In ‘The Last Exile,’ Vancouver Plays Itself

The Last Exile: A Wakeland Novel
Sam Wiebe
Harbour Publishing (2025)

Few authors capture Vancouver like Sam Wiebe, the best-selling author of the locally-set, critically acclaimed Wakeland series.

The crime novelist is at the height of his powers in The Last Exile, the fifth grisly case for Vancouver-based private investigator Dave Wakeland. After bidding the city goodbye in the last instalment, Wakeland is summoned back home to investigate the murder of a couple in a Granville Island float home. To no one’s surprise, there’s more to this case than meets the eye.

Vancouver is the setting for more than its fair share of mass media, especially film and TV.

But what Wiebe’s novels do is let Vancouver play itself, with an attention to detail that only a local could manage. The thorny case takes him all over the (regional) map, from East Van to Hope to his downtown Vancouver office, which is perfectly placed.

Many have said that the Tyee newsroom looks, from the outside, like the base of operations for a Chandleresque detective. In The Last Exile, we learn that his fictional office is next door to ours.

Of course it is.

Hyperlocal authenticity reigns throughout Wakeland’s adventures. One morning, he makes his way to Buntzen Lake to clear his head. Later, he meets with a mob boss at International Village, remembering the days when it was known as Tinseltown.

Wiebe now lives in New Westminster, but it’s clear from his books that he still loves Vancouver, especially in how he criticizes his hometown.

“Vancouver has lost the smell of sawdust,” Wakeland observes early in The Last Exile. “The days of making an honest living were over.”

Later, Wiebe describes the way that, in Vancouver, “You ingest small doses of loss every day.”

This guy gets it.

In advance of the release of his 10th book, due March 25 from Harbour Publishing, the award-winning author met The Tyee at Main Street’s Gene Coffee Bar to talk about capturing his favourite local places, the value of genre fiction and who would play Dave Wakeland in a film or TV adaptation.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The Tyee: Thanks for meeting me here. I was going to suggest bubble tea at Tinseltown, but your book gave me such an instant craving for taro coconut boba that I went down there and had it yesterday.

Sam Wiebe: I was dying to write about Tinseltown. I love that place. Nobody else calls it Tinseltown unless they grew up when it was Tinseltown. How is this place still here?

It doesn’t make any sense.

It’s just a great lost place. That’s what I like about it. It’s like a Potemkin village in a way. It also has the scariest washrooms. There are no doors on the stalls. There’s a guy watching a Chinese soap opera on top of the urinal. I go in and think, all right, I’ll do my business as quickly as possible.

You have a real eye for a memorable space. I noticed that you picked one of Vancouver's strangest coffee shops for us. Gene. I’m surprised it’s not in the book. “Gene, which exists at the delta of Main and Kingsway.”

This is my favourite part of the city… and this is one of my favourite places in the city. The tea’s really good. A lot of writers end up working here. So I almost don’t want to write about it.

It’s clear in The Last Exile that you know this area so well. Like when you wrote: “Maggie's brother was killed up in Hope.” I was struck by how specific that preposition is. Because you go out to Abbotsford. But you go up to Hope. It’s also clear how important it is to get it right. I loved the car chase on the downtown side of the Cambie Bridge. He’s over here. Now he’s back on Expo. Now he’s on Beatty. Now he’s looping back around to Nelson.

I had to walk that a few times.

I thought so! That’s a confusing area now. You’ll be on Nelson, and then you’re like, well, wait, I don’t want to go over the bridge. How do I get back to Pacific? Can I turn down this little brick road?

Vancouver is changing. Some of the places I write about are just gone. But it’s one of the two engines that drive that series. One, I love private eye novels, the [Raymond] Chandler stuff. That whole lineage is really important to me. And then it’s Vancouver, and how it changes, and the different parts and places.

Hate to admit it, but this is the first detective novel I’ve read in a long time. I’m probably guilty of downplaying the value of the genre, which I know tends to happen. As one of the preeminent crime fiction writers in the country, I have to imagine you have some thoughts on the high art, low art dichotomy.

