Showing posts with label Abridgements. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Abridgements. Show all posts

07 February 2022

The Incomplete Repent at Leisure


A follow-up to last month's post on Joan Walker's Repent at Leisure.

Repent at Leisure
Joan Walker
The Star Weekly, 5 October 1957

The Star Weekly would like the reader to know that Joan Walker's Repent at Leisure is an award-winning novel.


Do not be impressed by this. In its day, the Ryerson Fiction Award was second only to the Governor General's Award, but it had little impact, nor did it receive much notice. Unlike most literary prizes, it was presented before publication, as detailed here in this old Winnipeg Tribune piece (which I expect is a rewritten press release):

27 June 1944
"Spy, detection and crime stories are ineligible," yet other genres were just fine? Seems unfair, especially when one considers that a good number of its fourteen winners – Here Stays Good Yorkshire (1945) by Will R. Bird, Desired Heaven (1953) by Evelyn Richardson, Pine Roots (1956) and The King Tree (1958) by Gladys Taylor, and Short of the Glory (1960) by E.M. Granger Bennett – fall neatly into the historical fiction category. 

I can't quite wrap my head around Ryerson's publishing strategy. Why hand off the novel's debut to the Star Weekly?


Even more curious, Repent at Leisure wouldn't arrive in bookstores until the second half of December. Was the idea to take advantage of last minute Christmas shoppers?

Star Weekly readers who loved Repent at Leisure and longed for more of Veronica and Louis's troubled romance were in for a treat because the "STAR WEEKLY COMPLETE NOVEL" wasn't the complete novel. In fact, the Star Weekly Repent at Leisure isn't half as long as the Ryerson Fiction Award winner.

  

While I'm sure it's possible to publish a 94,000-word novel in fourteen tabloid-sized pages, I very much doubt it could be read with the naked eye. 

How was it done? Cut the first two chapters to start.

This Repent at Leisure begins shortly after Veronica's arrival in Canada. There's nothing of her relationship with her parents, their concerns over her hasty marriage, or the descriptions of post-war air travel that this reader found so interesting. It opens instead with our heroine sitting, waiting her turn to meet with a customs officer.

Other cuts aren't as glaring, but they are obvious. I had some fun in comparing the two versions. This is the Ryerson version with the words cut in the Star Weekly struck out:

I like this scene because the Westmount Nash family come off as snobs of the highest order, which I'm certain wasn't the author's intent. They also seem so very English -– more so than the immigrant who has just arrived from London. Gone is the awkward and unnatural dialogue about the "Indian village Cartier found in fifteen-something on his first trip up the St. Lawrence;" which shouldn't have made it past Ryeson's editor.

The most interesting thing in comparing the two came in the discovery of additions made to the condensed version. Alan smokes whilst poring over the map in the Star Weekly edition. Margaret suggests that he's found only one Giroux Street because his map isn't up-to-date. Jane hands Veronica a cup of tea and a pink linen napkin. 

All minor changes, but mysterious given that the task at hand. And who did that task? Was it the author herself? The copyright notice suggests as much.

Might it be that the added bits are things the editor at Ryerson cut?

All this begs the question: Whatever happened to Joan Walker's papers?



18 April 2021

Arthur Stringer Unshackled (then bowdlerized)



The Wife Traders: A Tale of the North
Arthur Stringer
Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1936
319 pages

Tooloona: A Novel of the North
Arthur Stringer
London: Methuen, 1936
248 pages

There's a good chance that anyone who's read more than a couple of Arthur Stringer books has been here before. I don't mean Iviut Inlet, the Inuit community in which The Wife Traders is set, I refer instead to the novel's premise. Like A Lady Quite Lost (1931), Man Lost (1934), and Intruders in Eden (1942), it involves a privileged American who, having suffered a crisis, seeks sanctuary and spiritual cleansing in the most remote regions of Canada.* This time out, that man is Owen Winslow, who flees his Park Avenue apartment and expansive Long Island house for a cramped cabin in Ungava.

Richard Stendal, not Owen Winslow, is the novel's main character. He's been pursuing Celina, the beautiful, leggy wife Winslow abandoned. Though Celina appreciates Stendal's assistance in these trying times, referring to him as her "knight," she remains faithful to her husband. Stendal likes to think Winslow is dead, while Celina is certain that he's alive.

Turns out Celina right.

