The Dusty Bookcase

15 January 2025

The Weird Covers of Wes Beattie

Two weeks into 2025 and I'm only now starting in on my first novel of the New Year... and so late in the day!

I've wanted to read The Weird World of Wes Beattie for some time, but forays through the used bookstores of Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia brought frustration. Exhausted from the chase, I resorted to online booksellers, which explains how it is I ended up with a copy of the Harper & Row first American edition purchased from a bookseller in New South Wales.

It took longer than expected to arrive.

I like to "follow the flag" – The Weird World of Wes Beattie was published in 1963 by Macmillan in Canada – but the expense could not be justified. A rare book, the Canadian first edition was a split run with the American Harper & Row. Publisher names aside, it is pretty much identical, the only other exception being the price. Harper & Row's front flap lists the price as US$3.95, while the Macmillan is not so base as to mention cost. For the record, the Canadian price was $4.95.

From what I've read so far, it was a bargain either way.

Both the Macmillan and Harper & Row editions share the same James Kirby jacket illustration (above). Does it not suggest whimsy?

I ask because the Faber & Faber's first British edition strikes a very different tone:

The illustration used in the 13 October 1963 Star Weekly condensed version looks like something from a storyboard of Silence of the Lambs:

In 1966, Corgi published a mass market edition with prominent quote from the Scotsman review:

It's a challenge to make out, and so I quote:

A novel of suspense with all the ingredients of a Hitchcock thriller... A new talent in detective writing... if Harris can keep this up, Gardner has a formidable rival.

Sadly, tragically, in 1966 Harris was in no position to "keep this up;" he'd died in 1964, not twelve months after The Weird World of Wes Beattie arrived in bookstores.

The Corgi cover suggests something sophisticated along the lines of Ocean's Eleven. To this reader, it appears incongruous, but then I'm only a few chapters into the novel. The Canadian Popular Library edition, published the same year, is gritty as all get out:

Nothing whimsical here.

SOON BE A MAJOR MOVIE?

How soon is now?

Two translations followed in the heels of the novel's first publication, the earliest being Un monde farfelu, which came out in 1964 from Gallimard as part of its Séries noire.

This was followed by a Spanish translation titled El fantástico mundo de Wes (Barcelona: Malina, 1965). It's cover illustration with tortured soul is the bleakest by far.

The Weird World of Wes Beattie is in print today thanks to the good folks at New York publishers Felony and Mayhem. The covers they've used to date are more in line with James Kirby's original, though I have a bone to pick with the claim that it is "The First Truly CANADIAN Mystery."

Is The Weird World of Wes Beattie whimsical, sinister, sophisticated... bleak?

I'll let you know next Monday.

02 January 2025

The Nine Best Canadian Novels of the 1920s

In my twenties, the 'twenties – by which I mean the 1920s – seemed the height of art, film, decadence, glamour, and romance.

I'm not sure I was wrong.

The decade also saw the the height of the novel, though perhaps not in Canada. My CanLit profs assigned works by Mazo de la Roche, Frederick Philip Grove and Martha Ostenso. How they paled beside Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Forster, Hemingway, Joyce, Wharton, and Woolf! But then, what might one expect from a country of a mere nine million?

Time has passed, during which I've come to recognize that the keepers of the canon have messed up in so very many ways.

As we're now half-way through the 2020s, I present this list of the nine best Canadian novels of the 1920s. Not one of the authors received so much as a passing mention in my CanLit courses.

By no means definitive, I've limited the list to nine titles because I've yet to read Douglas Durkin's The Magpie (1923) and They Have Bodies (1929) by Barney Allen (Sol Allen). From what I know of the two, it's likely that at least one would round out a top ten. I'll be making a point of reading both this year and will keep you informed. But for now:

The Thread of Flame
Basil King
New York: Harper, 1920

In the aughts and tens of the last century, King topped American bestseller lists with The Inner Shrine, The Wild Olive, and The Street Called Straight, though his two best books date from the twenties. This one involves a man who lost his memory whilst fighting in the Great War, but don't let that put you off.

The Empty Sack
Basil King
New York: Harper, 1921

The best King novel of the nine I've read, this involves the Folletts, transplanted Nova Scotians living comfortably in New York City until the aging patriarch is let go by his employer. The drama that unfolds has less to do with the economic devastation than it does the struggles in adapting to a post-Great War world.

The Wine of Life
Arthur Stringer
New York: Knopf, 1921

In his time, Stringer was dismissed as a writer with an eye on the market. This work, an outlier, was inspired by his ill-fated marriage to statuesque Gibson Girl Jobyna Howland. It's Stringer's most literary novel as evidenced by the fact that it was rejected by his usual publisher Bobbs-Merrill only to be picked up by Alfred Knopf.

