Depth of Field

By Michael Blair

Dundurn Press – A Castle Street Mystery

332 pages
ISBN 978-1-55002-855-3

Following a couple of adventures with the relatively taciturn Joe Shoe, author Michael Blair returns to Vancouver for the third appearance of Tom McCall, the commercial photographer whose life is interrupted by the more frequently than probable criminal doings of unanchored characters living and working near his Granville Island houseboat.

As Blair has described it, the place is port for artists, tourists, retirees, freebooters and assorted flotsam that many in the rest of Canada imagine populates the entirety of Lotus Land. McCall is an overloaded punt himself consisting of businessman, divorced father, ex-husband, brother, lover, employer, neighbour and homeowner, like most of us continually trying to find our legs on pitching seas.

The first two books were romps through narrowly avoided disasters despite mounting can’t-get-any-worse pile-ups, showing off Blair’s ironic wit and break-neck pacing. In Depth of Field, Blair ships some of his more erratic characters overseas (daughter spending a year in Oz, sci-fi sex-adventure television star and romantic interest shooting a TV show in Germany) swaps eccentric neighbours for a violently schizophrenic street bum, and puts photo-assistant Bobbi into a coma for much of the book after she’s nearly killed on assignment shooting a nearby boat. McCall was supposed to do the job, so he’s feeling guilty, natch, especially after the client disappears, natch. For his everyday sampling of shake-your-head human behavior he’s down to his hectoring sister, a nudie fundraising-calendar shoot, the on-again/off-again cataloguing of a client’s breast-art collection and moving the office from downtown Vancouver to Granville Island.

That, believe it or not, barely fazes our guy so he frees up time to investigate Bobbi’s beating, contemplate quantum physics (alternative universes, human identity, imagination and perception included) and take a quick aside into six-degrees-of-separation theory. Not quite as funny maybe as Overexposed and If Looks Could Kill but what can you expect? Crime fiction has always been the locale for characters that are not as they first appear. Characters like McCall’s incognito client; a determinedly dull politician; his stern wife; a philandering yet boring art dealer and his many sad and disappointed lovers.

Ever the romantic, McCall is nonplussed by the amount of sexual activity going on in his neighbourhood. He’s more than willing to look at all the angles before jumping to conclusions, making Depth of Field a thoroughly entertaining read. If reading about it isn’t enough though, rest assured that Blair kills off enough characters to open up some interesting Vancouver real-estate opportunities.