Showing posts with label Collins White Circle. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Collins White Circle. Show all posts

15 May 2021

The Dustiest Bookcase: N is for Niven


Short pieces on books I've always meant to review (but haven't).

Old Soldier
Frederick Niven
London: Collins, 1936
256 pages


Twelve years of The Dusty Bookcase and I have yet to read a single book by Frederick Niven.

It isn't for lack of trying.

Regular readers will remember that I spent good money on an old Collins White Circle edition of The Flying Years, but couldn't make it past it's dull, dull, deathly dull cover.

I did better with The Three Marys – which I bought for its cover – only to give up after reading the publisher's description, in which it's revealed that the hero, portrait painter Robert Barclay, is involved in a rail accident: "Barclay is killed, and the books [sic] ends on this note of tragedy." 

Bit of a spoiler, right?

I own only two other Niven titles: Mine Inheritance and Old Soldier. The former is "a story based on the Red River Settlement, Canada," though you wouldn't know it from the jacket of the Collins first edition:

Leaving aside the fact that the clothing is from the wrong century, are those mountains I see?

Mine Inheritance appears to have been popular; plenty of cheap used copies are currently offered online. Sadly, mine is an abridged edition intended for use in Canadian schools.

This leaves Old Soldier, about which I know next to nothing. I say next to nothing because I made the mistake of hunting down 85-year-old reviews. The first mentioned something about a store... and then I smartened up and stopped reading.

What's the book about?

No idea. But I will read this Niven novel! What's more, I'm going to do it this year!

I wonder what the cover looked like.

Related post:

12 November 2019

Three Little Women and One Big Spoiler



Frederick Niven wrote The Flying Years. I learned this as a teenager through a list of New Canadian Library titles printed in a copy of Philippe-Joseph Aubert de Gaspé's Canadians of Old.

The Flying Years was series title #102.

Frederick Niven... The Flying Years... I never saw mention of one without the other, and I never saw either in a bookstore.

For a long time, I thought Niven had written no other books, when in fact, he'd published more than thirty; from The Lost Cabin Mine (1908) to The Transplanted (1944), they span the better part of his life.

At some point last decade, I ordered a copy of The Flying Years, sight unseen, from an online bookseller – surely, it was the place to start in on things Niven – but when it arrived, it looked deathly dull. The publisher's assurance that its logo was a "SIGN OF A GOOD POPULAR NOVEL" did not sway, and I set it aside.


I continued to keep an eye out for Niven titles, but the only offerings I found were online. The Porcelain Lady sounded interesting. Who can't help but feel excitement in a title like Hands Up! One lone copy of Niven's 1927 novel Queer Fellows (US title: Wild Honey) was listed at £68 (with a further £11.21 in shipping), but I couldn't justify the expense.

So, imagine the thrill in finding a copy of The Three Marys (London: Collins, 1930) in an ill-lit, musty antique store not thirty kilometres from our home.

I paid $7.50!

There are so many things to like about this book. Let's beginning with it being a fifth impression. Who would've thought that Niven's readership was so large!

I like advert for Kolynos Dental Cream.


And if you lose the jacket, a second ad is stamped on the book itself.


I also like that the price intrudes on the spine and cover illustration.


And what of that illustration? Does the towering artist not intrigue? How about the petite women of increasing elegance?


Forget The Flying YearsThe Three Marys was the novel for me! A little research found that H.E. Bates liked The Three Marys, placing its author at "the front rank of contemporary story tellers." Writing in Everyman, Bates praised Niven's ability to create "real characters."

This past weekend, I sat down with The Three Marys. Not two minutes later, I put it aside, having read this:


And now I try to forget.

Should I have warned you? Chances are you'll never come across a copy.

I've never read a spoiler quite like the above. Can you blame me in sharing it?

So, I pick up my copy of The Flying Years and, after all this time, notice this on its cover:


Should I have been reading The Flying Years all along?

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12 June 2019

The True Crime Book That Spawned an Industry



The Black Donnellys
Thomas P. Kelley
Toronto: Harlequin, 1962
158 pages
Oh you who hail from Ontario
Know the tale of the Donnellys Oh
Died at the hands of a mob that night
Every child and man by the oil torch light

                         — Steve Earle, 'Justice in Ontario' (2002)
Because I hail from Quebec that I didn't know much about the Donnellys until well into adulthood. My introduction came through a work colleague when I was living in Toronto. Together, we made up a very small department in a very large book retailer – so large that it had its own publishing arm.