By chance, the missing man's image is captured – if only fleetingly – in a film of an Inuit walrus hunt in Ungava. When screened, months later at a meeting of Explorers' Club, one of the men in attendance recognizes Winslow in the footage.**

Celina asks Stendal to travel to Ungava, find her husband, and convince him to return to New York.


It seems a rather large request, but then Stendal has been so very helpful in the wake of Winslow's disappearance, right?

The Wife Traders begins with Stendal's arrival at Iviut Inlet, at which the walrus hunt had taken place. There he finds the errant husband shacked up, quite literally, with a young Inuit woman by the name of Tooloona. Winslow considers her his wife.

Now, given Stendal's thing for Celina, one might think that he'd let matters lie and report the bigamy upon his return to New York. If so, one would be mistaken. Instead, Stendal does all he can to break up the couple, going so far as to bribe Ootah, the local shaman, into telling Tooloona that she must leave Winslow.

Stendal's motivation isn't spelled out until quite late in the novel, though I imagine more thoughtful readers than myself might spot it early on. From the start, Stendal sees Tooloona as primitive, a savage, an animal. Even after she saves his life, he compares her to a "faithful dog." Yet, inwardly, he struggles with his growing physical attraction to Winslow's new mate:  
He failed to remember the day or the occasion when he first grudgingly admitted that her body was a beautiful one, that there was something arresting in even the triangulated face with dark tangle of lashes along the smooth cheek, too pale to be called a daffodil-yellow and too dark to be compared to a gardenia. But he had not been compelled to revise his earlier estimate of her. Nothing was gained, he knew by contending that she was an undersized and flat-faced barbarian who exuded the odor of fish oil. It was the white man's duty to be loyal to his white race.
And there you have it.

A bold statement is made on the dust jacket of the American edition:


I've not seen the jacket for Methuen's first British edition, but don't imagine it makes a similar claim. The editor's red pen is found throughout, beginning with the title. The Wife Traders – problematic at best – is replaced with Tooloona. Other changes are much less apparent. Now and then a sentence is struck, and there are occasional word substitutions, like "wonton" for "bitch." The twentieth chapter sees the longest single cut – nearly two pages – in which Winslow criticizes Stendal's assessment of the Inuit as smelly.


The most eye-popping sentence in The Wife Traders does not feature in Tooloona. Anyone curious will find it on page 83, at the very end of Winslow's inept defence of the Inuit woman:  
"I'll concede that she has her own ars erotica. That's imposed upon her, I suppose, by her environment. She has to be warmer-blooded, in a country like this, just as she has to wear warmer clothing. You can write it down to Nature's plan for keeping the race going. Where the soil is thin there must be no mistake about planting the seed. I'm not a medical man enough to know how true it is that the Innuit vulva is more prominent and prehensile than the white woman's."
The Wife Traders is a well-intentioned book, but doesn't transcend the time in which it was written.

Or does it?

The Inuit are seen through the eyes of Stendal, Winslow, and Celina (yes, she eventually shows up). Stendal is a white supremacist. Winslow appreciates Inuit culture, but only when it doesn't cross his own beliefs. Interestingly, it's late-to-arrive Celina who has the greater recognition and appreciation of the Inuit – Tooloona above all. Though Winslow likes to think that he understands the Inuit of Iviut Inlet, his fragile ego leads to tragedy.

Someone is killed.

It wasn't the character I wanted dead.
* Stringer's 1927 novel The White Hands, in which a pair of Jazz Age sisters are sent off North Ontario, provides a bit of a twist on the premise.

** I can't help but note that in Helen Dickson Reynolds' truly strange He Will Return (1959), abandoned wife Constance Owen-Jones discovers her husband is still alive through a newsreel street shot. 

The Critics Rave:
Trash – and not "good trash" –  but none the less will appeal to the vast majority of those who demand nothing but "escape" from their reading. The story of a New Yorker who escapes civilization by joining a tribe of Eskimos in the Far North, "buying" a mate, and evading the claims of wife and home; succeeds in making so-called civilized ideals sufficient excuse for immorality.
Kirkus, 15 June 1936

Trivia:
Iviut Inlet is found nowhere outside Stringer's imagination. It later appears in his 1940 novel The Ghost Plane.


Objects: I have three editions of the novel, the earliest being the Bobbs-Merrill first edition. Bound in green boards, it has stood the test of time. In black boards, Tooloona, the first (and only) British edition, has shown itself a touch more fragile.


