Showing posts with label Fulford (Robert). Show all posts
Showing posts with label Fulford (Robert). Show all posts

11 March 2013

A Not So Nice Place to Visit



The Sin Sniper
Hugh Garner
Richmond Hill, ON: Pocket Books, 1970

From the back cover:


So what's he doing writing a cheap paperback original?

The answer is going full circle and then some – past Storm Below, his 1949 hardcover debut, to Waste No Tears(1950), Cabbagetown (1950) and Present Reckoning (1951). Paperback originals all, the latter three brought more money than would've been garnered – sorry – through higher literary endeavours. It's true that Storm Below did the author well, but not in an immediate sense. A man needs to eat... and drink.

Garner's seventh novel, The Sin Sniper landed just months after his sixth, A Nice Place to Visit (1970). It enjoyed a higher print run, more editions, and as Stone Cold Dead, would eventually be adapted for the screen in a film starring Richard Crenna, Paul Williams and Linda Sorensen.



Robert Fulford, who had a certain respect for Garner, was none too impressed. Writing in the Ottawa Citizen (5 November 1971), he dismissed The Sin Sniper as "close to being dreadful", adding "one was left with a nothing but baffling sense of being told to go left on Sumach, or right on Dundas, or left on Parliament."

I see what he means. This is the novel's opening paragraph:
Detective Inspector Walter McDurmont of the Metropolitan Toronto Police homicide squad jockeyed his three-year-old Galaxie along Dundas Street East in the morning rush-hour traffic. He crossed the Don River over the Dundas Street bridge, swung left down River Street, made a right turn at Shuter, and stopped when confronted with the raised stop-sign of the school crossing guard at Sumach Street, near Park Public School.
Lest you get lost, the book features a map that looks to have been ripped from a city directory.


Garner's setting is Toronto's Moss Park neighbourhood. The premise is found in the title: a sniper is murdering prostitutes. First to die is Claudia Grissom, whose snow-covered body is found early one morning near the corner of Shuter and Jarvis. Bernice Carnival is shot the next day (Dundas Street, one block from the Dainty Dot, just the other side of Church).

Those looking for a good mystery will be disappointed. There's little detective work here; McDurmont banks pretty much everything on catching the sniper in the act. While he comes to focus the investigation on three suspects, one of whom proves to be the sniper, nothing is provided that might justify the decision.

What saves The Sin Sniper is that the characters driving and walking through the streets of Toronto, turning left and veering right, are real people moving between real places. I'm not suggesting that this is a roman à clef, but I'm certain that Garner, a self-confessed alcoholic, drew heavily on the folks he met in drinking establishments, just as I'm certain that the drinking establishments in the novel would be recognizable to Torontonians of a certain age.

A Torotontonian of a certain age himself, Robert Fulford would know much better than I just how true the novel is to the people and places of Moss Park. I enjoyed the tour as much as the encounters. Fulford concludes his dismissal of The Sin Sniper by writing that the only mystery about the book is that it was published. To me, the answer is obvious: Money. Pocket Books recognized this, as did Paperjacks with their reissue, as did the investors in Stone Cold Dead.

Meanwhile, we're still awaiting the screen adaptation of Storm Below.

Money.

Trivia: Set in 1965, the climax of the novel takes place the same day as the Mersey Mops (read: The Beatles) play Maple Leaf Gardens. Garner moves the concert from the summer to the winter.

Outside the Beatles' 19 August 1965 concert, Maple Leaf Gardens, Toronto.
More trivia: Stone Cold Dead was written and directed by George Mendeluk, who would the next year take on Charles Templeton's The Kidnapping of the President.

Object: I bought my copy for $3.95 this past February 23rd, the day after what would have been Garner's hundredth birthday. A first edition, it features this misleading notice:


Access: Well represented in our university libraries. Decent copies of the first edition are plentiful and begin at $6.00. The 1978 movie tie-in, as Stone Cold Dead, is less common but just as cheap.

15 November 2012

The Kidnapping of the President for Christmas



The Kidnapping of the President
Charles Templeton
Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1974
Charles Templeton [...] will probably have some idea by mid-November whether he is launched on yet another successful career, this time as a novelist. His meticulously researched first novel, The Kidnapping of the President (McClelland and Stewart), comes out in October; within, say, 90 days from now he'll know whether he's another Arthur Hailey or just a guy who once wrote a novel. 
— Robert Fulford, The Windsor Star, 6 September 1974
It took at lot less than ninety days.

The Kidnapping of the President entered bestseller lists in the month of its release, then fought Richard Rohmer's Exxoneration and Frederick Forsyth's The Dogs of War to become the top novel of the gift giving season.

Its title pretty much says it all, but I'll expound a bit:

President Adam Scott looks to make gains in the 1978 mid-terms by holding a rally in New York's Herald Square, while Marxist Guatemalan terrorist Roberto Moreno and girlfriend Linda Rodriguez see an opportunity to further their cause. Disguising themselves as Brink's guards, they manage to hustle the President into an armoured truck and race toward Times Square. Linda is dropped off at the subway and, incredibly, manages to blend in with the crowd. Moreno emerges to give himself up, telling the secret service that someone somewhere (this would be Linda) holds a remote control device that can blow up the truck, the President and the ever-gathering crowd.

