Nelson Ball (1942 - 2019)

Thoughts this weekend have been with Nelson Ball, who died this past Friday. I first encountered Nelson as a poet, and later as a bookseller. He knew more about Canada's fly-by-night post-war paperback houses than anyone. It was my good fortune to have been able to tap his knowledge. Unfailingly generous, Nelson shared my enthusiasm, encouraged my exploration of CanLit's dustier corners, and took joy in my discoveries (most particularly Richard Rohmer's pseudonymously published volume of verse).

Nelson supplied me with dozens of books over the years: Sugar-Puss on Dorchester Street, Flee the Night in Anger, Bad Men of Canada... but of all he sent my way, I value nothing so much as Minutiae, a limited edition chapbook he published in 2014 with Cameron Antsee's Apt. 9 Press. A gift, it was included in an order for Sin for Your Supper, Dirty City, Frustration, No Place in Heaven, Overnight Escapade, Strange Desire, Daughters of Desire, He Learned About Women, and Too Many Women.

Its inscription reads "For Brian Busby - with admiration."

Right back at you, Nelson.

I thank you for your kindness. I'm grateful that our paths crossed.

You will be missed.

You are missed.

RIP

Addendum: Cameron Anstee and rob maclennan share their memories of Nelson.

Frustration, Part II: Paint a Vulgar Picture

So, how was your weekend?

Regular readers will remember that I ended last week's post on Henry C. Clayton's very, very bad Frustration by recommending the novel. There are several reasons why you should read it, and all have to do with the past.

Like any work of fiction – historical novels included – Frustration is of its time, and reveals a good deal about same. A News Stand Library title, it was sold through news stands, not book stores. A cheap thing, it was not built to last much beyond its November 1949 pub date. News Stand Library didn't last long either, but in its brief history, it published several novels about men who make a living as artists. My favourite is Artists, Models and Murder by Toronto-based comic book artist Tedd Steele.

You can see why these books appealed to post-war commuters. Painting nudes for a living is far preferable to, say, processing overdue payments in the accounts department at Sun Life.

Maybe that's just me.

Tony Pearce, the protagonist of Frustration, paints nudes for a living. Some of his canvasses end up in high-end Manhattan art galleries, but most are used in ads for Joyous Brassieres and more restrictive undergarment manufacturers: "The moguls of feminine underthings were well aware that the touch of genius in Tony's renderings of the body beautiful gave them an out-of-this-world quality which caused men to lick their lips and some wives to first fume, then rush out to buy the same type of girdle in the hope, never realized, that they would look like that." The most unusual thing about Tony's craft is revealed three pages into the novel:

There was the cynical, flippant Tony Pearce who painted gloss nudes, adroitly exaggerating a curve here on the bust, adding length to the thigh there, and so causing virile men to become restless and their wives to rage with futile envy. Tony never put the garments on his creations. They were added to the nude, with just the proper degree of transparency, by air-brush experts at the advertising agency.

Today's ad agencies would have no use for Tony – nor air-brush artists – though the manipulation of the female form continues. That in itself makes this novel interesting, but the main reason one should read Frustration has nothing to do with advertising.

Spoilers follow:

The murderer in Frustration – three bodies in total – is Tony's friend Eileen Henley. A talented artist, and smart as a whip, Eileen has by far the most attractive personality in the novel... and yet she is a spinster. To Tony, Eileen is beautiful in every single way except that she walks with "a slight limp." Minutes after meeting Eileen, Tony turns to his agent, Johnny Kozak, and says: "I liked her. Too bad she's crippled."

Tony is sometimes distracted from Eileen's limp by "the swelling of her breasts and the enticing valley between," and so he must remind himself that she is a cripple. Nevertheless, our hero enjoys Eileen's company and is often tempted to give her a kiss. As the novel draws to an end, author Henry C. Clayton rushes things along by having Tony take Eileen to the Stork Club, then really ramps it up:

Funny, wasn't it? The girl he would fall for wasn't perfect – and maybe that was why. Physically perfect girls were a dime a dozen. But the fact that she could ignore her infirmity so blithely, that she could climb the ladder of her career with any sears on her soul, that meant that Eileen was a girl in a thousand.

After eats, Tony ends up at his date's Sutton Place flat, where she slips into something more diaphanous:

Eileen came back in to the room and he stared. She was wearing a thin black negligee – and nothing else, and her hair was down on her shoulders. He hardly noticed her limp until her saw clearly her left leg was thinner than the other. Not much, but enough to show. It wasn't nearly as bad as he thought it would be.

Yes, not nearly as bad as he thought it would be, but Eileen has let slip something that suggests she just might be the triple-murderer. Tony doesn't do anything about it because her negligee falls open and he is fairly choked by "the heat of her breasts."