To these eyes, the most interesting in my collection is the third. Published in 1955 by Harlequin, it marks the last time Stringer has seen print. As far as I've been able to determine, it's faithful to the Bobbs-Merrill text. Both front and back covers would not make the grade today.



"What secret made him choose the arms of a dark savage instead of the elegance of a penthouse?"

Oh, I don't know. Might it have something to do with being more attracted to women than interior decoration?

Odd that Harlequin describes Tooloona as a "dark savage." Stringer doesn't. 

Access: The Wife Traders was first published in 1936 by Bobbs-Merrill and McClelland and Stewart. Tooloona followed later that same year. And then, of course, we have the 1955 Harlequin paperback.

Used copies of The Wife Traders begin at US$6.50 (the Harlequin paperback in "Good-Very Good" condition). As of this writing, only two are listed online. Get them while you can! The Bobbs-Merrill appears more common. Asking prices range between US$17.00 and US$85.00. Copies with dust jackets begin at US$30.00.

No copies of Tooloona are listed for sale online.

Library and Archives Canada, the Toronto Public Library, the London Public Library, Memorial University, the University of New Brunswick, Mount Alison University, Acadia University, Dalhousie University, the University of Toronto, McMaster University, Guelph University, the University of Saskatchewan, the University of Alberta, Simon Fraser University, the University of British Columbia, and the University of Victoria hold one edition or other of The Wife Traders.

No Canadian library has a copy of Tooloona.

Note: I was inspired to read The Wife Traders by the 1936 Club week. 


Links to reviews of other 1936 titles can be found through here. I've only ever reviewed one other title from that year: Arthur Meighen's The Greatest Englishman of History.

Related post:


13 January 2020

That Old Black Magician



The Black Magician
R.T.M. Scott
New York: Triangle, 1938
244 pages

The Black Magician is the first Aurelius Smith novel, but it does not mark his debut. Earlier adventures appeared throughout the early 'twenties in the pages of AdventureThe Black MaskAction Stories, and other pulp magazines. Back then, Smith was an agent with the Criminal Intelligence Department of India. How he came to lose his position is covered in one of those adventures, though I can't say which one. Was it "The Emerald Coffin" (Detective Tales, April/May 1923)?

Just a guess.

Whenever it happened, whatever the cause, the Aurelius Smith of The Black Magician is no longer with the department. Now a private detective, he lives and works in a converted Manhattan garage with manservant and cook Langa Doonh, pretty stenographer Bernice Asterley, and a former Chicago street kid named Jimmie. Nothing is to be made of the living arrangements; Langa Doonh's space is by the kitchen, Bernice has two rooms to herself by the main door, and Aurelius and young Jimmie sleep on the second floor.

Again, make nothing of it.

Those unfamiliar with Aurelius Smith – Mr J.H. Scanton, for example – may be taken aback by his languid, seemingly indifferent demeanor. Scranton visits the former garage because he wants Smith to catch the man who stole his wife's necklace at the Hotel Magnifique:
"Necklace an investment?" queried Smith. "Will you suffer if you don't get it back?"
     "Certainly not!" retorted Scranton. "I could lose ten times as much and sleep well. I'm here because I never let anybody beat me and the police have failed."
At that, Smith declines the case, and Langa Doonh ushers an astonished Scranton to the door. A second prospective client, a man named Grayson, will offer something more mysterious and less self-serving, but before he can begin, Jimmie bursts into the room: "Gee! Mr. Smith! Dere's a swell guy croaked on de front steps wid a stovepipe lid!"

The dead man is, of course, Scranton, as depicted here with Smith on the cover of the July 1929 issue of Compete Detective Novel Magazine:


Searching for a pulse, Smith notices a faint pin-prick on the dead man's right thumb. Resting beside the body is a small, five-pointed silver star.

After the police arrive, Smith returns to Grayson, who shares his concerns for the wellbeing of the female employees working in his department store. In the space of two short months, one has committed suicide and another has been placed in a sanatorium. Then, just yesterday, Grayson's secretary suffered a breakdown after opening an envelope to find a small, five-pointed silver star!

