Undertow a fine effort, but doesn’t break new ground

Second entry into B.C. Blues series takes care of business in workmanlike manner

The songwriters most held in esteem by other musicians tend to be those who take a genre, such as popular music, and do something revolutionary with it.

As listeners, we may neither know nor care that David Bowie used diminished minor-ninth chords, or that Roy Orbison wrote chord progressions to suit the melody he imagined, rather than the usual chords and tune.

The effect, however, is to create a distinctive, at best groundbreaking, addition to a genre, perhaps even creating a genre of its own in the process.

Other songwriters are content to stick with a commonly accepted idiom, such as 12-bar blues. While few would deny the quality of songs such as Taking Care of Business, equally few people would make the claim that such songs rewrite the rule book, break new ground or make people look at music in a fresh light.

Much the same might be made about genre fiction. Many regions seek to replicate the success of the Scandinavian noir genre, which has spawned at least two multi-million selling authors and a seemingly endless series of movies, Netflix and HBO series, together with academic studies, conferences and festivals. Scotland, Australia, France, Ireland and, yes, Canada, all have either established or rising crime/noir scenes that aspire to the Nordic crown.

R.M. Greenaway’s B.C. Blues series is part of a growing movement of crime fiction from the Pacific Northwest that is beginning to gather pace both through writers such as Greenaway and Elle Wild (both published by Dundurn) and Cuffed, the Vancouver Crime Writing Festival launched in 2016. If the beginnings of any movement cause excitement, then such beginnings also need innovators — those prepared to take risks with their work, to push the boundaries of their genres and make things new.

With Undertow, the second book in Greenaway’s series, experienced readers of crime fiction will find themselves on familiar ground. A woman’s body is washed ashore in North Vancouver. Other murders, apparently unrelated, are committed. A semi-cynical cop and his partner are assigned to the case: cue the shady owner of a nightspot and his wife; a stripper who dated one of the dead men, and a witness too young to give away much information.

Greenaway’s writing is economical, her plotting taut, her knowledge of the geography of Vancouver sound. At no point does this book fail the crucial test of being credible: events described feel real, characters speak in the register and diction they would if we met them, and the plot cracks along at an electric pace. So much so, that if there’s a criticism of Greenaway’s technique, it would be that she could afford to slow down at times and offer more description, especially of people.

This apart, Undertow is an enjoyable read that does exactly what you’d expect a crime thriller to do. Much like the 12-bar blues tunes though, the B.C. Blues series is in need of a Jimi Hendrix or Stevie Ray Vaughan to lift it out of its genre and place it in another class.

One example of this comes in the book’s main reveal which — without giving away the plot — seems to happen rather too fortuitously. Further reveals occur as overly convenient confessions and, near the end of the book, there’s a sense that rather too many loose ends are being tied up to give readers the urge to carry on with whatever Greenaway may yet cook up for Cal Dion and Dave Leith, the characters to whom we were introduced in her debut, Cold Girl.

Those who love Arthur Conan Doyle’s work will recall how Holmes and Moriarty do battle through a Gordian knot of wit and intrigue; how Holmes ends The Final Problem in peril of death at Moriarty’s hands overlooking the Reichenbach Falls, only to explain how he killed Moriarty and escaped at the beginning of Holmes’ next adventure.

Such cliff-hanging bravura may be the missing element in Greenaway’s work: if she’s to attract a wider audience, then the welcome realism on offer here needs to be married to some element of luck or fantasy, something that will mark her out from the growing number of crime writers populating the Pacific Northwest.

Without that, the B.C. Blues series will remain much more Taking Care of Business than Bowie’s Starman.