Vancouver Noir

Introduction Black Rain and Broken Glass

Noir is a messy term. Borrowed from the French and best-known in reference to film, noir has been applied to everything from The Long Goodbye to The Dark Knight Returns. Purists will only award the term to the work of half a dozen white guys who wrote in the early 1900s. Others throw it around as a loose synonym for mystery.

Dennis Lehane borrowed heavily from Arthur Miller when he called noir “working-class tragedy.” I admire that definition, I think it’s true, but it wanders slightly afield from the heart of the matter.

Noir is bad shit happening to people much like ourselves.

At its heart, noir is the ugly shadow of ourselves we always knew was there, but out of convenience chose to ignore.

You might wonder what shadows could exist in Vancouver, rain-spattered jewel of the Pacific Northwest. Nestled between the US border and the Coast Mountains, the city’s postcard charms are familiar even to those who’ve never been here, thanks to the films and TV shows shot in Hollywood North: The X-Files and Deadpool, Rumble in the Bronx and Jason Takes Manhattan. Vancouver is the so-called City of Glass. A nice place, in any case, and much too nice for noir.

Looked at from afar, Vancouver may seem idyllic. But living here is different — cold and baffling and occasionally hostile. While outsiders focus on high-test BC bud, locals see a heroin crisis: Vancouver is home to the first legalized safe-injection site in North America, now heavily taxed by overdoses resulting from street drugs cut with fentanyl. It’s ground zero for the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, a nationwide catastrophe involving the deaths and disappearances of hundreds of marginalized women. Money and status trample culture and community.

If Vancouver is a city of glass, that glass is underneath our feet.

The stories in this collection come from very different writers, yet themes emerge linking them together. Land and violence, sex and community.

Vancouver is a colonial outpost on the unceded territory of three First Nations: the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlil̓wətaɁɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) peoples. Moreover, the city is one of North America’s largest immigration hubs, and includes one of the oldest Chinatowns. Land speculation and a lack of low-income housing have created a real estate crisis: most of us nonmillionaires have either left, or cling tenuously to our homes. The cost of living here — the cost of life — is examined in Carleigh Baker’s “The Midden” and Nathan Ripley’s “The Landecker Party.”

In the last thirty years or so, half a dozen serial killers have stalked Vancouver’s streets. Most of them have targeted at-risk women: addicts, sex workers, those on low incomes, indigenous people, and people of color. Those whose voices struggle to be heard, to whom large parts of the culture remain indifferent. Gendered violence is a part of city life; the topic is tackled here in several forms, in depictions of the sex trade by Yasuko Thanh and Don English, as well as female perpetrators of violence, such as the protagonists of Linda L. Richards’s “Terminal City,” Dietrich Kalteis’s “Bottom Dollar,” and Sheena Kamal’s “Eight Game-Changing Tips on Public Speaking.”

Neighborhood and community exist in Vancouver, though they are harder to define in a city caught in the throes of gentrification. Whether the elderly immigrants of S.G. Wong’s “Survivors’ Pension,” the Lululemon-clad mothers in Robin Spano’s “The Perfect Playgroup,” or the aging mobsters trying to hold on to long-lost Greektown in Nick Mamatas’s “The One Who Walks with a Limp,” communities are made and refashioned by the people in them.

From Stanley Park to the Britannia shipyards, from Jericho Beach to the bohemian mess of Commercial Drive, Vancouver Noir offers readers a tour through the dark nooks of the city, from an expert group of guides. These stories knock holes in the City of Glass. They paint a picture of a city in flux, a city struggling to redefine itself. A city under siege by drugs, poverty, racism, colonialism, violence directed at women. In other words, a city like any other.

So welcome to Vancouver, the place where the west ends. And welcome to Vancouver Noir. It gets dark here. Know that going in.

Sam Wiebe

Vancouver, British Columbia

July 2018