Young Jimmie is sent out to trail anyone who looks to be searching the ground where Scranton had fallen. The payoff is nearly immediate, leading Smith to Jerome Cardan, a mystic who claims to be the reincarnation of sixteenth-century Italian polymath Girolamo Cardano. The charlatan – is he a charlatan? – has been using his skills as a mesmerist to manipulate Grayson's wife in order to get his hands on the family fortune.

But to what end?

When first identified as the villain, Cardan tells Smith that he wants a million dollars in order to "erect a suitable institute of knowledge in Europe." Later in the novel, the villain reveals that his goal is half of Grayson's wealth, which he will use to seize power in Russia. I didn't much care which was true; my interest had long wained as Smith came to rely less on deduction and more on derring-do.

What kept me reading to the end were trace elements of the author's life. For example, the detective makes several references to his involvement in the Great War, including a four-page account of an experience he'd had while serving with Canadian forces at Ypres. Scott himself fought at Ypres as a captain in the 21st Battalion. His exit from the war came in 1917 – the result of a shell concussion which left him with headaches and deafness in both ears.

(Interestingly, one of the mysteries of the novel is explained by Cardan's "supernormal hearing." He's able to trace Smith's movements about a room by focussing on the ticking of the detective's wristwatch.)

A regular contributor to Mystic Magazine, Scott's interest in what is referred to as the "superphysical" is reflected not only in Cardan but in Smith. The characters' initial meeting takes place in a room lined with centuries-old copies of Pistis Sophia, Iamblichus' Theurgia, and the works of Cornelius Tacitus. Discussions of Paracelsus and Madame Blavatsky will figure, and Smith will challenge Grayson over the department store owner's atheism.

The November 1930 issue of Mystic Magazine,
featuring two articles by Scott:
'Mysteries of India’s Magic' and
'Mystic Magazine Gets Exclusive Message
from A. Conan Doyle.'
The end couldn't come fast enough, yet I was left wondering whether Smith hadn't found employ with some other secret service. He's turned down Scranton's offer of $10,000 (the equivalent of $149,000 today), had spent money with abandon in chasing Cardan, and had taken no payment from Grayson. How was he able to support himself, never mind Bernice, Jimmie, and Langa Doonh?

Ah, but let's not focus on the material world.

Object: A cheap production consisting of scarlet cloth boards, yellowing paper stock, and a poorly printed dust jacket, my copy was purchased last year from a Toronto bookseller. Price: $10.00. The uncredited jacket illustration depicts an event that doesn't take place in the novel. Is that meant to be Bernice? Whoever it is, she looks cold.

Access: The Black Magician was first published in July 1925 by Dutton. As far as I've been able to determine, the months that followed saw a second Dutton printing and two more from A.L. Burt. A UK edition was published in 1926 by Heinemann. In July 1929, The Black Magician reappeared as one of four works in the aforementioned issue of Complete Detective Novel Magazine. Given that the issue is 144 pages in length, I think it safe to assume it is an abridged version. My 1938 Triangle edition marks its last appearance in the English language.

The novel has appeared in at least two translations: Auf der Spur des schwarzen magiers (Munich: Georg Müller, 1928) and Le magician noir (Paris: Librairie des Champs-Elysées, 1952).

Library and Archives Canada has a copy of the novel, as does the University of Alberta. C'est tout. It appears no Canadian library has either translation.

Not many copies are listed for sake online. At the time of this writing, at US$8.99, the least expensive was a Burt in "acceptable condition," lacking dust jacket. A Dutton copy caps up things off at US$30.09 (VG+, lacking dust jacket). My advice is to buy the cheapest.

As always, print on demand vultures are to be ignored.

20 November 2019

Beautiful Joe: Now with 30% Less Violence!



Beautiful Joe
     (Modern Abridged Edition)
Marshall Saunders
Racine, WI: Whitman, [c. 1965]
254 pages

Whitman is the first publisher I knew by name. Its books were the stuff of childhood birthday parties, given to friends who'd really wanted a Hot Wheels Super-Charger. I was never so unfortunate as to receive a Whitman book myself; until this month, the only one I ever owned was Who's Got the Button?, a Monkees tie-in that I bought sometime in the early 'eighties.


Who's Got the Button? was written by William Johnston, author of other Whitman titles like Gilligan's Island, The Munsters and the Great Camera Caper, and Ironside: The Picture Frame Frame-Up. None were considered part of the publisher's Classics Library.


