Showing posts with label Stringer. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Stringer. Show all posts

01 January 2024

Start the Year with Stringer!


The 1924 New Year's edition of Maclean's. What is suggested? A year of excitement? Terror? Is there not something disturbing in this child's expression? That is a child, right? 

The issue's lead article, 'Saying "Success" With Flowers,' concerns T.W. Duggan, who "took hold of a bankrupt business — and made it worth half a million." The very thing one would expect in a periodical founded as The Business Magazine. After that comes fiction by Henry Holt, W. Michael Edwards, Stanley J. Weyman, and Canada's own Norma Phillips Muir. I was much more interested in this tempting advert. 

I was reminded again of how much I enjoyed Arthur Stringer's 1915 novel The Prairie Wife, which I read last February. And it makes me think of giving the author another go this year. I don't know about The Wire Tappers, Phantom Wires, and The Gun Runners – I've never been much for Stringer's adventure novels – but maybe something else. After all these years, I still haven't read The City of Peril. As a title, Are All Men Alike intrigues, in part because it lacks a question mark.

Rhetorical?

Wishing everyone a year of good books and fine reads!

Related posts:

26 December 2023

The Best Reads of 2023: Publishers Take Note


The season brings a flurry of activity, which explains why I haven't posted one review this month. Still, I did manage to tackle twenty-four neglected Canadian books in 2023, which isn't so small a number. James de Mille's A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder (1888) was the oldest. Were I judging books by covers it would've been considered the finest. James Moffatt's The Marathon Murder (1972) was the youngest and ugliest. But then, what can one expect of a book that went from proposal to printing press in under seven days.

De Mille's dystopian nightmare is available from McGill-Queen's University Press as the third volume in the Centre for Editing Early Canadian Texts series.  

I first read the novel back when it was a McClelland & Stewart New Canadian Library mainstay. New Canadian Library is no more; it was killed by Penguin Random House Canada. McClelland & Stewart – "The Canadian Publisher" – has been reduced to an imprint owned by Bertelsmann SE & Co. KGaA, but that hasn't prevented the German conglomerate from trying to make a buck – two bucks to be precise – selling it as an ebook.

Dystopia.

Three other books covered here this year are also in print, but from American publishers:

The Weak-Eyed Bat - Margaret Millar
New York: Doubleday, 1942
New York: Syndicate, 2017
The Cannibal Heart - Margaret Millar
New York: Random House, 1949
New York: Syndicate, 2017

The Heart of Hyacinth - Onoto Watanna [Winnifred Eaton]
New York: Harper, 1903
Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000
I'm wrong,  The Heart of Hyacinth is by far the best-looking book read this year; it was also the very best novel I read this year.

Note to Canadian publishers: Winnifred Eaton's novels are all in the public domain. 

What follows is the annual list of the three books most deserving of revival: 

Pagan Love
John Murray Gibbon
Toronto: McClelland &
   Stewart, 1922

A novel penned by a man who spent his working life writing copy for the CPR,  Pagan Love provides a cynical look at public relations and the self-help industry. Add to these its century-old take on gender bending and you have a work unlike any other.

Dove Cottage
Jan Hilliard [Hilda Kay
   Grant]
London: Abelard-Schulman,
   1958 

The fourth of the author's six novels, this once centres on a man, his wife, and his mother-in-law, whose lives are elevated by way of an inheritance. Black humour abounds!

The Prairie Wife
Arthur Stringer
London: Hodder & Stoughton, [n.d.]


The first novel in Stringer's Prairie Trilogy. Dick Harrison describes it as the author's "most enduring work," despite the fact that it hasn't seen print in over seven decades. I'd put off reading The Prairie Wife because I have a thing against stories set on "the farm." What a mistake! An unexpected delight!


Last December's list of three featured Grant Allen's Philistea (1884), Stephen Leacock's Moonbeams from the Larger Lunacy (1915), and Horace Brown's Whispering City (1947). 


Ten months later, Whispering City returned to print as the eighteenth Ricochet Books title. Yours truly provided the introduction. It can be ordered through the usual online booksellers, but why not from the publisher itself? Here's the link.

As for the New Year... well, I'm back to making resolutions:
  • More French books (and not only in translation).
  • More non-fiction (and not only the work of crazies). 
That's it.

Keep kicking against the pricks!

Bonne année!

