Serious Crimes

C.S. Gray is Director of Information Services, Institute of Chartered
Accountants of Ontario.

Gough’s fourth crime novel featuring Vancouver police detectives
Willows and Parker is a relatively well-executed and occasionally grisly
entertainment. The author never aims at anything more virtuous than
providing the reader with a tale of vice and vicious people, and in this
he succeeds completely.

Garret and Billy—the novel’s two youthful criminals—carry the
reader’s interest through the novel. They are small-time car radio
thieves who talk about, and eventually succeed in graduating to, more
serious crime. Much of the detective work in the novel seems wasted,
since the eventual confrontation between Garret and Billy and Willows
and Parker seems inevitable.

The novel offers mostly one-dimensional characters. The bad guys are
thoroughly bad, and Willows and Parker are portrayed as two ordinary
people who happen to be police officers. Gough offers his reader little
more than shadowy sketches in black-and white—people who act, but
seldom come to life on the page. This shadow-and-light effect is
reinforced by a structure that from chapter to chapter alternates
between the point of view of the crooks and of the police.

Black and white, good guys and bad guys, crime and punishment—those
are the elements of standard crime novels. Readers are swept away on a
tide of violence to a world much worse than their own. They keep reading
not to satisfy their intellectual curiosity, not to find out whether the
criminals are caught, but rather to get the emotional satisfaction that
the crooks’ capture provides. In Serious Crimes Gough uses all the
crime novel’s basic elements to produce a highly competent and
entertaining example of the genre.