The Colony of Unrequited Nightmares

Portrait in Fear [Mystery of Cedar Valley]
Vera Henry
New York: Caravelle, 1964
160 pages

I expected little of Portrait in Fear, the lone novel from an author whose bibliography consists almost entirely of confessionals published in post-war love pulps.

Ideal Love (December 1946) and Glamorous Love (July 1954)

She had me from the opening:

Even after all this time, the townspeople of Cedar Valley view our small summer art colony with suspicion. They tolerate us for business reasons, but they do not like us.

The narrator, children's book illustrator Maggie Balfour, is the colony's longest resident. She's also the youngest. Her parents first brought her as a child. She was fifteen the summer Steve Wentworth moved into the cottage next door. He was writing his first novel. Steve was a young man. Maggie was a girl with a crush. There was nothing untoward about their relationship. As the years passed, the two became good friends and in the off-season would visit other art colony residents in "the city." They all expected the pair to one day move on from being just friends, and so were surprised when Steve all of a sudden married another. Maggie had only herself to blame for introducing the two. Riona, Steve's bride, was an old schoolmate.

Now it's the newlyweds' first summer at the colony. Maggie is determined to put on a good front, and for the most part succeeds. Not so the colony's other women. Retired stage actress Connie Ordway is right in suspecting that husband Brown has been having an affair with Riona. Gwen Darlan is not only certain that her spouse would leave her for Riona, she would gladly give him up. It's not that she doesn't love her spouse, rather that she wants him to be happy. Where the reader recognizes a selfish, directionless child of a man, wife Gwen sees a genius deserving of so beautiful a woman. Sadly for Ted, Riona sees him as a plaything, little more than a sardine entangled by a fishing line.

Riona fits the femme fatale stereotype, right down to her dark hair, pale blue eyes, pale white skin, rocking body, and provocative dress. In a tight-knit community with so much resentment, jealousy, and hatred directed toward one person, you just know that something bad is going to happen. The front cover tells you as much.

Here I'm going to change focus, as I often do when writing about mysteries. I never want to wade in too far for fear of spoiling things. Let's look instead at this Caravelle Books edition, beginning with the cover copy:

• Riona is not "pretty." Maggie, who has every reason to find fault, describes her as the most beautiful woman she has ever seen.
• Riona has great sense of right and wrong. Manipulative and cruel, she's no "lost pussy cat."
• "They" do indeed have a reason to kill Riona, and of course one of them does.

I've spoiled nothing in revealing that Riona is murdered, right? 

Now, the back cover:

The artists' colony is hardly "swinging," though it is true that its men are keen on sleeping with Riona, husband Steve included. 

There is a whopper of an error in the second paragraph:

When Marie Balfour, Steve's ex-fiance, questioned Riona about the odd gold brooch she wore, Maggie didn't know it then but it was a pin that would unlock the mystery of Riona's death.

I'm glad I didn't see this until after I'd read the novel, otherwise I'd've kept an eye out for Marie, the jilted lover. The copywriter means Maggie, not non-existent Marie. Not only are Maggie and Steve never engaged, they never exchange so much as a kiss.

Returning briefly to the novel itself, much of the mystery has to do with painter Paul Petrie. Unlike Maggie, he was not raised in the arts colony, but on the outskirts. He grew up within the "Evangelical Brethern [sic]," a small religious sect that had settled Cedar Valley after "fleeing from the temptations of the mid-Victorian world." Paul was very much a black sheep, painting from an early age in a religious community that considers lipstick garish.

After years of condemnation and rejection, Paul Petrie disappeared at the very point his talent began to be celebrated. If anything, his recognition caused further bad feelings within Cedar Valley's predominantly Evangelical Brethern locals. Young Paul would've given them his paintings for free, now they hang in the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art.

Marie Balfour never appears, but does Paul?

I'm not telling, though I will say that the surprise ending Caravelle promises did indeed smack me right between the eyes.

About Cedar Valley: The author gives few clues as to the location of the community, but careful reading suggests that it is on Lake Ontario somewhere between Toronto and Hamilton.

About the author: Vera Henry (née Bates) began life in Forest, Ontario. According to the 1911 Canadian census he was born in July 1909, likely the last of seven children born to 37-year-old William, a livery stable laborer, and 40-year-old Margaret. The family doesn't appear in the 1921 census.