Related posts:



27 February 2023

Go West, Young Woman



The Prairie Wife
Arthur Stringer
London: Hodder & Stoughton, [n.d]
251 pages

In the summer of 1985, I bought a copy of The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature and read it from cover to cover. This is nowhere near as impressive as it might seem; what I read was the original two-column 843-page edition (1983), not the two-column 1099-page second edition (2001). Nevertheless, it was through the Companion that I first learned of Arthur Stringer. The author's entry, penned by Dick Harrison, amounts to little more than a half-page. Here are some of the things I learned:
  • born 1874 in Chatham, Ontario;
  • studied at the University of Toronto and Oxford;
  • wrote for the Montreal Herald;
  • established his literary career in New York;
  • "made an enduring contribution to Canadian literature with his prairie trilogy: Prairie Wife (1915), Prairie Mother (1920), and Prairie Child (1921)."
Harrison gets the titles of the trilogy wrong – The Prairie Wife, The Prairie Mother, and The Prairie Child are correct – but never mind, what stuck with me was Prairie. As decades passed, I forgot all about Chatham, Toronto, Oxford, Montreal, and New York, and came to think of Stringer as a Western Canadian. It wasn't until 2009, when I read The Woman Who Could Not Die (1929), my first Stringer, that I was reminded he was an Ontario boy. A Lost World novel set in the Canadian Arctic, I liked it well enough to keep reading and begin collecting his work.

My Arthur Stringer collection (most of it, anyway).
Cliquez pour agrandir.
Admittedly, much of my interest has to do with his enviable popularity, the deals he cut with Hollywood, and his marriage to Jobyna Howland. This is not to suggest that I didn't like the books themselves. My favourite Canadian novel of the early twentieth-century is Stringer's The Wine of Life (1921), which... um, was inspired by his marriage to Jobyna Howland.


A second admission: I put off reading The Prairie Wife, the first volume in Stringer's "enduring contribution to Canadian literature," for no other reason that it is set in rural Canada. Before you judge, I rush to add that this Montrealer has lived in rural Canada these past two decades. Country living attracts, but not novels set in the country. This may explain how it is that I was swept up by its early pages.

The Prairie Wife takes the form of a series of entries, written over the course of more than a year to someone named Matilda Anne. Its writer, Chaddie, begins by describing a voyage from Corfu to Palermo and then on to the Riviera. She is of the moneyed class – that is until Monte Carlo, where Chaddie receives a cable informing that the "Chilean revolution" has wiped out her nitrate mine concessions. Made a pauper, Chaddie's first action is to dismiss her maid; the second is to send word to her German aristocrat fiancé:
I sent a cable to Theobald Gustav (so condensed that he thought it was code) and later on found that he'd been sending flowers and chocolates all the while to the Hotel de L'Athenee, the long boxes duly piled up in tiers, like coffins at the morgue. Then Theobald's aunt, the baroness, called on me, in state. She came in that funny, old-fashioned, shallow landau of hers, where she looked for all the world like an oyster-on-the-half-shell, and spoke so pointedly of the danger of international marriages that I felt sure she was trying to shoo me away from my handsome and kingly Theobald Gustav — which made me quite calmly and solemnly tell her that I intended to take Theobald out of under-secretaryships, which really belonged to Oppenheim romances, and put him in the shoe business in some nice New England town!
After a respectable period of mourning lost wealth, Theobald Gustav throws her over. Just as well, really, because the Paris Herald had reported on of a traffic accident that had occurred when he'd been in the company of a "spidery Russian stage-dancer." On the rebound, Chaddie proposes to Scots-Canadian Duncan Argyll McKail, whom she'd met in Banff the previous October. He is too much in love and far too practical to turn her down.

And so, this is how Chaddie, an American socialite who'd shared the company of Meredith and Stevenson, and had sat through many an opera at La Scala, ends up in a one-room shack with flattened tin can siding on the remote Canadian prairie.

Duncan – annoyingly, his bride refers to him as "Dinky-Dunk" – is a civil engineer from the east. He's got it in his mind to make a fortune through farming, and has purchased a 1700-acre parcel of land one hundred or so kilometres northwest of, I'm guessing, Swift Current.

"He kept saying it would be hard, for the first year or two, and there would be a terrible number of things I'd be sure to miss," Chaddie writes Matilda Anne. 

No doubt!

