Vancouver Noir
City outgrew its steam- age industrial economy, but the changes didn’t come easily or overnight
Diane Purvey and John Belshaw have combined on a book about working class Vancouver and the sensibility associated with industrial modernism.
Some readers might be confused at first by Vancouver Noir, an often fascinating book by Diane Purvey and John Belshaw.
On the basis of the title, many will think of film noir, the movie genre that grew out of German Expressionism in the Weimar period and was then embraced by Hollywood. Remember all those dark angular shadows and rainy sidewalks, all those crooked cops and moralistic private eyes? To say nothing of dames with a past.
Purvey and Belshaw write little about noir films, except for the intriguing fact that several were made in Vancouver in the 1930s for the export market. They had such titles as Death Goes North and Secrets of
Chinatown. Nor do the collaborators, both of them academics, look deeply into noir fiction, which was equally influential in depicting gritty urban life.
At one point they speak of what’s to be found “in Dashiell Hammett’s L. A.” when of course they mean either Hammett’s San Francisco or the Los Angeles of Raymond Chandler.
They are largely mute on the topic of the big market for Canadian detective magazines and crime tabloids that thrived for so long.
They say nothing at all of the often pseudonymous pulp novels published by Newsstand Library or White Star Books ( but most often set in Montreal and Toronto, rather than out here).
What they’re writing about, then, isn’t culture but the sensibility associated with industrial modernism. This is a book about working- class Vancouver in the three decades between, say, the opening of the Marine Building in 1930 and the death, in 1959, of Errol Flynn, in the arms of his teenage girlfriend after an enthusiastic evening at the Penthouse Cabaret on Seymour Street.
It’s about the first two generations of Vancouverites born into the age of automobiles, radios, tall skyscrapers, Hollywood movies, and the bitter distinction between East Vancouver and the West Side ( and, later, Shaughnessy).
It’s illustrated with about 150 maps and black- and- white photos, including shots of murder victims and other crime scenes: the sort of images that always contain a great deal of visual information.
The authors write well about what they properly call Speed Graphic photography. The phrase refers to the type of camera used by news photographers of this period — a period when Vancouver’s three daily newspapers relished coverage of the underworld. ( From 1932, a typical headline from The Sun: “Bandits in Weekend Orgy of Crime.” Those were the days.)
They were also the days when respectable business and political leaders, and the people they represented and epitomized, feared not only “yeggs” and “cracksmen” ( burglars and safecrackers) but also labour unions, gambling, nightclubs, foreigners and, just generally, the “unregulated behaviour” of people “on the margin, particularly the sale of illegal stimulants, entrepreneurial approaches to sex, and incidents of public violence. These were all features of life in Vancouver ….”
What makes Vancouver different in this respect from other North American cities of the time ( all of them with silhouettes like that of Batman’s Gotham City)?
The answer, according to Purvey and Belshaw, is that the white worthies of Vancouver blamed everything they disliked not only on Asians and native peoples but also, especially, on Americans.
The underbelly of Vancouver dealt with here is mostly petty crime, not gangsterism. Yet it’s odd that there is no mention of Joe Celona ( 1898 ─ 1958), the city’s underworld kingpin during much of this time, who had the mayor and the police chief in his pocket.
Vancouver Noir retells how the city simply outgrew its steam- age industrial economy. Streetcar lines were foolishly torn up, the waterfront piers that were forever catching fire were finally abandoned, and the old downtown core was heavily redeveloped.
The authors explain that with such changes in the civic landscape came changes in attitude.
One hidden theme of the book is the increasing professionalism of the police. Quotations from old VPD annual reports are some of the book’s most vivid and informative moments.
But the changes didn’t come easily or overnight.
Fred Herzog ( who proved that the noir world view could also be captured with colour photography) arrived here in 1953 and found the city “engagingly sleazy and colourful.”
Just as in the past, the establishment continued to be fearful and appalled. “Juvenile delinquents” were the new boogeymen. Comic books were one proof of their heinous intentions, and local do- gooders burned them in the streets by the thousands.
As the story draws to a close in 1960, readers are left with the following conclusion: “Despite successive ‘ wars on vice,’ Vancouver ends the Noir years much as it began: a haven for gamblers and drinkers” and other individuals leading highly textured lives.
As two professors writing history for a popular audience, Purvey and Belshaw show affection for their period’s colourful patois.