More lonely, melancholic males popping up in forgotten BC fiction. This from Bertrand W Sinclair’s Hidden Places (1922) which just succeeded in putting me to sleep (I was tired admittedly). This book contains some of the worst weather descriptions in Vancouver’s literary history…. I’ll save you from them and offer these melancholic male rumblings instead.

“He walked slowly down Granville Street in the blackest mood which had yet come upon him. It differed from that strange feeling of terror which had taken him unaware the night before. He had fallen easy prey then to the black shadows of forlornness. ”

“He went back to the second-rate hotel where he had taken refuge, depressed beyond words, afraid of himself, afraid of the life which lay in fragments behind him and spread away before him in terrifying drabness. Yet he must go on living.”

“Here in this pushing seaport town, among the hundred and fifty thousand souls eagerly intent upon their business of gaining a livelihood, of making money, there was not one who cared whether he came or went, whether he was glad or sad, whether he had a song on his lips or the blackest gloom in his heart. “

My favourite line in the novel thus far is

“There was no stove and there had never been a stove.”

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Many of Bertrand W Sinclair’s novels are available to read online via Gutenberg, contrary to what the Georgia Straight article asserted this week. I wish writers would check google rather than just accepting the prevailing view.  Sinclair’s first wife B M Bower also wrote 57 novels. (Westerns, I understand)