Here are 68 books that Vancouver Noir fans have personally recommended if you like
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When I was a kid growing up in Vancouver my parents had a collection of books arranged on shelves around the living room. The only one I remember taking down and actually reading was an early history of the city. I recalled being impressed by the simple fact that someone had thought my hometown was interesting enough to write about, not something that was self-evident to a cocky teenager. Many years later, some two dozen books of my own under my belt, I decided maybe I’d earned the right to take a crack at the city myself.
Janet Smith was a young Scottish housemaid who was murdered in the home of her well-to-do employer in 1924. Never solved, the murder is one of the most celebrated crimes in Vancouver history, featuring political corruption, racial animosity, sex, drugs, and jazz. The book is a wonderful evocation of life in the city in the 1920s when it was emerging from world war and recession and finding its feet as a cosmopolitan community with pretensions to economic leadership. This is one of the first books I ever read about Vancouver history and it remains a favourite.
Literary Nonfiction. New Edition as part City of Vancouver's Legacy Book Project, with foreword by historian Daniel Francis. WHO KILLED JANEY SMITH? examines one of the most infamous and still unsolved murder cases in Canadian history: the 1924 murder of twenty-two-year-old Scottish nursemaid Janet Smith. Originally published in 1984, and out of print for over a decade, this tale of intrigue, racism, privilege, and corruption in high places is a true-crime recreation that reads like a complex thriller.
Anvil Press is pleased to be reissuing this title as part of the City of Vancouver's Legacy Book Project. This new edition…
The dragons of Yuro have been hunted to extinction.
On a small, isolated island, in a reclusive forest, lives bandit leader Marani and her brother Jacks. With their outlaw band they rob from the rich to feed themselves, raiding carriages and dodging the occasional vindictive…
When I was a kid growing up in Vancouver my parents had a collection of books arranged on shelves around the living room. The only one I remember taking down and actually reading was an early history of the city. I recalled being impressed by the simple fact that someone had thought my hometown was interesting enough to write about, not something that was self-evident to a cocky teenager. Many years later, some two dozen books of my own under my belt, I decided maybe I’d earned the right to take a crack at the city myself.
The secret of the title refers to the fact that Vancouver’s most famous landmark, Stanley Park, was home to many Indigenous people before they were dispossessed and removed from the park following the creation of the city. Jean Barman is one of British Columbia’s leading historians and she combines her skill as a researcher with many hours of conversation with descendants of the original families to write a path-breaking book. Reading it was a watershed moment in my own understanding of the city.
Finalist for 2006 BC Book Prize - Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize
Shortlisted for George Ryga Award for Social Awareness in B.C. Writing and Publishing
Each year, over eight million people visit Stanley Park, a 400-hectare (1000-acre) haven of beauty that offers a backdrop of majestic cedars and firs and an environment teeming with wildlife just steps from the sidewalks and skyscrapers of Vancouver. But few visitors stop to contemplate the secret past of British Columbia's most popular tourist destination.
Officially opened in 1888, Stanley Park was born alongside the city of Vancouver, so it is easy to assume that the…
When I was a kid growing up in Vancouver my parents had a collection of books arranged on shelves around the living room. The only one I remember taking down and actually reading was an early history of the city. I recalled being impressed by the simple fact that someone had thought my hometown was interesting enough to write about, not something that was self-evident to a cocky teenager. Many years later, some two dozen books of my own under my belt, I decided maybe I’d earned the right to take a crack at the city myself.
Stanley Park occupies such a giant place in the city’s imagination. Most Vancouverites well remember the devastating windstorm that blew through the city in 2006 – it tore down several trees in my own neighbourhood and scared me witless – leveling great swathes of the park. Historian Sean Kheraj uses the storm as a jumping-off point to reflect on the park’s history and its complicated relationship with the citizens of the city.
In early December 2006, a powerful windstorm ripped through Vancouver's Stanley Park. The storm transformed the city's most treasured landmark into a tangle of splintered trees and shattered a decades-old vision of the park as timeless virgin wilderness. In Inventing Stanley Park, Sean Kheraj traces how the tension between popular expectations of idealized nature and the volatility of complex ecosystems helped transform the landscape of one of the world's most famous urban parks. This beautifully illustrated book not only depicts the natural and cultural forces that shaped the park's landscape, it also examines the roots of our complex relationship with…
Jake Sledge, a rugged ex-cop turned private eye, teams up with his colossal partner Bobo to navigate the gritty streets of River City.
A murdered lawyer drags them into a web of political intrigue, neo-Nazi thugs, and bloody showdowns. With sharp wit and hard-hitting action, Jake tackles scumbags the only…
When I was a kid growing up in Vancouver my parents had a collection of books arranged on shelves around the living room. The only one I remember taking down and actually reading was an early history of the city. I recalled being impressed by the simple fact that someone had thought my hometown was interesting enough to write about, not something that was self-evident to a cocky teenager. Many years later, some two dozen books of my own under my belt, I decided maybe I’d earned the right to take a crack at the city myself.
