The Dusty Bookcase

The Wonderful World of Mortimer Tombs

2012-02-12T08:23:00.000-05:00

Basil Hayden, Publisher

RIP

Following Thursday's post on I Hate You to Death...

I envy Mortimer Tombs. His is a world in which writers make very good money. Just look at his betrothed, blonde and beautiful Audrey Allen – she lives off Central Park in a spacious apartment that is made small by her crazy collection of Victorian antiques. Audrey is able to afford such luxury, along with housekeeper and cook, by dashing off the occasional love story for Basil Hayden's Passionate Love magazine. Fellow Hayden wordsmiths Monica and Gordon MacGregor – she writes romances, he adventure tales – live in a grand house close to the park. Then there's Augustus Hamilton, who is lured from his position as a tenured university professor by the lucre of literature.

Keith's Edgar's writers write, but don't think that they devote their days to the craft. Audrey, dressed in diaphanous negligee, moves about her apartment between pump organ and boudoir, playing the girly girl. Gordon spends his days reclining, awaiting inspiration dressed in silk dressing gown. Monica takes her cues from Audrey, breezing into rooms in "flame-colored negligee." Meanwhile, humorist Isaac Grimm lies reading wrapped in a blanket (he has the sniffles).

Their complaints against publisher Basil Hayden have only to do with rejection. The doomed man refused one – and only one – work by each of the seven writers suspected of his murder. All evidence indicates that when it came to his writers Hayden was very generous indeed. Mort received a $5000 advance for one of his crummy potboilers* – $67,000 today.

Such is the luxury contained in Mort's Manhattan flat that even dim bulb Detective Haggerty can't help but notice:

"Do yourself pretty well, I see. Didn't know they paid out heavy dough for drivel."
"Oh, come, now," I protested. "Genius must be recognized. We artists don't live in garrets in this day and age."

Another day, another age... an alternate universe.

* Edgar gives a glimpse of Mort's prose with the beginning of Blood on the Ceiling: "The wind was howling down the brick canyons, howling past the deserted corners, driving swirling snow against lamp posts into sinister doorways..."
Related post: 'Publisher Dies in Orgy of Hate'

'Publisher Dies in Orgy of Hate'

2012-02-09T06:00:00.000-05:00

I Hate You to Death
Keith Edgar
Toronto: F.E. Howard, 1944

Seven writers lure hated publisher Basil Hayden to a private dining room on the fourteenth storey of a swanky New York hotel. The plan is to hold him captive and read aloud their rejected works until he pays up. In the darkened room, under hooded reading light, mystery writer Mortimer Tombs (né Smith), is first in line. Before beginning, he advises:

"Remember, Mister Basil Hayden, that while I am reading this you will be feeling the concentrated HATE of seven people. Seven people in this room are hating you. Feel their hate!"

Our narrator, Mort is fifteen or so minutes into his "thrilling mystery" Blood on the Ceiling when it is discovered that Hayden is dead. "Heart attack," pronounces one of Mort's fellow frustrated writers. The group of seven are about to call for the hotel doctor when one of their number, humorist Isaac Grimm, suggests the police. And so, a new plan is born in which the frustrated writers will cry "Murder!" – then mine the scandal.

Grimm's gamble works. Headlines like the one borrowed for the title of this post pepper newspapers, Hollywood comes calling and the agents move in. Blood on the Ceiling is sold to a publisher sight unseen, while others try to sign up the mystery writer for further work.

Then comes the news that Hayden really was murdered. Brian Haggerty, the detective assigned to the case, fingers Mort as prime suspect, and we're off... rather, they're off. For no other reason than he is a mystery writer, Haggerty has Mort tag along as he visits and revisits the six other writers.Though nothing furthers the plot, the reader is treated to several encounters with the blonde, the beautiful Audrey Allen, a contributor to the dead publisher's Passionate Love monthly. It's in the first of these that we're afforded the opportunity to rethink narrator Mort's status as hero of I Hate You to Death. Consider, if you will, the man's reaction when Audrey suggests that he wants to marry her for her money:

I jumped to my feet, spilling chicken sandwiches on the floor and breaking the plate. I grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her until her lovely teeth rattled.
You – know – damn – well," I panted, "that – I – make – a – damn sight – more money – than you!"
I shoved her back in the chair and snarled, "One of these days I'm going to beat the living bejesus out of you and knock some sense into your head!" I returned to my chair and sat down again.
Haggerty hadn't moved.

Haggerty doesn't move much in this novel, though he is as a man adrift. A mystery himself, the detective's speech alternates between hayseed and a metropolitan sophisticate. Haggerty's ineffective interrogations invariably include a feeble request for the murderer's name. "If only I could pin down the underlying motive", he whines to Mort, before making a bold pronouncement:

"Why was Basil Hayden killed? When I know that I'll know he murder. I must have the answer here somewhere, and damn me if I don't get it tonight."
"I hope you do," I answered him. "I'm fed up with the whole thing."

I concur.

The exchange between Haggerty and Mort takes place on 114 of the novel's 127 pages. The detective does indeed "get it" that night... but not through his own work. Ultimately, the murderer reveals himself through a suicide note – printed in full on pages 124 and 125 – in which he hints at his motivation. Author Keith Edgar cheats here, by sliding all sorts of new stuff under a slowly closing door, and by having Haggerty quickly announce, "The case is closed."

The last words are left to Audrey and Mort::

"Murders are fun," mused Audrey, "if you don't happen to be a friend on the murderer."
I guess that summed up the situation neatly.

I do not concur.

Object: A digest-size paperback numbering 127 pages in length, the cheap paper and flimsy wraps have held up well these past sixty-eight years. The keen-eyed will have noticed that only six of the seven hate-filled writers are depicted on the cover – one of the two women is missing. I'll add that not one of the five men depicted fits the description of "stout and baldish" Gus Hamilton, writer of "pseudo-scientific thrillers".

Access: A rare book, of all our libraries only those of the City of Toronto and the University of Toronto have it in their holdings. Four copies are listed for sale online – all from American booksellers, they range in price from US$22 to US$54.

Cheap, I'd say.
Related post: The Wonderful World of Mortimer Tombs

POD Cover of the Month: The Backwoods of Canada

2012-02-07T05:46:00.000-05:00

BiblioBazaar takes Catharine Parr Traill's cheery account of her life in our backwoods and turns it into Stalag 17. I much prefer Tutis Classics' sunny cover:

First edition:

London: Charles Knight, 1836

Runner up:

Another proud BiblioBazaar offering.

POD Cover of the Month: The Simple Adventures of a Memsahib

POD Cover of the Month: Romany of the Snows

A Millar Mystery and the Art of Deception

2012-02-05T11:56:00.000-05:00

Following last Wednesday's post on Margaret Millar's An Air that Kills:

One man dies in this novel; here's how the discovery of his body is described:

Two barges, sent down from Meaford with winches and dredging equipment, located the car in twenty feet of water just below the cliff where Lehman had found the tire tracks. The car was barely damaged. the windows and windshield were unbroken and Ron Galloway was still inside, fastened snugly to the driver's seat by his safety belt.

So, who's that above on the cover of the 1985 International Polygonics edition?

The 2000 British edition from Allison & Busby (again, no relation), does the reader a similar disservice by falling back on that tired cliché of the clutching hand.

Who exactly is drowning here? It can't be poor Ron Galloway, who enters the drink in a comatose state, courtesy of best friend and pill pushing pharmaceutical salesman Harry Bream.

Though Ron's staged suicide by car crash is a key event, it's never described by Millar. We learn of the tragedy many days after the fact when tire tracks leading off the edge of a cliff are discovered. The author makes much of the fact that Ron was behind the wheel of a submerged Cadillac convertible when he died, yet all German editions feature an image of a sedan that has hit a wall.

It's understandable that readers of Die Süßholzraspler might expect someone at some point to drive into a wall, just as folks with the International Polygonics edition would've been keeping an eye out for a floating body. I expect those who read the Allison & Busby edition braced themselves for Mrs Millar's description of a struggling, drowning man.

Readers of the 1976 Penguin edition may have found some satisfaction; the cross-scarred wrists depicted on the cover feature in the novel, appearing fleetingly on page 243 of the 247-page book.

They're of no importance to the plot.

Forget those covers – they're bland and boring. The best, the steamiest, the sexiest is the 1960 Bantam edition:

It too has problems. The flying Caddie is great, but that can't be fair-haired, chunky Thelma Bream. And while its true that An Air that Kills is a "novel of subtle evil", it's not until the final chapter that the hidden "savage lust for revenge" is revealed. Consider that a spoiler.

Four years later, unmourned publisher Lancer got Thelma's hair right, but little else. While acknowledging that this ugly edition was published when Twiggy was at her height, I must ask: Can the femme fatale in blue bra be considered plump?

Or am I being just too damn picky?

The least colourful cover I've yet to find comes from Tokyo publisher Sogensha. It's also the most accurate. The small lake on its cover could very well be located outside Meaford, Ontario; I see nothing to indicate otherwise, except for the fact that the area is blessed with some of the most beautiful scenery on the planet. This doesn't do it justice:

The most beautiful feature on the cover lie in the words of A.E. Housman, who provided the novel's epigraph:

Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.

Published in 1995, Sogensha's is the fourth – yes, fourth – Japanese edition. We Canadians are still awaiting our first.

Margaret Millar and the Air Up North

2012-02-01T07:49:00.000-05:00

An Air that Kills
Margaret Millar
New York: Random House, 1957

We Canadians shouldn't beat ourselves up too much about Margaret Millar. Yes, we don't study her work in school; true, our publishers ignore her work; but the Americans aren't paying much attention either. There was a time when Mrs Millar was celebrated in the United States, her adopted country. Her books sold well and won considerable critical praise; The Beast in View was awarded the 1956 Edgar for Best Novel. In 1965, this Kitchener native was Los Angeles Times Woman of the Year and later received the Grand Master Award by the Mystery Writers of America. Today, eighteen years after her death, An Air that Kills is one of only two of Millar novels in print down south; one half of a bind-up from Stark House Press of Eureka, California.

An Air that Kills is one of Millar's Canadian novels – by which I mean that it is one of the novels she set in her home and native land. It opens with a seemingly trivial conversation between husband and wife. The former, Ron Galloway is preparing to leave his Toronto home for a weekend of fishing with his buddies on Georgian Bay. Meanwhile, wife Esther rustles around the room in a pink taffeta dress.

"I'm sick of my hair like this," she said. "I think I'll become a blonde. An interesting psychic blonde like Thelma."
"You're psychic enough. And I don't like phoney blondes."
"What about natural ones like Thelma?"
"I like Thelma alright," he said obstinately. "She's my best friend's wife. I have to."
"Just all right?"
"For Pete's sake, Esther, she's a fattish little hausfrau with some of her marbles missing. Even your imagination can't build her up into a femme fatale."
"I guess not."
"When are you going to get over these crazy suspicions?"
"Dorothy..." She swallowed as she spoke the name, so that he wasn't sure until she repeated it. "Dorothy had no suspicions."

We will learn that Dorothy is Ron's first wife, just as we will discover that Esther's suspicions are justified. Thelma Bream is pregnant with Ron's child, an unfortunate situation of which he learns on his way north. Best friend Harry Bream awaits at the lodge, as do second tier friends Bill Winslow, Joe Hepburn and Ralph Turnee, a professor of economics at the University of Toronto. A flurry of phone calls follow when Ron fails to show. Seemingly inconsequential events come together – a dog is struck, a Mennonite girl discovers a driving cap – leading to the discovery of Ron and his Cadillac convertible at the bottom of a small lake just outside Meaford. A suicide note arrives by post a few days later.

It often seems that there's no real mystery in this mystery novel, rather a whole lot of domestic drama. Esther struggles in adapting to dual roles of grieving widow and betrayed wife, while the Breams battle and a baby is born. Harry clings, Thelma rejects and things become increasingly unpleasant. Though its not expressed in so many words, the author having a subtle touch, the second tier friends breath a collective sigh of relief when Harry is transferred to the United States. Thelma, who has spent much of her life pining for warmer climes, ends up in southern California.

It doesn't end there, of course. It never does.