The University of Oregon Libraries, which holds Vera Henry's papers – all "0.5 feet" – reports that the author graduated high school at age fourteen. She may have been living in Michigan at this point. I have nothing to go on other than the proximity to Forest and Vera Henry's association with the state.

The most informative profile I've found, 'You May Be in One of Her Stories,' was published in the 8 May 1954 edition of the Detroit Free Press. This was on the occasion of the Detroit Women Writers honouring Vera Henry as Writer of the Year.

There's so much to explore, like distaste expressed for her cash cow:

This suggests a lost work:

And here's something to keep in mind if I ever write a second edition of Character Parts:

Vera Henry died in Royal Oak, Michigan on 4 October 1987.

About Forest: A community of fewer than three thousand souls located five kilometres east of the southern shores of Lake Huron, Forest has had more than its fair share of notable residents. Emily Murphy lived there for a time, as did journalist Robyn Doolittle. Like any Canadian small town, it has produced at least a couple of NHL players, but the name that stood out to me is Emm Gryner. For ten years, our paths crossed as residents of nearby St Marys, Ontario. Here's Emm onstage with David Bowie:

Object and Access: A mass market paperback, my copy was purchased online earlier this month from a Guelph bookseller. Price: US$3.50.

Evidence suggests that in 1967 there was a second Caravelle edition. As I write, seven copies of the two Caravelles – 1964 and 1967 – are listed online. Prices begin at US$5.00.

The novel was first published in 1964 by New York's Avalon Books as Mystery of Cedar Valley. Worse title, better cover:

Might it also be a better novel?

I ask because Caravelle's Portrait in Fear features several remarkable errors, this being the worst:

One copy of Mystery of Cedar Valley – ex-library – is listed online. It's in pretty rotten edition condition, but does include the dust jacket (chopped up and pasted on the boards here and there). Price: US$50.00.

I recommend both.

The Great Lost Canadian Mystery Novel?

'Four To Go'
Kay Grant [Hilda Kay Grant]
The Star Weekly (24 - 31 March 1973)

I once thought that Hilda Kay Grant's bibliography could be divided neatly into two unequal parts. The first spanned thirteen years, beginning in 1951 with The Salt-Box, a fictionalized memoir of her youth published under the name "Jan Hilliard." Five novels followed, all using the very same nom de plume, the last being 1964's Morgan's Castle. The second part, which lasted from 1967 to 1969, consisted of three works of non-fiction written or co-written under the name "Kay Grant."

And then silence... Again, this is what I once thought.

Last autumn, while working on the Ricochet Books reissue of Morgan's Castle I stumbled upon a reference to a novel by "Kay Grant" titled Four To Go published over two 1973 issues of Toronto's Star Weekly.  

Surely this couldn't be same Kay Grant. It had been nine years since her last novel. Besides, all her fiction had been published as being by "Jan Hilliard." Could this be the other Kay Grant, the one who wrote wartime verse like It's 'ard to Keep Straight in the City (1941) and It's 'ard to Be Good in the Blackout (1944)?*

Rural life can be 'ard. I was spoiled during my Montreal, Vancouver, and Toronto years in having ready access to resources. It took some effort to access those old issues of the Star Weekly, but the heart leapt when I did. Here's why:

The Niagara Peninsula! Why, Morgan's Castle is set in the Niagara Peninsula! So is her 1956 novel The Jameson Girls! I next came across this:

The Star Weekly, 17 March 1973

Written by Gwen Beattie, it's an author profile published in anticipation of the next week's publication of Four To Go. In it, Kay Grant is identified as Jan Hilliard, the author of "earlier Niagara-based novels – The Jameson Girls and Morgan's Castle."

I would've felt confident in declaring Four To Go as the work of Hilda Kay Boyle just the same. Location aside, it contains two elements found in each and every Jan Hilliard novel: dysfunctional family and an unusual house.

Twenty-five-year-old widow Katie Gaylord is narrator and protagonist. Maiden name Whitney, she'd thrown off her family-pressured engagement to stable second cousin Charles Davis, a lawyer, and had eloped with freewheeling Harry. During their two-year marriage, Katie's husband promised much, delivered little, and brought it all to an end by drowning off the coast of California. Left with next to nothing, Katie packs her clothes in cardboard boxes. gets in a pale green convertible – "purchased during a brief period of affluence" – and drives the more than four thousand kilometers home to Cragsmore, the grand Whitney family home on the Niagara Escarpment.