We were it.

After a few months working together, he suggested we reprint Orlo Miller's The Donnellys Must Die. I nodded in agreement, though Miller meant nothing to me, and I'd never heard of the book. The new edition of The Donnellys Must Die we ushered back into print sold twelve thousand copies in twelve weeks. Its success led us to consider reviving Miller's next book, Death to the Donnellys. We joked about commissioning a third book to be titled Die, Donnellys, Die!

What Steve Earle refers to as "the tale of the Donnellys" is infused with bloodshed of a sort that we Canadians like to think of as foreign. It begins with the 1842 arrival of Irish farming couple James and Johannah Donnelly in what is today Lucan, Ontario. They had with them a son, who had been named after his father. Six more boys and a daughter would follow, all born on Canadian soil their parents had cleared. The respective births were punctuated by violence and murder. First to be killed was neighbour Patrick Farrell – "John Farrell," according to Kelley – whom patriarch James hit on the head with a handspike. The murderer then hid in the woods, and dared work his fields disguised in his wife's frocks:
Johannah was almost as tall and heavy as her husband; appareled in her clothes, Donnelly was taken for her by those traveling the road and seeing him in the fields, and he was able to get in the seeding. Later, still dressed in women's clothing, he brought in the crops, working with his sons, and did the fall plowing.
Murder by handspike aside, this episode is the lightest part of the Donnelly story. Kelley doesn't do as much with it as I thought he might, though he does go for laughs here and there throughout the book. Poor Johanna receives the brunt:
She looked like and should've been a man; her sex undoubtably robbing the bare-knuckle prize ring of a prospective champion. In later years she sprouted a miniature Vandyke, wore red flannels, and told of never having been "much of a beauty." Her picture proves the words to be an understatement.
In Kelley's account, the matriarch directed many of the misdeeds attributed to her offspring. Beginning in 1855, various members of the Donnelly family were charged with larceny, robbery, assault, and attempted murder, amongst other crimes. The events that most troubled this reader concerned animal mutilation. It all came to an end on February 4, 1880, when a mob descended on the Donnelly farmhouse, beat its residents to death, and set the building alight. They then moved on to the home of second son William Donnelly, where they killed third son, John Donnelly. 


Steve Earle is wrong. Not every child and man died that night. There was a survivor in John O'Connor, a hired farm boy, who hid under a bed when the mob broke in. No doubt that mob would've murdered him, too, just as they did Bridget Donnelly, James' twenty-two year-old niece, who was newly arrived from Ireland. No one was ever convicted of the slaughter.

That Kelley records John O'Connor's surname as "Connor" is typical. He made his living as a speedy magazine and paperback writer. He had a reputation as a man who could be relied upon to fill pages in a pinch. The Kelley technique is on full display in this passage:
The writer first heard of the Donnelly feud – bits of it, at least – more than twenty years ago when travelling around the Lucan area. Twenty at the time – ah, my lost youth – the history of Lucan and its violences of bygone years did not interest him. A pair of blue eyes in the nearby village of Exeter, did. Eventually marrying the owner of the eyes, and as time went on, learning more of the feud, it became apparent at last, however, that mere hearsay, a thorough knowledge of the Lucan district or even the tales of oldtimers, would not be enough to write the true story of the Donnellys.  Seemingly endless hours of research were and did become necessary – the reading of old files, old newspapers, police and court records, etc.
It's unlikely that the seemingly endless hours Kelley spent researching the Donnellys were many, but they were lucrative. They resulted in "The Donnelly Feud," a 1947 article written for New Liberty Magazine. It was reprinted in his book Famous Canadian Crimes (Toronto: Collins White Circle, 1949) and then reworked as "The Terrible Donnelly Feud" for his next book, Bad Men of Canada (Toronto: Arrow, 1950). The Black Donnellys, which followed four years later, is said to have sold more than a million copies.


