Gary Engler has written three novels in his series Fake News Mysteries.PNG

American Spin, War on Drugs, and Misogyny

Gary Engler | RED Publishing

The realist in murder writes of a world in which gangsters can rule nations and almost rule cities Raymond Chandler.

As the hard-boiled fiction pioneer Raymond Chandler knew well, and elaborated in the essay quoted above, murder mysteries have often had a subtext of class analysis and class war. Chandler himself set his gritty stories against a backdrop of corrupt politicians, businessmen and cops, a moral landscape of mean streets on which a flawed but moral investigator fights for whatever scraps of truth and justice can be salvaged from the civic ruins.

Gary Engler, a former news editor at The Vancouver Sun, has recently published three linked novels in a series he is calling the Fake News Mysteries, books that represent an effort to bring the Hammett/Chandler tradition up to date in the nightmarish orange glow of the Trump era, telling stories of murder and conspiracy that take into account the punishing realities of class, gender and racial oppression in our times.

Englers protagonist in all three of these promising mystery novels, Waylon Choy, is, as the series author once was, a B.C. based journalist when we first meet him in American Spin. As Choy has to explain repeatedly to the curious, he owes his surname to a Chinese ancestor who came to Canada in the 19th century and his mongrel Anglo appearance to a family history of strenuous multiculturalism that includes ancestors from European, Indigenous, Hawaiian and African backgrounds.

In that opening volume, Choy is drawn into investigating the suspicious death of a former Vancouver police chief and before all the narrative dust settles he has uncovered a right-wing conspiracy and Ponzi scheme that links neo Nazis and corrupt cops.

In the next two volumes in what promises to be an ongoing series, War on Drugs and Misogyny, Choy, now a freelance journalist, continues to tangle with violent right wing conspiracies, and encounters a rogues gallery of villains.

The action is well plotted and propulsive, and readers who love the noir elements of the hard-boiled detective genre will find much to enjoy here. The three books suffer occasionally from too much earnest exposition and could use a bit more of the snappy dialogue and sardonic humour found in Chandler and Hammett. Despite the few moments when the attempted noir effects shade toward earnest watercoloured mildness, these are exciting and thought provoking reads. Highly recommended.

Tom Sandborn lives and writes in Vancouver. He welcomes feedback and story tips at tos65@telus.net

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Book Review: Gary Englers Fake News Mysteries offer hard-boiled fiction for the Trump era - The Beacon Herald