My city is gone
March 28th, 2025
Reviewed by John Moore
In Sam Wiebe’s latest Dave Wakeland mystery, The Last Exile (Harbour Publishing $24.95), Wakeland returns to Vancouver after an eighteen-month “retirement/exile” in Montreal, where he’d been getting stale as a day-old baguette. An urgent call from criminal defence lawyer Shuzhen Chen, cousin of his former business partner Jeff Chen, shakes the apathy and ennui out of him faster than a feral cat can snap the neck of Ballantyne Pier rat.
The Chens are “family” in a way his own never was, especially Shuzhen, with whom he has “history,” as former lovers say when attempting to brag discreetly. To rumple the sheets further, Jeff has gone AWOL, leaving his pregnant wife at the helm of Wakeland & Chen Security, about to founder in a sea of debt thanks to a cynical client who refuses to pay, assuming they’ll go under before he has to pony up.
Welcome home, Dave.
Shuzhen’s client Maggie Zito, a hard-assed take-no-shit Eastside single mom who runs a landscaping firm, has a different kind of history with the Exiles MC, a Vancouver biker outfit patched-over and connected to a major global biker criminal organization. Decades ago, Maggie’s brother Beau was savagely murdered by Exile bikers after a beer parlour incident in the town of Hope.
Maggie publicly vowed revenge and she’s the kind of woman whose word you take lightly at your peril. When senior Exile, Budd Stack and his wife Jan are brutally murdered on their False Creek houseboat, the reflex police investigation of Maggie is validated by the discovery of an axe and machete covered in their blood in her tool-shed. Cops and the Crown assume it’s a coffee-and-donuts case that won’t come to trial because Exile members present at the arraignment make it clear Maggie will miss her day in court due to being shanked in the snake-pit of pre-trial jail. Initially sceptical, Wakeland catches the nasty whiff of a frame-up and dives head-first back into the oil-scummy waters of low-tide in Vancouver, where big dogfish eat little dogfish and dream of becoming Great White sharks.
After sixty years of evolving into major drug-and-gun-running organizations, the brotherly veneer of biker culture has worn thinner than an old Sixties denim “cut” whose bold colours have faded to grey. Biker club presidents ride Range Rovers instead of Harleys and spend more time at exclusive golf clubhouses than the MC hangout, but the polo shirts barely disguise men (and women) hardened by half a century of viciousness who have substantial financial interests to protect. Like the generations of hard-boiled private investigators he’s descended from, Wakeland gets a refresher course to remind him that when a poodle noses the backside of a pit-bull, the result is likely to be mayhem, maiming or worse.
In four previous Wakeland novels and The Last Exile, Sam Wiebe has shown he has the feet to fill the heel-worn gumshoes of the inventors of modern noir fiction, Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. He’s mastered their method of the “wandering plot,” a reaction against the formulaic murder mystery perfected by Agatha Christie a generation before. Christie understood the power of Aristotle’s “dramatic unities” of Time, Place and Action. In her best novels all characters/suspects are introduced and confined in a setting—an English country house, on a steamboat on the Nile or the Orient Express train—where the action unfolds in consecutive time, usually with a surprising twist at the finale.
Hammett and Chandler broke the rules by having detectives pursue more realistic investigations that stumble, stagger and sometimes reel from one clue and setting to another at opposing ends of the social spectrum, encountering characters unlikely to assemble in a drawing-room for a Big Reveal where the detective names the murderer. Like Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe and John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee, Dave Wakeland is the domestic version of the morally compromised international spy created by Somerset Maugham and Graham Greene and refined by John Le Carre.
The tone of The Last Exile is deeply elegiac. Though Wakeland has only been away from Vancouver for eighteen months, Wiebe’s narrative is peppered with references to the “lost” city of Vancouver, rapidly being replaced by ruthless money-driven development. It’s like listening to The Skydiggers’ Andy Maize sing his lament for his hometown, Toronto, “My City Is Gone” on repeat play.
Almost all the characters in The Last Exile are aging out. Even the young biker prospect, Felix Ramos, seems to have second thoughts about a criminal career after hanging out with Wakeland, as if he senses he might’ve pinned his hopes on a stale-dated vision of a future about to be erased by corporate interests who wouldn’t hire him as a doorman.
Is The Last Exile the last Dave Wakeland novel? Let’s hope not.
9781998526086
John Moore reads and reviews books in Garibaldi Highlands. His most recent book The Last Reel, an historical fiction sequel to the movie, Casablanca, was released this year by Ekstasis Editions.
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