The Black Donnellys is not the best place to begin reading about the family and its fate; I recommend The Donnellys Must Die or, better still, The Donnelly Album by Ray Fazakas. Kelley's book is a fun read, but is wholly unreliable – which is not to say that it is without value. What I find most remarkable about the book has less to do with its contents than it does its impact. Sure, those who hail from Ontario know the tale of the Donnellys, but this wasn't always so. I don't doubt that Kelley (1905-1982), an Ontario boy who toured the province with his medicine man father, claims he hadn't heard of the family until "travelling around the Lucan area" at the age of twenty. After they faded from the headlines, very little was written about the Donnellys. Published a full seventy-four years after the bloody events of February 4, 1880, The Black Donnellys was the first book about the family and its fate. It's inaccuracies and – here I'm betting – commercial success encouraged Miller to write The Donnellys Must Die. More than a dozen Donnelly books have followed.

In this way, it is Kelley's greatest achievement as a writer. Would that we could all have such influence. He's owed a debt of gratitude.


Postscript: I left the very large book retailer in 2001, and began writing books that were published under noms de plume. Eight years later, when living in the Ontario town of St Marys, roughly twenty-five kilometres east of Lucan, I was commissioned to write a YA book on unsolved Canadian mysteries. A chapter on the Donnellys – "Who Killed the Donnellys?" – seemed a given. The St Marys Public Library then held seven books on the family, each of which was represented on the shelves by a block of wood bearing its title. Patrons interested in checking out a volume brought the appropriate block to the front desk. This system had been put in place to prevent theft.

Object: A paperback original, The Black Donnellys was first published in 1954 by Harlequin. My well-read copy, a seventh printing, was won for $7.50 in a 2009 auction at a St Marys, Ontario, thrift store.

Access: A 2002 Globe & Mail story reported that The Black Donnellys had to that point sold over one million copies in Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom. I point out that that same article refers to The Black Donnellys as a novel. The only American edition (right) is a 1955 paperback published by Signet. I've found no trace of a UK edition.

The Black Donnellys helped build Harlequin. The original 1954 printing was followed by fourteen others. The last was in April, 1968, long after Harlequin had (otherwise) come to focus exclusively on romances. Subsequent editions have been published by Greywood, Pagurian, Firefly, and Darling Terrace (it's current publisher).

Unsurprisingly, dozens of used copies are listed for sale online. Prices begin at US$2.99.

Easily found in academic libraries, but uncommon in the public. I suggest instituting the St Marys Public Library block system.

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09 October 2018

The Dustiest Bookcase: K is for Kelley


Short pieces on books I've always meant to review (but haven't).
They're in storage as we build our new home.
Patience, please.

I Found Cleopatra
Thomas P. Kelley
West Linn, OR: Fax Collector's Editions, [1977]
111 pages

Thomas P. Kelley was a regular in the early years of the Dusty Bookcase. From 2009 to 2012, his writing was the focus of a steady parade of posts, which included reviews of No Tears for Goldie (1949), Bad Men of Canada (1950), and two markedly different versions of The Fabulous Kelley (1968), a loving memoir about his snake oil-selling father.*

All this came to an end my review of 'The Soul Eater', a lost world story Kelley published in the May 1942 number of Uncanny Tales. Of all the things I've written on Kelley, it's my favourite. So what made me stop?

Something to do with the remaining Kelley titles in my collection, I suppose.


I wasn't much interested in taking time to separate truth from fiction in his books about the DonnellysSimon Gunanoot, and the Mad Trapper of Rat River. Things would've been different if I'd found a copy of this:


After The Black Donnellys and Vengeance of the Black Donnellys, I Found Cleopatra is Kelley's most reprinted work. First published in the Weird Tales (November 1938) – and again in Uncanny Tales (July 1941) – the novel has appeared three times in book form, most recently  in 1980 by Borgo Press. I found and bought my Fax Collector's Editions copy last summer.

It's now in a storage locker just outside the town of Merrickville, Ontario.

Wish it wasn't.


* Here I ignore my growing suspicion that Kelley was the author of No Place in Heaven, a 1949 News Stand Library pulp published under the name "Laura Warren."

Note: Not to be confused with I Found Cléopâtre, the 1988 account of my discovery a Montreal drag bar with the longest and cheapest Happy Hour in the whole damn city.


Related posts:

12 June 2018

Of Whips, Veins, and a Bottomless Pool of Warmth



Arctic Rendez-vous
Keith Edgar
Toronto: Collins White Circle, 1949
192 pages

I've finally finished my review of Arctic Rendez-vous, promised here last month.

No apologies. You'd have taken a long time, too.