Trivia: While An Air that Kills has never been published in Canada, foreign editions abound. Random House, Bantam, Lancer and International Polygonics have handled the novel in the United States. In Britain, as The Soft Talkers, it has been published by Gollancz, Penguin, Chivers and Allison & Busby (no relation). Then there have been the translations: French (Un air qui tue), Spanish (Un aire mortal), Catalan (Un aire sue mata), German (Die Süßholzraspler), Dutch (De mooipraters), Danish (Stakkels Harry), Norwegian (Treer gjester venter vert), Finish (Tappava ilma) and Japanese (殺す風).

Object: A very attractive hardcover bound in scarlet cloth. The dust jacket, designed by science fiction illustrator Richard Powers, was adapted for the French first edition.

Access: Though uncommon, Very Good copies of the first edition begin at US$30. No copies of The Soft Talkers, the 1957 Gollancz first British edition, are currently listed for sale online. Various editions are held by Library and Archives Canada, the Toronto Public Library, the Vancouver Public Library and seven of our universities.

The Stark House edition, with very fine Introduction by Tom Nolan, is not sold in Canada.

Suggestive Harlequins: A Romantic Threesome

2012-01-30T06:00:00.000-05:00

To Please the Doctor

Marjorie Moore

1959

Doctor in Bondage

Jean S. MacLeod

1961

Strange Request

Marjorie Bassett

1960

Related post: SF, not S/M

'Burns' by James McIntyre, the Cheese Poet

2012-01-25T08:46:00.000-05:00

The Robert Burns Memorial

Square Dorchester (né Dominion), Montreal

Photograph by Wally Gobetz

BURNS

The following ode was read by the author at the Centennial Anniversaryof Burns in the year 1859.

This night shall never be forgot
For humble life none now despise,
Since Burns was born in lowly cot
Whose muses wing soars to the skies.

'Round Scotia's brow he wove a wreath
And raised her name in classic story
A deathless fame he did bequeath,
His country's pride, his country's glory.

He sang her hills, he sang her dales,
Of Bonnie Doon and Banks of Ayr,
Of death and Hornbook and such tales
As Tam O'Shanter and his mare.

He bravely taught that manly worth
More precious is than finest gold,
He reckoned not on noble birth,
But noble deeds alone extolled.

Where will we find behind the plow
Or in the harvest field at toil
Another youth, sweet bard, like thou,
Could draw the tear or raise the smile.

We do not think 'twas Burns' fault,
For there were no teetotalers then,
That Willie brewed a peck of malt
And Robin preed like other men.

'Tis true he loved the lasses dear,
But who for this would loudly blame,
For Scotia's maids his heart did cheer
And love is a true heavenly flame.

So here we've met in distant land
Poor honest Robin to extol,
Though oft we differ let us stand
United now in Ingersoll.

From Poems of James McIntyre (Ingersoll, ON: Chronicle, 1889)

No Lady Before Judith Hearne

2012-01-22T22:09:00.000-05:00

A Bullet for My Lady
Bernard Mara [pseud. Brian Moore]
New York: Gold Medal, 1955

As titles go, A Bullet for My Lady ain't so bad. The problem is that that narrator Josh Camp has no lady, and the only person who takes a slug is a small time crook named Domingo Jiménez.

Barcelona sets the stage. Camp, a trader in airplanes, arrives in "the biggest, roughest city in Spain" to search for AWOL business partner Harry Spoke. He's barely set foot on Spanish soil when met by a beautiful woman who reports that the missing man got drunk and fell from the balcony of a fourth class hotel. Camp doesn't believe a word. Harry, always one for routine and discipline, never strayed from a two drink maximum.

Camp takes a room in the selfsame flophouse, where he's visited by the beautiful bearer of bad news, a moustachioed marquesa, a lovely lush named Lucille and, of course, Domingo Jiménez. As it turns out, all are searching for the coffin of a cardinal who, centuries earlier, was buried wearing vestments inlaid with pearls, rubies and diamonds. What we have is a dark, violent, not so funny It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World.

A Bullet for My Lady ain't so bad. While the plot isn't much and the characters cardboard, Moore's sketches of Spain are at times quite striking. (He banged out the early chapters in Barcelona and Majorca.)

The fourth of his disowned novels, it appeared two months before Judith Hearne. Back in 1955, the Gold Medal thriller was Moore's moneymaker, bringing an advance that was well over ten times that proffered by André Deutsch for the more literary undertaking.

Three more Moore pulps followed.

Can you blame him?

Object: A cheap mass market paperback with spicy cover illustration by James Meese. The back cover features a curious black and white photograph that looks for all the world like a still from a movie that was never made.

Access: The first and only printing arrived at news stands in March 1955. Very Good copies begin at US$45 and, for no good reason, go up to US$150. Non-circulating copies can be found at the Toronto Public Library, Library and Archives Canada, McMaster University, the University of Saskatchewan, the University of Calgary and Simon Fraser University.

Related posts:
Brian Moore's True First
Murderers Move in on Montreal
Parisian French, not Québécois French

The Dominatrix of Time (and other fantasies)

2012-01-20T09:30:00.000-05:00

There are no whip-wielding women in Masters of Time, green-skinned or otherwise. In fact, the only female so much as mentioned in the entire novel is aging spinster Nora Matheson. The 1974 Manor Books edition above is a cheat designed to appeal to adolescent boys. I was eleven when it arrived in stores.

With van Vogt, covers rarely reflect content. Publishers puff, peddling images that – four times out of five – are entirely unappealing.

Yes, four times out of five.

I present the following as evidence:

Super-Cérebro [Supermind]

Lisbon: Livros do Brasil, 1978

The Book of Ptath

London: Panther, 1975

Out of the Unknown
London: New English Library, 1970

宇宙嵐のかなた [Mission to the Stars]

Tokyo: Hayakawa, 1970

The Weapon Makers

New York: Greenberg, 1952

Related post: The Homoerotic van Vogt

Wasting Time on A. E. van Vogt

2012-01-18T06:00:00.000-05:00

Masters of Time
A. E. van Vogt
New York: Macfadden-Bartell, 1967

Masters of Time opens with poor Norma Matheson scrambling up a slippery riverbank after a failed suicide attempt. Eleven years earlier she'd rejected college boyfriend Jack's marriage proposal to pursue a career in social service. How'd that go? The author won't say, though the publisher provides plenty in this pitch to prospective purchasers:

Front cover, back cover, front page – Macfadden-Bartell describes this novel three different ways, though not one is true to the plot.

The finest scene is the first. Norma rests on a park bench gathering herself for another run at the river when she's approached by Dr Lell, a gaunt man who offers a job recruiting mercenaries for "the Calonian cause". That she accepts might be an indication that things didn't go so well in the social service game. Norma soon discovers that her employer is not the country of Calonia, but aliens amassing soldiers for a war in the distant future. She runs to the local police station only to be temporarily transformed into a mute old woman by Dr Lell.

Norma next turns to the US Mail, penning a plea to former beau Jack, now a world-renowned physicist. The lengthy letter she receives in response is full of mixed messages. Jack questions her sanity, repeats each and every detail Norma has gleaned of the alien plot, provides scientific analyses of same, and encloses $200 so that she might pay for psychiatric help.

What began as a mildly interesting episode of Twilight Zone suddenly becomes awkward and disjointed. The novel stumbles forward, picking up and discarding characters, concepts and concerns while torturing the reader with pedestrian prose. Here are Jack's thoughts upon learning that he's aboard a spaceship bound for Venus:

Venus! He let the word roll around in his mind and it was exciting, intellectual food, immensely stimulating to a mind shaped and trained as was his. Venus? For ages, the dreams of men had reached into the skies, immeasurably fascinated by the mind-staggering fact of other worlds, as vast as their own continents, seas, rivers, treasure beyond estimate. And now for him there was to be reality.

This plain passage is atypical in that it is at least comprehensible. As in Bond parodies, van Vogt's villains reveal too much. Explanations are plentiful, advanced knowledge is imparted and secrets are spilled, but nothing the aliens say makes much sense:

"–the seventeenth x space and time manipulations... taking place sometime in the future... several years from now. Your spaceship either by accident or design caught up in the eddying current in the resulting time storm– Still no clue to the origin of the mighty powers being exercised."

While readers may feel that they have missed something, fault lies wholly with the author who in his Reflections of A. E. van Vogt reveals that the novel was but one cobbled together from unrelated stories. The effort was, as he put it, "fix-up work". I suggest that "hack work" is more appropriate. I'll add that that grafting lifeless things to other lifeless things brings animation only in science fiction... and not with science fiction.

Oh, one more thing: Nora and Jack get married in the end.

Trivia: The novel first appeared as "The Recruiting Station" in a 1942 issue of Astounding Science Ficton. It first appeared in book form coupled with a shorter pulp story, "The Changeling". It has also been published as Earth's Last Fortress.

Translations include L'ultima fortezza della terra (1976), La dernière fortresse (1978) and Beherrscher der Zeit (1978).

Object and Access: A mass market paperback, typical of its time, copies of the Macfadden-Bartell edition are plentiful and cheap. Good copies can be had for one dollar (double that for Very Good). The first edition, published in 1950 by Fantasy Press of Reading, Pennsylvania, is not nearly as rare as one might expect. Near Fine copies begin at the forty dollar range. In Canada, only the Toronto Public Library and a handful of universities have the novel in their collections.

The Mystery Writer Mystery Unravels

2012-01-16T06:00:00.000-05:00

'Keeping an Eye Out for Pamela Fry' pays off:

A writer friend informs that Pamela Fry, author of Harsh Evidence and The Watching Cat, is the very same Pamela Fry who once worked as an editor at McClelland & Stewart. Though Miss Fry's years with the publisher were not many – 1965 to 1971 – she did work with several canonical favourites, including Sinclair Ross, Ernest Buckler and Farley Mowat. I imagine she'll be best remembered not for her mysteries, but as the editor of The Edible Woman, Margaret Atwood's debut novel. A high point to be sure.

The low? Look no further than Eric Koch's ill-fated satire The French Kiss (1969), which I mention here only because the book just might lay claim to the worst launch in Canadian publishing history. In Jack, McClelland biographer James King tells us that The French Kiss was on bookstore shelves when legal advice came down that members of Quebec's Johnson family might have been slandered in its pages:

The three thousand books were recalled, small slips pasted over the offending passages and the copies then returned to retailers. Jack only learned of the potentially disastrous situation at the book's launch at the home of the book's editor Pamela Fry. He called her aside, told her the book would have to be recalled and acted quickly and decisively to prevent a lawsuit.

According to King, Pamela Fry left M&S in for a position on a federal government task force. In his autobiography, Drawing on Type, designer Frank Newfeld places her c.1980 at the National Gallery of Canada. From there the trail grows cold.

Thanks go out to my "writer friend" and to fellow sleuth Richard Blanchard.

Related post: Keeping an Eye Out for Pamela Fry

"The Canadian Publishers"

2012-01-10T19:30:00.000-05:00

McClelland & Stewart swallowed up by Random House Canada

McClelland and Stewart

"The Canadian Publishers"

1906 - 2012

RIP

Artwork by Astrid K. Busby
with apologies to Frank Newfeld

POD Cover of the Month: Romany of the Snows

2012-01-09T06:42:00.000-05:00

Romany of the Snows – what we sticklers refer to as A Romany of the Snows – another fine product from print on demand house Tutis. Take care, bears are not nearly as cute, cuddly, petite or domesticated as they'd have you believe. From the novel:

I got sick and numb. There on that anvil of snow and ice I saw a big white bear, one such as you shall see within the Arctic Circle. His long nose fetching out towards the bleeding sun in the sky, his white coat shining. But that was not the thing — there was another. At the feet of the bear was a body, and one clawed foot was on that body — of a man.

First edition:

Runner up:

The Tutis take on Michel and Angele – what we sticklers refer to as Michel and Angèle – Sir Gilbert's romantic tale of two young lovers in 16th-century England.

POD Cover of the Month: Rila of Ingelside
POD Cover of the Month: The Simple Adventures of a Memsahib

Mister Gumble Meets David Golder

2012-01-06T10:56:00.000-05:00

A brief follow-up, of sorts, to Monday's post on Mr. Gumble Sits Up.

One keen-eyed friend notes that Irène Némirovsky's David Golder features amongst the "Selection of Horace Liveright Fall Books" listed on the back flap. Indeed it does. The publisher seems to have really been behind this novel, pushing it also on Gumble's back jacket.