Harrison doesn't use the term "Prairie Realism" in his Stringer entry, but I will; The Prairie Wife is a good fit with later novels by Frederick Philip Grove, Martha Ostenso, and Robert Stead. Can we agree that Prairie Realism was never terribly realistic? Though pre-Jazz Age, Stringer's story begins as a crazy Jazz Age adventure in which a carefree debutante marries a man she may or may not love. In her earliest pages to Matilda Anne, she writes:
O God, O God, if it should turn out that I don't, that I can't? But I'm going to!  I know I'm going to! And there's one other thing that I know, and when I remember it, It sends a comfy warm wave through all my body: Dinky-Dunk loves me. He's as mad as a hatter about me. He deserves to be loved back. And I'm going to love him back. That is a vow I herewith duly register. I'm going to love my Dinky-Dunk.
Chaddie continues:
But, oh, isn't it wonderful to wake love in a man, in a strong man? To be able to sweep him off, that way, on a tidal wave that leaves him rather white and shaky in the voice and trembly in the fingers, and seems to light a little luminous fire at the back of his eyeballs so that you can see the pupils glow, the same as an animal's when your motor head-lights hit them!
There's a clear separation between the opening pages and the rest of the novel. Whimsy gives way to practicality, as Duncan chases his fortune. Remarkably, Chaddie settles on the prairie, and into matrimony, rather nicely. Harrison writes of "disillusionment as the marriage deteriorates," but this reader saw nothing of the kind. True, there are moments of discord, as in the strongest of marriages, but Dinky-Dunk and Chaddie – he calls her "Gee-Gee" – are soon in one another's arms. She does come to love her Dinky-Dunk.

The frontispiece of the A.L. Burt photoplay edition, c.1925.
I don't know what Harrison means when he writes of Chaddie's "mature resolve as she begins an independent life on the Prairies." The married couple only become closer as the novel progresses, and the two are increasingly reliant on a slowly growing cast of characters. The earliest, hired man Olie, is a silent Swede who at first can't keep his eyes off Chaddie. This male gaze has nothing to do with objectification, rather her ridiculously impractical city dress. Pale Percival Benson Wodehouse, whom this reader suspects to be a remittance man, is next to appear. He was sold the neighbouring ranch from "land chaps" in London. Nineteen-year-old Finnish Canadian Olga Sarristo enters driving a yoke of oxen. Two weeks earlier, what remained of her family had burned to death in their own shack one hundred or so miles to the north. To Chaddie, stoic and stunning Olga is like something out of Norse mythology, "a big blonde Valkyr suddenly introducing herself into your little earthly affairs." Olga is a welcome addition to the farm; every bit as capable physically as Olie and Duncan. Last to arrive is Terry Dillion, a fastidious young Irishman who had once served in far off lands with the British Army.

Together they support Duncan's big gamble, which involves putting all he has on a sea of wheat covering his 1700 acres. Threatened by draught, fire, and hail, the crop survives, making him a wealthy man. His riches are further increased by a new rail line to be built across his land. The final pages have Duncan and Chaddie poring over house-plans mailed from Philadelphia. "We're to have a telephone, as soon as the railway gets through," she writes Matilda Anne. 

The Prairie Wife is the first Stringer novel I've read with a woman narrator. Early pages aside, I found Chaddie's voice oddly convincing. This audio recording by Jennifer Perree, stumbled upon in researching this novel, reinforced my conviction. An enjoyable story, an entertainment, it left me wanting to hear more from Chaddie.

And there is more!

Stringer wrote more than forty novels, but The Prairie Mother is the only one to spawn a sequel, The Prairie Mother (1920)  – and then another in The Prairie Child (1922).

Like Dinky-Dunk, Stringer really knew how to make a buck.  

Favourite sentence:
The trouble with Platonic love is that it's always turning out too nice to be Platonic, or too Platonic to be nice.
Bloomer: 
I can't help thinking of Terry's attitude toward Olga. He doesn't actively dislike her, but he quietly ignores her, even more so than Olie does. I've been wondering why neither of them has succumbed to such physical grandeur. Perhaps it's because they're physical themselves.
Trivia: In 1925, The Prairie Mother was adapted to the silver screen. A lost film, the trade reviews I've read are lukewarm, mainly because there is no gunplay. Chaddie is played by comedic actress Dorothy Devore, one of many who fell in making the transition to talkies. New to me is Herbert Rawlinson, who played Duncan. Olga is played by Canadian Frances Primm, about whom little is known, A pre-Frankenstein Boris Karloff plays Diego, a character that does not feature in the novel. Most interetsing to the silent film buff is Gibson Gowland (Olie), the man who played McTeague in Erich von Stroheim's Greed.

Motion Picture Magazine, December 1924 
Object: My copy was purchased last year from a bookseller located in Winterton, Lincolnshire. Price: £9.00. Sadly, the jacket illustration is uncredited.

The rear pushes all three books in Stringer's trilogy, The Prairie Child not yet available in a bargain edition. The flaps feature a list of other Hodder & Stoughton titles, including works by Canadians Ralph Connor (The Sky Pilot of No Man's Land [sic]), Hulbert Footner (The Fugitive Sleuth, Two on the Trail), Frank L. Packard (The Night Operator, The Wire Devils, Pawned), Robert J.C. Stead (The Homesteaders), and Bertrand W. Sinclair (Poor Man's Rock).