I bought Whitman's Beautiful Joe after reading the 1927 "New and Revised Edition." Writing in the Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature, Elizabeth Waterston informs that the violence of the 1894 original was "softened" for that latter edition." I found the violence hard and hard to take, and was certain that Whitman had softened it even further for we children of the 'sixties.

And I was right.

The greatest distinction is found early, in the novel's most violent scene. I've struck out the sentences that are absent in the Whitman edition:


Those familiar with Beautiful Joe know further violence follows when Jenkins mutilates Joe by cutting off his ears and tail with an axe. The pivotal scene, it's just as it is in the 1894 first edition.

By my calculation, the word count of Whitman's "abridged" Beautiful Joe is just over 64,000; roughly 30,000 less than the original. Of the numerous deletions, this is the longest:


Saunders' second novel, Beautiful Joe was written with an eye on a prize offered by the American Humane Education Society (hence the reference). That the novel won is surely owes something to its incorporation of the Society's positions, including "the proper way to kill animals." Saunders was also smart in taking the sad story of a Canadian dog and transplanting it to Maine. To these northern eyes, the most interesting passages are those in which Americans express concern for the future of their nation:


The comments about immigration, Spaniards, and Italians, do not appear in the Whitman edition.

Less violence. Less bigotry, too.

But I wouldn't give it as a birthday present.
.

Object and Access: A hardcover issued without dust jacket. The cover, endpapers, and interior illustrations are all by Robert MacLean.

I purchased my copy for $US9.38 from an Ohio bookseller.

There are plenty of copies listed online at similar prices.


Related posts:

04 February 2019

Margaret Millar Simplified and Spoiled



The Listening Walls
Margaret Millar [abridged by George McMillin]
New York: Falcon, 1975


The Listening Walls
Collected Millar: The Master at Her Zenith
Margaret Millar
New York: Syndicate, 2016

I'm a great fan of Syndicate Books' seven-volume Collected Millar. Not only did it return all twenty-five of the author's novels to print – most unavailable for decades – it did so in attractive volumes and at affordable prices. The only criticism I have seems to be shared by pretty much everyone familiar with the set: the print is too darn small. My middle-aged eyes can manage, but given the choice I'll reach for an old mass-market paperback any day. This is why I was quick to splurge 25 cents on a Falcon edition of The Listening Walls spotted at a charity shop last month. In my haste, I didn't notice this small print on the cover:


There's irony for you. Or is it? Alanis Morissette has still got me confused.

Edited and abridged "for young people and adults who want to read books of mature content with greater ease and enjoyment," Falcon Books meant nothing to me. Interior copy informs that they were "especially recommended as supplemental readers in junior and senior high school courses;" happily, they weren't used in mine. If my 25¢ copy of The Listening Walls is anything to go by, the abridgements stripped much of what made their originals worth reading. Consider the opening paragraph to Margaret Millar's The Listening Walls:
From her resting place in the broom closet Consuela could hear the two American ladies in 404 arguing. The closet was as narrow as the road to heaven and smelled of furniture polish, chlorine, and of Consuela herself. But it was not physical discomfort that disturbed her siesta, it was the strain of trying to understand what the Americans were arguing about. Money? Love? What else was there, Consuela wondered, and wiped the sweat off her forehead and neck with one of the towels she was supposed to place in the bathrooms at exactly six o'clock.
Now, here is the Falcon abridged version:
From the broom closet, Consuela could hear the two American ladies arguing in Room 404. The closet was small and smelled of furniture polish and cleaning fluid, and of Consuela's own body. But it was not the tiny closet and its smells that disturbed her siesta – her afternoon nap. It was the argument she was hearing through the wall. She strained to hear what the Americans were arguing about. Was it money? Was it love? What else could it be? Console wondered about it and wiped the sweat off her forehead and neck with one of the clean towels she was supposed to put in the bathrooms.
Things are spelled out – "404" becomes "Room 404," "chlorine" becomes "cleaning fluid"  – and subtleties are missed. What spoils
Consuela's siesta (not necessarily an "afternoon nap," says my OED) is not the sound of the two American ladies arguing, but that she can't quite make out what they are saying. Gone is the description of the closet, Consuela's "resting place," as being "as narrow as the road to heaven," and with it the first hint of her religious beliefs and their influence on the plot.