What cost two dollars back in 1930, cannot be had today... at least not through online booksellers; only two copies of this first English-language edition are listed. Both sans jacket, the more expensive is described thusly:

There [sic] pages are clean except for some slight damp stain at the outside edge of some pages. The half-cloth binding has some staining mostly to the orange front paper cover. The corners are bumped, the spine is cocked, and there is a small tear to the crown of the binding. Webbing is exposed in the back.

"Reading copy" is the bookseller's summary. Surely not! At US$500 – a price I expect he'll get – his is a copy for the collector. This is a reading copy:

Sold in the original French for a mere C$9.99. New.

Dead Man Sitting

2012-01-02T10:26:00.006-05:00

Mr. Gumble Sits Up

Douglas Durkin

New York: Liveright, 1930

Back in 1930, when it received its first and only printing, Mr. Gumble Sits Up was described by the Chicago Tribune as “a fantastic tale”. That I can’t report anything more says much about my reaction to this novel. Mr. Gumble Sits Up is a fantastic tale, and an intriguing book, but not so much that I’d pay the paper the US$3.95 they’re asking for the rest of the review.

The novel begins with the demise of its title character. Gumble is a simple and simple-minded small town hardware store owner. Unhappily married, pursed by creditors, he’s overtaken by mortal illness “on one of those very days when life had, so to speak, given him another beating.” His wife pulls back, creditors pull back, and Gumble enjoys the silence:

When he was told the solemn truth at last – that is he was about to die, was dying, in fact – Gumble embraced the knowledge with what remaining strength he had and went to sleep as peacefully as any child. In the morning he was dead.

Gumble’s rest in peace ends abruptly when he returns to life at his own funeral. This resurrection raises all sorts of interesting questions: Is the widow Gumble still free to marry her true love, Mr Pound of the village of Wayne? What of all creditors? Should they begin apportioning the man’s estate or would they be obliged to extend their loans?

Ill-feelings abound, and Gumble figures it would be best for all concerned if he simply vanished. He sneaks away from this Leacockian quagmire, entering a rural America that bears some similarity to that of Liveright stable-mate Sherwood Anderson. Dark laughter meets black humour, bleak situations and curious conversations that consist almost entirely of what the dust jacket describes as “homely philosophy”. Here Gumble exchanges views with a snake oil salesman:

“It’s a wise man that accepts the truth and acts before it is too late.”
“True enough,” replied Gumble, “true enough! But you have heard, perhaps, that it is a wise man who knows when to doubt.”
The vendor looked puzzled for a moment. “I have never heard that, my friend,” he retorted at last, “but I have heard that a fool can ask questions a wise man can’t answer. What is it you want to know?”
Gumble knew how to appreciate a witty turn even when he himself was the butt of it. “Very good, very good!” he laughed affably.

And so it goes. Things happen – often fantastic, usually amusing – but all is undercut by page after page of tiresome dialogue, more often than not instigated by Gumble himself:

”You have heard it said, I am sure, that every dog must have his day.”
“You mean, perhaps, that by the same token we should let sleeping dogs lie,” laughed the widow.
“Very good!” Gumble declared and joined heartily in her laughter. “Very good, indeed!”

The reader is relieved when, after 230 pages of this, Gumble succumbs to an accidental drug overdose. Dead for a second and final time, he takes in a sun that “had never shone so brightly”, and just keeps talking:

“And what do you make of it all my friend?” he asked the first wayfarer he met. “or are you good at riddles?”
“As for that –” quoth God, and was silent.

Thus endeth the novel.

God is merciful, is he not?.

Object: A well-constructed hardcover in black boards with gold lettering. The dust-jacket, turquoise paper with black and red printing, is a bit fragile. The back flap price reductions reflect Liveright's ineffective reaction to the 1930 book war begun when Doubleday and others slashed prices of their new fiction lists to one dollar.

Access: A rare book, it's held by not one of our public libraries and just eight of our university libraries. No copies are listed for sale online. My copy, the only I've ever seen offered, was purchased last month from an American bookseller for US$9.95.

Related post: Mr. Gumble Meets David Golder

Immature Verse for a New Year

2012-01-01T06:30:00.008-05:00

Twenty-two lines of celebration from Poems (Beauchemin, 1922), the first volume by young Ethel Ursula Foran (1900-1988). The daughter of True Witness editor Joseph Kearney Foran, himself a poet, she subtitled her collection of "immature verses" A Few Blossoms from the Garden of My Dreams.

Just Say the Invitation Never Arrived

2011-12-31T06:42:00.001-05:00

The Globe and Mail, 30 December 1936

A Quiet Revolution and Still Cowards Complain

2011-12-27T06:00:00.005-05:00

The Squeaking Wheel

John Mercer [pseud.]

n.p.: Rubicon, 1966

Let's get rid of this so as to not track it into the New Year.

I came upon The Squeaking Wheel a few months ago in a London thrift shop; its bold, if inept declaration – "4TH. [sic] PRINTING OF THE BEST-SELLING BOOK ALL CANADA'S TALKING ABOUT!" – did attract.

I don't remember talk of this book; but then I was only just learning to speak when The Squeaking Wheel was first published. Sure looks like it was popular:

Four printings in three months! Two in February 1966 alone! In the Foreword author John Mercer tells us that the first two printings amounted to "many thousands" of copies. So why is this the only one I've ever seen? And why was there no fifth printing?

I'd ask John Mercer, but he's a fabrication, a pseudonym behind which two men hide. "English-speaking Montrealers who have a curious desire not to be blown sky-high to a Protestant Heaven by a few well-placed sticks of dynamite", they reveal nothing more about themselves than that they work in the fields of advertising and medicine. Even today their identities are a mystery.

More furious than funny, those familiar with Sun comment pages will recognize the John Mercer style. Irrational anger and uncontrolled ranting accompany fantastical statistics presented without citation. Quotations, even those pitching the book, lack attribution.

It's all here, including that old straw about Quebecers being horrible drivers:

It has often been said by opponents of French-Canada that one way to solve the problem of Quebec is to give every inhabitant a car and turn all the traffic lights green for one day.

Take care now. Those words come not from the authors, but the "opponents of French-Canada". Or so the John Mercer men would have you believe. The reader will soon recognize that they too are "opponents of French-Canada".

The Quiet Revolution is five years old, the Bi and Bi Commission is just beginning, and already the authors, who "have lived all their adult lives in Quebec", are fed up. Their message is clear: "Quebec is a conquered country and its people are a conquered people"... and somewhat inferior.

Again, don't you be pinning this on John Mercer. That stuff about the stripper and the hockey player comes from some politician. Who? Who knows. The men behind the pseudonym are only repeating what they've heard; they don't quite agree. Not quite.

The Squeaking Wheel was never talked about by "everyone in Canada"; not even Montreal's English and French-language presses paid much attention. Serious discussion of the book is limited to a few sentences in journalist Solange Chaput-Rolland's Reflections (Montreal: Chateau, 1968):

The pens of these English-speaking compatriots are certainly not very brave. Of course it is true that, when one describes unpleasant reality, one receives in return unpleasant insult. But liberty of speech demands the dignity and courage of that speech. And those who hurl invective at their compatriots, while keeping themselves well hidden, are not really respectable citizens.

No more need be said, except this: I don't think the cowards hiding behind the pseudonym were Montrealers. Real Montrealers know it's Lili, not "Lily"; and they know she was not French-Canadian, but American.

I'll add that Canadians know not to hyphenate "hockey player".

There, sweet Virginia, I've scraped this right off my shoes.

Lili St. Cyr
(née Willis Marie Van Schaack)
RIP

Object and Access: A bland, trade-size paperback, various printings are held by our larger university libraries, the Bibliothèque et archives nationales du Québec, the Toronto Public Library and the Vancouver Public Library. Fifteen copies are currently listed for sale online, thirteen of which can be had for three to seven dollars. I bought mine for fifty cents. Our old friends in Vermont want US$132.93. What's so special about their copy? Nothing... nothing at all.

A Merry Christmas to All

2011-12-25T07:56:00.001-05:00

A few favourite images from the 1961 Eaton's Santa Claus Parade Colouring Book. The entire thing – 32-pages, plus "COLOUR GUIDE IN FULL COLOUR" – is available for download here from the Archives of Ontario.

Merry Christmas!

Pulp Noir à Montréal

2011-12-23T06:00:00.013-05:00

The new edition of Canadian Notes & Queries lands, and with it comes another Dusty Bookcase sur papier. This time the spotlight plays upon Ted Allan's Love is a Long Shot. Not the Love is a Long Shot for which he was awarded the 1984 Stephen Leacock Medal, but a cheap, pseudonymous pulp novel from a quarter-century earlier.

Published by News Stand Library in September 1949, two months before newspaperman Al Palmer’s Sugar-Puss on Dorchester Street, this Love is a Long Shot holds the distinction of being the first pulp noir novel set in Montreal. As I write in CNQ, it ain't that pretty at all. The cover depicts, but doesn't quite capture, one of the darkest, most horrific scenes in any Canadian novel.

There's more to the issue, of course, including new fiction by Nathan Whitlock, new poetry by Nyla Matuck and – ahem – praise for A Gentleman of Pleasure from George Fetherling.

POD Cover of the Month: The Simple Adventures of a Memsahib

2011-12-22T06:30:00.004-05:00

Wait, isn't that Montreal?

It seems almost cruel to again focus on Nabu Press, but what better way to begin this day, the 150th anniversary of Sara Jeannette Duncan's birth, than to take a swipe at those dishonouring her work. Using a stock photo of a Slovakian castle for a novel set in India is one thing, but what I find more interesting is the botching of fair Sara's name:

Sara Jeanette (Duncan) "Mrs. Everard Cotes" Cotes

What dog's breakfast lies beneath that cover?

The first edition:

New York: Appleton, 1893

A Christmas bonus:

Further ineptitude from POD publisher Echo Library of Fairford, Gloucester. The surname is correct.

The Harper Hockey Book Watch (Updated!)

2011-12-20T17:03:00.018-05:00

Regular readers and suffering dinner companions will know that for years my eyes have been scanning the horizon for signs of Stephen Harper's long promised hockey book. The prime minister does love to tease, promising a work that seems forever on the verge of completion.

Today, some hope. In her regrettably named "Morning Buzz", Globe and Mail reporter Jane Taber brings news that "there is a publishing date for the long-talked about and much-anticipated prime ministerial tome one [sic] hockey history." While the pub date – "next year" – seems awfully vague, we may take cheer in the fact the source is Stephen Harper himself. "He did not say who the publisher is," adds Ms Taber, leaving the reader to speculate as to whether he refused to say or simply wasn't asked.

Now, morning buzz turning to evening hangover, I see that the prime minister's critics are having fun with his writerly habits: "15 minutes every day for eight years". Oh, by all means, go ahead and snicker. Me? I admire the man's determination as much as I do his realistic expectations. Again, Ms. Taber:

He will not make a cent on it, he said.

I dare say, our prime minister understands something of what it is to be a writer in this country.

There's a sentence I never thought I'd write.

Later that day: Postmedia's Mark Kennedy reports that the prime minister has not yet completed the book.

Take heart, after today he'll be fifteen minutes closer.

Related post: Ignatieff's Ink and Harper's Hockey Book

Keeping an Eye Out for Pamela Fry

2011-12-16T06:00:00.007-05:00

The Watching Cat

Pamela Fry

London: Davies, 1960

Who was Pamela Fry? None of my Montreal friends, bookish types all, have been able to answer this question. Yet the married "Miss Fry" once lived in the city and twice used it as a setting in mystery novels. Both were published by respected houses, both were lauded in the pages of the New York Times and both have been out of print for half a century.

The Watching Cat, Pamela Fry's second mystery, stumbles out of the gate with an entirely unimaginative premise: Catherine Ellis, a young, single schoolteacher from a remote Manitoba town inherits a large Montreal house from a previously unknown, eccentric uncle. Much as I'd hoped the work would quickly ready itself, Miss Fry fairly clings to cliché as the story falters forward. Poor Catherine, an orphan, enters what she expects to be an empty domicile only to encounter an evil stepmother, an unstable half-sister and a tall, dark and handsome lodger. A shady lawyer works in the background as those in the know sneak about the house looking for riches hidden away by the recently deceased funny uncle.

