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Recommended for anyone into Canadian literature
Book Review
By Derryll White
Deverell, William (1979). Needles.
âWe are told to forgive our enemies. But we are not often told to forgive our friends.â
— Frances Bacon
William Deverellâs background as a lawyer shows through here in how well he understands the RCMP. He lays out the career path, frustrations and temptations â and he gets it right. He also paints a beautiful picture, even with his allusions to the dark underbelly, of Vancouver 35 years ago. The city is described in the unfettered beauty that has led to the current press of development and people. It is really quite wonderful to read Deverellâs word pictures of a world-class city recumbent in early spring delight.
The story is an old one â crime, drugs, lies, deceit. William Deverell gives it new legs with lawyer Foster Cobb, a prosecutor hooked on heroin. Cobb takes on a Chinese distributor, a virtual warlord. The trial scenes ring of truth and practice, the result of Deverellâs long tenure as a trial lawyer.
The author also pays attention to the natural wealth of coastal B.C., revelling in the natural wonders and cursing the logging companies steadfastly wiping it out.
Deverell received the Seal $50,000 first novel award for âNeedles.â Since then he has written 16 published novels. I recommend him to anyone interested in Canadian literature. He describes himself as âa non-political, cause-orientedâ civil liberties lawyer.
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Excerpts from the novel:
OLD VANCOUVER âSkid road, squeezed into several blocks between Chinatown and the Burrard Inlet docks, comprises rows of poor rooming houses, junk shops, and barren square hotels and stores and coffee shops.
Chunking Alley was at the border of Chinatown and skid road, in an area of warehouses, tenements, and thirty-dollar-a-month hotels. It was a dead-end lane, narrow and forbidding, one commercial building, which housed H-K Meats â a wholesale emporium catering to the Chinese restaurants â and, on the second floor, the Nationalist Benevolent Society. There were no people, except drunks and bums and whores past their prime.
WEST COAST â Although the breezes had slackened by mid-day, and now only softly buffeted the waves, the ocean rollers still carried the energy of old Pacific blows, and they lashed the rocks at the feet of the promontories, pounding with the sound of artillery. But the waves that licked up the beach had spent their strength getting there, and were now subdued.
A flock of wintering plovers scurried along the sound, picking food at the tide-line. Offshore, on rocks, a pair of cormorants sat, while grebes and Arctic loons dipped and rolled nearby. Further at sea, a family of quillemots scuttered about the waves.
â Derryll White once wrote books but now chooses to read and write about them. When not reading he writes history for the web at www.basininstitute.org.