A Ross Macdonald Sunday Matinee Mystery – With Guest Appearence by Catherine O'Hara

It's been a remarkably cold winter, made more so by news Friday that Catherine O'Hara had died.

Apparently, she was seventy-one.

Who knew?

She was as convincing playing a pre-teen as she was an octogenarian.

 

Catherine O'Hara and other SCTV cast members had been on my mind of late due to an Olman's Fifty review of Kenneth Millar's The Three Roads. An early work – so early that it was written before he adopted his Ross Macdonald pseudonym – the novel had been adapted to film in 1980 as Deadly Companion. 

The result isn't terribly good, nor is it terribly bad. Deadly Companion is a prime example of Canadian film as it was at the time, cast included. Michael Sarrazin played the male lead, Susan Clark played the female lead, and then we have Kate Reid, Kenneth Welsh, Maury Chaykin, and Michael Ironside. What sets it apart is the inclusion of SCTV cast members.

Not only O'Hara, Candy, Flaherty, Levy, and Thomas, but the King of Kensington!

John Candy was awarded the film's only comedic role as a cocaine pushing inmate of a sanatorium. The other SCTV talents are wasted, particularly Eugene Levy, who is afforded a single line of dialogue. Hidden behind a decorative screen in a poorly lit bar, you'll have to have a good eye and ear to catch his performance. 

At nearly two minutes, Catherine O'Hara has the longest screen time as Judith, personal assistant to prominent architect Paula West (Susan Clark). It's a straightforward role, requiring her to act as... well, a personal assistant. Nothing more.

In The Three Roads, the Paula West character is a screenwriter named Paula Pangborn. The screenwriters of Deadly Companion, Thomas Hedley (Obsession, Flashdance) and Janis Allen (Meatballs, Meatballs III), made other changes. The most important involves Sarrazin's character Michael Taylor. In the novel, he is Bret Taylor, an American naval officer whose ship is destroyed during the Second World War. In Hedley and Allen's screenplay, Michael Taylor is a Toronto Star journalist who was kidnapped in the Middle East. He witnessed a colleague being shot in the head by his captors and then had had a gun held to his own head in a faux execution.

There are other differences. I read and reviewed The Three Roads eleven years ago and would be hard pressed to identify them all. The two things that strike early on are changes in time and location: sunny post-war Los Angeles for gloomy late-seventies Toronto winter. So much white! Even the interior scenes look cold.

Judge for yourself:

The IMDb rating is 4.0, which seems fair.

What is unfair is that it rates half a percent below Blue City, Hollywood's piece of crap 1986 adaptation of the Ross Macdonald novel of the same name.

There have been surprising few adaptations of Ross Macdonald novels. The best by far is Harper (1966), based on The Moving Target (1949). Written by William Goldman, it stars Paul Newman, Lauren Bacall, Julie Harris, Janet Leigh, and Shelly Winters, yet still falls short of being one for the ages.

In 2015, a few months after reading The Three Roads, Warner Brothers announced that it had optioned Macdonald's 1966 novel Black Money with Ethan and Joel Coen writing and perhaps directing!

I don't know where the project stands today. What I do know is that it won't feature Catherine O'Hara.

A damn shame.

Rest in peace, Lola Heatherton. I had such a crush on you.  

A query: In the closing credits, Catherine O'Hara is referred to as "Katherine O'Hara."

An error or an inside joke?

Related post:

Discovered Vile

The Jan Hilliard Ricochet

Let the revival begin!

I first read Jan Hilliard three years ago. The book was Dove Cottage, her third novel. It may not be the best place to start, but Dove Cottage is very good, so good that I purchased and read all her others.

Morgan's Castle was Jan Hilliard's most successful book saleswise. Published in 1964 by Abelard-Schuman, it received enthusiastic reviews. Anthony Boucher championed the novel in the pages of the New York Times. Unlike her other books, it enjoyed second, third, and fourth lives in mass market paperback.

Fifty years have passed since Morgan's Castle last hit drug store spinner racks.

It returns to print this week as the nineteenth Véhicule Press Ricochet Book.

As series editor, I'm proud to have played a part. In my opinion, Jan Hilliard stands with Phyllis Brett Young (whose 1962 thriller The Ravine was Ricochet #16) as the two most unjustly neglected Canadian authors of their generation.

Jan Hilliard (Hilda Kay Grant) in a 1973 Toronto Star profile.

This new edition, with introduction by yours truly, can by purchased at the very best bookstores, the usual online sources, and through this link to Véhicule Press. 

