Hometown heroine introduced in new noir novel
Vancouver is a dream setting for a noir story. Our hometown’s overcast, murky weather and long winter nights help provide the sub-genre’s requisite crime chiaroscuro, an ambiguous blend of shifting shadows and oblique light, both literal and moral. Our city’s location on a harbour that serves as one of the continent’s significant entry points for offshore drugs and money can provide a context in which the genre defining elements of crime and violence, louche, convoluted romances, plot twists, betrayals and counter betrayals can all flourish.
Lawrence Gough has rooted many of his crime novels in Vancouver’s noir possibilities, as has poet/novelist Jim Christy. The recently released Cold Case Vancouver (reviewed in these pages last November) provides abundant evidence for a strong noir element in the city’s history as well as its fiction. And Chris Haddock’s brilliant TV work such as Intelligence and the two series featuring coroner/mayor Dominic DaVinci is a testament to Vancouver’s noir potential.
The wonderfully named Fraser Nixon, whose first novel, 2011’s The Man Who Killed (set in Montreal’s rum running scene in 1926) was short listed for the Crime Writers of Canada Best First Novel and for Amazon.ca’s annual First Novel Award, has set his sophomore effort Straight to the Head here, and the energetic, inventive crime novel takes full advantage of the city’s noir dimensions as he tells a complicated story about a beautiful, mysterious and amoral Eastern European immigrant named Irina, her estranged husband Ted, who claims to be an unacknowledged heir to the British throne, a dutiful adult daughter in Chinatown who has a secret life as a high end shoplifter at the beginning of the story and (spoiler alert) is recruited as a CSIS agent before the last page, a hired killer, two corrupt local cops, a king’s ransom in stolen cocaine and money and the ghost of Chief Dan George!
Set in 1983 as Vancouver was getting ready to host Expo 86, the World’s Fair event that is often (however speciously) credited with turning Vancouver from a sleepy outpost of the Commonwealth into a bustling, “world class” Pacific Rim city, the book is richly provided with period details of pop culture and Canadian politics from the era, including one pitch perfect comic set piece featuring Pierre Trudeau and Jimmy Pattison.
The book’s pace is fast, the prose mainly uncluttered and accessible, and the plot is satisfyingly convoluted. A comic scene of drug and money transfer set among the nude bathers on Wreck Beach is wonderfully funny, and the obligatory violence that drives a noir novel is delivered vividly. The chief villains are satisfyingly evil, especially the two corrupt cops, and the visiting hired killer is a persuasively chilling figure, especially when taking revenge on the two bent cops. You will never look at a caulking gun or garden shears the same way after you finish this book.
Straight to the Head is slated to be released in April of this year, just in time to be sold as a beach or airplane book for the summer holidays, a role it is perfectly suited to fill. It should find a large and appreciative audience among fans of the genre and fans of hometown Vancouver references.
Dorothy Kwan, the hip young Chinatown landlady who morphs from shop lifter for hire to spy over the course of the story is an appealing character, and the fact that she is seen in the book’s final pages both accepting an offer to work for CSIS and reuniting with a love interest from earlier in her backstory suggests that Nixon, like this reviewer, was charmed enough by this character to think she might work as a repeating figure in a series of crime and suspense novels. I will be very surprised if we don’t hear more from this genuinely original character, who strikes me as a perfect candidate to join the long list of women detectives who have ornamented a number of crime series in the past few decades. I can easily imagine enjoying many more stories featuring the resourceful and pragmatic Kwok.
That said, this book is a promising but not entirely flawless performance. While Nixon deserves credit for bringing little known elements of Vancouver’s history into focus in this book, including the little known role of Hawaiian natives in 19th and 20th century Vancouver, his portrayals of one key Hawaiian character and a group of his friends on a North Shore reserve veers dangerously close to racist caricatures, and the episode of attempted magical realism featuring the late Dan George seems to have wandered in from another book entirely.
It should have been sent back there. A good final edit might have made the native characters more complex and believable, and eliminated the unnecessary ghost story. Such an edit might also have identified problems of consistency in the way Nixon provides background information and exposition. Sometimes the book provides more background than necessary, and some figures who would not be familiar to most non-Vancouver readers are not properly identified.
Nevertheless, this book delivers a full adult dose of reading pleasure and some welcome reminders of the Vancouver past. Highly recommended.