The two American ladies are friends Wilma Wyatt and Amy Kellogg. The pair have travelled from San Francisco to Mexico City on a girls' getaway. Poor Wilma has been having a particularly tough year that has included divorce (her second), the loss of both parents in a plane crash, and a bout of pneumonia. It's now September. Can it get much worse?

Yes, it can.

Wilma is unhappy with everything – herself most of all – and is itching to bicker and bully. Amy tries to make the best of it, all the while reminding herself that husband Rupert had warned the trip was a mistake. Gill, Amy's big brother, called her an imbecile. Things deteriorate further when Amy discovers that Wilma bought a handcrafted silver box engraved with Rupert's initials. Why would Wilma do that? And why would she hide the purchase? The fighting escalates and Wilma storms off to the hotel bar.

That evening, Wilma dies of a fall from their hotel room balcony.


The Listening Walls has less to do with Wilma's death, and whether or not it was murder, than it does the mystery of Amy's subsequent disappearance. Rupert gives Gill a letter from Amy in which she writes of her need to be alone for a while. Gill, who had already found things were "damned peculiar," hires a private detective, and Rupert starts making mistakes.

The Listening Walls shares The Master at Her Zenith, the third volume of the Collected Millar, with Vanish in an Instant, Wives and Lovers, Beast in View, and An Air That Kills. By far the weakest novel of the lot, its flaw lies with the nineteenth and penultimate chapter, in which one character explains his actions throughout the previous eighteen. Amounting to several dense pages – uncharacteristic of Millar – it reads like an information dump. This same scene in the abridgement is less irritating in that there is less to explain. The keen-eyed will have noticed that the Falcon opening paragraph quoted above is actually longer that the original; so, how did abridger George McMillin make the novel shorter? The answer is that he slashed dialogue to the bone, and cut entire scenes. In order to bridge the gaps, McMillin added some passages of his own. In fact, the passage quoted on the back cover is entirely his own work:


I've hidden the first character's name because it misleads. The character is not a murderer and would never think to murder. The passage is just another example of McMillin's misunderstanding of the novel.

Much has been made of the novel's ending, beginning with the dust jacket on Gollancz's first UK edition:


Sort of spoils things, doesn't it?

Julian Symons liked the ending, as did I. Had it not been for publisher hype, I expect Anthony Lejeune would've liked it, too. Reviewing the novel in 1959 for the Times Literary Supplement, he writes:
Miss Millar knows how to make her story-line twist like a snake. It is not her fault that the publishers, in big letters on the jacket, promise "as smashing a last sentence as we can recall!" That promise is not fulfilled. The final twist is surprisingly unsurprising.
More recently, Jon Breen wrote in the 18 April 2005 Weekly Standard: "Millar brings off a trick that is rarely attempted and even more rarely accomplished: withholding the final surprise to the very last line of the novel."

Foreknowledge that the final line brings surprise ruins the ending... and I've done so here. Apologies.

George McMillin liked the last sentence enough to leave it untouched.

At four words, it could hardly be shorter.

Trivia: For a "textbook" publisher – their description, not mine – Falcon proved itself particularly inept. The author biography is incorrect in describing Millar's It's All in the Family as a mystery. Students are told that her husband is "known professionally as Ross MacDonald," and not Ross Macdonald.


Objects: A study in contrasts. The Falcon is a slim mass-market paperback numbering 141 pages; the Syndicate is a bulky trade format paperback of 560 pages. The latter includes an introduction by Ross Macdonald biographer Tom Nolan.

My Falcon copy was once the property of the Smiths Falls District Collegiate Institute.


Access: The Listening Walls was first published in 1959 by Random House in the United States and Gollacz in the United Kingdom. Editions by Corgi (1961), Dell (1964 & 1967), Orion (1974), and International Polygonics (1986) followed. In 1980, Curley published a large print edition.


Used copies listed online range in price from US$1.60 (International Polygonics) to US$349.26 (Curley). At US$50.00, the copy to buy is a Random House first edition (with review slip) offered by a Florida bookseller.


The novel has enjoyed at least eleven translations: French (Les Murs écoutent), Spanish (Las paredes oyen), Danish (De lyttende vægge), Finnish (Seinillä on korvat), Swedish (De lyssnande väggarna), Norwegian (Piken som lyttet), German (Die lauschenden Wände), Italian (La scatola d'argento), Polish (Śmierć w hotelu), Japanese (耳をすます壁), and Korean (엿듣는 벽).