Next thing you know, Tony is struggling for breath as Eileen tries to strangle him with a strip of canvas. Fortunately, Tony is able to fish a penknife from his pocket and cut the fabric. Eileen says she has to pee and commits suicide in the bathroom. This leaves our hero to explain her motive:

The girl had beauty and talent, a rare combination, and yet she was deformed. She had a passionate nature, and yet it would be difficult for her to find a husband, a decent husband who was on her own intellectual level.

And so, you see, she killed.

"Different times," remarked my wife.

Indeed.

Researching this piece, I learned that last year the World Health Organization recorded just forty-two cases of polio worldwide. It is expected that next year the disease will be eradicated completely.

This information felt good. But it was followed that same day by a video from The Rebel's in-house Jew-hater Gavin McInnes:, in which we find these words:

Who doesn't want to know a handicapped person? That's cooler than a black friend. I want to at least have a friend with, like, a lobster claw. You need that in your repertoire. Friends are baseball cards. You need some freaks in the mix.

Different times.

Frustration is a novel I won't forget. I recommend it to anyone who has so much as a passing interest in the portrayal of the physically challenged in popular fiction.

The Rebel is also recommended. Know thine enemy.

Note: Gavin McInnes is not a "drunk Scotsman," as he claims. He was born in Herefordshire and grew up in Ottawa. That said, I do believe he is a drunk.

Object: A cheap, poorly-produced 158-page mass market paperback, reading Frustration proved to be more challenging than the average New Stand Library title.

I purchased my copy three years ago from bookseller Nelson Ball. Price: $6.00.

Not on WorldCat. Four copies are listed for sale online. Get one while you can!

Related posts:

Frustration, Part I: Paint Over Passion
Hurray for the Crippled Children's Bus!
A Comic Book Artist's Absurd Murder Mystery

The Canada Doctor (First Visit)

The Canada Doctor (Second Visit)

An Award-Winning Novelist's Bowdlerized Debut

The Pillar of Fire
Gordon Green
Toronto: News Stand Library, 1950

The Praying Mantis
H. Gordon Green
Fredericton: Brunswick, 1953

H. Gordon Green received an Avery Hopwood Award for The Praying Mantis. I wasn't much impressed because I'd never heard of the Avery Hopwood Awards. Now that I'm familiar, I'm still not much impressed. Open only to University of Michigan students, dozens are handed out each year. In 1948, Green was awarded $600 for his unpublished manuscript. A year or so later, he received a further $400 by selling the condensation rights to Export Publications for use in their News Stand Library.

"I was horrified when the paperback came out to see how the original had been murdered," he later wrote. "Only about half of the original was used [and] I look back on my dealings with them with no pleasant memories."

What did he expect? News Stand Library never published a book longer than 160 pages. The Pillar of Fire, the title slapped on the condensation, comes within two of that number (and its pages are very dense). It wasn't until 1953, with Brunswick's The Praying Mantis, that Green's novel was published unabridged. While I can't say it was worth the wait, I will allow that many of the best bits were lost in the cutting.

Have you read Erskine Caldwell? I haven't, but I once collected Signet paperback editions of his books because I liked the cover art. Judging those books by their covers has me thinking they're mildly risqué tales set amongst poor, uneducated folks in the rural American South.

I could be wrong.

In any case, I thought about Caldwell when reading The Pillar of Fire and again when tackling The Praying Mantis. Both versions of the novel were published when Caldwell was at the height of popularity, a time in which his books were selling in the hundreds of thousands per annum. Green didn't share that good fortune.

His novel takes place in rural Ontario. His heroine, Myra Leduc, is a swell-looking girl of nineteen. She lives with her French Canadian father, her English Canadian mother, and far too many siblings. Because the Leduc family is impoverished – again, too many siblings – Myra travels to take a job with Uncle Jurd, her mother's brother. Judd Galloway is an interesting character, though we have seen him before. A successful farmer, he holds great sway over his dry country as the fiery pastor of the Foursquare Gospel Hall. Jurd's Lord isn't merciful, nor is he:

Judd came slowly down the walk. Myra saw the little woman timidly draw him aside, heard her speak. "... I was thinking about Pat," the woman faltered, begging the fevered eyes that looked down at her now. "Pat used to play the fiddle you know. But is was only for the old-time squares and the likes of that. He couldn't play jazz.... And he was a very good man really.... Well, you remember how it happened. That time his car hit the bridge he was... he was coming home from playing that French wedding party... but he was a good man, really.... Don't you think?...."
     The old woman dared say no more. She didn't have to.
     Judd said, "Playing the fiddle for the lust of the flesh, Sister? And for a pagan wedding?" He shook his head slowly, with a terrible finality. "The wrath of ou God is an awful thing, Sister. An awful thing!"