It all seems so forgettable, but I'll remember The Watching Cat as one of the most disappointing novels I've ever read. The author has a peculiar penchant for planting, then ignoring, seeds of a dark psychological drama. When the evil stepmother relates stories of family mental illness, Catherine begins to question her own sanity – but only for a paragraph or two. Gaslight invariably dims to a Nancy Drew mystery, as when our heroine is awoken by a scratching sound:

The noise came from somewhere very close – surely it was the other side of this very wall, the wall alongside her bed. There was someone in Uncle Jeremiah's room... She looked at the luminous dial of her watch. It was three minutes to four... But who could be in there at this time of night – and for what reason?

So boring, so bland... and yet on occasion The Watching Cat stretches to rise above it all. Catherine's half-sister, for example, proves not to be mentally ill, rather she's a heroin addict. Her pusher is boyfriend Eddie, a young medical school drop-out who is not only in on the scheme, but is probably sleeping with the evil stepmother. And there's a good deal of fun, like when small town girl Catherine, dressed in a hideous handmade green taffeta gown, attends a party populated by beats.

Nearly everything I know about the attractive Miss Fry is found in the book's author biography. Her debut novel, Harsh Evidence, published in London by Wingate (1953) and in New York by Roy Publishers (1956), is held by all of nine libraries worldwide. Harsh Evidence isn't listed for sale online, and seems exceedingly scarce – only the British Library has the Wingate edition – so you'll understand my surprise in discovering that it was translated into both Swedish (De döda tala ej, 1956) and Finnish (Kuolleet eivät puhu!, 1957) .

Did more mysteries follow? The only other books I've been able to uncover by Miss Fry are The Good Cook's Encyclopedia and The Good Housewife's Encyclopedia, both published in the early 'sixties by London's Spring Books. I'll step out on a limb and speculate that a third Spring title, Cooking the American Way, is naught but a repackaging of the first.

Who was Pamela Fry? Disappointed as I was by The Watching Cat, it contained just enough quirk to keep me in the hunt for the answer.

Object: A very attractive hardcover in dark blue boards. I can't quite make out the cover artist's signature. My copy, signed with publisher card, was purchased this past autumn from a Montreal bookseller who tells me that he has never seen another. It would appear that that this, the novel's only edition, received no second printing. No Swedish or Finnish translations this time.

Access: A rare book, Canadian library patrons will find The Watching Cat at the University of Toronto, the University of British Columbia and the University of Victoria. A mere three copies are listed for sale online. At US$15.77, Serendipity Books of West Leederville, Australia offers the one in best condition ("top edge foxed else v.g. in worn and sl. torn d/w"). Second place, goes to a New Zealand bookseller who is selling a slightly less attractive copy for an even twenty American dollars. A Canadian bookseller in Oakville, Ontario brings up the rear by asking C$60 for a crummy thing that lacks the dust jacket and front flyleaf. On the other hand, The Watching Cat is so uncommon that it might just be worth the price.

Further reading: I follow Juri Nummelin in my attempt to track down more about Pamela Fry. His initial investigation is found at Pulpetti.
Related post: The Mystery Writer Mystery Unravels

The Pan Jalna (and the Careering Jalnawagon)

2011-12-15T08:23:00.000-05:00

The Whiteoak books represent the idealized portrait of Canada, which all English people have. Life is hardly ever painful at Jalna. It's comfortable, it's exciting, there are domestic dramas going on. I think that Englishmen like to believe that anywhere abroad life goes on as it used to go on in England. We always like to think that life for our parents must have been wonderful and life for us is horrid. Englishmen reading about the Whiteoaks think that life is lived that way now, and we know that life is not lived that way in England – or in Canada.
– Lovat Dickson

In the final pages of his 1966 biography, Mazo de la Roche of Jalna, Ronald Hambleton remarks on the very different reception the author has been accorded by her "three most important audiences". American acclaim, brought when Jalna took the 1927 Atlantic Monthly Award for "novel of the year", faded as the series progressed. Canadians cooled as that it became apparent that de la Roche's focus was on a country that had long passed. Hambleton concludes, "in Britain her reception continued and continues to be warm."

By the mid-sixties, Pan, de la Roche's British paperback publisher since 1948, had sold more than two million copies of the series' titles. Things were still balmy on 20 May 1971, when The Whiteoaks of Jalna began filming. In The Secret of Jalna, the enthusiastic Ronald Hambleton writes of "the careering Jalnawagon, whose pace as a literary phenomenon has showed no signs of slackening since Mazo de la Roche pencilled the first lines in late 1925."

In 1972, Pan issued tie-in editions that featured stills from the series and did one more revamp. Now, the Jalnawagon runs no more... at least not for Pan. Toronto's Dundurn Press publishes the sixteen books of the Whiteoak Chronicles with a cover image of "Benares", the Mississauga home upon with Jalna was modelled. They're attractive enough, but I much prefer the Pan editions of the 'fifties and 'sixties. A visual feast:

Jalna panned:

The Globe & Mail, 7 January 1972

Jalna's Dirty Little Secret Exposed! (Part II)

2011-12-13T06:00:00.011-05:00

Continuing yesterday's post on Ronald Hambleton's The Secret of Jalna, this cautionary tale concerning literary executors:

"What is the secret of Jalna?" begins the cover copy, then peppers the prospective purchaser with further questions: "Did a house called Jalna really exist? Who was Mazo de la Roche and why did she hide her origins? What kept the Jalna stories off television for ten years after her death?"

Anyone wondering as to the existence of a house called Jalna would have found the answer in Hambleton's previous book, Mazo de la Roche of Jalna (1966). A polite biography, it went far in exploring de la Roche's life and why it was that she hid her origins, all the while skirting speculation that she and life-long companion cousin Caroline Clement were Sapphic sisters.

Ultimately, The Secret of Jalna is very much a reflection the ill-conceived series. A rough gathering of short pieces on de la Roche's life, ancestry and writings, it jumps around with no real purpose. Anyone familiar with Mazo de la Roche of Jalna will find nothing new other than the answer to that fourth question, "What kept the Jalna stories off television for ten years after her death?":

In her lifetime, Mazo de la Roche stubbornly refused to permit any of her books to be broadcast on either radio or television in any sponsored broadcast; and though her will did not come right out and forbid commercial adaptations of her books, she left no doubt of her own opinion.

Hambleton goes on to add: "Today, the creator of the world of Jalna is dead, and the world is no longer self-renewing."

Cold.

Following de la Roche's 1961 death, repeated efforts were made to turn the Whiteoak Chronicles into a series. By 1970, two-thirds of her estate – represented by adopted children René and Esmée – were on board; the hold out was companion Caroline, "the only inheritor of the attitude of mind of her late cousin."

The paragraphs that follow are the most peculiar and revealing of the book. The reader is told: "Caroline Clement knew that Mazo, had she been living, would certainly not have agreed; but now, after ten years? For Caroline Clement is herself an old woman, subject to illness, easily tired yet plagued by insomnia, living on without Mazo."

Hambleton sketches a disturbing picture of an elderly, blind, frail woman being wooed over afternoon tea by Head of CBC Television Drama Fletcher Markle, George Desmond of the network's copyright department and story consultant April Sinclair (who was present "because of her English accent; it would help to put Caroline at ease"):

Caroline was sent flowers, talking books, and cassettes of her favourite music to hear during her solitary hours.
Then, after the agreement was signed, Mrs. Sinclair was given the task of telling Caroline Clement that other material was being added to up-date the Whiteoaks, since after all, Caroline had been invited to attend a private showing of the pilot episode together with the rest of the family. (She refused to attend, and gave it as her wish that no member of the family, nor her friends John Gray and Lovat Dickson, attend either that or any other arranged showing.)
Caroline heard her out, then said nothing for a long moment. At last she asked, in a quiet, numbed voice, "Can I do anything to stop it?"
April Sinclair said no.

Nothing more need be said, except for this: The series deserved to fail.

The Globe & Mail, 3 March 1972

Object: A 175-page mass market paperback, printed on heavy paper, with 122 illustrations and a Whiteoak family tree. My copy, purchased a few months ago from a London, Ontario bookseller for one dollar, features a few spidery notations relating to Miss de la Roche's grandparents.

Access: Held by the Toronto Public Library and roughly half of our universities. Fifteen copies are listed for sale online at prices ranging in price from US$1 to US$99.16. Condition is not a factor. A Burlington, Ontario bookseller adds the book to the sixteen title Whiteoak Chronicle. "Later and/or first printings" of the Pan paperback editions, all are "Good or better with most being better". Price: US$200. Good luck to him.

The Pan Jalna (and the Careering Jalnawagon)

Jalna's Dirty Little Secret Exposed! (Part I)

2011-12-12T06:00:00.011-05:00

The Secret of Jalna

Ronald Hambleton

Toronto: Paperjacks, 1972

I remember Jalna... rather, I remember The Whiteoaks of Jalna. The television adaptation of Mazo de la Roche's sixteen-book soapy saga ran on Sunday nights from January through April in 1972. A nine-year-old aspiring architect, I'd lie on the floor, sketching the house by the glow of our Viking colour TV. My mother, much more attentive, did her best to follow along with the aid of a Whiteoaks family tree she'd clipped from the pages of Weekend Magazine.

The Whiteoaks of Jalna was to have been our Forsyte Saga. CBC Television Drama poured nearly everything it had into the project, draining resources and, ultimately, crippling future productions. With a total budget of $2,000,000, 'twas such a big deal that even an elementary school student such as myself knew it was coming. The Secret of Jalna, thrown together in anticipation of the series debut, captures some of the excitement. Here, for example, is the book's poorly laid-out reproduction of an undated Toronto Star headline:

"Jalna pilot bombs" would have sufficed.

Polite company does not speak of the series. In Turn Up the Contrast, her history of CBC Television drama, Mary Jane Miller devotes all of two paragraphs to this most of monumental flops. Still, I think she's summed thing up nicely: "The problem was that Jalna readers, who wanted their old familiar story, were treated to an ill-conceived experiment in narrative structure complete with flashbacks, multiple plot strands, and intercut time frames, all edited in haste as the air date approached. Of course they were frustrated by this. Viewers unfamiliar with the novels were simply confused."

Blame belongs, in part, to lead writer Timothy Findley.

The Whiteoaks of Jalna never made it to beta, VHS, laserdisc – you won't find it on DVD, Blu-ray or Netflix. YouTube has no clips, and there are not more than a couple of images online. I'll add this photograph, drawn from the book, capturing the wonderful Kate Reid in hideous 'seventies attire.

The series aired for a second and final time two years later. Windsor Star critic Ray Bennet speculated: "The great fiasco may have some camp appeal by now." He was wrong. But then camp appeal grows with time.

How soon is now?

The Pan Jalna (and the Careering Jalnawagon)

Max Braithwaite's Bawdy Book

2011-12-07T06:30:00.005-05:00

Humorist Max Braithwaite was born one hundred years ago today in Nokomis, Saskatchewan. His Why Shoot the Teacher was one of the very first Canadian novels I ever read... and the 1977 film adaptation, starring Bud Cort, is a favourite.

So why is it that I haven't so much as picked up another Braithwaite novel?

The titles have something to do with it. The Night We Stole the Mountie's Car and The Commodore's Barge is Alongside gave off a folksy ring that had me covering my ears.

McClelland and Stewart's cover treatments neutered titillating titles...

...or rendered them dull and humourless.

So I passed on his books, offered in plenty at garage sales, thrift shops, and church bazaars, until last week I happened upon this, the one Braithwaite novel McClelland and Stewart did not publish:

Not bought at a church bazaar.

Sexy Stuff from Bizarro Superman's Creator

2011-12-05T08:26:00.018-05:00

Touchable

Les Scott and Robert W. Tracy [pseud. Alvin Schwartz]

New York: Arco, 1951

Alvin Schwartz died six weeks ago at his Chesterville, Ontario home, just short of his ninety-fifth birthday. It wasn't until this past summer that I first encountered his name – courtesy of my pal Stephen J. Gertz – but I've read much of his work. Schwartz was one of the foremost figures of comic books' Golden Age, writing adventures for Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, The Flash, Green Lantern and Captain Marvel. He's probably best remembered as the father of Bizarro Superman, an accomplishment that should be overshadowed by his existential novel The Blowtop (1948), inspired by his friendships with Jackson Pollack and Willem de Kooning.

A lesser book, Touchable, the story of a small town girl who runs off to the corrupt and corrosive big city, follows a post-war pulp template. Anyone looking to read this novel is well-advised to ignore its jacket flap, which gives a pretty accurate rundown of what's in store for heroine Ruth.