Related posts:

10 July 2013

Toronto Noir, Montreal Noir and the Dark Road Between



Flee the Night in Anger
Dan Keller [pseud. Louis Kaufman]
Toronto: Studio Publications, 1952
The name's Danny Keller, ex-convict, three years for manslaughter. I hit a man. He fell and struck his head on a fire hydrant. He was a rat. I'm not sorry he's dead, but I'd rather be dead beside him than do time again.
It's not such a bad beginning, but as with so many post-war noir novels the writer just can't keep it up. Twenty pages in, with three hundred to go, I'd become much more interested in the back cover:


Is the man in the photo Louis Kaufman? Did Kaufman really serve in the RCAF? Did he enjoy swimming, sailing and pecking at the keys of a second-hand piano? Or are these just elements of Kaufman's Dan Keller persona? And why take the name of your protagonist as a nom de plume when it's clear that Dan Keller the ex-serviceman and Danny Keller the ex-con cannot be one and the same?

I know nothing about the author, but believe I've got a pretty good handle on the protagonist.

Danny Keller is an unlucky man. After his stint in Kingston Penitentiary, he tries for a new life in Toronto but finds that no one is too impressed by his criminal record. Desperate, Danny makes a mistake in considering a shady job, becomes a bit hotheaded during the job interview, and walks away convinced that he's accidentally killed his prospective employer.

An honest man would turn himself in, a dishonest man would skip town, but Danny takes the route of a stupid man by keeping an appointment that had been arranged by the dead man. In a dark and wet cocktail lounge he meets with "some looker; tall and supple, dressed in a light, filmy summer frock that did nothing to hide her assets and plenty to promote them." It's only then that he finds out the nature of the job: Danny is to retrieve a briefcase from the checkroom at Union Station. Simple enough, except the befrocked looker has only one half of the check slip. Two days later, she shows up at his flat with the other half. She defrocks, they have sex, and he's off to Front Street.

Union Station, Toronto, c. 1952
Now the problem: The two halves don't match!

Danny phones his flat, but the babe in his bed doesn't pick up. On his return he finds that she has a hole "like a torn socket bereft of its eye" beneath her left breast. Our hero fears a set-up, moves the dead woman's body to her apartment, then splurges on a Trans-Canada Air Lines ticket to Montreal.

"Montreal appealed to me as a good place to disappear from," he tells us. Don't you mean "in which to disappear", Danny? You're trying to disappear "from" Toronto.

Never the smartest guy in the room, it's only after our Danny books the flight that he remembers finding a bill from a Montreal lingerie store in the dead woman's apartment. Like many a rube before, he sets out to clear his name before the coppers – his word, not mine – slap on the cuffs. The task is not nearly as unpleasant as it sounds. Danny enjoys a couple of tumbles with Belle Doan, a former burlesque dancer who is now a mob boss wife, and has several similar encounters with a coltish, well-scrubbed girl named Joan. Think Ginger and Mary Ann... or Lili St. Cyr and Madeline Kronby.


Flee the Night in Anger is unique in our post-war noir in that it moves back and forth between Toronto and Montreal. The pace is fast, and becomes even more so in the 1954 American "Complete and Unabridged" Popular Library edition, which cuts roughly a quarter of text. A lot of the sex is lost, including a pretty hot encounter in which we read of Belle's masochistic tendencies. She does like to be knocked around. Die hard noir fans will want to read the Canadian edition, and may wish to skip the paragraphs that follow. There be spoilers.

Three people are killed in Flee the Night in Anger. As befits a mystery, the deaths of the first two are explained in the closing chapter. For the third, the reader must wait for the very last page, in which the lead detective explains:
As near as we can tell from the evidence, he tripped over the chair and put out his hand to save himself as his full weight fell on the seat of the chair, forcing it down. A broken spring inside the chair caught the trigger of the gun and fired it. The bullet hit him in the stomach; as he fell he pulled the gun free, upsetting the chair over himself before he died.
So, you see, it was just a freak accident. These things happen.

In the Canadian edition, Danny then heads upstairs for sex. The American ends in a kiss.

Dedication: "For this, his first novel, Keller insists upon the dedication: 'For My Doll.' As publishers we accede to his request with the knowledge that his 'Doll' is none other than his charming wife..." These words come from the back cover to the Studio Publications edition, yet no dedication is found within its pages.