Katie knows that her 87-year-old grandmother Beatrice will accept her back. The prodigal granddaughter  reappears as Beatrice is entertaining two other elderly ladies:

"Well, Katie," she said, as matter-of factly as if I'd left home that morning. But she clutched my hand tightly as she lifted her face to be kissed. "Sit down and have some tea. You know everybody. Mrs. Kemp, Mrs. Taylor. They're collecting for the unmarried mothers."

Grandmother Beatrice will never say a word about Harry or his tragic death. He will be forever forgotten, expunged from the Whitney family history.

* * *

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

— Leo Tolstoy

Katie's family isn't particularly happy or unhappy, though its history is tinged with tragedy. Only one of Gran's children lived beyond infancy, that being Shane O'Neill, described by daughter Katie as a "philanderer and amateur sadist":

Three years later, forty-something Shane married eighteen-year-old Rose, then three months pregnant with Katie. Gran liked this second wife and was heartbroken when Rose's car plunged over a cliff not a half-mile from the family home.

Shane was the next to go (boating accident), but not before fathering a son, Conn, who was left on the doorstep by the teenage daughter of an itinerant fruit-picker.

The Whitney fortune came from jam.

* * *

If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don't put it there.

—Anton Chekhov

Though it has been just two years since she left, Cragsmore is much changed from the house Katie knew. Thirty-three-year-old Martha, a woman who had never once garnered a second look from a man, is now married to local lothario Joe Bennett. Mrs Baines, the long-time cook is gone. Joe replaced her with a man named Horace. He lives with his "cousin" Dickie in an apartment above the old coach house. Dickie is employed as Gran's chauffeur.

Martha has taken to wearing makeup and now cares more about her dress. Katie doesn't even recognize seventeen-year-old Conn. He's grown his hair and bought a motorcycle, but really only as an act of rebellion against Martha. Conn's also taken up with a runaway named Sue, who he has hidden away in a room above the old barn. It also contains his rock collection. At night, he uses the old dumb waiter to sneak out of the house. It works on a pulley system that involves ropes and lead weights running from the cellar to the second of Cragsmore's three storeys. Originally used to carry coal, now used to carry laundry, Martha has the dumb waiter inspected every March and September by old Mr Bennett. He died in April. 

You'd be right in thinking that something's going to happen with that dumb waiter.

I'll leave it at that.

Four To Go is a conventional mystery. An argument can be made that it is the author's only mystery. I'm happy to have found it, all the while being disappointed. Four To Go just doesn't reach the level of the Jan Hilliard novels. Black humour is absent, the pacing is off, and the denouement seems so very long.

In that old Gwen Beattie Star Weekly article she describes Four To Go as a condensed version of the author's "latest Niagara novel."

The uncondensed version has yet to be published. The manuscript has yet to be found.

Is Four To Go the Great Lost Canadian Mystery? 

I don't suppose we'll ever know. Are there other lost Canadian mystery novels? 

Is Four To Go worth republishing as is?

Of course, it is.

* What little I know of Australia's Kay Grant comes from the brief author bio found on the rear jacket of the American edition of the intriguingly titled It's 'ard to Keep Straight in the Navy.

cliquez pour agrandir

Related posts:

The Jan Hilliard Ricochet
A Nova Scotian Writes Ontario Gothic
As He Lay Dying

She Ain't Sleepin': This Year's Harlequin Valentine

The Window with the Sleeping Nude
Robert Leslie Bellem
Toronto: Harlequin, 1950

A mystery novel, The Window with the Sleeping Nude begins with store detective Barney Cunard – "two hundred pounds of hangover" – arriving at work at Westervelt Department Store. A naked mannequin is lying prone in a display window. Some joke, except that it's not a dummy and is very dead. Martha Deane's body is found upstairs. Then Kitty Cavane goes missing.

Harlequin's cover holds a greater mystery. Nora Gleeson had no navel.

Related posts:

Harlequin: Before the Romance

Another Harlequin Valentine

This Year's Harlequin Valentine

A Harlequin Valentine from Day Keene
Romance… Harlequin Romance
A Harlequin Valentine from Syd Dyke
A Harlequin Valentine Just for You
C'mon, It's Harlequin Valentine Time

This Year's Climacteric Harlequin Valentine

A Weird and Tense Harlequin Valentine

Harlequin & the Eternal Valentine's Day Question

Nothing Says Romance Like a Harlequin Romance

A Harlequin Harlot Romance for Valentine's Day
The Worst Harlequin Valentine
A Ruthless Harlequin Valentine

You're on Your Own This Harlequin Valentine's
Harlequin Valentine Woman Hunt?