Access: The Prairie Wife first appeared in 1915, published serially over four issues of the Saturday Evening Post (16 January - 6 February). That same year, it appeared in book form in Canada (McLeod & Allen) and the United States (Bobbs-Merril). Both publishers used the same jacket design:

Evidence suggests that The Prairie Wife is Stringer's biggest seller. A.L. Burt published at photoplay edition tied into the 1925 Metro-Goldwyn Mayer adaptation. Is that Boris Karloff as Diego on the right?


At some point, Burt went back to the well to draw Prairie Stories, which included all three novels in Stringer's prairie trilogy. As far as I've been able to determine, The Prairie Wife last saw print in The Prairie Omnibus (Grosset & Dunlap, 1950), in which it is paired with The Prairie Mother

Used copies of The Prairie Wife can be purchased online for as little as US$8.95.

26 December 2021

The Very Best Reads of the Second Plague Year


This annus horribilis draws to a close – thank God – meaning the time has come to recap the last twelve months of reading old books. I tackled a bunch, twenty-one of which were reviewed here and in the pages of Canadian Notes & Queries. I'm counting Arthur Stringer's 1936 novel The Wife Traders and its British reworking, Tooloona, as two.

Fight me.

They're two different books... and having slogged my way through both, I've earned it.

Stringer proved to be this year's most read author, though I'm at a loss to explain why. I read four books by this son of Chatham, which is more than the previous seven years combined. The majority were pretty awful, but one made it onto my annual list of the three out-of-print reads most deserving a return to print:

Ted Allan
Toronto: McClelland &
   Stewart, 1977

Forget The Scalpel, the Sword,  this is the Ted Allan book you want to read. And yes, I'll again point out the wonderful Quentin Blake illustrations.

Get it while you can, then share it with the children in your life.

The Shadow
Arthur Stringer
New York: Century, 1913


Better known under the later (superior) title Never-Fail Blake, this story of one man's relentless drive to bring another to justice was one of Stringer's most reprinted thrillers. Today, it is all but forgotten. It doesn't deserve that fate.


Poldrate Street
Garnett Weston
New York: Messner, 1944


This was the second Weston novel read this past summer. Where the first, The Legacy of Fear, disappointed, Poldrate Street entertained as the year's most unpleasant, stomach-turning read. Voyeurism, adultery, greed, murder, and something approaching necrophilia figure. No disappointment here!


Three of the books I reviewed this year are currently in print:

Dear Departed stands out as a relatively new book. The first true collection of Brian Moore short stories, it features writing that originally appeared between 1956 and 1961. Dear Departed was published just last year by Belfast's Turnpike Books, but went almost unnoticed in the author's adopted land. The only review I've seen or heard is Randy Boyagoda's on The Next Chapter

Having been elevated in 2012, Grant Allen's An African Millionaire (1897) holds certain distinction as a Penguin Classic. Much as I like the novel, I wonder why. The Woman Who Did is a much better, more interesting, more enduring, and more culturally significant work.

Never mind.

Give An African Millionaire a read, but if you want Allen at his best I recommend The Woman Who DidThe Devil's DieFor Mamie's Sake, Michael's Crag, Under Sealed Orders, Hilda Wade, What's Bred in the Bone or The British Barbarians.

Brash Books is in the process of returning every Tom Ardies novel to print. The author's second, This Suitcase is Going to Explode (1972) has the defeated hero of the first, Charlie Sparrow, pick himself up to save us all. The third and final Sparrow novel is titled Pandemic (1973), in which he saves us from same.

 At least, I think he does.

Praise this year goes again to Stark House (first recognized in 2012) for its continued dedication to the work of Douglas Sanderson (aka Martin Brett, aka Malcolm Douglas). This year, the publisher put one foot outside its usual crime territory in publishing Dark Passions Subdue, which I reviewed here ten years ago. Sanderson's debut novel, it concerns a male McGill student's attraction to another man.

Dark Passions Subdue was first published in 1952 by Dodd, Mead. The next year, Avon brought it out as a mass market paperback. The McGill University Library does not have a copy of either edition. Now's its chance.

I was involved in the reissue of only one novel this year. Due to production matters, it's been pushed into next. Here's something to look forward to in the New Year:

Resolutions? I have a few:
  • I will focus more on francophone writers;
  • I will review more non-fiction;
  • I will keep kicking against the pricks.
Here's to a better New Year!

Bonne année!

