L. R. Wright and the Sunshine Coast

L.R. Wright hasn’t been receiving the attention she deserves in recent decades. Her groundbreaking, award-winning novels were well-regarded during the 1980s and 1990s. She was the first Canadian to win an Edgar, for her first mystery novel, The Suspect. But after her death in 2001, which curtailed her new series featuring RCMP officer Edwina Henderson, her works became hard to find.

It’s a great pleasure, then, that with the Fox broadcasting of a series based on her fiction this past fall, her novels are being reissued in an attractive and affordable format. Though I do still have some nostalgic fondness for the older editions.

L. R. (Laurali) Wright was born in Saskatchewan but grew up in Abbotsford, British Columbia. After a short journalism career, she wrote several literary novels before turning to mystery fiction–somewhat inadvertently, according to a Chatelaine profile. The Suspect was the first novel in her RCMP investigator Karl Alberg series, and the series continued with eight more books. The woman that Alberg begins dating in the first novel, Cassandra, is one of the biggest draws. She’s the Sechelt librarian in his new Sunshine Coast community, and by the end they are effectively co-protagonists.

At the time of her death, Wright had completed two novels in a second series featuring a female investigator. Unlike Alberg, she has to deal with entrenched sexism including stalking by her former partner, a Vancouver police officer.

Both series are set on the Sunshine Coast in British Columbia, and are infused with a strong sense of place.

The Sunshine Coast is intriguing, hard to get to and featuring small, distinctive communities such as Sechelt and Gibsons. The Canadian TV series The Beachcombers was set in the region. It’s a terrific location, and it’s unfortunate that this new show is filmed but not set there. From some vague hints, it seems to be located in the U.S. The better to please an American viewership, perhaps?

Anyway, Wright is overdue for a revival. While the first few episodes of the adaptation haven’t seemed promising to me, I’m hoping for improvements over time.

Several of the novels feature, verbatim, this description of the locale, so it’s worth quoting at length:

“Just north of Vancouver, there is a wide blue crack in the continent called Howe Sound, 10 miles wide. Across it, the province of British Columbia just abruptly west and then extends northward for almost a thousand miles. Its intricate coastline is fissured by innumerable inlets and channels, clustered by countless small islands, and is at first sheltered from the open Pacific by Vancouver Island, 285 miles long.

Highway 1, the Trans-Canada, comes to a halt on the shores of Howe Sound, at Horseshoe Bay. Ferries leaving from here provide the only access to the Sechelt Peninsula, otherwise known as the Sunshine Coast.”