Of Problem Children and Adolescent Angst

Sunburst
Phyllis Gotlieb
New York: Fawcett, 1964
160 pages

Sorrel Park is no place to live, but this wasn't always so. A smallish city not far from Chicago, it was once a place of industry and well-paying jobs. During the "Open-The Door-In-Eighty-Four" policy, immigrants from Western Europe flooded in until it all went horribly wrong. First came the 1994 nuclear reactor explosion and resulting deaths. The federal government was quick to impose a press ban, the city was sealed off, martial law was imposed, the old coal plant was fired up, and the rest of the country continued on as before.

Shandy Johnson was born in Sorrel Park on June 3rd, 2011 to second generation Americans. Her father's family came from Denmark, changing their surname from Jensen along the way. Shandy's mother was named Mary O'Brian; as might be supposed, her family immigrated from Ireland. Until the explosion, Mary cleaned the offices at the nuclear facility, after which she was transferred to the coal plant. Shandy's father worked in both, even after being being struck on the back of the head with hot material. The wound would never close.

Shandy's birth, seventeen years after "the Blowup," came as a surprise. Her parents had assumed they'd been rendered sterile, but here they were in their forties with a baby girl. The joy they experienced as parents was short lived: "I was three and a half when they died, and since I can't remember much that happened before I was eighteen months old, that means I can't have really known them for more than two years..."

The novel begins on Shandy's thirteenth birthday. A strong-willed, savvy girl, she spends much of it evading capture. It didn't begin this way. Shandy had been celebrating the day with a vanilla cone and licorice stick when spotted. Shandy is a target because she is unusual. "I can't remember much that happened before I was eighteen months old," suggests something, don't you think?

New York: Berkley, 1983

Years earlier, not long after Shandy was born, dozens of Sorrel Park teens, offspring of the men and women exposed to radiation from the explosion, went on a violent rampage. It lasted no more than a few hours, but was devastating just the same. Much of the downtown lay in ruins, thanks entirely to newly awakened telepathic and telekinetic powers. It was only through dumb luck in the form of a freak accident that authorities were able to round them up. They've lived ever since in "the Dump," a prison compound equipped with a device that shields the outside world from their abilities. What sets young Shandy apart is that her mind cannot be read by those imprisoned in the Dump. She is a mutant amongst mutants, and thus of great interest to the government. 

I've never been one for stories in which radiation exposure brings the superhuman – something to so with having seen film footage of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at an early age, I suspect. It's probably the reason why the Hulk, Spider-Man, and the Fantastic Four never really appealed. 

The Hulk #1, May 1962

Yet Sunburst did appeal. It would be enough to say this all comes down to Shandy, but all the characters are brilliantly drawn. There's Jason Hemmer, who first spots the girl. He is the one mutant who cooperates with the authorities, and so is tasked with finding others. Colonel Prothelo was assigned to Sorrel Park in the aftermath of the Blowup. The son he fathered in Sorrel Park instigated that night of destruction. Cigar store owner Ma Slippec is a fleeting character, but just as fully formed. It was she who took in the orphaned Shandy, provided a modicum of stability, and introduced her to bootlegging in what is a dry city.

Of course, at the centre of it all is Shandy, a tall, awkward looking girl who is bothered by her flat chest. She longs for adolescence to really kick in, all the while worrying that she'll also develop abilities that will lead her to incarceration the Dump.

Sixty-two years ago, Fawcett positioned Sunburn as "A Science Fiction Classic of Tomorrow," and here we are in that past's tomorrow. While we don't have superhuman mutants, we do have government and corporate surveillance, suppression, manipulation and brutality. In this way, Sunburn is a classic of today.

About the author: 

Phyllis Fay Gotlieb (née Bloom)

Phyllis Fay Gotlieb (née Bloom) was born in Toronto one hundred years ago today. She attended the University of Toronto (BA, 1948; MA, 1950) where, I'm guessing, she met her husband (see: Dedication).

