The Dusty Bookcase

04 February 2026

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.

Destination: Montreal

Constance Beresford-Howe Memorial Plaque

01 February 2026

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

28 January 2026

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

02 January 2026

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

01 January 2026

'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.