Harlequin: The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name
Suggestive Harlequins: A Romantic Threesome
Harlequin Librarians: So Many Secrets
Harlequin's Filthiest Title

Let the Right One In

The Invisible Gate
Constance Beresford-Howe
New York: Dodd, Mead, 1949
241 pages

I met Constance Beresford-Howe at the 1991 opening of a Toronto bookstore. She was sixty-nine at the time. I thought she was much older. This had less to do with appearance as bibliography. Her debut novel, The Unreasoning Heart, had been published a full forty-five years earlier. What I didn't know was that she'd been a 23-year-old McGill undergraduate at the time. Of This Day's Journey, her second novel, was published the following year while she was writing her Masters thesis. Constance Beresford-Howe was working on her PhD at Brown when The Invisible Gate hit bookstores.

The Montreal Gazette, 19 November 1949

Looking back on old posts, I see that I didn't think much of her first novel, thought better of her second, and predicted that I'd like the third even more.

That prediction proved correct.

The Invisible Gate is set in Montreal. It begins with protagonist Hannah Jackson stepping off a city bus and walking home through Notre Dame de Grace Park. The month being November, she notes the bare trees though her mind is on local boy Will Ames. The year being 1945, Will is on his way home from Europe. His most recent letter estimated the would arrive on Sunday:

"I've thought of you so often, Hannah, these last few months. It may seem funny to you after we've been friends for so long. But I think of you differently now than ever before. It's taken three years of war and three thousand miles to show me; but if you'll let me, I want to talk pretty seriously when I get home, about marriage."

Hannah is returning from her work at a law office. Her home is a bit of a wreck, but she does what she can:

Mother and father, poor lambs, couldn't help dying – they hated leaving me with the kids. And I hated it, too. Fourteen is no age for that responsibility. Those brats, John and Pen, and Laurel, so delicate. Aunt Marge may have been our guardian, but she was so twitter-brained! It was me that worried all the time over shoes and bills and report cards, me who sat up nights with croup, me that whaled Pen for stealing...  it made me old... old at twenty... older now at twenty-eight, and I'll never be young again. And John ... buried in Africa now; joined up just when he was beginning to be a real brother, and left me with nothing but his baby...sweet old Fan!

Quite the info dump.

Now a toddler, Fan is a delightful handful. Her mother, John's widow, didn't stick around long before decamping to California. Fifteen-year-old Pen hangs around with a tough crowd, but is otherwise reformed. He does what he can to support the household. Not so twenty-year-old-sister Laurel. Willowy, gorgeous, fragile, and blonde, she's fallen in with a crowd of artistic types.

Returning to Hannah, did you not sense a lack of passion in Will's letter? He arrives earlier than expected accompanied by Noel Carter. The two had bonded during the Blitz. Noel is tall, dark and close to handsome. English-born, his parents divorced when he was a tot. As neither wanted him, Noel was sent to an aunt in Montreal. She didn't want him either. As soon as Noel turned seven, he was sent to a Toronto boarding school. "Let me add that I richly deserved it," Noel tells Hannah, "and have led a thoroughly bad life ever since."

Noel is slightly taller, slightly older, and much more self assured than Will. As a very young man, he'd moved to New York with aspirations of becoming a serious novelist. After his first novel received its first rejection, he threw it and all other literary writing in the fire, then dove into the commercial. Noel made good money dashing off scripts for the radio serial Joanna Miller, Small-town Girl. During the war he was awarded the Military Cross, the DSO, and a half-dozen other medals, achieving the rank of major. 

But what of Will?

We learn more about Noel's backstory in that early scene than we do Will's. In fact, we never do know much of Will's history, the suggestion being that there isn't much worth noting.

By the end of the evening, Noel has moved into the room of dead brother John, hotel rooms being hard to come by. I was worried about scandal – a man rooming in a house with two unmarried women – but that fear proved unfounded.