This unusual book is a tour through the working-class city in the middle of the last century. This is a portrait of Vancouver when working people occupied the waterfront, instead of glittering condo towers. Knight imagines taking a trip on the old No.20 streetcar that once ran the length of the city’s eastside waterfront, painting an evocative portrait of the mills, docks, flophouses, and beer parlours that occupied the strip. Then he turns the book over to a series of personal reminiscences from men and women who called the neighbourhood home. Vancouver prides itself today on being a world-class destination for the global super-rich. This is where it came from.
In Along the No. 20 Line, Rolf Knight takes the reader on a tour through working class East Vancouver of a century ago.
Knight's "through line" is literally a line: the old No. 20 Streetcar Line that ran between downtown Vancouver and the present day neighbourhood of the Pacific National Exhibition. From 1892 to 1949, when it was shut down and replaced by the No. 20 Granville / Victoria Drive bus, the No. 20 line took thousands of Vancouverites back and forth from their East Van homes to their jobs along the waterfront, on the docks, in mills, factories and…
Why Vancouver? Yes, it's my hometown, but I've lived in other places for about 20 years of my life, and I'm anything but a thoughtless booster. Vancouver is a beautiful city, but it's a conflicted one between dreamers of its potential greatness, people wanting a laid-back West Coast lifestyle, and those for whom it's the end of the poverty road with the mildest climate in Canada. Thinking about it, painting it, and writing about it—it's an itch I have to scratch.
A unique work of visual storytelling using maps created by the author that trace the evolution of this place defined by a major river, a natural harbour, and a backdrop of snowcapped mountains, decade by decade from Indigenous times through the 1980s.
Each map has detailed notes focusing on changes and developments and a two-page spread of the key players of each period.
Absolutely unique in its presentational style, Vancouver: A Visual History is a delightful and important book. This stunning, full-colour historical atlas brings to life Vancouver’s first fourteen decades, beginning with a map of the 1850s depicting the land use, economy and settlement patterns of its first peoples, and ending with a map of the 1980s.
Using a repeating grid format, in which each ten-year period of the city’s history is examined through the application of the same criteria, each decade is introduced by a full-colour map that illustrates land use patterns. A column of text to the left of this…
Crime is intrinsically interesting. From an early age, we’re taught behavioral norms. Hearing of transgressions, we ask, “How’d this happen?... Is it true?... What’s the deeper meaning?” Audiobooks also have a unique ability to engage us. With my reporting background plus a historical novel under my belt, I began researching the real-life case behind Takers Mad, aiming to bring it to life with the intimacy, suspense, and power of an audio drama. Then I was gobsmacked to find fresh evidence in this Gilded Age murder. Now, with Khristine Hvam’s ultra-talented narration, I hope our work entertains and also leads listeners to ponder vital questions—just like the best crime audiobooks.
Unspooled as an episodic series, Danielle Elliot traces the true story of one woman’s long-running nightmare in Vancouver. Police received hundreds of complaints about a stalker and then repeatedly arrived at shocking scenes. But authorities began to doubt the victim’s claims—until she was found dead. I’ve long admired the hard-boiled writing of Ross Macdonald and Margaret Millar, and I don’t think it is only the Canadian setting that makes Death by Unknown Event remind me of their work, but rather the psychological intrigue. Except the twisting plot of these 12 episodes is no work of fiction—sometimes life just can be that strange.
For seven years, Vancouver nurse Cindy James reported more than 100 separate incidents of harassment, ranging from threatening phone calls to home invasions to ritualistic assaults, including strangulations and stabbings. Canada’s Royal Mounted Police spent over a million dollars investigating her claims and found zero evidence of foul play, leading them to suspect she was making it all up. Then, in 1989, Cindy was found dead, bound and naked, half a mile from where her car was parked in a shopping mall. What happened to Cindy James remains one of the most bizarre and perplexing true crime stories in recent…
Caroline Herschel has always lived in the shadows. Beholden to her wildly popular older brother, William, who rescued her from servitude, she's worked hard to build a life for herself – one where she can go unnoticed and repay the debt she believes she owes him. But when her brother…
I’m a Canadian author who has been fascinated with how others see the world since I was a child. I was captivated by Charlotte’s Web. If pigs and spiders could be having unheard conversations, what else was I missing? I delight in stories that invite me into the distinct world of the narrator, so it’s no surprise that my novel, Entitled, is written from a unique perspective—that of a book. When done well, these stories let us see life through the eyes of someone else. If we all experienced our surroundings, just for a minute, as others did, perhaps there would be more humanity in this world.