There are a lot of bad mystery novels, as there’s bad literary fiction. It’s tough when it gets tarred with the same brush. Because I think that the really good writers, you know, Chandler, Walter Mosley, Patricia Highsmith, Ross Macdonald… They’re such talented stylists, but they’re also really good at bringing in their own preoccupations and fears and things like that.

When I read Raymond Chandler and the way he writes about LA, it’s a reflection of some of those post-war fears, and growing up in this world where the law is basically colluding with organized crime. And then when Mosley writes about LA, it’s about, you know, being Black and coming from the South, and the tenuousness... You can just go through that with every one of those great writers.

It does seem like a great way to criticize the city you live in is to write a novel like this, that kind of exposes the seedy social underbelly.

The nice parts, too. And to put those in conversation, which is, I think, the thing that the private eye novel does better than anything. You have this character who moves from the bottom rungs to the top rungs, sees gangsters, sees really respectable people, and at the end, you get this sense of a place that you really don't get in any other type of fiction. I think that there’s a great tradition in crime fiction. I love it, and I love being a part of it. If people don’t like it, that's fine, but I think they are missing some of the best social criticism and social novels that are coming out.

The relationship between genre fiction and the literary world is kind of odd, at best. It can be very tough to move in those circles. I feel very fortunate, but also like I’m gonna be singled out. I did the SFU Writer-in-Residence 20th-anniversary bash. I’m next to Carleigh Baker, Michael Turner, and you just expect someone to be like, ‘oh, you should get out.’

Do you have that kind of imposter syndrome? I understand that people often think of the genre you write in as, like, a lesser genre. I wonder how you handle that.

Well, I mean, I don’t feel like it’s a lesser genre.

Me neither, just to be clear.

But I don’t feel like I have to defend it. With academia, especially, there are some people who are so open, like Clint Burnham at SFU has been such a champion of just getting other voices into the classroom. But yeah. I did an event the other day, and the first thing a guy said was, “I read your book. A lot of murders, huh? More than in Vancouver.” And I'm just, like, do you know how few murders I actually write about compared to what goes on? So it’s a constant push and pull.

You also write under the pseudonym Nolan Chase. How did you settle on that name?

I pulled it out of the hat. The publisher wanted to try a pen name.

Why?

Well, that series of books is set in Washington State. The main character is a small-town police chief, and if I'm known for anything, it’s Canadian, private eye…

Vancouver stuff.

So not having that familiarity kind of let the book stand on its own. They’re written for more of a general mystery audience. They’re a little bit lighter. Less salty language. They’re more like the Longmire series. That kind of thing. So I just kind of chose something that would sound pleasantly Pacific Northwest. I actually just finished the second one of those.

When you are writing under a pseudonym, does that change you at all? Does it change how you write? Does it change how you think? Is it like Batman, where once you put on the mask, your voice is deeper, and you’re more mysterious, and it’s night?

Well, it took me most of last year to just figure out how to exist with that. Because, I mean, I’m very used to doing promotion and stuff. But I’m not coming up with a second Twitter. Nolan Chase at Bluesky with three followers? No. That’s not worth it. But to me, it’s steering a little bit more into that old pulp paperback tradition. Those kinds of books that would have some sort of lurid cover and be, like, 200 pages. That fun thing that you could get off the rack at a drugstore.

I grew up reading a lot of that stuff. Elmore Leonard, even Louis L’Amour. Lighter books. My friend called them “cozy mysteries for emotionally dead men.” Some people like both. Some people really love those ones. And some people are like: when is Wakeland coming back?

Do you imagine that there will be other pen names? Like, my dream has always been to take on a pseudonym and write something totally out of left field. Afrofuturist erotica, maybe. I found out recently that Louisa May Alcott wrote a bunch of erotica under the name A.M. Barnard. Is that something that you'll do at some point? Maybe not erotica. But another genre that's off-brand for you?

I've always wanted to write a horror novel, because that’s the other genre that I just love, and I stink at it. I’ve been working at it with a lot of abortive false starts for years.

Last question: Who plays Dave Wakeland in your adaptation?

I don't know. All the actors I know are people from movies from the ‘70s or earlier. So I'm a bad person to ask.

So not Timothée Chalamet, then.

I mean, he’s a good actor. But the important thing to me would be that Vancouver gets to play itself. That would really make my day.