Remember Will wanting to "talk pretty seriously" about marriage when he gets home? Well, it takes him a while to get around to it. After three years of war, he feels a need to acclimatize. Not so, nearly-handsome Noel. He's a go-getter. When Will declines the offer of a job in the bond market, Noel picks it up. Next thing you now, he's bought a new car, yet still keeps his room in the Jackson house.   

I had a sense of where this was heading and expect you do, too.

Proven correct, my initial reaction to The Invisible Gate was that it wasn't quite up to Constance Beresford-Howe's previous efforts, but then scenes began to haunt. Hannah's lunchtime meeting with Noel is one of the most uncomfortable I've encountered. Noel's later confrontation with Hannah in her home's basement laundry room is another. I'm sure that this latter scene would've been even more powerful had it been for the self-censorship of the time.

The Invisible Gate was better than The Unreasoning Heart and Of This Days Journey because at age twenty-six she had become a better, more mature writer, even if the plot is just as unimaginative.

I must admit that the reason I prefer this to her two previous efforts is personal. The novel made me nostalgic for Notre Dame de Grace – NDG – where I lived many years as a young man.

Though fleeting, I enjoyed the depiction of Montreal's nightlife, something rarely seen outside the novels of David Montrose, Douglas Sanderson, the early pulps of Brian Moore, and the non-fiction of William Weintraub. Constance Beresford-Howe is the first woman I've read to write about Montreal as a sin city.

The corner of Sherbrooke and Girouard, 1941.

And then there's my late mother. She grew up on Old Orchard Avenue. She would've stepped off a city bus hundreds of times, then walked home through NDG Park. Like Hannah Jackson, she would've gazed at the bare trees of November 1945.

Dedication: 

Constance Beresford-Howe's father was born in 1890 in Calcutta. The 25 July 1958 edition of the Westmount Examiner informs that he was educated at Cheltinham College, the London School of Economics, and the Tilley School of Languages in Germany before his 1913 immigration to Canada. Once here, he studied at McGill, met his wife Marjorie, and found long employ as an insurance agent with North American Life.

His end, not at all peaceful,  came nine years after The Invisible Gate was published.

The Westmount Examiner, 25 July 1958

Bloomer: 

"I suppose she's gone off somewhere tonight with her musician friends, and didn't tell me because she knows I think they're queer and drink too much."

Trivia: Will informs Hannah that he will be home early because Noel managed to "double-talk" a Ferry Command pilot into transporting them to Gander aboard a LC-4. "We had to crouch eight hours among a lot of packing cases in the tail, but it was worth it," says Will.

The LC-4 was built by Kansas-based Buckley Aircraft Company in 1930. Number produced: 1. The author may have been thinking of the Douglas DC-4. 

 

Trivia (personal): The Beresford-Howes – Russell, Marjorie, daughter Constance, and son John, – lived in Montreal at 2063 Marlowe Avenue. According to the 1931 census, the family had a live-in domestic named Noella Cadieux.  

2063 Marlowe Avenue (left door, bottom flat) in October 2020.

I was born at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, 2100 Marlowe, which is on the very same block!

About the author: Having be part of the committee responsible for he Constance Beresford-Howe plaque, I thought I knew a lot about the author, but I had no idea as to her weight at birth.

The bio errs with "The Invisible Gate, like her previous novels, is laid in her native Montreal." Beresford-Howe's first novel, The Unreasoning Heart, is set in the city, but her second, Of This Day's Journey, takes place at a college somewhere in New England. The Invisible Gate was her third novel.

Object and Access: A slim hardcover with black boards, the jacket-less copy I read was bought several years back in Toronto as part of a lot. It was once property of Wellington Consolidated Schools, which I assume to have been a school board that once existed in and about Wellington County in Southwestern Ontario. It has since been replaced in my dusty bookcase by a copy with dust jacket I happened upon earlier this month.

It would appear that the Dodd, Mead edition enjoyed nothing more than a single printing. A UK edition was  published three years later by Hammond. Was it also a single printing? I ask because I've found two different dust jackets.

As I write, one copy of the Dodd, Mead edition is listed for sale online. With no jacket, it's going for US$40.00. Shipping to Canada will set you back even more.

I'm interested in the first UK edition, published in 1952 by Hammond. As far as I can tell, it enjoyed just one printing, yet appears to have had two very different dust jackets. Sadly, neither is currently listed for sale online.

Related posts:

Reason Over Passion in a Bland Bachelor's Lap

Destination: Montreal

Constance Beresford-Howe Memorial Plaque

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