Arctic Rendez-vous features the worst, most cringe-inducing sex scenes I've read since Donna Steinberg's I Lost It All in Montreal. Here's a sample:
The fragrance of her hair was in his nostrils and her gentle breath sent a warn zephyr against his chest.
   She whispered shyly, “I don’t know what came over me, Taffy — I —"
   Taffy said shakily, “I love you too, Marta, I always have.”
   Marta was quiet for a moment, then she raised her head and kissed him on the mouth.
   A vein was hammering in his temples and there was an uncomfortable warmth creeping through his thighs.
   His mouth sought for and found her moist sweet lips and she pressed close to him. Taffy, Darling, I want you so much — so much —"
   He slid his hands down her smooth back, the part of him that was still rational thinking that her body was suddenly hot, hot all over. He could hardly speak, his voice was so husky.
   “Are you sure, Marta? Are you sure?”
   “Please, Taffy. Please take me. Please. Please.”
   “I love you Marta, you know that don’t you?”
   The pressure of her thighs against him was unbearable. His mouth groped with desperate hunger for her lips and together they sank down into a bottomless pool of warmth and breathless wonder.
Those with strong stomachs can find the review posted at Canadian Notes & Queries online:
A Femme Fatale in the Frozen North
A bonus: In my my previous Arctic Rendezvous post, I remarked that the woman on the cover, Marta, should have black hair, adding that her breasts should be conical. This brought an emailed query, the answer to which is provided in this passage:
She trembled in his arms and twisted to bury her face in his shoulder, moaning softly. He slid his hands up her shoulders, pressing her to him until the hard cones of her breasts started a vein throbbing in his throat. 
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28 May 2018

A Publisher's Worst Book?



A sunny weekend in St Marys was made brighter still when I finally finished Arctic Rendez-vous, the sixth novel by part-time pilot and sometime novelist Keith Edgar.

Now all I have to do is write a review of the damn thing.


Arctic Rendez-vous ranks in the lower tier of Canada's post-war pulps. The early pages are by far the most interesting, taking its hero, Taffy Calhoun, from chatting up a young lady in the Imperial Room of Toronto's Royal York Hotel, to a tense business meeting at the Bank of Commerce Building.


Things then shift to the Arctic archipelago... where my interest waned.

I would've given up on Arctic Rendez-vous had not been the errors – the many errors – that plagued the book. Something of a surprise, they kept me going because I'd long considered the novel's publisher, Collins White Circle, to be the most competent producer of Canadian post-war paperbacks. I've read White Circle editions of Ralph Connor, Hugh Garner, Stephen Leacock, and David Montrose, but never encountered anything nearly inept.

Ignoring typos – "riffe" for "rifle" is one example – let's look at the title: Arctic Rendez-vous. The title page and back cover have it as "Arctic Rendezvous."

This, I'm willing to overlook – hell, no less a publisher than Penguin got the title wrong with no less an author than Brian Moore – but then comes the back cover copy:


"Here is the story of a man and a woman, savage and elemental, matching their hatred and a strange attraction in a race for a guilty secret and sunken fortune..."

In fact, the fortune is not sunken, though there are several pages in which Taffy believes that might be the case. The "ghost-ship Baychimo" doesn't feature in the novel. Taffy and Marta are racing to reach the Unaikto, a fictional ship that was abandoned after becoming icebound.

This is not to say that there was no Baychimo. It was abandoned in 1931, the very same year as the fictional Unaikto. A ghost-ship, it was last seen in 1969.


That's Marta being groped on the cover.

Her hair should be black.


Her breasts should be conical.

More anon.

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14 May 2017

A Novel My Mother Read



Glengarry School Days:
     A Story of the Early Days in Glengarry
Ralph Connor [pseud. Rev. Charles W. Gordon]
Toronto: Westminster, 1902

My mother was a great reader. Her typical day began by pouring over the Montreal Gazette during breakfast. When finished, she'd turn to a little booklet that provided a passage from the Bible with a brief commentary. The books she read dealt primarily with politics and the environment. In her mind, religion, politics and the environment were inextricably linked.

My mother never expressed much interested in fiction. I remember her reading Five Smooth Stones, Ann Fairbairn's 1966 bestseller, but I'm certain this was only because someone once gave her a copy as a Christmas gift.

Five Smooth Stones is 932 pages long. She was a good friend.

