The most prescient West Coast crime story is easily Jack Wassermann and Howard Robens' co-authored Hambro's Itch (New York: Doubleday, 1979; New York: Signet, 1980), about a Pentagon scheme to spread a deadly, sexually transmissible virus ('Hambro's Itch') to Third World countries via Vancouver. Written prior to the knowledge of AIDS, it's a bizarre and twisted tale that reads better with age.

Hammond Innes' 29th book, High Stand (1985), culminates in B.C., as does Dick Francis' The Edge (1988). Crime fiction currently receives a good deal of attention in B.C. from the Vancouver Sun book page editor, Peter Wilson, himself an aspiring crime writer.

[Summer/BCBW 1989]