Related posts:

A Crooked Cousin in a Cunning Cottage

A Nova Scotian Writes Ontario Gothic
Nature as the Devil's Playground
Phyllis Brett Young's Ricochet

The Woman Who Didn't (and the Man Who Very Much Wanted To)

The Woman Who Didn't
Victoria Cross [Annie Sophie Cory]
London: Lane, 1909

159 pages

The narrator is a British soldier who is returning home on leave having served six years in India. He reclines in the aft of a large boat one dark Aden evening, smoking and listening with bemusement to his fellow countrymen squabble with local boatmen as to when payment should be made for services. 

"I should pay now; if you mean to at all," says someone from the stern. The voice is that of a woman. After further squabbling, she adds: "Well, I am going to pay mine, and I strongly advise you to, or we may lose our ship. What can it matter to you whether you pay now or afterwards."

Untitled engraving of Aden in 1885 credited to T. Taylor.

Slowly, the other passengers open their wallets. The boatmen bring them to the awaiting vessel and its long ladder. Our narrator stays back because he's curious about the woman who stood so resolute.

Eventually, she appears out of the darkness. Petite, fetching, and young, her name is Eurydice: 

"It’s an awfully pretty name!"

   "Not with the surname,’ she answered, laughing. "Eurydice Williamson! Isn't it a frightful combination!"

   "I don’t think so," I maintained unblushingly, though the seven syllables in conjunction positively set my teeth on edge.

Together, they enjoy a stroll around the deck, made all the more pleasant through conversation. All in all, the beginning of what? A friendship? A romance? Both seem possible until our soldier narrator leans in for a kiss outside her cabin door. Eurydice avoids his lips, hitting the back of her head in the process. She strikes his chest, then shuts him outside.

Evelyn – the soldier's name is Evelyn – makes his very best apology the following day and is taken aback by Eurydice's forgiveness. The remaining days of the voyage toward England's green and pleasant shores are spent in conversation. The soldier is smitten. On the final day, just as he begins to lay bare his soul, Evelyn is met with an unwelcome discovery: Eurydice is a married woman!"

In grand Victorian tradition, the reader is met with a misunderstanding. Eurydice had lost her wedding ring during an unfortunate handwashing incident. Did Evelyn not read the ship's passenger list! Eurydice shares that she's wed to a man who is unfaithful. Her husband's dalliances began the month after their marriage, and yet she maintains her vows.  

The news strikes hard. Despite his many faults, Evelyn has drawn a line at pursuing married women. He and faithful Eurydice – again, did he not read the passenger list? – choose to never see one another again.

Being somewhat familiar with Victorian  literature, I was fairly certain where this would land. Evelyn would keep his distance until Eurydice's degenerate husband's lifestyle did him in. It wouldn't be long.

I was wrong. 

The Woman Who Didn't is a simple, commonplace story with an unconventional ending that I promise not to spoil.

From the beginning, The Woman Who Didn't (1895) has been paired with our own Grant Allen's The Woman Who Did (also 1895). It is most certainly not an offspring; title aside, I would argue that it is of no relation at all. 

Much has been made about the two these past few decades. In The Cambridge Guide to Women's Writing in English (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999), Lorna Sage describes The Woman Who Didn't as "a deliberate response to The Woman Who Did." Kathryn G. Lamontagne goes further in Reconsidering Catholic Lay Womanhood (New York: Routledge, 2024): "Victoria Cross's The Woman Who Didn't (1895) was written in angered response [emphasis mine] to Allen's work which scandalized contemporary society."

Was it? 

Contemporary accounts suggest otherwise. In the mid-July 1895, two months before The Woman Who Didn't was published, Arthur Waugh submitted this to The Critic:

I suggest that the title The Woman Who Didn't has everything to do with publisher John Lane seizing an opportunity to cash in even further on The Woman Who Did, his firm's new succès de scandale. 

The Woman Who Did is the story of Herminia Barton, a young, educated clergyman's daughter who falls in love with successful lawyer Allan Merrick. Despite the depth of this love, Herminia rejects his proposal because she does not believe in marriage. She convinces her lover that they should simply live together, outside the "unholy sacrifices" matrimony has sustained. But then Allan dies, leaving behind a pregnant Herminia.

What Herminia "did" – what she dared do – was raise the child, a daughter, at a time when she would have been expected to give it up for adoption. You see, the title is not nearly as titillating as it would seem.