Related posts:

The Very Best Reads of a Plague Year (2020)
The Very Best Reads of a Very Strange Year (2019)
Best Books of 2018 (none of which are from 2018)
The Year's Best Books in Review - A.D. 2017
The Year's Best Books in Review - A.D. 2016
The Year's Best Books in Review - A.D. 2015
The Christmas Offering of Books - 1914 and 2014
A Last Minute Gift Slogan, "Give Books" (2013)
Grumbles About Gumble & Praise for Stark House (2012)
The Highest Compliments of the Season (2011)
A 75-Year-Old Virgin and Others I Acquired (2010)
Books are Best (2009)

Arthur Stringer Unshackled (then bowdlerized)
Little Willie, Willie Won't Go Home
A Shadow Moves Through a Showy Underworld
The Dead of a Dead End Street
Fumbling Towards Legacy
Shorter Moore
Starting on on Grant Allen: A Top Ten
Getting to Know The Woman Who Did
A Nineteenth Century What's Bred in the Bone
Grant Allen Tells Us Like It Is
Criminal Notes & Queries
Have Bomb – Will Travel
The Jacket, the Dressing Gown and the Closet

01 December 2021

The 1921 Globe 100 206: Don't Mention the War


The Globe, 3 December 1921
The 1921 edition of 'Recent Books and the Outlook,' the Globe's annual list of best books, begins on a positive note: "Author's and publishers have had an unhappy experience during the past few years owing to conditions which they could not control, but the current season has a distinctly better tone."

The Great War must surely have ranked as the preeminent condition. There were years in which the conflict came close to dominating 'Recent Books and the Outlook.' The 1920 edition had an entire section devoted to books about the war:


Not only is the Great War barely mentioned in the 1921 'Recent Books and the Outlook,' just three of its 206 books are related to the bloodshed just twenty-four months past. Great War poetry disappears entirely... and with it poetry. I exaggerate, but only slightly. Eight volumes of verse are listed, down from nineteen the previous year; four are Canadian:
My Pocket Beryl - Mary Josephine Benson
Later Poems - Bliss Carman
Bill Boram: A Ballad - Robert Norwood
Beauty and Life - Duncan Campbell Scott
I'm not familiar with any of these titles, but have read and reviewed Robert Service's 1921 Ballads of a Bohemian. To this point, the Bard of the Yukon had been a 'Recent Books and the Outlook' favourite;' I'd thought Ballads of a Bohemian a shoo-in. Is Bill Boram: A Ballad so much better? I must investigate.

As in years past, fiction makes up the biggest category; their number is seventy-two, the star being If Winter Comes by A.S.M. Hutchinson:


Hutchinson's achievement aside, the Globe is disappointed by foreign offerings:
Fiction in other countries has been disappointing during the last year, and has certainly not proved as rich as biography or history. American readers fall into two classes says the New York Times Book Review, those who like John Dos Passos' "The Three Soldiers" and those who do not.
The correct title is Three Soldiers.

It doesn't make the list.

My copy
(New York: Doran, 1921)
Where foreign writers of fiction disappoint, Canadians flourish. A record twenty-four Canadian fiction titles figure. Or is it twenty-three? Twenty-two?
The Lone Trail - Luke Allan
Anne of the Marshland - Lady Byng
Barriers - Lady Byng
To Him That Hath - Ralph Connor
The Lobstick Trail - Douglas Durkin
The Gift of the Gods - Pearl Foley
Red Meekins - W.A. Fraser
Maria Chapdelaine - Louis Hemon [trans W.H. Blake]
Maria Chapdelaine - Louis Hemon [trans Andrew Macphail]
The Quest of Alistair - Robert A. Hood
The Hickory Stick - Nina Moore Jamieson
Little Miss Melody - Marian Keith
The Conquest of Fear - Basil King
Partner of Chance - H.H. Knibbs
The Snowshoe Trail - Edison Marshall
Purple Springs - Nellie McClung
Rilla of Ingleside - L.M. Montgomery
Are All Men Alike? - Arthur Stringer
The Spoilers of the Valley - Robert Watson
Let's ignore the misspelling of Isabel Ecclestone Mackay's surname, shall we. Louis Hémon's, too. Interesting to see both Maria Chapdelaine translations, don't you think? What really intrigues is the inclusion of Basil King's The Conquest of Fear.


As my 1942 World Library edition (above) suggests, The Conquest of Fear is a work of philosophy. The Globe describes it at a novel:


The inclusion of Arthur Stringer's Are All Men Alike? is just as intriguing. The author published two books in 1921, the other being his heart-breaking roman à clef The Wine of Life. By far the finest Stringer I've read thus far, my dream is to one day bring out an edition featuring the twenty-four James Montgomery Flagg illustrations it inspired.