The only other fiction I remember my mother reading was I Am Barabbas, a religious historical novel written by Laurence H. Blackburn (author of God Wants You to Be Well and The Evaluation of Physiological Syncope in Aviation Personnel). I'm sure there were other novels. Her copy of Erskine Caldwell's Tobacco Road, the 1946 Collins White Circle Edition, sits on my shelves.


Strange to think she bought this as an eighteen-year-old. Tastes change, I suppose. People, too.

Glengarry School Days is the only Canadian novel that I know for a fact my mother read. I have  memories of her telling us – my sister and I – whenever we passed through Glengarry County on annual visits to our Upper Canadian cousins. Of the novel itself, my mother said nothing. Having read it now myself, I wonder how much she remembered?


Published in 1902, the year after The Man from Glengarry, Glengarry School Days is not so much a sequel as filler. It takes place during the same time period as the earliest chapters of the former, though you'd never know it. The characters are familiar – Rev Murray, Mrs Murray, Hughie Murray, and Ranald Macdonald, to name just four – but no references are made to the events of The Man from Glengarry. There is no overarching narrative, rather the book consists of a series of episodes, as reflected in the chapter titles: The Spelling-Match, The New Master, The Bear Hunt, etc.

Judith Skelton Grant and others suggest that Glengarry School Days is drawn the author's memories of the county and the one-room schoolhouse he attended as a child. I'm sure they're right, and it is in this the novel's strengths and flaws lie. Connor's attention to detail may be of value to cultural historian, but it stalls the plot, as in this early passage:
The afternoon was given to the more serious part of the school work – writing, arithmetic, and spelling, while, for those whose ambitions extended beyond the limits of the public school, the master had begun a Euclid class, which was at once his despair and his pride. In the Twentieth school of that date there was no waste of the children's time in foolish and fantastic branches of study, in showy exercises and accomplishments, whose display was at once ruinous to the nerves of the visitors, and to the self-respect and modesty of the children. The ideal of the school was to fit the children for the struggle into which their lives would thrust them, so that the boy who could spell and read and cipher was supposed to be ready for his life work. Those whose ambition led them into the subtleties of Euclid's problems and theorems were supposed to be in preparation for somewhat higher spheres of life.
Schoolhouse aside, the unifying element of the novel is religion. As in The Man from Glengarry, it is the flawless, saintly Mrs Murray – and not her ordained husband – who serves as spiritual guide, leading boys and young men the path they will follow tho become clergymen. Their number includes cynical city boy Jack Craven, the last in a line of schoolteachers.

No more drinking for Jack!

In this novel, Mrs Murray's example is echoed in Mrs Finch, the mother of Hughie's good friend Thomas. An older boy, Thomas serves as a role model to young Hughie, much like Ranald Macdonald did in The Man from Glengarry (in which, it should be noted, Thomas is not so much as mentioned). The two are similar in both character and family, the most obvious difference being that Ranald's mother is dead. Thomas's mother is still alive, though she is suffering a long, slow death from breast cancer. Mrs Finch nearly makes it to the end of the novel, expiring with just two pages to go.

I spoil nothing. You can see it coming.

The deathbed scene is melodramatic and jarring, particularly given the subtlety of the message imparted throughout Glengarry School Days. You see, it is Thomas, not his sisters, who nurses Mrs Finch through her final months. Connor wants to demonstrate that one can be masculine and muscular – or, best of all, a Muscular Christian – and still be tender, gentle and loving.

A good son, that Thomas Finch. A role model for us all.

Homage: The fourth chapter begins with a conversation between Mr and Mrs Bushy (not Busby), two squirrels who live by the schoolhouse in an old beech tree. Lasting two pages, the exchange is entirely out of place. I was reminded of nothing so much as the animal stories Charles G.D. Roberts and Ernest Thompson Seton – particularly Bannertail – which, of course, was Connor's intent.


Trivia: All UK editions – four that I can count – were published by Hodder & Stoughton under the title Glengarry Days.

Object: I own two copies. The one I read appears to be the first Canadian edition... or so a bookseller once claimed. I have no reason to doubt. It also appears to have once belonged to a man – or, perhaps, boy – named Dougal Sinclair. Might this be the same Dougal Sinclair, a 21-year-old dry goods clerk, who was recorded in the 1901 census as living in Glengarry? I like to think so.

Three hundred and fifty pages in olive green cloth, I bought it four years ago in London, Ontario. Price: $2.00.