The Woman Who Didn't concerns a woman who very much believes in marriage, so much so that she is willing to endure an unfaithful husband. And so, Eurydice and Evelyn face separate futures, each made more unhappy for having ever met.

In what way is that an "angered response" to The Woman Who Did? How is it a response at all?

Annie Sophie Cory [Victoria Cross]
1868 - 1952
RIP

The claim is made all the more absurd when one considers the author's other works. In January of the same year, 'Theodora: A Fragment,' her first published work of fiction, was published in The Yellow Book.

As the title suggests, it was written as part of a longer work. Though complete, it wouldn't be published until 1903 under the title Six Chapters of a Man's Life. It revolves around an unmarried couple, Cecil and Theodora. Well matched, they share interests in art, literature, spiritualism and sex. It is more than hinted that Cecil has had homosexual encounters in the past. His attraction to Theodora has much to do with her "hermaphroditism of looks."

Annie Sophie Cory's twenty-six novels and short story collections are replete with positive depictions of extramarital sex, so what exactly would have provoked a response, angry or otherwise, to Allen's novel? If anything Cory, who never married, is more likely to have agreed with Herminia Barton:

"I know what marriage is, from what vile slavery it has sprung; on what unseen horrors for my sister women it is reared and buttressed; by what unholy sacrifices it is sustained, and made possible. I know it has a history. I know its past, I know its present, and I can't embrace it; I can't be untrue to my most sacred beliefs."

The Woman Who Didn't ends just that way with Eurydice caring for her absent, philandering husband's mother, sacrificing the possibility of a better life with a man she loves, but found too late.

That said, I'm not convinced Evelyn is such a catch.

Trivia: Aboard ship, Evelyn hears a young woman singing "She told me her age was five-and-twenty!" It comes from 'At Trinity Church I Met My Doom':

Fun fact: The author's third novel, A Girl of the Klondike (1899), is set in and around Dawson at the time of the Gold Rush.

New York: Macauley, 1925

Object and Access: First published in the autumn of 1895 by John Lane. My 1909 edition, one the earliest paperbacks in my collection, was purchased in 2024 from a German bookseller. Price: €10.35.

When published it cost one shilling.

The front cover illustration depicts a scene that does not feature in the novel. It is almost certainly inspired by Evelyn's unwelcome attempt at a kiss the night he met Eurydice. This of course, should have taken place outside her cabin, not in it.

The back cover features adverts for three other John Lane books:

As I write, I see nothing but print on demand dreck being offered online.

I don't see that any Canadian library has a copy.

Related post:

Getting to Know the Woman Who Did

'To the New Year,' 'To the New Year,' and More

For the day, the very first poem in Mary Morgan's very first collection of verse, Poems and Translations (Montreal: J. Theo. Robinson, 1887).

The poem appears on page three. This features on page 51:

I wonder which came first. and whether there aren't more Mary Morgan poems titled 'To the New Year.'

Henry Morgan & Co., Montreal, 1890.

I've yet to find a third, but not for want of effort. Mary Morgan is a fascinating figure. Raised in privilege, she was a member of the Montreal department store dynasty. Miss Morgan intended to study medicine at McGill University only to be denied entry owing to her sex. According to Types of Canadian Women (Toronto: William Briggs, 1903), it was after this rejection that she "devoted herself entirely to literature."

Mary Morgan produced six more volumes of verse. Her last book, Glimpses Into the Letters of a Wanderer (London: Elkin Matthews, 1914) was an autobiography. I've never seen a copy. WorldCat tells me that the nearest volume is held by Oxford University, a touch over 5313 kilometers away. Cambridge also has a copy, as does the British Library.

I refuse to believe that the book isn't to be found outside England, and so ask Westmount friends to check the attics of their respective family homes. Let's see what we can do to flesh out Mary Morgan's Database of Canada's Early Women Writers entry this year.

Happy New Year! Bonne année!

Related posts:

'Premier Janvier' by Jean Bruchési

Unpleasant Verse for the New Year
'Welcoming the New Year' by Arthur Weir

'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

Ten Poems for National Poetry Month,

Number 10: 'April' by Mary Morgan

The Three Best Reads of 2025 (two are in print!)

An annus horribilis, wouldn't you say? Strange, too! Never thought I'd be flying the flag of Greenland from the porch of our Upper Canadian home. 

This has also been an unusual twelve months for the Dusty Bookcase in that two of this year's top three reads are actually in print!

Huzzah!

