CYNICAL SLEUTH HITS NEXT CASE
Private eye no fan of West Coast life as he seeks answers in gripping tale
Cut You Down Sam Wiebe Random House Cut You Down is the second of Sam Wiebe’s novels on the case with David Wakeland, a brooding, fists-ready, disappointed romantic of a P.I. Grippingly twisty entertainment, the story also offers provocative thoughts about the state of the West Coast’s soul.
The book is marked by a curious but attractive mixture of qualities. Foremost is the surprising elegance. Wiebe’s spare meticulous sentences are little marvels of concision. His chapters are likewise brief and to the point. He unreels details and plot artfully, producing a literal page-turning momentum.
What makes that elegance particularly striking is the superbly jaded outlook (which alternates with despairing, grim, and, rarely, upbeat).
Thirty years old and no stranger to whiskey or corroded human hearts, Wakeland’s musings on the West Coast — and the “evil city” at its economic centre — are conveyed with a degree of cynicism.
To name a few, there’s architecture (“gray monoliths”), food courts (“Life’s lowered expectations brought you here”), reputation (Vancouver’s a city’s “known for its missing and murdered women”), economic reality (“You want to live here, on your own terms? Be prepared to steal”), Pacific Northwest towns (they seem “the choice of an insane creature that would rather stare at its own feces than a perfection it had no hand in shaping ”), and, of course individuals — including one enforcer with “a face like a ruined holiday.”
Evidently, prolonged exposure to the mean streets can exterminate one’s joie de vivre.
Though Wiebe’s working within the noir tradition where there’s routine brutality on both sides of the law, deceits and half-truths as a way of life, ulterior motives, betrayals, and beatings, Wiebe’s story doesn’t languish under that tradition’s shadow. Wakeland’s a tough-guy gumshoe, sure, but of the here and now. And he’s no hipster trying out Sam Spade zingers.
Wiebe’s plot is propulsive. There’s a missing person case. Wakeland is hired by a seemingly delicate and naive professor with romantic feelings for one of her former students. That student disappeared after a financial scandal rocked Surrey Polytechnic. While he’s simultaneously navigating the growing empire of his business (thanks to Jeff Chen, his business partner) and showing his half-sister the P.I. ropes, Wakeland is approached by his ex-girlfriend, a cop, who asks him to check out her “white and male and connected” current partner at the VPD. She correctly suspects him of shady dealings.
Trips to Matsqui, Ladysmith, Surrey, Abbotsford, Cloverdale, and of course various stops within the metropolis reveals criminality and corruption everywhere.
Wakeland chases leads and finds what he seeks, only to have the revelations result in further complications.
A well-told and apparently effortless tale, Wiebe’s book contributes to a growing sense that the notion of the Canadian character as nice and law-abiding is little more than an outdated myth.