Objects: Short-lived Studio Publications aren't remembered, least of all for the quality of their books; my copy all but fell apart in the reading. The lesser, slimmer Popular Library edition holds up much better.

The uncredited cover to the Studio edition has a disembodied Danny hovering above what I presume is meant to be Montreal. No, it doesn't look much like the city, but it sure ain't Toronto. The Popular Library front cover by A. Leslie Ross finds Joan surrounded by an unnaturally calm, green Lake Ontario. That's Danny and Belle on the back.

Access: With no listing on Worldcat, Studio's truly complete, unabridged Flee the Night in Anger is pretty rare. As of this writing just two copies – both from bookseller Nelson Ball – are being offered online. At $10 and $15 they're great bargains. Go get 'em.

The University of Toronto, the University of Calgary and York have copies of the Popular Library edition. Fourteen copies of are listed for sale online, ranging in price from US$1 to US$35. As is often the case, the bookseller at the highest end is misinformed, offering the tardy abridgement as a "First Edition".

26 March 2013

Condensed CanLit



Why Shoot the Teacher
Max Braithwaite
Reader's Digest Condensed Books
Montreal: Reader's Digest, 1981

Our local public library book sale approaches, bringing a trickle of donated Readers's Digest Condensed Books. Like the leak in the 110-year-old building's limestone foundation, it seems we can't do a thing to stop it.

Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against condensed books. The problem I have, as someone doing his darndest to raise money for the library, is that no one will buy the things. I do mean no one. A veteran with seven book sales under his belt, I realized last year that we'd never sold so much as a single volume. And so, we decided to give them away.

I was the only taker.


This is it, a lone volume saved from the recycling bin for the simple reason that it features an abridged version of Max Braithwaite's Why Shoot the Teacher, with illustrations by Bruce Johnson. An artist deserving of more attention, I first learned of Johnson last year through Leif Peng's Today's Inspiration.


Numbering four in total, it appears that the illustrations have never been reprinted.


The last two are a touch too wacky for me, but they are in keeping with the novel. This Johnson illustration from a 'fifties Maclean's is more to my taste:


Not many Canadian authors have had bank accounts blessed by Reader's Digest Condensed Books – and the most blessed, semi-citizen Arthur Hailey, hardly needed the money. The decision to include Why Shoot the Teacher seems both obvious and surprising. On the one hand, Braithwaite's good-natured humour is well-suited to the series, on the other it comes so very late. Why Shoot the Teacher was first published in 1965, and was adapted to the screen in 1977, so what's it doing here?

At roughly 72,000 words, I imagine the novel was much easier to abridge than, say, Airport or Hotel. Less than half remains. Never having owned a condensed book before, I was curious to see how it was done. These pages I marked up from the first edition give some idea:

(cliquez pour agrandir)
Not to worry, it's a photocopy.

One trick is to combine chapters – "Tic Tac Toe, Hockey, and Sex" and "The Hot Dust of Spring" become "Tic Tac Toe, Hockey, and the Hot Dust of Spring". No sex, please, this is Reader's Digest. No frozen horse turds, either. "There were always plenty of the around," says narrator Max Brown. Like Canadians of old, he uses them in lieu of a puck. Hockey takes a good hit here with talk of the Olympic hockey team, international hockey tournaments, Gordie Howe, Max Bentley and Ted Lindsay cut.

But what's this?

Where in the original, Max Brown tells us Canada produces "the best hockey players in the world", the condensed version has him saying that we produce "many of the best hockey players in the world".

Isn't that longer?

One last thing, the condensed version replaces "colour" with "color". Shorter.

Trivia: Reader's Digest receives fleeting mention in both the original and condensed versions of the novel:
"Trouble is," Harris said, "we're stultityped in our thinking. All we can think of is growing wheat. Now I've been reading an article in the Reader's Digest that really has the idea."
More trivia: The keen-eyed will have noticed that the second paragraph of the page spread above features an errant line ("wind hit southwestern Saskatchewan and melted most of"), which usurps the rightful words ("hour and a half to two hours' free time each day").

Object: Boards covered in a brown plastic-like material, the book contains three additional condensed works: Banners of Silk by Rosalind Laker, A Ship Must Die by Douglas Reeman and Kalahari by Henry Kolarz.

Access: Not listed amongst the thousands of Reader's Digest Condensed Books currently listed online. You will not find it at your local library.