Showing posts with label Fry (Pamela). Show all posts
Showing posts with label Fry (Pamela). Show all posts

20 February 2012

On Lovingly Hand-Selected Recommendations



That they pretend to know me irritates. I write here of Alibris, the self-described "premier online marketplace for independent sellers of new and used books". For four years now they've pestered, prodded, poked and pushed, peppering my inbox with books they know I'll want. "We've lovingly hand-selected the following recommendations just for you", I'm told (emphasis theirs).


Here's one of their most recent picks:


Here's another that was chosen with me in mind:

Alibris add insult, describing this classic as a book I thought I'd never find:

And finally, there's this "book", which is actually a DVD:
Now, to be fair, the folks at Alibris have very little to go on. Our only contact took place back in 2008 when I purchased The Authentic Confessions of Harriet Marwood, an English Governess through their site. Faux-Victorian erotica penned by Montreal poet John Glassco, it says a great deal about Alibris that not a single Canadian title has figured in their four years of lovingly hand-selected recommendations. No poetry or porn, either.

Photo by Mary Elam

All this brings me to the Word Bookstore in Montreal, which launched its own website just last week. I've been a patron for nearly thirty years, first darkening the doorway as a fresh-faced university student.

These are just four of the many books owner Adrian King-Edwards has put in my hands over the years:

Memoirs of Montparnasse
John Glassco
Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1970

Inscribed and annotated by the author. Ex-libris Frank and Marian Scott.


Œuvres Illustrées de Balzac, volume 3
Honoré de Balzac
Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1867

Ex-libris John Glassco



The Beautiful and Damned
F. Scott Fitzgerald
London: Grey Walls, 1950







The Watching Cat
Pamela Fry
London: Davies, 1960

Inscribed by the author.





Every one purchased. The only times I've ever passed on a recommendation – a rare event – was when I already owned a copy of the book in question.

The good souls at the Word know me; they don't insult, they don't waste my time... and they're very generous with bookmarks.

16 January 2012

The Mystery Writer Mystery Unravels



'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

16 December 2011

Keeping an Eye Out for Pamela Fry



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