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12 August 2024

Murder at Expo 67: A Complete Mystery Novel?



So Long at the Fair, Janet Gregory Vermandel's debut novel, made its own debut as "Murder at Expo 67" in the October 1967 issue of Cosmopolitan. "A Complete, Stunning Mystery Novel" says the cover, a claim that is more or less repeated in the magazine itself. But look carefully at the bottom of the page. 


Did you catch it?

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"Murder at Expo 67" is "from" So Long at the Fair in much the same way the American version of XTC's English Settlement is "from" the British. Nowhere near complete, at roughly 33,000 words, it's not sixty percent the length of So Long at the Fair. 

Skimming "Murder at Expo 67," I missed most of the cuts, which only made me more curious as to how it was done. Long-suffering readers are all too aware that abridgements and bowdlerizations are something of an obsession of mine. Marshall Saunders, Arthur Stringer, R.T.M. Scott, Margaret Millar, Dan Keller, Joan Walker, Max Brathwaite, and Ezra Levant... I do go on, I know, and so will limit myself to five pages, the first being the beginning as published by Dodd, Mead:


There's not a lot to see here, but I find it interesting in that the first sentence is different: "Goodbye Brian" in Cosmo, is "Good-by, Brian" in So Long at the Fair.

Personally, I'm more accustomed to "Good-bye, Brian."

So Long at the Fair is more liberal in its use of commas, though I don't imagine that this would've had much effect on the Cosmo layout. The most notable difference between the two texts occurs about a third of the way through the novel, where heroine and narrator Lisa accepts a ride from a excitable aluminium foil salesman named Patrick Goulet:

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An awkward, unnecessary information dump, this is So Long at the Fair at it's very worst. Small wonder that the bulk didn't make it into the pages of Cosmo. I see this is a good thing. Goulet's fanaticism might've been  be a turn-off to anyone considering a visit in the fair's final month.

An Expo fanatic myself, it was the promise of the fair that led to me purchase So Long at the Fair. Though I was disappointed in that it takes place three months before the the gates opened, there were things that held my interest, like this description of the disruption caused by its construction. 

and again
The Administration and News Pavilion and its staff seem right out of Mad Men.

The "Z-shaped" Administration and News Pavilion, now home to the Port of Montreal
October 2020
It swung.

Fifty-seven years later, Montreal is swinging still.

Trivia I: To put it politely, "Murder at Expo 67" is a misleading title. The plot features two murder victims, both women. The body of the first is found on a golf course north of the city. There is no reason to suspect that the murder took place at the Expo 67 site. The second body is found at the scene of the murder, a motel on Upper Lachine Road.   

Trivia II: The Cosmo illustration is by the great Bob Peak. It's in keeping with the American, German, and Dutch book covers to come in that it features a scene that does not appear in the novel.


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