How much Schwartz had to do with Touchable is anyone's guess. His pseudonym appears on the front of the book's dust jacket, but not the spine; the title page credits only co-author Les Scott. Another of Scott's Arco titles, Lady of the Evening (1952) features the very same ingredients – sex and drugs and Greenwich Village – but in different qualities.

In Touchable, the sex begins on page two, when eighteen-year-old Ruth quite literally takes a tumble in the hay. Drugs don't appear until the mid-point, when she's offered a reefer by lipstick lesbian Tony. Here marijuana proves to be a gateway drug, "the first turning of the key that unlocks a gate of terrors". Next thing you know, poor Ruth is turning tricks and mainlining horse supplied by her pimp.

The one thing that sets Touchable apart from Lady of the Evening is an odd account of the 1930 Ohio Penitentiary fire. Fourteen pages in total, it provides a detailed description of the institution, events leading to the disaster, the fire itself and the aftermath. For the first and only time, Ruth disappears from the narrative and attention shifts to her imprisoned boyfriend Blackie... only we don't see much of him either.

The Chicago Sunday Tribune, 27 April 1930

New York is later referred to as "the Inferno", but the whole episode is otherwise entirely incongruous; indeed, it reads like something lifted from another work. Perhaps it was.

I imagine a good deal of fun and frustration can be had in studying Alvin Schwartz's œuvre. Here's hoping someone does just that... and is able to figure out who, Schwartz or Scott, deserves credit for this novel's final line:

Chin up, her breasts pointing bravely, she walked back to the Inferno.

Trivia: As Robert W. Tracy, Schwartz wrote several other novels for Arco, including Hot Star, City Girl, Man Made, Sword of Desire and Sinful Daughter (with Jack Woodford). All were published in 1951 and 1952. Touchable co-author Les Scott was even more prolific, supplying Arco with She Made It Pay, Three Can Love, Twilight Woman, Twilight Women, The Girl from Hell's Kitchen and Lady of the Evening over roughly the same period. An earlier Scott title, Pick-Up (1950), was published by Toronto's own News Stand Library.

Object: A cheaply produced hardcover in ugly grey boards with red letters. My copy has notes by a former owner that direct the reader from one sex scene to the next.

Access: Worldcat reports Touchable in just nine libraries – all of which are in the United States. Only one copy – Good in Fair dustjacket – is listed online; the good news is that it's priced at US$20.

Addendum: I would be remiss if I didn't point out Brad Mackay's very fine tribute to Alvin Schwartz.

The Highest Compliments of the Season

2011-12-02T12:03:00.013-05:00

Now in the final month of the year, tradition dictates that I offer holiday gift suggestions – this time accompanied by bits and pieces published one hundred years ago today in the Globe.

Of the twenty-eight neglected books reviewed here this year, the three most deserving of a return to print are:

Hot Freeze by Martin Brett (né Douglas Sanderson)
The Pyx by John Buell
Four Days by John Buell

By coincidence, not design, each deals with the Montreal criminal underworld of decades past. Used copies of are available through online booksellers for as little as a dollar ($5 in the case of Hot Freeze).

Praise this year goes to the British Columbia publishers that returned worthy titles to print through the Vancouver 125 Legacy Books Project. Ten books in total, I recommend Class Warfare by D.M. Fraser, Crossings by Betty Lambert, The Inverted Pyramid by Bertrand W. Sinclair and, above all others, Edward Starkins' Who Killed Janet Smith?

Macmillan of Canada, 1984/Anvil Press, 2011

I'll be so bold so to make this final gift suggestion: my own A Gentleman of Pleasure: One Life of John Glassco, Poet, Memoirist, Translator and Pornographer, published this past April by McGill-Queen's University Press. Seven years in the making, at long last a biography of this country's most unusual writer.

Right now, the least expensive copies – C$25.17 – come through Amazon.ca. Would that I could compete. The best I can do is offer signed copies, gift wrapped in Anaglypta (heavy embossed paper) and postage paid to any destination, at the retail price of C$39.95. Kind souls can make contact through email at my blogger profile.

Once a bookseller, always a bookseller.

A Post-Victorian Christmas (w/ Frank L. Packard)

2011-12-01T05:56:00.005-05:00

Purchased just last week, a century or so after it arrived at the news agent, the December 1911 edition of The Canadian Magazine was hard to resist. Just look at what's on offer: "A Study of Iago" by Arthur Stringer, some thoughts on winter by L.M. Montgomery, a new Homer Watson and no less than ninety lines of verse from the delightfully quirky Isabel Ecclestone Mackay.

But what really sold me was "The Mad Player", an uncollected work by Frank L. Packard. Something just less than 4000 words in length, this simple story is reflected in the accompanying illustrations by J.W. Beatty, R.C.A., O.S.A.

The unnamed narrator is a landscape artist travelling somewhere in France. One evening he comes upon a wild looking violinist busking on a village street.

The painter returns to lodgings, where he is confronted by the violinist – as a fellow artiste, he is offended that our narrator put a coin in his cap. Things are becoming quite unpleasant until the eyes of the unkempt musician fall upon the painter's most recent landscape:

"Monsieur will tell me where it was done – where?"

When told, he rushes out. The innkeeper, who is highly amused, fills in our narrator. It seems that the wild violinist is an aristocrat who as a young man lost his mind at the drowning death of his fiancée.

The following morning, the violinist's body is discovered near the spot captured in the landscape. Wracked with guilt, the painter watches the cortege. He returns to the landscape, trying to make sense of the insane aristocrat's reaction. Though it takes some time, he realizes that the violinist viewed the work upside down.

I reversed it quickly – and then I, as he had done, with startled cry, carried it closer to my eyes. At last I understood. The foliage, by some grim freak as my brush had traced it, bore a crude, but unmistakable resemblance to a woman's face, with her hair streaming down touching the river's brink – and to the poor, crazed brain it had been the end of a long search!

FIN

"The Mad Player" is the work of a man honing his craft as a storyteller; it's well-written, intriguing and, ultimately, most unsatisfying.

When the story appeared in The Canadian Magazine, Packard was labouring as a civil engineer; fortune and fame were still in the future. That said, 1911 did see the publication of On the Iron at Big Cloud, his very first book.

Though Thomas Y. Crowell, Packard's publisher, didn't advertise in this magazine, a whole lot of houses did. Macmillan, Cassell & Co., William Briggs, Oxford University Press, the Upper Canada Tract Society and Copp, Clark all took out full page adverts, only to be overwhelmed by a pink, four-page spread for the brand new Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica.

I ask, who wouldn't want to be met like this on Christmas morn?

The Fugitive Bertrand W. Sinclair

2011-11-28T12:06:00.011-05:00

Following Friday's post...

A couple of months ago, Vancouver's Ronsdale Press reissued The Inverted Pyramid, thus becoming the first Canadian house to in over eight decades to publish Bertrand W. Sinclair. Their choice was apt, I think. Sinclair didn't think of the novel as his best work – that would be Poor Man's Rock (1920) – but, as dedicated biographer Betty Keller tells us in Pender Harbour Cowboy, he'd hoped to be remembered for this "literary" novel.

First published in January of 1924 by Little, Brown, like The Hidden Places, The Inverted Pyramid is touched by the Great War. It tells the story of brothers Rod and Grove Norquay, and their divergent dreams for a family fortune that had been built on BC timber. Ronsdale describes the book as having been "a best-seller". An imprecise term to be sure, but still I can't agree. Back in 1923, Little, Brown had become so certain that the book would not be a best-seller that it sought to avoid the competitive Christmas market by postponing publication until the new year. There was no second printing, though A.L. Burt did produce one of its cheap editions. One could dismiss the relatively low sales as self-fulfilling prophecy – Little, Brown chose not to advertise the book – but evidence points to an overall lack of interest in this new, higher-brow Sinclair. Despite strong reviews, The Inverted Pyramid became the one novel that his agent failed place as a serialization.

"The Inverted Pyramid's poor showing in the bookstores had made him cautious about returning to literary novels in a hurry", writes Keller. "He opted to play it safe..." This meant falling back on pulp magazines – wells from which he drew until the 'forties, when they began to run dry.

It's interesting to consider that Sinclair's books, all novels, represent nothing more than a small percentage of his work. The pulps published over two hundred of his short stories; one encounters them from time to time in anthologies like Best Mounted Police Stories and Vancouver Short Stories, but they otherwise remain in the forgotten past.

Reading Betty Keller's very fine biography, one can't help but wish for a collection of Sinclair's stories. Let's not let another eight decades pass.

Sex, Betrayal and the Scars of the Great War

2011-11-25T08:49:00.024-05:00

The Hidden Places
Bertrand W. Sinclair
Toronto: Ryerson, 1922

With H. Bedford-Jones and Thomas P. Kelley, Bertrand W. Sinclair must surely rank as one of the most prolific Canadian pulp writers. I know of 246 magazine appearances, and I'm betting there are many more. Whether or not his short stores are worth reading I can't say, but I think The Hidden Places is the best Canadian novel published on the heels of the Great War.

This is not a war novel, but a post-war novel; for its tortured hero, the conflict changed everything. Born raised and educated in Eastern Canada Robert Hollister, was once a man of more than modest means. Before the war, he shared his life with wife Myra, whom he "loved with a lover's passion." But war creates the very worst of long distance relationships. Two years into the fighting, Robert receives a "Dear John letter". Days later, he becomes one of the 24,029 Canadian casualties at the Battle of the Somme, "lying just outside the lip of a shell-crater, blind, helpless, his face a shredded smear". He's saved by German surgeons, and spends the remainder of the war in a prison camp. Upon his release Robert learns that he'd been reported killed in action; Myra, meanwhile, has remarried, taking his money with her.

And that's just the backstory.

We catch up with Robert in the winter of 1919, just after his arrival in Vancouver as "a single speck of human wreckage cast on a far beach by the receding tides of war." Though intelligent, educated and healthy, his disfigured face limits opportunity; it's a challenge to rebuild one's life when others will not so much as look at you. Walking city streets, he is "a disagreeable spectacle" from which people turn with brief annoyance. Robert retreats to Toba Inlet, 150 miles up the coast. There, on his lone remaining property, he attempts to make a modest living through logging.

Coincidence features big in pulp fiction, but I found it difficult to pass this off as mere chance: Myra and her new husband, an Englishman, live on the neighbouring land. Certainly, I thought, something sinister is afoot; after all, Myra is supposed to have known nothing of the Toba Inlet property. But no, it all ends up as a great coincidence. Much more believable is Robert's chance meeting with Doris, a pretty woman who had years earlier lost her sight after being struck by a falling tree on, yes, his Toba Inlet property. Following a whirlwind courtship, the disfigured man and blind woman marry and move into a new house overlooking Myra's modest cabin.

The Hidden Places features a frankness about marriage and sexuality that is foreign to Canadian literature of the time. Never having divorced, Robert is tormented by the secret knowledge that he is a bigamist. He suspects that he has an "overstimulated sexuality" and wonders whether Myra suffers from the same. She left him for another, but this was not the man she married. Now, Robert watches from afar as other men visit in her new husband's absence. Sinclair never paints Myra in anything but a sympathetic light. A woman who is coming to terms with, as she puts it, "the nature I was born with", Myra struggles to remain faithful to her second husband, while nearly running off with another man. Ultimately, she offers herself again to Robert.

Tittilating to be sure, but what I find more interesting about The Hidden Place is its detailed condemnation of the British War Office as an impersonal machine that "would neither know nor care nor tell." Greater still is the indictment of Canadian society, as represented by the men and women who seek to avoid Robert on Vancouver's streets:

A great many men had been killed. A great number had lost their legs, their arms, their sight. They had suffered indescribable mutilations and disabilities in the national defense. These people were the nation. Those who passed him with a shocked glance at his face must be aware that fighting involves suffering and scars. It appeared as if they wished to ignore that. The inevitable consequences of war annoyed them, disturbed them, when they came face to face with those consequences.

What makes this all the more remarkable is that The Hidden Place first appeared in an October 1921 issue of The Popular Magazine. Thus, less than three years after the armistice, comes the damning accusation that Canada has turned away from its veterans.

Plus ça change.

Betrayal by a woman is one thing, betrayal by one's county is quite another.

Trivia: The author errs in placing the Battle of the Somme in "the fall of '17". In fact, it took place the previous November.

