Writer does justice to Vancouver’s character

Sensational Vancouver

By Eve Lazarus

Anvil Press, 158 pages, $24

A couple of years ago, Eve Lazarus wrote Sensational Victoria, all about some of the colourful characters in our history, including some who stayed on the good side of the law.

It was a superb book, and a concept that Lazarus has applied to life on the boring side of Georgia Strait, the mainland side.

Well, that might have been a stretch. Vancouver has had its fair share of sensational news, thanks in part to a police department that gave, in the first half of the last century, plenty of reason to question its integrity.

As Lazarus notes, the average tenure for a police chief in Vancouver was just four years.

Her book includes legendary cops such as Detective Joe Ricci, who worked in the opium dens and gambling joints of Chinatown, and Lurancy Harris, the first female police officer in Canada.

We also read of Walter Mulligan, Vancouver’s chief constable in the 1940s and 1950, who left office under a cloud of suspicion and in the middle of a public inquiry.

Mulligan fled to California, but returned to Canada a few years later, and lived in retirement on Dallas Road in Victoria. He died in 1987.

Sensational Vancouver also includes Gerry McGeer, who, as mayor of Vancouver, had given Mulligan the job as police chief. McGeer had connections to Victoria as well; he married a daughter of department store magnate David Spencer, and he ran the Victoria Daily Times for a couple of years after the Spencers obtained control.

This book includes many people who were sensational for positive reasons, such as actor Michael J. Fox and singers Bryan Adams and Doug Bennett. Phyllis Munday, who climbed many mountains, is here, as are athlete Valerie Jerome and writer Joy Kogawa.

Lazarus writes of buildings as well — the Casa Mia mansion, the Vogue Theatre and the Marine Building, among others.

By Vancouver, Lazarus means Greater Vancouver, so the mountains above Lynn Valley are no obstacle when the people who lived there — artist Frederick Varley, to be precise — mattered.

Sensational Vancouver is lavishly illustrated with photographs of people and places, and a map makes it easy to tie things together.

This book is filled with great stories, and they are short, so it’s easy to dip in here and there as the mood strikes. As a package, they make for fascinating reading.

The reviewer is editor-in-chief of the Times Colonist.