'A constellation of voids:' how Sam Wiebe's fiction lays bare the reality of BC's organized crime
The acclaimed series of novels chronicling the adventures of private investigator Dave Wakeland is 'entertainment first and foremost,' says Wiebe, but carries a deeper message
When Vancouver private investigator Dave Wakeland required an urgent meeting with the president of BC’s notorious Exiles motorcycle gang to plead for the life of a client falsely accused of a double murder, he didn’t expect to find himself in a private dining room at the Shaughnessy Golf and Country Club.
The veteran PI quickly took in the scene: the feared biker Terry Rhodes is sitting with “a trio of men with the air of wealth and good fortune,” immaculately “dressed as I’d never seen him before, in earth tones and bone-coloured cardigan. Harder than the people around him, which was noticeable even from a distance, but he didn’t stick out.
“On the contrary. He belonged.”
This sharply observed encounter from Sam Wiebe’s The Last Exile, the latest in his award-winning Wakeland series of crime novels, reveals part of the secret to Wiebe’s best-selling success.
He makes the implausible seem probable, the unseen become visible. All cities have organized crime, but few can claim a crime writer of Wiebe’s skill and panache.
Vancouver itself is a character in these mysteries, the incubator of the crimes Wakeland is hired to solve. The seamless connection between organized crime and the top leadership of the city’s economic and business elites rings true. Who hasn’t wondered at remarkable coincidences?
Wakeland is not just a crime fighter, he’s a social observer, alive to power and class. To him, the city is in long-term decline, driven by a real estate boom fuelled by laundered money that is destroying the city’s soul.
“Vancouver has lost the smell of sawdust,” Wakeland laments. “The days of an honest living were over. The new frontier involved corporate pillaging, jicama slaw and the view of construction cranes from a 300-square-foot micro apartment.”
“Land is at the heart of every mystery,” Wiebe writes. “A finite commodity with infinite uses and therefore infinite value . . . In Vancouver, every evil leads back to real estate.” Where others see a vibrant city, Wakeland sees a “constellation of voids.”
But true to his calling, Wiebe leaves his darkest conclusions largely unsaid, focussing on the wrong-doers and their wrong-doing.
“It's entertainment first and foremost,” Wiebe said recently over coffee. We were in a suitably noir neighbourhood at Main and Broadway just steps from Pulp Fiction, one of Wiebe’s favourite bookstores.
“The books have to be fun. They have to have some sort of a puzzle to them, but it's also social commentary. It's a genre where you're writing about the real world. So, it's not quite like fantasy or science fiction where you're extrapolating from the world. You're actually writing about real places, [combining] the atmosphere of that with the entertainment of the crime story.
“There's a way to tell a story that's interesting to people, but that also has a lot of truth to it. I think that really appealed to me.”
Wiebe, born and raised in Vancouver, was winding up an MA in English at SFU when he realized he had always wanted to write and “if I don’t write a book now, I’m never going to.” He put his studies on hold, wrote a novel, then another that got published, and never looked back. In addition to the five Wakeland books, he has published four other novels with a fifth on the way.
“I think Vancouver has one of the most interesting social hierarchies of social strata in the world,” Wiebe continues. “I mean, the absolute richest people live here. There is one of the poorest postal codes in the country.
“There are people who are fresh off the boat, recent arrivals. There are families that have been here for six generations. It really has a wonderful natural diversity that's very unforced. You can have a character move through this world and every place is a little bit different.
“I think that really, the private eye story and Vancouver really go hand in hand.”
In Sunset and Jericho, Wiebe’s previous Wakeland novel, the disappearance of the feckless brother of the city’s mayor, a cigar-smoking power broker in a same sex relationship with her female deputy chief of staff, triggers a plotline with multiple hairpin turns.
Have the disaffected graduates of a cult-like therapy centre taken direct action against the real estate sector by kidnapping a prominent developer and pushing one of his employees out of a tall building?
The corpse propped against the Gateway to the Northwest Passage, the sculpture overlooking English Bay at the entrance to False Creek, is yielding no clues, yet in Wiebe’s deft hands, this outlandish suggestion seems to fit the facts.
Wakeland is a complex character, troubled by the city’s decline, able to absorb terrible physical punishment, prone to intellectual references from literature and classical music and quick to stream Oliver Gannon or Miles Davis when he needs to muffle a private conversation.