Object: A hardcover in dark blue boards, it is typical of its time. The Marshall Frantz frontispiece, a black and white reproduction of the cover image, is meant to depict Doris and Robert at Vancouver's Jericho Beach.

Access: A book by a British Columbia author, The Hidden Places is found only in Ontario libraries: the Toronto Public Library, the University of Western Ontario, the University of Guelph and the University of Toronto. Over eight decades out of print, those looking to buy the book will wade through over one hundred print on demand monstrosities. The most expensive comes from our old friends ExtremelyReliable of Richmond, Texas, which offers an ugly IndyPublish copy credited to "W. Bertrand Sinclair". Cost: US$199.27. Shipping and handling are not included.

As of this writing, no copies of the Ryerson edition – the only Canadian edition – are listed online. One copy of the equally scarce first English edition from Hodder and Stoughton is on offer for US$9.99 from a bookseller in Gateshead, Australia. Two awful copies of the first American edition, published by Little, Brown, can be had for under ten dollars; a third, with dust jacket, is going for US$75. Need I add that this is the one to buy?

Dyson Carter's Long Exercise in Political Pathology

2011-11-21T10:46:00.006-05:00

Despite Moscow's best efforts, it wasn't until a decade or so after the collapse of the Soviet Union that I first became aware of Dyson Carter. Northern Neighbors, "Canada's Authoritative Independent Magazine Reporting on the U.S.S.R.", which he edited for some 32 years, was not something I saw on news stands. I didn't notice his books, including those published by the Communist Party of Canada, though they were distributed in the thousands at home and abroad.

In my defence, I point out that Carter is not found in The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature or Encyclopedia of Literature in Canada. He is very much a forgotten figure, as is reflected in The Canadian Encyclopedia entry, which has yet to record his death.

Further defence: Nearly all of Carter's books were published before I was born. What's more, his moment in the sun had come decades earlier. In 1940, Carter published Sea of Destiny, a much-discussed work in which he warned that undefended Hudson Bay could be used by the Nazis for an invasion of North America. The following year, months before the United States entered the Second World War, Carter predicted the development of the atomic bomb. It would, he wrote, bring a sudden end to the conflict.

The Portsmouth Times, 5 May 1940

In 1942, Carter's first novel, Night of Flame, drew considerable praise from the New York Times and the Globe and Mail. In the Ottawa Citizen, reviewer W.J. Hurlow described Carter as possessing a talent "only a little down the street from genius... We cordially hail Mr. Dyson Carter as a Canadian writer of brilliant possibilities."

Possibilities require opportunities, and for a Communist like Carter these became fewer with the advent of the Cold War. Just look what happened to Night of Flame. The 1942 first edition was published in New York by Reynolds and Hitchcock. Four years later, the novel was reissued in Canada by Collins White Circle. But by 1949, when American paperback giant Signet looked to do likewise, authorship had to be hidden behind a nom de plume.

Could Joseph McCarthy and company really be so easily deceived? Yes, yes they could.

Carter was born and raised in a religious household, surrounded by the troubled youth that his parents sought to save. In his own youth, he turned away from Christ and towards Lenin, only to see – and recognize – the lies of the Soviet Union laid bare by glastnost. In 1990, at age eighty, he wrote one friend, "I publicized so many Soviet 'achievements' that were total falsifications that I consider my 'work' an exercise in political pathology."

Dyson Carter's contributions to this country's literature are slight, and his oeuvre might hold little interest outside the world of academe, but is it not time for The Canadian Encyclopedia to acknowledge his death?

Related post: A Communist's Bodice Ripper?

A Communist's Bodice Ripper?

2011-11-15T06:00:00.024-05:00

The Governor's Mistress

Warren Desmond [pseud. Dyson Carter]

Toronto: News Stand Library, 1950

Oh, yes, a bodice is ripped, but I'm not so sure that this novel quite fits the genre. There's little romance in The Governor's Mistress, and passion, though present, is not as pervasive as cover copy would have you believe.

VIRILE - VIOLENT - WARM - WICKED - This was Angeline

Virile? Can a woman be virile? The OED answers in the negative. But then Angeline isn't violent either. She is warm though... and, it is implied, wicked in the sack.

Angeline – referred to as "Angel" on the book's back cover (and nowhere else) – is Angeline Paradis, a beautiful English spy who is sent into the heart of 17th-century New France. Hers, cover copy tells us, "is a tale kept out of school-books". Makes perfect sense; after all, Angeline was the creation of the author, and exists nowhere outside this book. She moves through pages populated by figures from our history... and it is here that this novel begins to falter. There is a supposition that the reader will know these men – they are all men – that is misguided. Frontenac? Yes. Radisson? Yes. But how many of us are familiar with the scandal and intrigue surrounding François-Marie Perrot, who served as Governor of Montreal from 1669 to 1684?

This Montrealer recognized his name.

That's all.

Pity the poor American reader, who I'm assuming has been taught little of the political machinations of New France. After all, it was to these folks that The Governor's Mistress was marketed. Its author, Dyson Carter, a card carrying member of the Communist Party of Canada, hid behind the pseudonym Warren Desmond only so that the novel might be sold south of the border.

The Governor's Mistress isn't so much a bad book as an irritating one. Stuff happens... but so often this takes place off-stage. When Radisson is put on trial for treason, an event that never actually occurred, he escapes the courtroom by painting his face with ghoulish features: "Thus had Radisson used the phosphorus oil he brought with him from Rupert's workshop." And thus we hear for the first and last time of Rupert's workshop.

Ultimately, The Governor's Mistress is a grand disappointment. The Harlequin set will find little in the way of romance, those seeking something spicy will be left dangling, and readers like myself who'd hoped for an oddball Marxist reading of life in New France will be met with nought but paper, ink and glue.

Object and Access: One of the publisher's more competent productions, the type is actually quite legible. I counted only two typos, which might just be a NSL best. Twelve copies are currently listed for sale online at between US$4 and US$18.29. All appear to have significant flaws, which leads me to think that mine could be the best copy out there. One copy – one – is housed by the University of Toronto's Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library. After that: rien.

POD Cover of the Month: Rila of Ingelside

2011-11-14T06:00:00.008-05:00

L.M. Montgomery's Rila [sic] of Ingelside [sic], another fine product from Createspace. Their slogan: "Publish your words, your way."

Rila of Ingelside can purchased through amazon.uk.co for a mere £26.76.

The first edition:

New York: Stokes, 1921

A bonus:

The Prince Edward Island house upon which Ingleside was modelled.

Edward Maurice Busby

2011-11-11T06:00:00.000-05:00

Edward Maurice Busby

(1891-1962)

My grandfather... not forgotten.

Canada's Great War Novelists: Charles Yale Harrison

2011-11-10T06:00:00.004-05:00

Charles Yale Harrison

(1898-1954)

Author of Generals Die in Bed

Canada's Great War Novelists: Philip Child

2011-11-09T06:00:00.003-05:00

Philip Albert Child

(1898-1979)

Author of God's Sparrows

Canada's Great War Novelists: Charles Yale Harrison

Canada's Great War Novelists: Will R. Bird

2011-11-08T06:00:00.004-05:00

William Richard Bird

(1891-1984)

Author of Private Timothy Fergus Clancy

Canada's Great War Novelists: Philip Child

Canada's Great War Novelists: Charles Yale Harrison

Canada's Great War Novelists: Peregrine Acland

2011-11-07T06:00:00.013-05:00

Peregrine Palmer Acland

(1891-1963)

Author of All Else is Folly

Related posts:

Alec Falcon, c'est moi

Remembering Peregrine Acland

The Bank Swindler's Signature

2011-11-05T09:00:00.007-04:00

A brief addendum to Wednesday's post, in which I happened to mention that my copy of Lucius A. Parmelee's The Confessions of a Bank Swindler is signed. One correspondent asks me to post the signature. I'm happy to do so.

Must say that for a man who made his money in large measure through forgery, it does seem rather awkward.

Related post: A Bank Swindler Tries to Cash In

A Bank Swindler Tries to Cash In

2011-11-02T06:00:00.035-04:00

The Confessions of a Bank Swindler

Lucius A. Parmelee

Waterloo, QC: Duval, 1968

The author begins by boasting that a member of the Canadian Banking Assocation once suggested he be offered a pension as an inducement to retire, adding: "I achieved fame of a sort and did very well." These more modest words set the tone.

Born in 1889, Lucius Parmelee was blessed in being a member of family of affluence and influence. Newspaper editor and three-term Liberal member of parliament Charles Henry Parmelee – that's him on the right – was an uncle. Another uncle once served as the province's Minister of Protestant Education. The latter's good work is reflected in this, nephew Lucius' only book; until Conrad Black, The Confessions of a Bank Swindler was likely the best written work by a Canadian criminal. I provide as evidence this passage in which the author looks back to his earliest years in Waterloo, Quebec:

One must remember that in this day there was no auto, radio, TV, and the thousand and one distractions, which are today offered to gratify our jaded appetites. Nor were they distracted by the innumerable incidents of a bizarre, and even sinister nature, which is the record of our daily lives. I do not agree with the French philosopher Rousseau, that the solution to the world's ills consist of a return to a state of nature. I do feel that there have been times in the past history of mankind, when the clock of destiny could well have been arrested, for a temporary breathing space, at least. Our characteristically North American attitude of service to the Gods of progress, may well mean serving an illusion.

No common criminal.

As a young man , Parmelee set off down the straight and narrow as a bank clerk, only to develop a rooted resentment toward the very industry in which he was employed. The low pay, which our grand banks expected to be supplemented by clerks' families, led to his resignation. Parmelee tried his hand at a number of occupations, including farmhand and barkeep, but returned to the banks as an unwelcomed visitor during the Great War:

From a moral point of view I had no scruples whatever. They paid their employees atrocious wages. They offered very little in the way of a life career. They obtained subsidy from the general public, due to the fact that their employees must have help from their parents for a few years, and in the case of the institution in which I served they had no pension plan. All in all I considered them bigger, and more cowardly robbers than myself.

Make no mistake, Parmelee's crimes were not robberies; they were swindles carried out though study, impersonation and forgery. The author's criminal activity spanned three decades

–

interrupted by an ill-considred investment in a chicken ranch, work at a wartime munitions plant and time spent in San Quentin. The author's final foray into

financial fraud

–
in 1947 Ottawa
–
was in his own words a "disaster". He hit the Royal Bank, the Bank of Toronto, the Bank of Montreal and the Dominion Bank, walking away with some $17,000 in the process... only to be arrested at a railway station in Vars, Ontario.

Time had caught

Parmelee

off guard. He'd kept up to date with changes in banking procedures, but didn't appreciate the advent of the "radio taxi".

Contemporary crooks will learn no tips from The Confessions of a Bank Swindler; Parmelee's scams and schemes were dated well before his book was published. The world into which he was ultimately released, on 15 June 1955, was foreign. "Montreal proved a revelation to me", he writes, unable to reconcile the metropolis with the tranquil city of his youth.

The Confessions of a Bank Swindler owes its existence to the late Weekend Magazine, which in 1956 published a rudimentary version of the memoir. I expect the reception wasn't quite what editorial director Craig Ballantyne had anticipated. Readers took considerable offence to Parmelee's unrepentant nature

–

the banks, it would seem, were unassailable. The swindler's memoir attracted no interest from McClelland and Stewart , Macmillan or Ryerson; it ended up being self-published through a little printer in the author's birthplace.*

No fame followed. Having gone straight, the man was accorded no obituary. Crime pays.

Object: A trade-size paperback, my copy is signed and includes a Weekend Magazine clipping that appears to have been used for promotional purposes. The first edition, I think, the only other I've seen – also signed – was published in mass market by a short-lived Montreal house called Bodero.

Access: There are no copies of either edition listed for sale online; look instead to the Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec and the Toronto Public Library. Seven of our university libraries hold the book. Library and Archives Canada? Don't ask.

* This was the very same printer that two years earlier produced John Glassco's self-published Squire Hardman.

Related post: The Bank Swindler's Signature

'November the First' by the Master of All Poets

2011-11-01T06:00:00.009-04:00

One of the more restrained poems composed as "a truthful guide" by James Gay, self-proclaimed Poet Laureate of Canada and Master of All Poets.