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

A novel about a veteran of the Great War written by a man who never served, The Hidden Places can seem absurd at times, and relies too much on coincidence, but it is interesting for its damning indictment of the treatment of men who returned from the conflict scared and disfigured.

Pagan Love
John Murray Gibbon
Toronto: McClelland &

Stewart, 1922

The most cutting Canadian novel of the decade, it has three targets: the self-help industry, corporate culture, and gender norms. Criticisms of the first two bring insight, but that of the last makes Pagan Love one of the most intriguing Canadian novels of the twentieth century.

"Cattle"
Winnifred Eaton
New York: Watt, 1924

A late career novel written by a Montrealer of Chinese and English parents who'd achieved fame by passing herself off as a Japanese princess. Eaton's final years were spent on an Alberta ranch belonging to her husband, inspiring this violent, disturbing novel set in cattle country.

The Land of Afternoon
Gilbert Knox [Madge

Macbeth]
Ottawa: Graphic, 1924

Scandalous in its day, something of a head-scratcher in ours, The Land of Afternoon provides further evidence that romans à clef tend to age poorly. There are biting satirical sketches, but who are the models? Even then, I expect few outside Ottawa had a clue.

Blencarrow
Isabel MacKay
Toronto: Allen, 1926

The last novel from a writer who never shied away from unpleasant topics: drug addiction, child abduction, worker exploitation, racism, mental illness. Domestic abuse and its effect on a wife and daughters permeate this one, yet it is not a message novel.

All Else Is Folly: A Tale of

War and Passion
Peregrine Acland
Toronto: McClelland &

Stewart, 1929

The great Canadian novel of the Great War. Written by one who was there, it is highly autobiographical and would've been banned had the author's father not been so well connected. Praised by Ford Maddox Ford and Frank Harris.

A century later, two are in print. They were not when I first read them. In fact, all nine had been out of print since the early 'thirties. Ten years ago, I played a part in reviving All Else is Folly as part of Dundurn's Voyageur Classics series.

Winnifred Eaton's "Cattle" was reissued in 2023 by Invisible Publishing. It was reviewed at the Dusty Bookcase here back in 2014.

If given the opportunity to bring another back, I'd chose John Murray Gibbon's Pagan Love. It is the most remarkable, unconventional, and challenging Canadian novel of the decade.

Or is that They Have Bodies?

I aim to find out.

A Very Canadian Succès de scandale

The Promise of a Man, a Mother in So Much Pain

Alec Falcon, c'est moi

01 January 2025

'Premier janvier' by Jean Bruchési

New Year's verse by Jean Bruchési from Coups d'ailes (Montreal: Bibliothèque de l'Action française, 1922)

PREMIER JANVIER

Comme un vase dont le cristal s'est émietté
Sous la main qui venait y déposer des roses,
Un an est disparu, brutalement jeté
Au gouffre où vont mourir toutes les vieilles choses.

Il n'est plus, sauf peut-être où vit le souvenir.
Il n'est plus. Oh! pourquoi faut-il donc que tout meure?
Pourquoi sur le passé reposer l'avenir?
Pourquoi vivre et lutter, puisque rien ne demeure?

Pourquoi? C'est que la vie émerge de la mort!
C'est que par le passé doit s'écrire l'histoire,
Et c'est que la richesse est faite de l'effort
Journalier, sans lequel il n'est pas de victoire!

C'est qu'il n'est point d'amour qu'il ne soit de douleur,
Qu'un plus doux parfum vient de la rose fanée,
Que l'âme se retrempe aux sources du malheur,
Et c'est qu'à Tan détruit succède une autre année!

Bonne Année! Happy New Year!

'A January Morning' by Archibald Lampman

Agnes Maule Machar's New Year's Wish (& mine)

'The New Year comes white-winged, unstained, a star...'

A Poet Laureate's 'Prayer for the New Year'
Decades-Old Verse for the New Year by E.J. Pratt

Temperance Verse for New Year's Day

An Old Poem for the New Year by Arthur Stringer

Immature Verse for the New Year

A New Year

26 December 2024

The Very Best Reads of 2024: Hilliard's Hat-Trick

With five days left in 2024, there's little chance I'll read and review another neglected book before the calendar turns... and so, the summary!

This was an unusual year for the Dusty Bookcase in that nearly half the books covered – twelve of the twenty-five – were published over a century ago. I don't know that I've reached half that number in the past. This years titles span 173 years, from Major John Richardson's Hardscrabble; Or, The Fall of Chicago (1850) to Richardson biographer David Richard Beasley's Canadian Authors You Should Know (2023). The former is the earliest paperback in my collection; Mark Breslin's Son of a Meech: The Best Brian Mulroney Jokes (1991), also read this year, is the ugliest in both appearance and content.