As I say, we've seen characters like Jurd before in American literature. His kind may feature in Caldwell, but I haven't read Caldwell. While I haven't encountered anyone like him in any other Canadian novel, I'm sure they're there somewhere.

Judd is very tightly wound, and things are only getting worse. Myra has come to his farm because her Aunt Belle, Jurd's wife, is dying of cancer. And then there's simple son Matt. "He wouldn't hurt a fly... really," Aunt Belle tells Myra, but Jurd feels otherwise:

"When a lad is mature in his body and not in his mind, he's likely to get a lot of urge that could be mighty dangerous to an attractive girl like you. especially when he's strong."

Judd's warning appears in The Praying Mantis, but not in The Pillar of Fire. It wasn't until I read it that I realized Matt was an adult; the shorter version somehow had me thinking he was an adolescent. News Stand Library was never known for its editing – authors were lucky if their names were right – but I can't really blame the nameless for the

misconception. I come to praise, not bury. In order to make Green's manuscript fit the 158-page format, over half the novel had to be excised. The skill demonstrated is worthy of the surgeons who once worked on Reader's Digest Condensed Books. Green's plot is left virtually intact, which isn't to say that I don't prefer The Praying Mantis. The widow's hesitant query about fiddler Pat doesn't feature in The Pillar of Fire, nor do Jurd's sermons about "writing and jiggling and jitter-bugging and bunny-hugging and flat-foot-floogying" with "niggers". Pastor Jurd of The Praying Mantis is even more reprehensible.

In both books, Aunt Belle dies, and young Myra becomes the object of Jurd's desire. Recognizing as much, the firm-breasted niece flirts, poses and rubs against her uncle to curry favour, all the while enjoying a clandestine romance with a young McGill science student named Napoleon Cadotte. Skinny dipping is a nightly occurrence.

Does that sort of thing feature in Caldwell? I haven't read the man.

Does it feature in Green's other novels. I'm not sure I care enough to find out.

The critics rave:

It's a common lament that Hopwood winners don't keep on writing. The idea is that the novel, or play, or series of poems with which they won their awards somehow ended rather than began something. Their art was an attempt to impose order on hitherto clashing elements in their own experiences. It was, in short, autobiographical, autocathardic, and, alas, artistically suicidal.

– A.M. Eastman,  Quarterly Review,  August 7, 1954

Objects: One of News Stand Library's more competent productions, The Pillar of Fire enjoyed just one printing. I bought my copy in 2012 from bookseller and poet Nelson Ball. Price: C$25.00.

The Praying Mantis passes itself off as a first edition; no mention is made of it's previous incarnation.  With 309 pages of text and a good number of blanks, it's a fairly bulky thing. It was issued simultaneously in cloth and paper. There was no second printing. My paper copy was purchased five years ago at Attic Books. Price: $3.75. It seems to have once belonged to a woman named Eleanor Coulter, who blessed it twice with her signature, and took the time to transcribe Annie Charlotte Dalton's "The Praying Mantis" on one of the book's many blank pages.

Access: Two Very Good copies of The Pillar of Fire are currently listed online by American booksellers. Prices: US$20 and US$25. A third Yankee offers an incomplete copy in very rough condition at US$12 The University of Calgary appears to be the only library in the country with a copy. The Praying Mantis is not as common as one might expect; only fifteen of our academic libraries and the Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec have it in their collections. Five copies are listed for sale online, in both cloth and paper editions, at prices ranging from US$3.14 to US$40.00.  I recommend the copy pictured below, offered at US$30.00 by Scene of the Crime in St Catharines, Ontario.

Canadian Notes & Queries en couleur

The new Canadian Notes & Queries arrived in the post a couple of days ago. The first colour issue – after forty-eight years in glorious black, white and grey – 'tis truly a thing of beauty.

My contribution, this season's Dusty Bookcase on paper, was inspired by the centenary of Ted Allan's birth this past January. The Gazette did not recognize, but I did. Of all the Allan titles in my collection, the focus of the column was the one that had remained unread: Don't You Know Anybody Else? It's a slim volume of short stories, published in the wake of Allan's fraudulent Stephen Leacock Medal win. Disturbing, though perhaps not so much as his original Love is a Long Shot, Don't You Know Anybody Else? it is one of those books sold as something it is not. 

In the same issue, I've contributed to a new feature: "What's Old: Notable CanLit reissues & offerings from the country's antiquarian booksellers". Still more retro goodness is to be found in Stephen Fowler's exhumation of Let's All Hate Toronto, a "narration, illustration and exhortation" by Jack McLaren.