As far as writing goes, she was known first a poet. In 1961, John Robert Colombo's Hawkshead Press published her a pamphlet of verse. Sunburst landed in 1964, the very same year as Within the Zodiac, her first book of poems.

Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1964

Phyllis Gotlieb is remembered more as a writer of science fiction than as a poet. Her bibliography features twelve books in the genre, including A Judgement of Dragons for which she received the inaugural Aurora Award. 

New York: Berkley, 1980

Phyllis Gotlieb died in Toronto on 14 July 2009 at the age of eighty-three.

Dedication:

Kelly is the author's  husband, Calvin Carl Gotlieb, CM FRSC (27 March 1921 - 16 October 2016), considered the father of Canadian computing.

Of Phyllis Gotlieb's twenty other books, the one I'm most interested in reading is Phyllis Loves Kelly, (Toronto: University of Toronto Libraries, 2014), a posthumous collection of poems written to her husband over the course of their sixty year marriage.

Object and Access: A typical Fawcett Gold Medal mass market paperback original in excellent condition, it showed no sign of having been read before I got to it. I took good care.

The novel first appeared, abridged, in Amazing Stories (March - May 1964). 

Two years after the Fawcett, Coronet published the first British edition. 

When cropped, the image looks like a 'sixties LP I'd buy in a second.

Other editions followed in Australia from Eclipse (1969) and the United States from Berkley (1978). In 2002, Insomniac Press published the only Canadian edition to date as part of its Bakka Books series. 

The novel is currently available from Wildside Press of Cabin John, Maryland.

The six-decade-old Fawcett first edition is cheap in more than one way. Prices listed online range from US$6.00 to US$19.00. Condition is not a factor. At under twenty-one dollars, two signed copies of the Insomniac edition tempt, but the one you really want is a copy of the Fawcett the author inscribed to Miriam Waddington (and was subsequently owned by Maurice Forget, OC). It is being sold for $36.00 by a Gatineau bookseller.

Sunburst has been translated into French (Psycataclysme) and German (Die Geißel des Lichts).

Related post:

The Dustiest Bookcase: G is for Gotlieb

Murder at Expo 67: A Complete Mystery Novel?

A short follow-up to last week's post on Janet Gregory Vermandel's

So Long at the Fair.

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?

cliquez pour agrandir

"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:

again, cliquez pour agrandir

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.

Related posts:

An Expo 67 Murder Mystery?
Beautiful Joe: Now with 30% Less Violence!
Arthur Stringer Unshackled (then bowdlerized)
That Old Black Magician
Margaret Millar Simplified and Spoiled
Montreal Noir, Toronto Noir, and the Road Between
The Incomplete Repent at Leisure
Condensed Canlit
Ezra Levant and the Crude Art of Bowdlerization

An Expo 67 Murder Mystery?

So Long at the Fair

Janet Gregory Vermandel

New York: Dodd, Mead, 1968

186 pages

Canadian publishers really messed up with Expo 67; McClelland & Stewart, Macmillan, Ryerson, and Copp Clarke published nothing related to the fair. Swan, so small a paperback house that it is pretty much forgotten today, sought to cash in with Instant French, its penultimate title.

Meanwhile, newspapers, magazines, and news agents seized the opportunity by publishing guides to the fair. MacLean-Hunter's official guide is by far the most common, followed by Bill Bantey's Expo 67, published by the Montreal Gazette.

American book publishers were far more savvy, giving us a memoir (Expo Summer), a work of pornography (Sexpo '69), and this novel of suspense.

So Long at the Fair was Janet Gregory Vermandel's debut. She shares something with memoirist Eileen Fitzgerald and pornographer Charles E. Fritch in being American. That she actually lived in Montreal sets her apart. The publisher's author bio (right) is one of the most unusual I've ever read.

I like it.

Vermande would go on to write five more novels, most of which were set in Montreal. She eventually returned to the United States and her home town of Buffalo, dying in 2002 at age 79, another victim of Alzheimer's.