NOVEMBER THE FIRST

Being one of the oldest settlers in your town,
I cannot remember of seeing such a beautiful day;
On the first day of November, see the stars so clear and bright,
They give us light,
All through the night.
Young gents and ladies walk out bold,
The weather is not too hot or cold;
Jack Frost has kept his hand away,
Those young and old can sport and play
All through the night till the break of day.
The leaves in October have passed away;
Like man on earth, he cannot stay,
Falling more or less each day,
Our bodies soon return to clay,
Thousands do never give this a thought;
Then what will be their awful fate?
With millions this word, too late, too late.
Leave off this sinful life, and try to act more clever,
Put your trust in Providence, life changes like the weather.

Related post: Local Poet!

It's Harlequin Halloween Time!

2011-10-31T06:39:00.002-04:00

Related posts:

A Harlequin Halloween
Another Harlequin Halloween

The Brilliance of Frank Newfeld

2011-10-29T10:30:00.002-04:00

Purchased for five dollars – five dollars! – during my most recent visit to Montreal, Ralph Gustafson's Rivers Among Rocks (McClelland and Stewart, 1960) provides an excuse to revisit the wonderful work Frank Newfeld. The cover may be a bit weathered, but it more than hints at the brilliance within.

Pardon my thumbs.

After all this beauty comes a lengthy "NOTE ON PUBLICATION":

This book is the result of a unique association dedication to improve of the standards of design and manufacturing in the making of Canadian books. It is the first of a group of selected works of poetry and belle lettres chosen both to inspire and to complement fine craftsmanship in the designing and manufacturing arts.

It has been published in a limited edition and will not be republished in this format. Its publication is experimental in the sense that the strict economic limitations that might normally prevail were waived to permit adequate attention in the various stages of production.

It was planned and illustrated by Frank Newfeld, a brilliant young Canadian designer, typographer and art director, whose work has earned him an imposing series of awards in various fields of design.

It was produced under the joint auspices of the Polland Paper Company Limited who supplied the stock, Laurentic Japan and Rolland Extra Stong; H & S Reliance Limited who supplied engravings for the illustrations, the jacket, and the case; T. H. Best Printing Company Limited, in whose plant the type was set and the books printed and bound; and McClelland and Stewart Limited.

Of that "group of selected works of poetry and belle lettres", I think it ranks second only to Newfeld's work on Leonard Cohen's The Spice-Box of Earth.

Related posts:

McClelland's Experiment, Newfeld's Art

Frank Newfeld's Masterpiece (and Leonard Cohen's Unseen Face for Tits)

Recognizing Nelly Arcan

2011-10-24T06:00:00.029-04:00

Whore [Putain]

Nelly Arcan [trans. Bruce Benderson]

New York: Black Cat, 2004

Nelly Arcan was in the news again last month with a new book, Burqua de chair. Between its covers she writes of humiliation, her words inspired by a 2007 appearance on Tout le monde en parle. Don't know it? François Lauzon devoted a piece to this autowreck in The Gazette.

Arcan hanged herself just over two years ago. There were obituaries. "Acclaimed Quebec Writer Who Penned 'Whore' Found Dead in Montreal" read the headline fed by the Canadian Press. The Moose Jaw Times Herald published all 220 words. It is the only time that her name has appeared in its pages. The best obituary published outside the province – and there is no coincidence in this – came from a fellow Quebecer, Linda Leith. Of this novel, Leith writes:

Bright and talented and aware, Arcan was also beautiful and – we already knew this long before her death – very fragile. Putain is a work of autofiction (or fictionalized autobiography), so she might have been prepared for journalists’ questions about the similarities between the prostitute Cynthia in the novel and Arcan’s own experience as a sex worker. She was not. She was panicked and stammering.

Writing has always been a solitary occupation, but we now expect our authors to take the stage on radio, on television, at book fairs and at literary festivals. Arcan's beauty, a publisher's dream, did distract. "She was thin and surprisingly busty," writes Leith, "and yes I know we’re not supposed to say such things, but Nelly Arcan’s physical presence was too eye-catching to ignore."

And yet, Arcan was ignored. Take away the obits and you'll find that she received next to no attention from the English language media outside Quebec. One wonders why. Where were the publishers? Were they really so ignorant of her talent? Or is it that pervasive puritanism and provincialism had them looking the other way? This English translation of Putain, Arcan's accomplished debut – a nominee for both the Prix Médicis and the Prix Fémina – wound up being published by Black Cat, an imprint of New York's Grove/Atlantic. I've never once seen it in a bookstore.

Arcan's final novel, Paradis, Clef en main, completed in the days before her death, has just been published in translation by Vancouver's Anvil Press. Titled Exit, it has been nominated for a Governor General's Award. I've never once seen it in a bookstore.

This is not a review, but a recommendation. If you haven't already, read Whore and then Exit. If your French is good – or even shaky – track down Folle. All are extraordinary works by a woman who is at once amongst this country's most recognized and most overlooked writers.

Object and Access: An attractive trade-size paperback – that's the author on the front cover. Unread copies, all first printings – there was no second – can be bought online for one dollar. Whore is found in eight Canadian libraries: the Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, the Toronto Public Library, the Vancouver Public Library and the libraries of Dalhousie, McGill, York, the University of Alberta and the University of British Columbia. Shame on all the others.

Putain, a bestseller, is readily available in bookstores and libraries in the province of Quebec... and in France, Belgium and Switzerland.

That's 'EN', Not 'AN'

2011-10-23T08:30:00.004-04:00

Adding insult to insult and injury, Gardner Auctions Inc open what might just be the final chapter in the sorry story of Arthur Meighen Public School. Named for the sometime prime minister and part-time Shakespeare scholar, who studied within its walls, the thinking around town is that no one will bid.

Can't afford to myself.

Alien with a Familiar Face

2011-10-21T06:00:00.003-04:00

A follow-up to Monday's post.

Watching what I could of The 27th Day, I was struck by the self-described "alien from outer space". He seemed so very familiar, yet I couldn't quite place him. I now know that "The Alien" was Arnold Moss, perhaps the most English man to have been born and bred in Brooklyn. An actor and cruciverbalist, I would have seen Mr Moss in many of the television shows I watched during my first decade: Star Trek...

The Monkees...

Bonanza.

I won't pretend to have completed one of his crosswords.

Though Moss doesn't get much screen time in The 27th Day, he steals the show – as reflected in this 1957 issue of Urania.

The Italian science fiction magazine published Mantley's novel twice – in translation and unabridged – thus giving it considerably more attention than it ever received in this country.

While the Germans were equally enthusiastic, it appears that it was the British who were the most keen. Over a four year period, they published two hardcover and two paperback editions, including this 1958 issue from Beacon (not to be confused with the American publishers of the unjustly neglected Orrie Hitt):

Collectors may be more interested in the 1961 Four Square edition, which features cover art by Josh Kirby of Discworld fame:

For my money, the most interesting is El 27° Dia, the 1957 Spanish language edition from Muchnik of Buenos Aires:

John Mantley, the only Canadian author I know to have been published in Argentina. I could've learnt something from him.

Aliens Murder Millions (and that's a good thing)

2011-10-17T06:00:00.053-04:00

The 27th Day

John Mantley

New York: Crest, 1958

In the middle of The 27th Day, Eve Wingate and Jonathan Clark share a first, passionless kiss. Next thing you know, they decide to marry.

Different times.

Our young lovebirds are two of five people who have been abducted by aliens from a dying world. These "space people", coveting our planet, seek to speed up what they see as our natural inclination toward self-destruction by giving each of the five earthlings capsules containing "the power to wipe out every human being on earth!" After just twenty-seven days, the weapons will be rendered harmless. Please understand, the aliens aren't evil, just desperate. "We, too, find the proposition that any race would knowingly destroy itself untenable," says their spokesperson, "but our computers, fed on the records of your racial history, insist that there is a better than 50 per cent possibility of this weapon being used within twenty-seven days."

There are some fine passages in this book, but I'm going to be very unfair by skipping right to the end of the story, because it's here that a bland, if competent book becomes suddenly, surprisingly bad.

We're meant to believe that the five – Eve, Jonathan, Soviet soldier Ivan Godofsky, Chinese peasant girl Su Tan and absent-minded Professor Klaus Bochner – were chosen at random, but it just happens that the professor, perhaps the world's most famous scientist, becomes humankind's greatest hero. In true thriller style, he cracks a code with mere minutes to spare, thus unleashing a force that not only kills the villain, the Soviet Union's "Great Leader", but forever ensures the survival of his species.

Listen – or read – if you will, to the radio announcer who, "delirious with joy", relates news that "tyrants and evildoers in high places" have been struck dead by "invisible rays from outer space":

I know it's unbelievable, fantastic, but it is true that the rays killed every leader known to have been a confirmed enemy of human freedom. But they also stunned others without seeming regard for importance, position, or age of the individual. The most unlikely people have fallen victim to the epidemic – gossip columnists, thieves, preachers, psychiatrists, senators, plummers, merchants; there have been attacks in every profession. And yet, it now appears that those who did not meet death in the first moments are destined to recover.

While it's true that those affected recover their health, their personalities are forever transformed. Jonathan himself experiences "a pain he had never known", but becomes a better person in the process.

To truly get a sense of this new world, let us turn again to our rambling radio announcer:

From every corner of the country, statistics are arriving which indicate that a great spiritual revolution has overtaken the nation. In Las Vegas, more than two thirds of the divorce applicants have expressed a desire to discontinue their cases...

How to explain this kind new world? Prof Bochner believes that "secretions" at fault for bad behaviour have been destroyed by "Alien power". Sadly, those with secretions high above the norm, like the Great Leader, had to die.

First published in 1956, set in 1963, narrated by a voice from the far off 1973, The 27th Day is very much a Cold War novel. A few have run with this, describing the work as anti-Communist, but things aren't nearly so clear-cut. The Soviet Union: bad. World federation: good. Competition: bad. Co-operation: good. You see what I mean.

In 1957, the novel was made into a black and white film that is... well, no more black and white. Mantley, who wrote the adaptation, published only one more novel, Snow Birch (1958), which he later turned into the Susan Hayward vehicle Woman Obsessed (1959). A Torontonian – Mary Pickford was a cousin – Mantley spent more than three decades writing for movies and television, but is best remembered as the longest serving producer of Gunsmoke.

Things were much more black and white on Gunsmoke. That Miss Kitty, she had a heart of gold.

Object and Access: Attractive enough, I suppose, my Crest copy is the first and only American paperback edition. Its cover image is generic – no space station features in the novel, and we never get so much as a glimpse of any planet other than Earth. Though the last edition was published in 1964, used copies are plentiful. Good copies of the US first edition – Dutton (right) – begin at $15.00. The more attractive UK first – Michael Joseph (below) –is a touch more dear. Those who want nothing more than to read the darn thing will find used copies listed online for as little as one dollar. Canadian library patrons are limited to McMaster University and the ever reliable Toronto Public Library.

The novel is also out there in German (Der Siebenundzwanzigste Tag), Danish (Den syvogtyvende dag), Spanish (El 27° Dia) and Italian (Il 27° Giorno) translations.

Update: The ever eagle-eyed JRSM notes this in John Mantley's Encyclopedia of Science Fiction entry: "The novel was filmed – from the US version, which has a revised ending – as The 27TH DAY (1957)." If accurate, this may go some way in explaining the rather absurd conclusion in the edition I read. As if to add to the confusion, I note that the ending discussed by folks at IMDb doesn't quite match. While in the Crest paperback the aliens come to share the Earth, the film has it that the "dying planet" stuff was a ruse. You see, it was all just a test to see whether we were civilized enough to join 30,000-member "Galactic Council". Don't worry, we passed.

POD Cover of the Month: Montreal for Tourists..

2011-10-14T14:09:00.009-04:00

Montreal for Tourists..[sic] by the man known affectionately as "From Old Catalogue" Phelps – a proud publication of Charleston, South Carolina's Nabu Press.

The first edition:

Buffalo: Delaware & Hudson, 1904

Runner up:

Update: A friend confirms my suspicion that the mammoth structure depicted is not found in Montreal – or our 'backwoods'. It is, apparently, Spiš Castle, built in the 12th century in what is today eastern Slovakia. The tourist visiting Montreal will find it 6669 kilometres to the east. The longest daytrip.

Alpha, Beta, Dada

2011-10-10T09:30:00.010-04:00

Where to begin? Why not with Tutis Classics? In the two years since I was first introduced to this print on demand publisher, it has held fast as the producer of the most inept and entertaining cover art.

