels, Shanghai Alley, Princess and Gore, and Terminal Avenue (Ekstasis), in the Vancouver of the 1930s and early 40s, when men were hard-boiled, women were over-easy and you could pick up a pistol for a double sawbuck at any pawn shop. Like Christy, Wiebe has had to dance the tango in a minefield, since the writers and genre characters he admires, Chandler especially, frequently used misogynist, homophobic and racist slurs in the dialogue and narrative of their works. That Sam Wiebe manages to do homage to Hammett’s Sam Spade and Chandler’s Philip Marlowe without turning Dave Wakeland into an anachronistic parody is nothing short of a literary tour-de-force. 9781990776236
John Moore has written three novels, a poetry collection, and most recently Rain City: Vancouver Essays (Anvil Press). He lives in Garibaldi Highlands.
Articles: 1 Article for this author
Invisible Dead
Review 2016
Chelsea mourning
By Maansi Pandya
Sam Wiebe's second, fast-paced noir thriller Invisible Dead (Random House $22) is a gritty journey into a Downtown Eastside crime world of seedy biker gangs, drugs and suspicious characters against a backdrop of homelessness and substance abuse. Now working as a private investigator, 29-year-old Dave Wakeland is a former cop who searches for Chelsea Loam, a young indigenous woman who disappeared eleven years earlier. He is hired by Chelsea's adoptive mother, Gail Kirby, who wants closure about Chelsea's fate now that she herself is ill and has only a few months left to live.
As the hunt for Chelsea Loam gets Wakeland into trouble, it's his never-back-down attitude in the face of danger that makes him an endearing character. Along the way we're introduced to a stream of characters willing to do whatever it takes to survive. Some are more dangerous than others, but all are battling their own demons.
Wakeland himself is no angel. He's a quick-witted, hasty and street-savvy guy, a tad reckless, and seemingly hardened by all the violence and darkness he has seen throughout his career. His friends and colleagues are somewhat taken aback when he appears to be taking a personal interest in the case. Wakeland is unable to accept how the city remains so unfazed by the scores of women who are going missing.
Sometimes it's easy to imagine the old school, hard-boiled detective voice of a Sam Spade or Humphrey Bogart: "Somewhere above or below ground was a woman who'd vanished when she was twenty-four and would be thirty-five this year. The world hadn't paused. Hadn't even noticed."
Wakeland receives word that a serial killer named Ed Leary Nichulls may know something about Chelsea Loam's disappearance. Nichulls is reminiscent of notorious hog farmer Robert Pickton. He doesn't divulge much; Wakeland gets little more than an eerie premonition: "Think I'm bad," says Nichulls, "there are people out there who put me to shame."
Wakeland learns from Chelsea Loam's social worker, Vivian, that Chelsea's old boyfriend may have been the last person to see her alive. At first, Vivian is reluctant to share this information. Wakeland says, "I believe you have an obligation to the living that supersedes any promises you make to the dead."
Vivian concedes and gives Wakeland a new lead: Chelsea's boyfriend may have been a pimp who went by the name of "Kamikaze." To get the lowdown on this guy, Wakeland finds Shay, an old classmate who works as a dancer in a club. Shay agrees to dig for clues, for a fee. Shay and Wakeland eventually develop a romantic interest in one another and their bantering dynamic adds a layer of much-needed levity
Clues lead Wakeland back to Terry Rhodes, the leader of a biker gang known as the Exiles. Again the horrific Picton story resonates. Arranging a meeting with Rhodes proves to be harder than expected. After a violent confrontation with one of Rhodes's lackeys, Wakeland is given repeated warnings to drop the search for Chelsea Loam, or face serious consequences.
Of course Wakeland ignores these warnings. When he finally does come face to face with Rhodes, he's conflicted by his need to save his own skin versus his pursuit of truth and justice for Chelsea. Wiebe does an excellent job of creating tension and nail-biting suspense. Certain scenes are not for the faint-hearted, but they never feel forced or unnecessary.
Wakeland narrows down his list of suspects. Tensions rise to the proverbial breaking point. Wakeland's own loved ones are threatened. His struggles within himself are powerful and visceral. Invisible Dead emphasizes the strength and resilience of the human spirit against seemingly insurmountable odds while shedding more light to the very real issue of missing women in British Columbia. It follows Wiebe's literary debut, Last of the Independents, which earned him a Kobo Emerging Writer Prize and a 2012 Unhanged Arthur Award for Best Unpublished First Novel. 978-0-345-81627-6
[BCBW 2016]
