The Dusty Bookcase: January 2025

20 January 2025

The Boy Who Cried Truth

The Calgary Herald, 26 October 1963

The Weird World of Wes Beattie
John Norman Harris
New York: Harper & Row, 1963
216 pages

Wes Beattie was born with a Woolworths spoon in his mouth; father Rupert's came from Birks. The vast difference in fortune is best explained by youthful folly and libido. Rupert had been the favourite son of Toronto's wealthy Beattie family until he had the misfortune of attending a stag party during his sophomore year at Trinity College. There he met a sixteen-year-old tap dancing accordion player named Doreen. She was so unlike the Rosedale girls he'd grown up with that he couldn't help but be captivated. Within nine months, Mr Maggs, Doreen's dad, came calling at the opulent Beattie home demanding money. Ever the romantic, Rupert thwarted the wishes of both sets of parents by marrying Doreen. She gave birth to a baby girl, and Rupert went from golden child to black sheep. Disowned, he became a door-to-door encyclopedia salesman and Doreen turned to drink. When war was declared in 1939, he was only too happy to enlist and be shipped overseas. Son Wes may have been the result of a fond farewell.

Wes Beattie never met his father, though he'd come to know all sorts of very nice servicemen who visited his mother. After Rupert was killed in Italy, his remorseful mother gave Doreen a nice payout and brought the her grandchildren into her home. Jane, the baby girl whose existence had caused the rift, rebelled, while younger brother Wes just wanted his mummy.

Backstory, all of the above is relayed in much more detail – and much more entertainingly – in the seventh of this novel's eighteen chapters. That it comes roughly half-way through the novel, speaks to its complexity.

Wes Beattie himself is a complex character. Though just twenty-three, recent adventures have made his life such a tangled mess that he has drawn the attention of psychiatrist Milton Heber, who lays all out in a seminar attended by doctors, lawyers and social workers. Heber's assertion is that Wes lives in a "weird world" of his own making; he is a fabulist unable to differentiate fantasy from reality. Wes has been charged with two crimes, the first involving a purse he took from a car parked outside the Midtown Motel. He served two months for that offence. The second, much more serious, is the charge that he murdered his beloved Uncle Edgar for fear of being cut out of his will. Lawyer Sidney "Gargoyle" Grant, one of the attendees, is so bothered by a seemingly insignificant detail in Heber's talk that he begins his own investigation.

Grant's efforts bring such small rewards that it would be easy to write at length about The Weird World of Wes Beattie without revealing much. To detail how it all fits together would take thousands of words. Your time is better spent reading the novel.

The Weird World of Wes Beattie is not "The First truly CANADIAN Mystery" as current publisher claims, but it is one of the very best.

What's more, it will make you laugh.

About the author: The life of John Norman Harris (1915-64) is worthy of a biography; consider the introduction to the John Norman Harris fonds housed at the University of Toronto. Is the "Wooden Horse" escape from Stallaf Ludt III not enough?

The author died alone on 28 July 1964, not one year after The Weird World of Wes Beattie was published, suffering a heart attack during an early morning walk in rural Vermont. This brief bio, attached to the 13 October 1963 Star Weekly bowdlerization of The Weird World of Wes Beattie hints at what we missed.

Trivia I: Though the novel makes much about Wes Beattie facing the gallows, the last execution in Canada took place on December 11, 1962. Capital punishment was abolished for murder in 1976. In 1999, it was abolished for all other crimes.

Trivia II:

The Globe & Mail, 14 March 1964

Trivia III: Announced by Warner Brothers in 1965 as a forthcoming Merwin Gerard production.

And still we wait.

Trivia IV: John Norman Harris's last address was 45 Nanton Avenue in Toronto's Rosedale, the very same neighborhood in which Wes Beattie is raised.

The house, described in the 17 September 2004 Globe & Mail 'Home of the Week' real estate column as a being of a "rambling English-cottage-style," has had several notable inhabitants. Its first owner, lawyer Edward Brown, was the son of John Brown, who became editor of the Globe after his brother George (Edward's uncle) was shot by a disgruntled former employee.

Future Pearson Minister of Finance Walter L. Gordon lived in the house during the Great Depression, only to leave after a ten percent increase in the rent.

It was at 45 Nanton that Harris wrote The Weird World of Wes Beattie, though you wouldn't know that from the Globe piece:

In 1959, it was owned by John Norman Harris, a writer who was also a public relations officer for the Canadian Bank of Commerce, which was poised to merge with the Imperial Bank to form the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce.

Mr. Harris offered the home as a venue for the secret negotiations, and the deal was signed in a large second-floor bedroom in 1961.

Bankers in bedrooms! Meeting secretly! Do tell!

The address's connection to things literary doesn't end with Harris. Apparently, playwright Tom Hendry rented a third floor room in the 'seventies. The only reason for the Globe piece is that the house had been put up for sale by children's author Kati Rekai.

This is the house as it was ten years ago.

Note the Heritage Toronto plaque on the fence. It has nothing to do with Harris, Hendry or Reikai, rather J.J.R. MacLeod. Because it's hard to read, I share this template from the Heritage Toronto site.

A man worthy of more than this honour alone.

Object: A solidly constructed hardcover with burgundy cloth and pale orange boards. The endpapers remind that this is a HARPER NOVEL OF SUSPENSE, which explains why the back jacket features no author photo, rather promos for other novels in the series:

Love in Amsterdam - Nicholas Freeling
The Fifth Passenger - Edward Young
A Dragon for Christmas - Gavin Black
It's Different Abroad - Henry Calvin

Access: First published in Canada by Macmillan, in the United States by Harper & Row, and in the United Kingdom by Faber & Faber. I see no evidence of second printings for any of of these editions, though as noted in the previous post the novel has reappeared a few times through the years, French and Spanish translations included.

The book isn't easily found in Canadian bookstores; online booksellers are your best bet. At £2, the cheapest edition is the 1966 Corgi, listed by a bookseller in Boat of Garten, Scotland who dares charge the equivalent of $35 to ship a mass market paperback to Canada.

The cheapest Faber & Faber edition – "Condition: Good" – is offered at €14.90 by a Dublin bookshop. It will ship to Canada for roughly $24.50.

The Harper & Row, with jacket, can be purchased for US$40 from a New Jersey bookseller.

If I were a rich man, or reasonably comfortable, I'd buy the signed copy of the Macmillan offered at US$150 by a Stoney Creek, Ontario bookseller. There can't be many signed copies out there.

Underpriced, if not sold by this time tomorrow I will be greatly disappointed.

Related post:

The Weird Covers of Wes Beattie

The Murder of George Brown: He Died with Grit

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!