That said, I do fear for Tutis. It's been some time since new titles have appeared on what should be an endless list. I mean, if Miss Laut's The Canadian Commonwealth is a "Great Classic", what isn't?

A recent post by the ever informative Bookride has my rolling eyes turning to Alphascript Publishing, its bastard brother Betascript and the numerous other imprints being spewed forth by VDM Publishing of Saarbrücken, Germany. While other POD publishers prey on works that have become public domain, Alpha and Beta target Wikipedia articles. They're not alone. Books LLC, for example, offers things like Canadian Alliance Mps [sic]: Preston Manning, Vic Toews, Maurice Vellacott, Stockwell Day, Dick Harris, Jason Kenney, Diane Ablonczy, Rahim Jaffer, an ugly 56 pages of material written by such authorities as Snickerdo, Headbomb and Duffy 2032.

Those familiar with Wikipedia will recognize Canadian Alliance Mps as a "category". Alpha and Beta's books don't follow this money-making model, rather they centre on the articles themselves, adding linked articles to the mix. "Some of the connections found in these books are almost Dadaist", notes Bookride. The example provided is the Betascript tome bearing the name of Swiss skier Vreni Schneider, subtitled: Annemarie Moser-Pröll, FIS Alpine Ski World Cup, Winter Olympic Games, Slalom Skiing, Giant Slalom Skiing, Half Man Half Biscuit.

While I've yet to find a Canadian title quite so groundbreaking, I see several Alpha and Beta covers that might have appealed to Tristan Tzara.

Is it any wonder that we won that war?

Canadian units [sic] of the War of 1812, 120 pages, sells for $48.62.

As for Tutis, whose employees do visit this blog on occasion, I extend a helping hand and point to the great number of L.M. Montgomery titles in the public domain.

F.R. Scott Memorial Plaque

2011-10-07T13:53:00.002-04:00

This coming Thursday, 13 October, will see the dedication of a plaque in memory of F.R. Scott at the chapel of Montreal's St James the Apostle Anglican Church. Scott's will be the third in a cortege of writers' plaques that began two years ago when a small group gathered to remember John Glassco. A plaque to A.J.M. Smith followed, installed on the eve of the thirtieth anniversary of his passing.

This year's service, which will see formal recognition of 'The Writers' Chapel', will include two speakers from McGill university, the institution forever tied to Scott: Desmond Morton (Hiram Mills Emeritus Professor) and Roderick A. Macdonald (F.R. Scott Professor of Constitutional and Public Law).

All are welcome.

Thursday, 13 October 2011

Evensong, 6 p.m.

Church of St James the Apostle

1439 St Catherine Street West, Montreal

A reception with wine and cheese will follow.

Crossposted at A Gentleman of Pleasure.

A Record that Speaks for Itself

2011-10-06T19:53:00.012-04:00

Election day in Ontario. If the pollsters are correct, the Liberals may just hold onto power – a near impossibility mere months ago.

I don't write much about politics here, but things do creep in from time to time: the fabulations of Preston Manning, the oeuvres of senators Wallin and Frum and our prime minister's non-existent, yet much-hyped hockey book. There's been more, of course, but those who know me will agree that I've demonstrated considerable restraint.

Returning from the polls today with politics on my mind, thoughts turned to Wilfrid Laurier. I remembered that 1911 was the year in which the great statesman finally stepped down as prime minister. Had I missed the centenary?

As it turns out, the sad event took place 100 years ago this very day.

The Globe, 6 October 1911

A result of this:

The Globe, 22 September 1911

Not exactly a dark day in Canadian history, but most certainly one on which things dimmed.

A Ninteenth-Century What's Bred in the Bone

2011-10-04T17:46:00.007-04:00

What's Bred in the Bone

Grant Allen

London: Tit-Bits, 1891

Two Canadian writers, both with strong ties to Kingston, Grant Allen and Robertson Davies each wrote novels entitled What's Bred in the Bone. I remarked on this in Character Parts, but don't see that anyone else has thought it worth the ink. Not even Judith Skelton Grant's massive biography, the 787-page Robertson Davies: Man of Myth, mentions the curious connection.

Perhaps I make too much of this. Davies was attracted by the neglected past, and had an appreciation of the peculiar, but he never exactly dwelled on Allen in his own writing. In fact, the Kingstonian's name appears only once in Davies' published work. The mention – fleeting – is found in "Canadian Literature: 1964", an essay that was written when Fifth Business was no more than a gleam in author's eye: "...if a Canadian novel is not a novel written in Canada by a resident of the country, what is it? There were a few, like Sara Jeannette Duncan, who wrote of the land they knew, and achieved reputation; others, like Grant Allen and Gilbert Parker, were Canadians by birth but Englishmen by choice."

Allen's What's Bred in the Bone is very much an English novel. At its core are Cyril and Guy Waring, identical twins of uncertain parentage and independent, if modest means. Cyril, a landscape painter, is our hero; he shows his stuff very early in the novel by saving the life of beautiful Elma Clifford after a railway tunnel collapse. Guy, much the weaker figure, is under the influence of Montague Nevitt, a London bank clerk . Nevitt uses his position to bet on sure things in the stock market, pressuring his friend to likewise. When one investment goes sour, the clerk exercises a near hypnotic influence over Guy, getting him to commit forgery in "borrowing" £6000 from his brother's account.

How handsome Cyril's came to have such a large sum, though believable, is very complicated. The same might be said for much of What's Bred in the Bone; hidden marriages, mistaken identities and multiple misunderstandings carry the plot. It says much about Allen's talent that no matter how tangled the web, the reader is never confused. This particular reader was caught up in it all, curious as to how everything would unravel, racing toward what was ultimately an overly melodramatic conclusion.

What's Bred in the Bone was written was an eye on a prize; that being £1000 offered by the English weekly Tit-Bits for the best serial story. If the magazine's hype is to be believed, the novel won out over 20,000 entries. However, the strive for the commercial was not nearly enough to hold Allen's quirkiness in check. No surprise here – we are, after all, considering the work of a man who would one day write a novel about an elderly civil servant who believes himself to be the archangel Michael. I focussed at first the twin brothers; they were so much alike, had both experienced a toothache "in the self-same tooth on the self-same night" and each had dealt with the problem in the very same way. But Guy put an end to this early on: "There's nothing of the Corsican Brothers sort of hocus-pocus about us in any way. The whole thing is a simple caste of natural causation."

The freaky comes out of left field when prim, proper and virginal Elma retires to her bedroom after her escape from the tunnel. Her bosom heaves, her heart beats violently and she feels "a new sense aroused within her." She begins dancing wildly, rhythmically, and yet this release is does not satisfy. "She hadn't everything she required for this solitary orgy", Grant tells us. "Her hands were empty. She must have something to fill them. Something alive, lithe, curling, sensuous... Cyril Waring! Cyril Waring! It was all Cyril Waring. And what on earth would Cyril Waring think of her?"

The cause of Elma's behaviour is not so obvious; the reader soon learns that a "Roumanian ancestress" has passed on an attraction to snakes, and Cyril has a pet snake, and... well, maybe it is obvious.

Trivia: In 1916, the novel was adapted for the silent screen as What's Bred in the Bone Comes Out in the Flesh.

More Trivia: What's Bred in the Bone was published in England, the United States and Denmark (Hvad i Kodet er baaret, 1893), but only once in Canada, when in 1911, Winnipeg publisher Heimskringlu issued Ættareinkennið, an Icelandic translation. A century later, it remains the only Canadian edition.

Object: An odd-looking, yet attractive hardcover, the slightly fragile first edition disappoints only in that it, like all subsequent editions, features no illustrations.

Access: Print-on-demand monstrosities all but overwhelm online listings. Seek and ye shall find a few copies of the first edition going for about $100. The Toronto Public Library and just four of our universities have copies – of any edition – in their collections. Three copies of Ættareinkennið, all offered by the same Winnipeg bookseller, are currently listed online at an even US$300 each. No Canadian libraries hold copies.

Six Exits to Shrewsdale

2011-10-01T16:43:00.005-04:00

John Buell's The Shrewsdale Exit was translated into the French by Jean-Patrick Manchette, the very same man who adapted the novel to film. It appeared first in 1973 as Sombres vacances, number 1596 in Gallimard's Série Noire. Anyone familiar with the series will understand why I'm not bothering with the image. L'agression, the movie tie-in published two years later, is much more attractive – that is, after all, Catherine Deneauve on the cover.

The novel did quite well in France, but nothing like Germany, where it went through no less than six different editions. Titled Highway, the not-so-great image below captures the very first, published in 1973 by Bücherbund. A Skull and Crossbones, an Iron Cross, a Star of David and what might be something from Star Trek – these bikers might be bad, but they don't discriminate.

While most German covers focus on the bikers, this 1975 edition seems to have been inspired by the novel's final peaceful pages.

Published in 1974, Salida de autopista (Highway Exit), the first Spanish language edition, sticks with the tried and true, while reimagining the evil bikers as daredevils and Vikings.

In 2007, long after the book had again gone out of print in English, a Polish language edition appeared out of nowhere. Titled Czarne wakacje (Black Holiday), its cover depicts a scene that is foreign to the novel.

Interesting to note, I think, that it's the Americans who have stayed truest to the novel. The Farrar, Straus & Giroux first edition was followed by this mass market paperback from Pocket Books.

The bikers are just as Buell describes them. An anonymous cover artist picks up on their number – three – in the 1984 Carroll & Graf reissue.

It would seem that the novel has never published in Canada, the author's home and native land.

Related post: Where is Catherine Deneuve?

Where is Catherine Deneuve?

2011-09-29T09:16:00.006-04:00

The Shrewsdale Exit

John Buell

New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1972

Read the book, see the movie. Always thought that was the way to do it, so I have only myself to blame for spoiling The Shrewsdale Exit. Buell's third novel, it begins blandly – intentionally so, I think – with a family vacation:

They ordered sandwiches and beer, a Coke for the little girl, and were served in good time. They weren't in a hurry. They were going to the coast, to work their way along the ocean, camping where possible and staying in boarding houses when necessary. They talked as they ate, and in a short time they were about finished.

Within an hour – it could be two – mother and daughter are raped and murdered by a motorcycle gang. The father is left for dead, but is really only knocked out. Things move quickly in this novel; six weeks follow, during which the man buys a gun, plugs the thugs, is sent to prison and escapes into a world of pastoral beauty.

I'm spoiling things here, but not nearly as much as my reading experience was spoiled by the 1975 movie adaptation, L'agression, posted on YouTube:

Jean-Patrick Manchette's screenplay moves the action from somewhere (but not anywhere) in the United States to southern France. Buell's unwashed, wild bikers appear as efficient, faceless contract killers – characters in conspiracy. Jean-Louis Trintignant is cast as the vengeful husband and father, playing opposite Catherine Deneuve, who brings beauty and talent to the role of Sarah.

Sarah?

Sarah is not in the Buell's novel. In fact, not a word or action from la déesse de l'amour features in the book. Silly me, turning the pages I kept expecting her to appear.

I'm placing too much blame on the film. The Shrewsdale Exit is a weak novel with a strong start; the shift from the mundane to the violent is jarring, horrific and uncomfortably real. But when our hero enters prison plausibility passes, and the sure hand that wrote The Pyx and Four Days becomes shaky. In the third act, it brings us as close as I ever want to get to a Jeanette Oke farm. It's no coincidence that L'agression draws on the beginning, and only the beginning. But don't see the movie, read the book... the first 166 pages, at least.

Trivia: The L'agression soundtrack was written, in part, by Robert Charlebois (who also plays a biker). I offer this brief sample:

The very music that made the Sex Pistols seem so very attractive.

Object: A hardcover with green cloth boards with a bland dust jacket by Larry Ratzkin. The English Angus & Robertson first edition cover image trades the green road sign for blue, but is otherwise identical.

Access: The Farrar, Straus & Giroux and Angus & Robertson editions received no second printings, though there were a couple of subsequent editions in mass market paperback: Pocket (1973), Carroll & Graf (1984). I've yet to find evidence that it was included in the 1991 HarperCollins Canada trade paper reissues of Buell's novels. Canadian library users are encouraged to visit their university libraries. As far as public libraries go, only that serving the suffering residents of Toronto satisfies. As always – well, nearly always – Library and Archives Canada fails.

Because enquiring minds want to know... (Part II)

2011-09-26T06:00:00.001-04:00

My most valuable book (I think).

My favourite book (I know).