Access: Once a mainstay, today's Canadian public library patrons will find that themselves served only by this country's very largest. Fortunately, copies of Glengarry School Days are held by nearly every academic institution in the country.

There have been numerous Canadian, American and British editions. Used copies are plentiful and cheap. I expect few booksellers bother listing it online. My advice is to go for one of the Westminster editions.

The novel was a longstanding title in the New Canadian Library, and somehow survived as part of the series to the end. The last NCL edition – price: $17.95 – is still listed on the publisher's website. Do not bother looking for it in our national chain; not one of its 231 stores stocks a copy.


Related posts:

15 July 2015

The Man Who Hated Toronto



Present Reckoning
Hugh Garner
Toronto: Collins White Circle, 1951

Tom Neelton has arrived too late for the party, but he doesn't care. It's the morning after V-J Day and he has just stepped off a train at Union Station. Outside, steamers hang limply from lampposts and confetti clogs the gutters.

What is he doing here?

Tom hates Toronto. Though born and raised in the city, "it had been something he had had to fight, an enemy of brick and stone and smug condescension." Tom's mother and father are dead. His nearest kin is a dishonest aunt with whom he made the mistake of storing his civilian clothes before shipping out. She'll claim that the moths got to them.

Again, what is he doing here?

At first, I thought the answer lay in Carol Berkett. Seven years ago, when he was twenty-five and she was seventeen, they'd gone out for a bit. She'd even brought him home to meet her mom. Roast was served. Tom and Carol did some necking on the chesterfield. He never called on her again.


He's now thinking he made a mistake. Tom imagines a better life, one in which Carol would have been waiting at the train station. He returns to familiar digs, a cheap room in the Pentland Hotel (read: Warwick Hotel), determined to track her down. But it turns out that she's not in the phone book. Her mom's not in the phone book either. Then, "like a soft slap against his consciousness", it occurs to him that Carol might be married.

So he gives up and is soon snogging Margaret, the buxom blonde who works the front desk.

Tom guessed right about Carol. We know because Garner devotes several chapters to her marriage.

Happy?

Not unhappy. Husband George, a punch press operator, has come to accept that his passion for amateur radio is not shared. He sometimes gets a good chuckle out of Blondie, which is his wife's favourite comic strip. Carol, who often thinks of her brief romance with Tom, becomes much more contented after the birth of baby Harold.

Clearly, Tom and Carol are destined to meet, but this doesn't occur before the second half of the novel. Until then, the returning veteran kills time drinking with friends in the local beer parlour. Margaret decamps for Kamloops, Tom takes up with bohemian art school student Louise Kramer and Garner runs up the word count.

Biographer Paul Stewe is dismissive of Present Reckoning, focussing in on what he considers a melodramatic climax. In the monograph he penned for the Canadian Writers & their [sic]Works series, George Fetherling describes it as "a little novel which depends far too much on chance meetings, coincidence and on the double-whammy at the end and is nowhere near the level of Garmer's best prose."

I agree with that last bit. That said, I count only two coincidences or chance meetings:
  • Louise sees Tom in a museum one week, then spots him a library the next.
  • Twelve months after returning to town, Tom encounters old flame Carol on the street.
These things happen.

I won't spoil the ending, other that to say that I found it believable, strong enough, more than a little upsetting and not the least bit melodramatic. But what I really took away from Present Reckoning – what is really of value – is its depiction of Toronto in the months after the war.

Carol lives in a new development, ever aware of the prying eyes of neighbouring housewives. George's company prepares for the new peacetime economy. Tom looks over glasses of beer, gauging the progress of a disfigured drinking buddy's reconstructed face. He'll also make the mistake of returning to an old haunt where he's confronted by "young punks in zoot-suit pants and girls in Eisenhower jackets." Tom later describes the scene to Carol:
"They danced differently than we did, wore their hair in brush cuts and feathered bobs, and stared at me standing on the sidelines as though I was a bouncer. I moved over near the orchestra and spent an hour or so listening to the music trying to recapture the feeling I had in the old days, but it was no use. I didn't belong there."
There's something not to like about Present Reckoning. It meanders in a way that had me wondering whether Garner wasn't drawing from unpublished stories and other jottings. After all, he'd done just that the year before with the pseudonymous Waste No Tears.


