The writer and historian Aaron Chapman discusses his new book Vancouver Vice: Crime and Spectacle in the City’s West End (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2021), with Joseph Planta.

Vancouver Vice: Crime and Spectacle in the City’s West End by Aaron Chapman (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2021). Click to buy this book from Amazon.ca: Vancouver Vice

Text of introduction by Joseph Planta:

I am Planta: On the Line, in Vancouver, British Columbia, at TheCommentary.ca.

Aaron Chapman joins me again. The bestselling and award-winning author has a new book out, Vancouver Vice: Crime and Spectacle in the City’s West End. It’s a lively, fascinating, and fast-paced look at a time and place in Vancouver that was volatile as the city and the world around it was changing rather dramatically. Aaron opens his book with the discovery of a body in Stanley Park near Lost Lagoon. It’s May 1984, and from there, he paints a colourful tale taking the reader back to the past and forward, to a changed Vancouver. By the early 1970s, the West End was home to a gay population, as well as sex workers. Comparisons to the Greenwich Village in New York or Castro Street in San Francisco were not only apt but sought. There was a lively music and club scene, and as some of the people Aaron talks to like Pamela Post or Doug Sarti, who both grew up in the area, it wasn’t as menacing as the media of the day might have portrayed it. But with the sex trade flourishing and a turf war between some residents, it invited the ire of the politicians and moralists, what with crime increasing. The book does a good job of telling the social, political and cultural history of this place and time, as well as offer a hell of a good crime story. Yes, there’s murder, deaths, and the sort of crimes that a city’s vice squad would pay attention to. Aaron Chapman is a writer, historian, and musician. He is the author of Vancouver After Dark: The Wild History of a City’s Nightlife, winner of the Bill Duthie Booksellers’ Choice Award in 2020; The Last Gang in Town, the story of Vancouver’s Clark Park Gang; Liquor, Lust, and the Law, the story of Vancouver’s Penthouse Nightclub; and Live at the Commodore, a history of the Commodore Ballroom that also won a BC Book Prize in 2015. The book will be launched at the Penthouse, Thursday evening, 09 December 2021. Keep up-to-date on Twitter; his handle is @TheAaronChapman. This new book is published by Arsenal Pulp Press. Please welcome back to the Planta: On the Line program, Aaron Chapman; Mr. Chapman, good morning.

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