Hayseeds will appreciate these visual aids from first edition:


Robert Fulford described The Kidnapping of the President as a meticulously researched first novel. Therein lies its greatest flaw. The author shares a whole lot about the Constitution of the United States, its Twenty-fifth Amendment, and the construction of armoured trucks, but this only serves to slow the pace; expending three of 237 pages on presidents who died in office and their respective vice-presidents seems a needless waste.

Though The Kidnapping of the President was written with an eye on the massive American market, Canadians will find some things with which they can relate, like the upbringing of the Saskatchewan born Director of the FBI, the Vice-President's Newfoundland fishing trip and the acknowledged ingenuity of the RCMP. Templeton had a bit of fun with news anchor Robertson Kirk and, I think, Art R. Eagleson, whose chick hatchery the Secretary of Agriculture is visiting on the day of the abduction. I really don't know what to make of Gerry Regan, "Special Agent in Charge of the White House Detail", who in 1974 shared his name with the Premier of Nova Scotia.

This first edition of Templeton's first novel features three blurbs, the first of which comes courtesy of political strategist Dalton Camp. "I guess this must be the biggest caper in Canadian fiction...", writes my favourite Red Tory.

Guess so.

Camp was no literary critic, but I think he had this book pegged. Nearly four decades after it was published, The Kidnapping of the President remains the great Canadian caper novel... but that's not saying a whole lot.

Q&A:

Q: How tempting is this?

 

A: Not tempting at all.

Trivia (personal): Amongst those tasked with guarding the President is Secret Service agent Gil Busby. He very nearly thwarts the kidnappers' plan with his suspicions about Moreno, but is sidetracked by a collapsing barricade from which he rescues a young girl.

Good man, that Busby.

Agent Busby is only the second character with my surname that I've encountered in Canadian literature. The first, whistling Sgt Calvin Busby, is found in Earle Birney's Turvey (1949).

Object: A slim hardcover, my first edition – signed by the author – I purchased my copy in 1991 from a Montreal Salvation Army Thrift Store. Price: $2.


Access: The Kidnapping of the President is long out of print – the most recent edition I could find was Seal Books' 1980 movie tie-in – but it still makes a great Christmas gift. The McClelland and Stewart first edition can be had in Very Good condition for one dollar. Expect to pay more – but not much more – for the 1975 Simon & Schuster American first, the 1976 Quartet British first, and the mass market editions from Avon (1975) and Seal (1980). There are dozens of copies to be had for under five dollars. Ignore the bookseller trying to sell a "Good" copy of the Simon & Schuster edition for $74.99.

Related post:

03 May 2010

Baseball in Panties, of Course



The Chartered Libertine
Ralph Allen
Toronto: Macmillan, 1954

As a young man I placed Ralph Allen with Thomas B. Costain and Thomas H. Raddall; Canadian writers whose book club editions choked church bazaars, thrift stores and library sales. Raddall, I would learn, was a perfectly fine writer; The Nymph and the Lamp was one of the more enjoyable novels read during my undistinguished university years. And Costain? Well, I could never get through more than a few pages. I didn't touch Allen, which is a pity because The Chartered Libertine is one of the cleverest satirical novels to have come out of this country

Timely and timeless, it concerns attacks on the CBC and its struggle for survival. At the centre is businessman Garfield Smith, "sole owner and president of radio station CNOTE, part owner and business manager of the Toronto Daily Guardian, chief debentures holder and Editor Emeritus of True Blue Revelations Magazine, and non-stockholding past chairman of the board of the rather disappointing Drive-in Dentistry Inc." Smith's newest acquisition is a failing women's softball franchise called the Swansea Lady Slugerettes. He brings the team to Toronto, renames it the Queens d'Amour and clothes the players in new uniforms consisting of "scarlet bodices and long opalescent pantaloons".

No fan of public broadcasting, Smith has been content to limit his attacks to station identification: "This is CNOTE, a station that is listened to and makes money." The trouble begins after the CBC refuses his cash offer to air Queens d'Amour games in place of cultural programming. Working under cover of anonymity he sets out to destroy the broadcaster through the League for the Incorporation of Godly and Humanistic Training (LIGHT), folks who don't much care for Shaw and take great objection to mention of unwed mothers on the radio.


The Globe and Mail, 29 May 1954

There's a good deal of noise, but no culture war. With an eye on the polls, the Conservative-Liberal PM orders the crown corporation sold, thus outmaneuvering the Liberal-Conservative leader who had always hoped to do just that... not that he'd ever let on.

You see, he had a hidden agenda.

Trivia: Robert Fulford, amongst others, has identified the model for Garfield Smith as Jack Kent Cooke.

Object: A nicely bound hardcover, it belonged to my father, a CBC employee.

Access: Easy enough to find in our university libraries. As far as I've been able to determine, there was just one Macmillan printing, and no paperback edition. The book was also published in the United States by St. Martin's – one wonders what American readers made of all that stuff about the CBC and Canadian party poltics. No surprise, I suppose, that one Yankee bookseller is selling the book as a "different kind of baseball novel". There are a few Very Good copies currently listed online in the C$15 to C$20 range. Of these, the real gem is one signed by blurb contributor Northrop Frye. And at only US$19.95! Then we have the sad example of an Ottawa bookseller who asks US$100 – four times more than anyone else – for a jacket-less copy with previous owner's signature. Priced fairly only if that previous owner was Jack Kent Cooke... and features his annotations.