The first sentence of So Long at the Fair shook me cold:

"Good-by, Brian."

Brian is narrator Lisa Bentham's ex-fiancé. They'd worked together at a Buffalo advertising agency until office gossip of his affair with a lithe, blonde co-worker reached her ears. Seems everyone knew but her. So Long at the Fair begins with Lisa, all of twenty-two, flying off to Montreal for a fresh start. 

Why Montreal?

Lisa preferred Paris or New York, but her mother did not approve. Montreal was a neat compromise. Mrs Bentham insists that her daughter room with Victoria Lester, niece to a bridge partner, until she finds her footing. And so, Lisa's journey from Buffalo to Montreal ends with a walk through a polished marble lobby lit by crystal chandeliers.

Victoria's apartment is luxurious and spacious – more than enough room for a guest – which is surprising for a woman who does occasional work at a temp agency. She and Lisa have known each other since childhood, but were never quite friends. After some awkwardness, they spend the evening catching up. The next morning Victoria heads off to work, leaving her guest alone to explore a foreign city.

Lisa returns in late afternoon to an empty apartment, waits for Victoria, gives up, makes herself an omelette, and then turns in. She's awoken after midnight by the sound of someone moving about the apartment. When she calls out Victoria's name all goes quiet.

It's not her.

Lisa next sees Victoria at the city morgue.

Maybe New York wasn't such a bad idea, Mrs Bentham.

So Long at the Fair features two murders, an attempted murder, an assault, break-ins, extortion, and various other crimes committed by seven different characters, not all of whom are connected – and yet, Montreal comes off rather well. Vermandel, clearly loved her adopted city, and has her heroine share the love by treating her to evenings out at Altitude 737, La Bonne Femme, and La Reserve in the Windsor Hotel. The Buffalo gal makes her way with surprising ease. Jobs are plentiful. The afternoon Lisa quits her first job, with printer Ross-Fairchild, she's hired as a secretary at the Expo 67 Administration and News Pavilion.

Publisher Dodd, Mead positioned So Long at the Fair as a "story of murder and romance, set against the fabulous background of Montreal's Expo '67." Certainly "background" – as opposed to "backdrop" – was intentional. The novel takes place in January 1967, ending with the fair still three months away. Set during the planning of Expo, it's to Vermandel's credit that she captures something of the excitement that until now I'd read about only in old newspaper and magazines.

Leave it to an American expat.

Trivia: As "Murder at Expo 67," a condensed version appeared in the October 1967 issue of Cosmopolitan (the subject of next week's post). 

Object: A typical Red Badge Mystery in that it is a cheaply produced hardcover. In this case, the boards are blue. The jacket is by Alan Peckolick, best-known for the GM logo.

I purchased my copy earlier this year from a bookseller located in League City, Texas. Price: US11.75.

Access: A few copies are listed online. At US$7.41, the least expensive is described as being in good condition. Seems a bargain.

The most expensive – £31 – is the UK edition published in 1968 by Herbert Jenkins as Murder Most Fair. 

Not sure about the title, but I do prefer its cover to the American.

There has never been a Canadian edition.

There have been two translations, the earliest being the German Kastanien aus dem Feuer (1968), which was followed by the Dutch Het rode paspoort (1969).

Neither cover depicts a scene found in the novel. Of the two, I like Het rode paspoort more, but only because it imagines a Montreal that has never existed.

Sadly, there has never been a French translation.

What is wrong with us?

Related posts:

Summer of a Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name

A McGill Student's Mild Summer of Love

The Little People of Expo 67

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?

Related posts:

On the High Heels of Pleasure

Anyone Care About the Ryerson Fiction Award?

Romance and the Psychopath's Daughter
Condensed CanLit

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:

But Why Would You Want Him To?:

The Very Strange Story of a Delusional Abandoned Wife

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 Adventure, The Black Mask, Action 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.