Has this cult declared war on the rich? Wakeland wonders. “How would I stop such a thing? And would I want to?”
The fentanyl crisis takes centre stage with Ocean Drive, set in White Rock, where the local RCMP detachment commander, a lesbian struggling with a marriage breakdown, is thrust into an investigation of the death of a young woman found horribly burned in a deliberately set fire. The main suspect is Cameron Shaw, a young White Rock man just released from prison.
Shaw is recruited by a mysterious lawyer whose clients want him to infiltrate the League of Nationz, a local gang operating in the violent zone between the men directing the drug trade and the retailer dealers. What Shaw discovers at great personal cost – he has one hand smashed with a hammer during a harrowing interrogation – lays bare a long-standing plan by local movers and shakers, backed by the League, to control a new casino.
“Because it's a small town,” Wiebe says, “there's that great dichotomy between a really sleepy place where nothing ever happens, but on the border, so it's tied into every transnational criminal enterprise. Having a character who is slowly realizing that the town isn't what she thought, I thought was really interesting.”
Wiebe is a student of crime, and his descriptions of how criminal organizations interact and evolve mirror the findings of police. Wiebe is a stickler for accuracy, so a car chase on the Cambie Bridge takes the right off ramp. For Vancouver natives, there are countless local references, right down to the excellent Dan Dan Chicken at Peaceful Restaurant near City Hall.
Wiebe never fails to entertain, nor does he romanticize his criminal characters. Outlaw motorcycle gangs benefit from a deliberate confusion in their image, he believes, that covers up their actual impact.
“There are different ways of looking at bikers specifically,” he says. “One of them is as the sort of Easy Rider, Sons of Anarchy, kind of fun-loving outlaw roughnecks who, you know, push the bounds of society, but they're basically like good people.
“And then I think the other way is to look at them as a really sophisticated and ruthless criminal network. Terry Rhodes is that second type, but he's also posing as that first type, and they kind of use that as the cover. And I think because they're white, they're not seen as foreign invaders ruining our streets and corrupting people.”
Organized criminal activity is on the rise in Canada, he believes. It is “very sophisticated and very internecine. To try to show that in the book is important, I think.”
Outlaw motorcycle gangs have been so successful in BC, Wiebe believes, that they have been able to move into countless legitimate and near-legitimate businesses, from real estate to online poker. Yet the violence continues.
“I did a talk at a school the other day and the teacher said, ‘there are a lot of murders in this book. A lot more than in real life.’ Actually, no I scale back the amount of violence because I want to focus on the consequences of one or two actions. That teacher lives in a world where there's no violence and it's a great city. But I think other people are aware that it's happening, and that people don't talk about it.”
Yet Wiebe’s books do talk about organized crime as we experience it every day, whether we admit it or not, proof that sometimes great fiction may be the best way to understand the violent and destructive reality of crime in this province
Chief Coroner yields to demands for inquest in the death of Tatyanna Harrison
BC Chief Coroner Jatinder Baidwan has reopened his investigation and promised an inquest in the 2022 death of 20-year-old Tatyanna Harrison – first declared an overdose, then the result of sepsis – after determined advocacy by Harrison’s family.
Harrison’s half-naked body was found in a yacht in a Richmond boatyard’s drydock. An independent report has questioned the sepsis finding as well.
Baidwan declined to order inquests into the deaths of Noelle O’Soup, 13, and Chelsea Poorman, 24, who died within six months of Harrison, arguing investigations into those cases remain open.
Nevertheless, the announcement reflects Baidwan’s pledge to overhaul the coroner’s service after his appointment in January. Under Lisa Lapointe, Baidwan’s predecessor, the service was the subject of continued criticism for the low rate of autopsies and inquests.
Scrutiny of the Coroner’s Service has been driven in large part by reporting in The Tyee by award-winning journalist Jen St. Denis.
In Victoria, an inquest continues into the death of UVic student Sydney McIntyre-Starko. That inquest was directly ordered by then Solicitor General Mike Farnworth in 2024 after McIntyre-Starko’s parents challenged UVic’s management of their daughter’s fentanyl overdose.
Baidwan’s decision signals a new determination in Victoria to maintain confidence in the coroner’s service, which is a critical source of information required to combat the overdose crisis. McIntyre-Starko’s inquest will involve 33 witnesses over 11 days of hearing.