A single image lingers in my mind from a novel I read a decade ago: the book was one in a series of Willows and Parker mysteries by local writer Laurence Gough. I can still see the utter mayhem at a local gas station as several pumps exploded into a fiery hell and a couple of people flew through the plate-glass window of the adjoin¬ing 7-Eleven. All of the nine or ten books in this series of crime novels are set in Vancouver. Devoted readers and there are legions — might want to suss out particular locations, although the gas station complex on Maple Street at Broadway has since been demol¬ished by more benign means.
Karaoke Rap, for example, snags a corpse from the waters outside the fictional Coal Harbour Yacht Club. In Killers, a body is found floating in the now-whale-bereft pool in the Vancouver Aquarium in Stanley Park. Among the earliest and best known in the Gough series are The Goldfish Bowl, Death on a No. 8 Hook, and Hot Shots.
Stanley Park, by Vancouver novelist Timothy Taylor, was published by Counterpoint Press in 2002 to considerable acclaim. Suffice it to say that it covers a lot of territory, from the perils of running a high-end restaurant in Vancouver to the dark secrets of its title subject. Wayson Choy’s Thejade Peony is a well-regarded tale of growing up in an immigrant family in the Chinatown ofthe 1930s and ‘40s. And
Malcolm Lowry’s masterpiece Under the Volcano the story of a single, tequila-soaked Day of the Dead in central Mexico was written while Lowry lived in a $10-a-month shack at Dollarton on the north shore of Burrard Inlet.
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