Douglas Durkin's 1930 novel Mr. Gumble Sits Up, reviewed here in 2012 so disappointed that a full thirteen years passed before I got around to The Magpie; this despite having been given a copy by a reader of this blog. He recommended it, suggesting it as the Great Canadian Post-Great War Novel. I think he's right.

First published in 1923 by Hodder & Stoughton, it's currently available here from Invisible Publishing.

Related to Durkin, quite literally, is future wife Martha Ostenso and her award-winning 1925 novel Wild Geese.

Was Durkin the co-author? Evidence more than suggests so.

Will we ever know the extent of his contribution? I expect so.

Do I want to get into it? No, I do not. 

Aging copies of the 2008 New Canadian Library edition are still available for purchase from Penguin Random House. The cover, an abomination, was clearly created by someone who knew nothing about the novel. Who signed off on it, I wonder.

Reuben Ship's The Investigator, a 1956 adaptation of his then-two-year-old radio play of the same name, rounds out the top three best reads. I enjoyed this book more than any other read this year. It made me laugh, and is as relevant a commentary on American politics as it was seven decades ago. 

If I could revive just one of the out-of-print books read this year, The Investigator would be it. However, tradition dictates I select another two books deserving a return to print. And so:

A case can be made for The Salt-Box, her Leacock award-winning 1951 debut, but I consider A View of the Town (1954) to be Jan Hilliard's first true novel. It concerns the approaching sesquicentenary of a Nova Scotia town and the rivalry between the heads of its founding families. The lightest of the novelist's five novels, should it also have won the Leacock? It was up against Joan Walker's Pardon My Parka, which I aim to read next year.

Will let you know.

Winnifred Eaton's second novel as "Onoto Watanna," and her second novel overall, A Japanese Nightingale (1901) was the Montreal author's big commercial breakthrough, I liked it a lot, and was surprised to find that it has not been caught up in the wave of things Eaton – Winnifred and sister Edith –  that has swept through academe these last few decades.

Returning to the in print, three more titles figure, beginning with The Weird World of Wes Beattie (1963), the first book read and reviewed this year.

Had it not been for the good folks at New York publishers Felony and Mayhem, this bit o' fun would've made it to the list of three books most deserving of a return to print. That said, I do wish F&M would stop pushing The Weird World of Wes Beattie as "The First Truly CANADIAN Mystery."

It's nowhere close.

Stephen Leacock's Arcadian Adventures of the Idle Rich (1914) is still in print. The fifteen-year-old copies New Canadian Library edition sitting in the Penguin Random House warehouse have a better cover than Wild Geese, but I recommend the Tecumseh Press Canadian Critical Edition edition edited by D.M.R. Bentley.

Finally, we have Charles G.D. Roberts' The Heart of the Ancient Wood (1900). This was was the most disappointing read of the year, but only because I remembered liking it so much as a young golden blonde university student. This old grizzled guy saw it quite differently.

The Heart of the Ancient Wood is in print today as part of the the Formac Fiction Treasures series.

The Investigator aside, it's no great shame that the rest are out of print. Robert G. Collin's Tolerable Levels of Violence (1983) was interesting for its depiction of a dystopian North America in which law and order has collapsed. It stands in stark contrast with Rev Hugh Pedley's Looking Forward (1913), which imagines a futuristic near-Utopian Canada brought about by the unification of most Christian denominations. Expo 67 obsessives – I'm one! – will want to hunt down copies of A Fair Affair (1967), Paul Champagne's lone novel.

Regrets? Well, I was looking forward to reading They Have Bodies, the 1925 debut novel by Barney Allen (aka Sol Allen), but somehow misplaced my copy. I found it only a few days ago.

Resolutions, by which I mean reading resolutions, I have but one. Since 2009, when I began this journey through Canada's forgotten, neglected and suppressed writing, I've read and reviewed 460 books, barely thirty percent of which were penned by women.

In the New Year, I'll be reading and reviewing books by women only. No male authors. Barney Allen will have to wait.

Should be interesting.

I'm looking forward to it.

Wishing you all a Happy New Year. I'm confident that it will be happier one.

Really, I am.

Related posts:

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

The Best Reads of 2023: Publisher's Take note
The Very Best Reads of 2022: Ladies First
The Very Best Reads of the Second Plague Year (2021)
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)

Dead Man Sitting

Exhuming McCarthy
Sunshine Scandals of a Little Town
Talking Joan Walker with Dick Bourgeois-Doyle

The Boy Who Cried Truth
The Urban Leacock

Don't Kill the Dog

Pardonable Levels of Violence
Towards a Canada of Light

A Fair Thriller