My collection of the Globe's 1921 Canadian "fiction" titles
Is Are All Men Alike? superior to The Wine of Life?

I haven't read it, nor have I read Jess of the Rebel Trail or Little Miss Melody. I have read Miriam of Queen's and The Window Gazer, both of which disappointed. The Empty Sack is my very favourite Basil King title, and yet it too pales beside The Wine of Life.

Or is it better? Are they all better?

What do I know? I think Three Soldiers is the best novel of 1921.

Yes, I'm one of those who like it.

12 October 2021

A Shadow Moves Through a Shadowy Underworld




The Shadow
Arthur Stringer
New York: Century, 1913
302 pages

Time was when Jim Blake could pass unnoticed through the seedier side of New York. He'd hobnob with dips, yeggs, till-tappers, and red-lighters. Blake befriended ticket snips, queer shovers, hotel beats, bank sneaks, keister-crackers, dummy chuckers, sun gazers and schlaum workers. He studied their routines, their tricks, their hang-outs, their histories, and got to know the Tammany heelers, "the men with 'pull,' the lads who were to be 'pounded' and the lads who were to be let alone, the men in touch with the 'Senator,' and the gangs with the fall money always at hand."

All this was when he was a Secret Service man with the Bureau of Printing and Engraving. That job ended – rather he ended it – when the press began reporting on his exploits. Blake pretended that he wasn't encouraging the coverage, but his higher-ups at the Bureau were no dummies.

Good thing he'd made those connections at Tammany Hall.

Blake left the Secret Service to become Third Deputy Commissioner in the New York Police Department. His fame increased. There were newspaper features, magazine pieces, and even a Broadway play based on his exploits. Blake never forgot standing, in private box, to acknowledge the applause of an admiring audience.

But this is all backstory. Years have passed, times have changed.

The early pages of the The Shadow find our protagonist in decline. Not long after joining the NYPD, Blake was elevated to Second Deputy Commissioner, but there his career stalled. He'd known to throw in his lot with the Tammany crowd, but that was the extent of his political savvy. Younger members of the force have come to see Blake and his crude methods as relics from an earlier time. He's even been put down by a cop on the beat:
"You call yourself a gun! A gun! why, you’re only a park gun! That’s all you are, a broken-down bluff, an ornamental has-been, a park gun for kids to play ’round!"

The Cavalier, 21 September 1912
Stringer encourages the reader to share this impression with an opening scene in which an exhausted Blake summons a former lover, Elsie Verriner (a/k/a Chaddy Cravath; a/k/a Charlotte Carruthers). Years earlier, Blake had picked her up as an accomplice of con man and bank thief Connie Binhart. Elsie had pleaded that she'd change her ways. Blake had been taken in by her pretty eyes, protected her from the law, had fallen in love, and had gone so far as to propose. Elsie was reluctant, Blake pressed, and then she returned to Connie Binhart.

Never-Fail-Blake (New York: McKinlay, Stone & MacKenzie, [c. 1928])
Again, this was years ago, which is not to say that all is forgiven or forgotten. Blake comes down hard on Elsie, demanding that she tell him just where her old partner in crime has been hiding. The last seven months have seen Binhart chloroform a woman, shoot a bank detective, and make off with $180,000. The Commissioner is under pressure to capture the crook. When Copeland, the First Deputy, fails, Blake steps up, seeing the capture of Binhart as a means of reestablishing his old reputation. Under threat of arrest for an unrelated crime, Elsie hands over a letter Binhart has written from Montreal.

Blake makes for Montreal, only to learn that the crook has decamped for Winnipeg. At Winnipeg, he's told that Binhart is on his way to Calgary. No dummy, Blake realizes he's been set up for failure, most likely by Copeland. Because returning to New York would only add to his humiliation, Blake takes a train to Chicago, where he begins his own inquiries into Binhart's whereabouts. It's here that the chase really begins, taking the Second Deputy through the more seedier locales of the United States, Brazil, Central America, and the Far East. 

The Shadow follows The Wife Traders (1937) and The Devastator (1945) as the third Stringer read this year. I'm glad I gave it a go. While those disappointed, The Shadow proved entertaining, imaginative, exciting, and highly atmospheric. If nothing else, read Chapter XIII, set on a ship running guns to Ecuador. This is Stringer at the height of his talent.

Anyone with an interest in the criminal underworld and its slang will enjoy, though I do warn that racial epithets feature. I admired Stringer's disregard of convention. Blake's life will be saved by a sexy female assassin in Shanghai. Elsie will reappear – reformed – as an agent for the Treasury Department. Both disappear well before the happy ending.

No women feature.

Were you expecting a love story?

