Sam Wiebe told me when we chatted was that his detective’s name is Wakeland, not Wakefield. It happens constantly, he said – readers coming up at events, excited, calling him by the wrong name. He’s even started putting it in the books, having characters get it wrong on the page.
Guns Across the River, the sixth Wakeland novel, opens with a jump from the Granville Bridge. A teenager named Nicola hits the water near Wakeland’s False Creek houseboat, and what follows pulls him from the city he knows – Vancouver’s back alleys, the Downtown Eastside, the geography he’s mapped across five previous books – out into Abbotsford and the Fraser Valley, where he has no contacts, no instincts about the power structure, and no particular comfort. That displacement is intentional. Sam talked about wanting to put his detective somewhere that unsettles him, and Abbotsford – which gets written off as just a right-wing farming community – turned out to be more interesting than the stereotype. There’s a gurdwara out there that’s one of the oldest in the Lower Mainland. There’s sushi. There’s a whole city that gets underestimated, and Sam wanted to show that.
I asked him about Barnston Island – a place in the middle of the Fraser River where you take a small ferry over and arrive to roosters and cows, five minutes from Surrey Central. He talked about walking around it for research, getting off the ferry into this completely different world that’s technically right next door to everything. I’ve been to places like that on Vancouver Island and the Gulf Islands and I enjoy the discovery of something that was there all along. It’s what makes the Wakeland books feel lived-in rather than imagined. Sam scouts the locations himself. Some he knows already. Others he wanders into on foot and lets the story catch up.
The ghost guns at the centre of this plot – untraceable, legally ambiguous kits that you can assemble into an assault rifle with a few extra parts – are real, and Sam talked about them with a clear-eyed unease. He’s not someone who gets spooked around firearms, he said. He used to shoot target at a range. But these weapons, loose and unlicensed, felt like a sign of something getting away from us. The book doesn’t lecture about it.
It just puts the guns in the story and lets Wakeland deal with the consequences, which is exactly how Sam said he thinks about social commentary: bake it in, don’t wave it around.
Hear the full conversation with Sam Wiebe on The PULSE Community Podcast at: https://bit.ly/S2EP37PulsePodcast
The PULSE Community website: ThePulseCommunity.ca.
Peter McCully is a multimedia creator and podcast host based in Parksville, BC. https://mccullymedia.ca/category/blog/