Vancouver Nightmare (1976)

Someone at the East Hastings Street Value Village has the right idea. There, in a display promoting Canadian, British Columbian and Vancouver-themed tourist books, is Vancouver Nightmare, the second in author Eric Wilson's Tom Austen Mystery series of Young Adult fiction. Other series titles include Disneyland Hostage (1982) and Vampires of Ottawa (1984).

Vancouver Nightmare opens with teenaged Winnipeggers Tom and his friend Dietmar touring through Gastown with Tom's grandparents. The overweight, middle-aged man Tom assesses at a restaurant ("If that fat one isn't a crook, I'll eat my hat") turns out to be a police inspector friend of Tom's grandfather. A common device in the book -- a teaching moment, as it were -- is Tom's chronic misreading of people, places and things.

Inspector Mort and Tom are introduced; Tom expresses an interest in police work; and two days later Mort is touring Tom through the Main Street station, its remand centre, and then to a private police officer's club where Tom meets a former cop who, he is told, is now working as a youth worker -- a worker who Tom correctly guesses (though initially he keeps this guess to himself) is an undercover cop.

At 96 large-print pages, Vancouver Nightmare is a quick read. Tom sees things and moves towards them at pace competitive with the reader's ability to anticipate the outcome. This was always the trick with books of this genre, though I would have to say that S. E. Hinton's The Outsiders (1967), a novel we read in Mr. Satterthwaite's Grade 8 English class, erred on the side of introspection. 

Here's a synopsis from the back cover of Vancouver Nightmare:

"A chance meeting with a drug pusher named Spider takes Tom Austen into the grim streets of Vancouver's Skid Road, where he poses as a runaway while searching for information to help the police smash a gang which is cynically hooking young kids on drugs. Suddenly unmasked as a police agent, Tom is trapped in the nightmarish underworld of Vancouver as the gang closes in, determined to get rid of the young meddler at any cost."