Trivia: The return address on Binhart's letter is 381 King Edward Avenue, Westmount. Part of the plant is that the letter was posted from Montreal's King Edward Hotel, not King Edward Avenue. Neither avenue nor hotel exist outside the pages of the novel.

Object: A bulky hardcover purchased earlier this year from the Princeton Antiques Bookshop. Price: US20.00 (w/ a further US$25.00 for shipping). Much as I'm happy to add it to my library, how is this right?

Access: There was a Bell & Cockburn edition, but I've never seen it. While I've yet to find evidence that the Century edition of The Shadow enjoyed a second printing, in terms of sales this novel looks to be one of Stringer's most successful. It first appeared in a shorter version in the pages of Cavalier (September 21 - October 12, 1912). Century's first American edition followed in January 1913. Nine years later, cheapo publisher A.L. Burt reissued the novel under the superior title Never-Fail Blake. It last appeared under that same title as part of a set of Stringer novels, "Supertales [sic] of Modern Mystery," published in the late 'twenties by McKinlay, Stone & MacKenzie.

As I write, two copies of the Century edition are being offered online. Neither is in wonderful condition, but they seem worth the $20 asking price. Copies of Never-Fail-Blake are best ignored. I don't imagine anyone is tempted by this:


The Shadow is held by Library and Archives Canada and is fairly common in our university libraries. Curiously, the Canadian War Museum, the Institut National de la recherche scientifique and École nationale d'administration publique also have copies. What's that about?

Public library users will find that only the Toronto Public Library serves.

The Shadow can be read online – gratis – through the Internet Archive and Project Gutenberg. 

01 May 2021

Stringer's Swan Song



The Devastator
Arthur Stringer
Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1944
198 pages

Arthur Stringer's first novel, 1903's The Silver Poppy, concerns a young woman named Cordelia Vaughan who passes off a manuscript left by a dead man as her own. When published, the stolen work tops the bestseller lists, and its supposed authoress becomes the toast of Manhattan The narrator of The Silver Poppy, English poet John Hartley, discovers Cordelia's fraud, but is too much of a gentleman to destroy her life.

The Silver Poppy was one of my favourite reads of 2019.

I thought of The Silver Poppy often when reading The Devastator, Arthur Stringer's final novel. It too features a male narrator who becomes enmeshed in the life of a seemingly successful female novelist. This time out, the novelist is authentic.

It's narrator, Paul Ruxton, is not an aspiring writer, rather a New York attorney who'd once handled a copyright infringement case for London publishers Dearness & Dengate. Some time has passed, and now Mr Dengate has asked Ruxton to assist Sibyl Sencourt, one of D&D's more lucrative authors, as she disembarks for a new life in the New World. Ruxton acquiesces, waiting three hours on a windy Hudson River wharf. The reader is meant to understand that the lawyer's patience has much to do with Miss Sencourt's most recent novel, The Night of Denial, which he's found "sufficiently interesting, with its frankness and phrasing and its rather manlike sturdiness in exploring the timeworn paths of illicit passion."

Sibyl Sencourt is not quite the woman Ruxton was expecting; petite and practical, there's a whiff of tweed about her. In the months following their meeting on the wharf, they share nothing more than two unmemorable lunches, which accounts for Ruxton's initial surprise by Sibyl's request that he accompany her to a New Year's Eve celebration. Things soon become clear:
What she wanted, she explained, was a first-hand picture of that bacchanalian American evening in one of New York's most bacchanalian hotels. And if I would shepherd her through that night of tumult she'd expect, in the circumstances, to pay all costs.
On the evening in question ‐ 31 December 1939 ‐ the attorney is gobsmacked when Sibyl appears made-up and dressed-up in a low-cut gown. She's definitely on the prowl, but only for material. "It was more ink than wine we spilled that night," Ruxton reports, noting that his date spent the evening observing others, often removing a fountain pen and pad from her clutch in order to jot down a sentence or two.

The authoress's investment in a New York New Year's Eve pays off when a highly-spirited man commands the attention of a neighbouring table. He's Leo Ortell, a handsome, charismatic, self-absorbed, showy, dimwitted Hollywood actor who just happens to be one of Ruxton's clients. In the recent past, the attorney has had to "untangle him from a couple of petticoats." Sibyl is intrigued, seeing in Ortell the inspiration for her next novel, and so follows the actor west by taking a job in Hollywood. Months pass. Ruxton hears nothing from Sibyl until she reappears in New York for a Book-of-the-Hour Club launch. There she tells Ruxton that she must get closer to Ortell to write her novel, and so is set on marrying the actor. "You mean," says the attorney, "that you want to carry the watch home and take it to pieces and find out just what makes it tick."