The best-looking book I've read in the past twelve months is the 1875 Lee & Sheppard edition of The Lily and the Cross by James De Mille. Coincidentally, De Mille's A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder was the most beautiful read last year.

To tweak the early Chapters slogan, great looks are just the beginning. The Dusty Bookcase has always been more about content than appearance. I write this, despite the near certainty that the jackets for this year's list of the three books most deserving of reissue were illustrated by the author herself:

The Jameson Girls
Jan Hilliard
[Hilda Kay Grant]
Toronto: Nelson, Foster &

Scott, 1956

The first of Nova Scotian's books to be set in Ontario, this one concerns four women brought together by the imminent death of their father, once a successful rumrunner. It's about them, not him.

Miranda
Jan Hilliard
[Hilda Kay Grant]
New York: Abelard-Schulman,

1960

This was the very best novel I read this year. The titular character is the focal point, though her story is told through her daughter Rose. An servant in London, in Canada Miranda tweaks her past and takes on airs, while Rose grows to see through it all.

Morgan's Castle
Jan Hilliard
[Hilda Kay Grant]
New York: Abelard-Schulman,

1964

Her fifth in ten years, this is the author's final novel. Though Hillard lived a further three decades, she wrote only three more books; all were non-fiction, all were published in the 'sixties.

Sadly, of all the books covered, only one is in print today:

Yellow-Wolf & Other Tales of the Saint Lawrence, Jane Brierley's Governor General's Award-winning 1990 translation of Philippe-Joseph Aubert de Gaspé's posthumous Divers (1893). Copies can be purchased directly from publisher Véhicule Press through this link.

I was tempted to include The Missing Chums (1928), the fourth Hardy Boys book penned by Ontario boy Leslie McFarlane, but that would've been cheating. The edition being flogged today was rewritten in 1962 by James Buechler. As I understand, all that's left of the original is the title.

This year, I was involved in the publication of only one book, the Ricochet rerelease of Sugar-Puss on Dorchester Street with new cover and revised introduction by Will Straw.

Next year will see a Ricochet reissue of a 1952 Canadian pulp novel that was deemed to spicy for the American market.

I'll say no more.

As for New Year's resolutions, I have but one. I resolve to read more humour. Given the racket from south of the border, I have a feeling I'll be in need of a good laugh every now and then.

As always, keep kicking against the pricks! Do Johnny Cash and John Metcalf proud.

Bonne année!

My Mistake in Reading Richardson

Of Known Knowns, Known Unknowns, Unknown Unknowns,
and David Richard Beasley

Too Soon?

Acadian Driftwood

As He Lay Dying

Growing up with Mother

A Nova Scotian Writes Ontario Gothic

Last Words of a Raconteur

Here's to Absent Chums

There's a New Sugar-Puss on Dorchester Street

25 December 2024

'Cloches de Noël' by Jean Bruchési

For the day, a poem by historian and diplomat Jean Bruchési from Coups d'ailes (Montreal: Bibliothèque de l'Action française, 1922), his only volume of verse.

CLOCHES DE NOËL

Cloches qui, dans la nuit, sonnez éperdument,
Carillons qui volez au-dessus des prairies,
Mêlez aux flocons blancs vos claires sonneries
Cloches qui, dans la nuit, sonnez éperdument.

Laissez tomber sur nous un peu de votre joie,
Emportez jusqu'aux cieux les désirs de nos coeurs;
Sans jamais mettre fin à vos accents vainqueurs,
Laissez tomber sur nous un peu de votre joie.

Chantez pour le vieillard et riez pour l'enfant,
A l'un donnez la force, à l'autre l'espérance;
Loin du pauvre qui pleure écartez la souffrance,
Chantez pour le vieillard et riez pour l'enfant.

Du Roi de Bethléhem, alertes messagères,
Vous annoncez partout la venue ici-bas.
En passant, répandez des roses sur Ses pas,
Du Roi de Bethléhem, alertes messagères.

O carillons d'airain, chantez: nous écoutons.
De cet Enfant qui nait, célébrez les louanges,
Et mêlez vos accords aux douces voix des anges;
O carillons d'airain, chantez: nous écoutons.

Elevez-vous là-haut, près des pâles étoiles,
Effleurez-les sans bruit de vos sons argentés,
Et revenez vers nous, pleines de leurs beautés...
Elevez-vous là-haut, près des pâles étoiles.

Chantez-nous la splendeur de cette grande nuit:
Parcourez sans arrêt les pays de la terre;
Redites à chacun le sublime mystère;
Chantez-nous la splendeur de cette grande nuit.

Sonnez, sonnez toujours, cloches de nos églises;
En nos coeurs déposez tous vos accents joyeux,
Et, demeurant pour nous la voix qui vient des cieux,
Sonnez, sonnez toujours, cloches de nos églises.