Again, I agree with my friend George that this is not Garmer's best prose. And yet passages like this, in which newly arrived Tom is confronted by his first sight of the Royal York Hotel, are just about the greatest things he ever wrote:
The hotel – Largest in the British Empire – squatted sullenly against the opposite sidewalk, daring those leaving the station to pass it by without a glance. He forced his eyes along its self-satisfied exterior and thought back to the days of its opening fifteen years before. There had been much fanfare then, with big-wigs by the score. Ben Bernie's orchestra, a porter for every bag and doormen garbed in coachman's habit. During the depression the coachmen had disappeared along with many of the other opulent ostentations, and for years the edifice had gone on like a bankrupt dowager, bravely pretending that things had not changed and that its hundreds of empty rooms were full of guests. To him it symbolized the city: smug, part good taste and bad, a brave thing formed of a maladmixture of decency and sham.
What was Tom Neelton doing back in Toronto?

Better the hell you know.

He'll come to wish he'd never returned.


A Bonus: Over at Canadian Fly-By-Night, Bowdler identifies the corner depicted on the cover as Bay and Richmond. The scene does not feature in the novel.

Object and Access:: A 158-page novel with a further two pages advertising Peter Cheyney's Lady Behave and One of Those Things. Present Reckoning was Garner's third paperback original, and was printed but once. My copy, a Reading Copy in every sense, was purchased last month at London's Attic Books. Price: $7.50.

Sixty-four years after publication, the novel has become scarce. I've found just three copies listed for sale online – all Fine, they range in price from US$75 to US$100.

All of six university libraries and the Toronto Public Library have the book in their holdings. As might be expected, Library and Archives Canada fails.

Related post:

23 May 2014

Young Mister Richler on the New Canadian Library



Further goodness from the May 1958 issue of The Montrealer with Richler reviewing the New Canadian Library's inaugural offerings. An interesting choice. Richler was no cultural nationalist – never was, as is evident in this piece, written at the age of twenty-seven. He spends the first two-thirds debunking the very notion of a Canadian literature:
Canadian writing is really regional North American writing and not a separate body. English-speaking Canadian novelists obviously have much more in common with their counterparts in the United States than with the French-Canadian writer around the corner.
And Canadian writers:
For my money the man who writes the best prose in Canada is Morley Callaghan. Yet he has surely been more influenced by Hemingway and Fitzgerald than by Frederick Philip Grove. He is an American writer. He just happens to live and write about Toronto just as others do about Boston, New Orleans, or Detroit.
Before surprising us all:
Whether or not the series goes further will, I guess, depend on public response. The New Canadian Library certainly deserves support.
Support it we did – though not always willingly. I'm still a bit pissed off about the copy of Canadians of Old I had to buy for a CEGEP course.

Over the decades the NCL has embraced then dumped many more titles than it has kept  – au revoir Jean Rivard – but the first four remain. In fact, all have been subjected to the sixth and most recent series redesign. Expect another before the end of the decade. Here are some excerpts from Richler's review for The Canadian Publisher™ to consider as blurbs:



Over Prairie Trails
Frederick Philip Grove


"It's too bad that the series has begun with Over Prairie Trails, because if there is a book that epitomizes all that is boring, ponderous, and self-important about Canadian literature than [sic] this is surely it."




Such Is My Beloved
Morley Callaghan


"I've got a blind spot when it comes to innocent priests and good whores although Mr. Callaghan, no literary slouch, certainly avoids the more obvious sentimentalities."





Literary Lapses
Stephen Leacock


"It seems to me, that this book is only unevenly successful, is already available in numerous editions – even, I think a thirty-five cent pocketbook – and that this further reprint is a redundancy."



As for Me and My House
Sinclair Ross


I'm much more grateful – maybe because it was completely unknown to me – for Sinclair Ross's As For Me And My House… it is, as Professor [Roy] Daniells writes in his preface, "a genuine artistic achievement."





Richler also quarrels with Frank Newfeld's "singularly unattractive" series format, singling out As for Me and My House: "Mr. Ross, whom I've never met, is drawn here to look like a comic strip detective."

I wonder what he thought about this 1965 Newfeld cover for New Canadian Library No. 45.


A bonus: The "thirty-five cent pocketbook" of Literary Lapses to which Richler refers is almost certainly the 1945 Collins White Circle edition. There had been no other. However, he is mistaken as to availability and price: the imprint ceased to be in 1952; all printings were priced at 25 cents.


The cover is by Margaret Paull, whose work also graces the Collins White Circle Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town.

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