The first of many weak points in this novel comes in that marriage. Setting aside his history as a philanderer, Ortell had always maintained that matrimony would hurt his box office appeal. How Sibyl manages to land the actor is unexplained, as is the subsequent revelation that she's fallen in love with her new husband. One of the strengths of the The Devastator is what happens next. In keeping with his past, Ortell quits Sibyl for Dorinda Perraton, a supple bathing beauty and aquatic queen he'd met on the set of his most recent film. But Dorinda proves unstable, causing scenes at the Mocambo Club and at the Trocadaro... and then she leaves him. 

The Mocambo Club in 1941, the year in which it opened.
That a woman gives up on Ortell ‐ and not vice versa ‐ should mean something, but Stringer doesn't make much of it; his focus is in reuniting the actor and his writer wife. Ruxton performs as unenthusiastic go-between in bringing estranged couple together: "no particular credit attaches to the agent who reunites two individuals already hungering for union."

Ruxton invites both to his home, then pretends that he's been called away. Returning two hours later, he finds a reconciled couple given to gush. Before long, Ortell begins going on about Sybil's stalled work in progress: 
"It's a wonderful book, Ruxton... And it's going to top everything Sibyl's already done."
     "What's it about?" I was foolish enough to ask.
     "It's about a two-legged vampire who feeds on the flesh of every friend he ever had. You understand ‐ a character study. He thinks he'd a mental wonder, while all the time masquerading as a moron ‐ just a shop window if you get what I mean."
     I proffered the opinion that it wasn't easy to make morons interesting.
     "But that's where Sibyl's a wonder, maintained her husband. "She turns him inside out and makes him so real you carry away the feeling he must have lived in the next block to you."
     I still wonder why some spirit of perversity should have prompted me to question: "Then who's the model?"
     I caught Sibyl's imploring look, and catching it, was glad Ortell had not seen it.
     She had none," he triumphantly proclaimed. "The bounder came out of her head. But I can't understand why she doesn't get busy and wind things up."
This is going to get good, right? Having fallen in love with Ortell, how can Sibyl finish her novel? Does she even want to finish her novel? If she does, will the reading public recognize what her actor husband doesn't ‐ that Ortell is the moron's model?

Sadly, just as The Devastator looks about to take flight, it takes an unexpected turn, skids about, and comes to a choking halt.

Against character, Ortell decides to join the war effort. Older than the average serviceman, the actor is rejected by the Air Force, the Navy, and the Army, but is somehow accepted in the Marines, becoming a member of the 1st Battalion, otherwise known as Edson's Raiders.

Here I note that the author's son, Hugh Arthur "Barney" Stringer (1919-2002), served as one of the Raiders. In fact, The Devastator is dedicated to the man:


Barney Stringer's all-too-brief obituary is well worth reading, but not The Devastator. In the novel's second half, focus shifts to Ortell's own engagements in the Solomons, where he proves himself a hero and leader of men. The transformation from egoist to self-sacrificing altruist is not convincing. Pages devoted to praising Major General Merritt Austin Edson, Sr, under whom the author's son was then serving, are out of place. Still, what struck this reader as most incongruous where four pages of aphorisms drawn from Sibyl Sencourt's novels.

They're not bad ‐ "Genius seems to be the faculty of having faith in everything, and especially one's self," for example ‐  though one wonders why they go on and on and on. My theory is that, at age seventy, Stringer saw The Devastator as perhaps his last opportunity to set in print pithy notes he'd made but had never used.

I may be wrong.

Either way, would that I had his stamina!

I admire Arthur Stringer's industry.

I always have.


Trivia: In The Silver Poppy, plagiarist Cordelia Vaughan is likened to a vampire for the way she exploits others. The same description is used twice in The Devastator, one of which is quoted above. The earlier occurs when Ruxton questions Sibyl's decision to marry the model of her novel: "'I'm not exactly a vampire," she protested, "I think I can give Leo something that he needs.'"

Object: Cheap wartime paper bound in blue boards. My copy was purchased last year from a bookseller in Chatham, the Ontario town in which Arthur Stringer was born. Price: US$21.59. It's inscribed, signed, and dated by the author.


The rear dust jacket lists thirteen recent Bobbs-Merril titles, the most famous being The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand.

Access:
Library and Archives Canada has a copy, as does the Toronto Public Library, the London Public Library, the Chatham-Kent Public Library, the Vancouver Public Library, and eleven of our universities.

Only one copy is currently listed for sale online. Price: US$23.00 (w/ US$30.00 shipping!). A library discard, sans dust jacket, it is not recommended. Give it a pass. You can do better.