A road trip provides a reliable narrative structure. But what makes each journey distinct is what the travellers see, do and learn along the way. This charming, funny book follows Ruthie, a recently single, down-on-her-luck 38-year-old as she accompanies Kay (70s) across Canada from Prince Edward Island to Vancouver, where Kay’s son wishes her to relocate. Kay doesn’t want to move, but if she is going to Vancouver, she has a list of ‘last chances’ for her and Ruthie to experience along the way. And thus an improbable friendship begins. Told from Ruthie’s perspective, this book reminded me of how much there is to discover on a road trip—the places we see, the people we meet along the way, and the person the journey inspires us to become.
At thirty-eight years old, Ruthie finds herself newly unemployed, freshly single, sleeping on a friend’s couch and downing a bottle of wine each night. Having overstayed her welcome and desperate for a job, Ruthie responds to David’s ad: he’s looking for someone to drive his aging mother, Kay, and her belongings from PEI to Vancouver. Ruthie thinks it’s the perfect chance for a brief escape and a much-needed boost for her empty bank account. But once they’re on the road, Kay reveals that she’s got a list of stops along the way that’s equal parts sightseeing tour, sexual bucket-list, and…
Why Vancouver? Yes, it's my hometown, but I've lived in other places for about 20 years of my life, and I'm anything but a thoughtless booster. Vancouver is a beautiful city, but it's a conflicted one between dreamers of its potential greatness, people wanting a laid-back West Coast lifestyle, and those for whom it's the end of the poverty road with the mildest climate in Canada. Thinking about it, painting it, and writing about it—it's an itch I have to scratch.
The first chronological and comprehensive history of the city in about 50 years, this book covers the battles of the 1960s and 1970s to keep freeways out of the city and save Chinatown and nearby areas from urban renewal, saving a little of Vancouver's rich and diverse past as it awaited the onslaught of international development money that came with Expo '86.
A brisk chronicle of Vancouver, BC, from early days to its emergence as a global metropolis, refracted through the events, characters and communities that have shaped the city.
In Becoming Vancouver award-winning historian Daniel Francis follows the evolution of the city from early habitation by the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations, to the area’s settlement as a mill town, to the flourishing speakeasies and brothels during the 1920s, to the years of poverty and protest during the 1930s followed by the long wartime and postwar boom, to the city’s current status as real-estate investment choice of the global super-rich.…
I have written two short story collections and am working on a third. I have been passionate about short stories for as long as I have been a reader, and continue to find the form extraordinary. Alice Munro famously defined a short story as a house you can step inside rather than a journey you undertake. I feel that a short story is a respectful invitation to the reader to visit briefly and enjoy a small interlude on the way to wherever they are going.
Rose grows up in a working-class family in a town in Southern Ontario between the wars. She is good in school, makes it to university, marries the son of a department store owner, moves to Vancouver, divorces, becomes an actor, teaches acting, grows older, and returns to the town to take care of her stepmother.
These connected stories give us a picture of Rose’s life, but each is a masterpiece by itself. The Beggar Maid, about her marriage, has the most devastating yet subtle ending I have ever read: a precise flick with a small, very sharp knife. I read this first when I was fourteen and too young to comprehend it. Now, I reread it every few years and probably will for the rest of my life.
**A BBC BETWEEN THE COVERS BIG JUBILEE READ PICK**
Previously published as 'The Beggar Maid', Alice Munro's wonderful collection of stories reads like a novel, following Rose's life as she moves away from her impoverished roots and forges her own path in the world.
Born into the back streets of a small Canadian town, Rose battled incessantly with her practical and shrewd stepmother, Flo, who cowed her with tales of her own past and warnings of the dangerous world outside. But Rose was ambitious - she won a scholarship and left for Toronto…
Rodney Bradford comes into Lindsay's restaurant, offers to buy her small house for double its value, eats her brownies, and drops dead on the sidewalk in front. Next, her almost-ex-husband offers to sign the divorce papers, but only if she'll give him her small,…
Why Vancouver? Yes, it's my hometown, but I've lived in other places for about 20 years of my life, and I'm anything but a thoughtless booster. Vancouver is a beautiful city, but it's a conflicted one between dreamers of its potential greatness, people wanting a laid-back West Coast lifestyle, and those for whom it's the end of the poverty road with the mildest climate in Canada. Thinking about it, painting it, and writing about it—it's an itch I have to scratch.
Announced as an "urban encyclopedia," the late Chuck Davis's almost 900-page work covers history, culture, recreation, buildings, and events through the pens of myriad writers. Davis had a reputation for interesting anecdotes and for tying dates to places and events that make history fun and memorable, and he encouraged the writers (including myself) to do the same.
If you want to know about your
neighbourhood's past, the background on Hollywood North, or the
shipping industry, this book has all sorts of rabbit holes to explore.