Wish I could join in, but I can't... our daughter was born there. God Bless Women's College Hospital, I say!

Other contributors include:

Mark Callanan

Peter Dubé

Alison Gilmour

Amanda Jernigan

Shaena Lambert

Colette Maitland

David Mason

Shane Neilson

Diane Obomsawin

Laura Ritland

Patricia Robertson

Anakana Schofield

Seth

Patricia Smart

J.C. Sutciffe

Bruce Whiteman

Finally, it would be a great mistake to not mention Jason Dickson's interview with bookseller and poet Nelson Ball. I've drawn on Nelson's extensive knowledge of obscure CanLit so very many times in writing the Dusty Bookcase; what's more, he has provided me with many of the books covered here over the years. Just last week, Nelson sent me these two by Kenneth Orvis, the subject of a future CNQ Dusty Bookcase.

How's that for a tease?

Subscriptions to Canadian Notes & Queries can be purchased through this link.

Related post:

Pulp Noir à Montréal

Chasing Down a Thriller Writer's Hidden Verse

Poems
Arthur Henry Ward [pseud. Richard Rohmer]
Don Mills, ON: Musson, 1980

It all began late last year when I noticed a seemingly foreign title in Wikipedia's Richard Rohmer entry:

Poems of Arthur Henry Ward? Rohmer as anthologist? Of poetry? A joke, right? And who the hell is Arthur Henry Ward?

Turns out that Arthur Henry Ward is Sax Rohmer's real name. I didn't know this because my knowledge of British mystery writers is next to nonexistent. I understand that his novels aren't half bad.

I could be wrong.

In any case, the discovery gave rise to a question: If Ward is Rohmer, could it be that Rohmer is Ward?

Further investigation revealed that Poems of Arthur Henry Ward was added to the entry by someone using the name "General Richard Rohmer". To date, the Wikipedian has made only one other edit – this to the very same entry. More have been made under the username "Richard rohmer [sic]"; IP addresses traced to the general's adopted hometown of Collingwood, Ontario (pop. 19,241), have also been used.

Richard Rohmer, right?

So convinced am I that Poems is the work of the man who gave us Ultimatum, Exxoneration and Separation that I purchased the lone copy listed for sale online. The investment paid off in the receipt of what is now the most unusual volume of verse in my personal library.

The slim tome's first poem, "Critic", begins:

I am a Critic!
As such I render competent artists incoherent, impotent
through my unfeeling castration of
talented painters, sculptors, authors, actors and
the beautiful disorderly horde of intuitive creators of
intellectual art

Ninety-four lines follow, but I'll stop here because I was lost on first reading. Still am. I don't quite get why the castration of the talented renders the competent impotent. Were they standing too close? Did the castrator's knife catch? Is psychological trauma to blame? More than anything, I'm left wondering whether castration is ever done with feeling. I should write Joni Ernst.

That first stanza is the easy one. This, the fourth, is more typical:

but of course, if you are a critic and therefore a
perverted, certified insanist with no relationship
to the real world, it is agreed by all who are
not mercenary critics and therefore by the whole
of those humanly afoot/abroad that critics are as
above described —

Rohmer was never the critics' darling. Before John Gellner's incompetent reviews of Massacre 747, and Starmageddon, I'm not sure he'd ever received positive notice. Rohmer once sued Larry Zolf and various higher-ups at the Gazette over a review of Balls! I'm not sure even Erwin Rommel was so great an enemy as William French, whom Rohmer once described – unjustly – as "the most skilled literary critic (so-called) in Canada when it comes to putting down Canadian authors."

The Gazette, 22 September 1979

Oh, but then a lot of authors hate critics. It wasn't until the first eight lines of the second poem, "Smoker", that I knew for certain that Ward was really Rohmer:

Polluters
contaminators who foul the already grit-crud filled
atmosphere of a crowded world, chemical waste
pouring into steams, rivers, lakes, oceans upward
into the moving air masses that insidiously fly
parasitical minute particles of man-generated
poisons to be lowered imperceptibly, secretly
enveloping the unsuspecting body

Smokers, you see, crowd Rohmer's novels, invariably falling into one of two camps: the weak and the villainous.

Some will take exception to me and "General Richard Rohmer", pointing to words like "already grit-crud filled / atmosphere", "chemical waste / pouring into steams, rivers, lakes, oceans", and the "parasitical minute particles of man-generated /  poisons". They will ask how these could come from Rohmer, a man who has spent decades arguing for aggressive expansion of the oil and gas industry in our far north. To these doubters I say there have always been contradictions within Rohmer's writing.

Consider his 1979 big bestselling Balls! In the novel, his fifth, a natural gas monopoly shuts off supply to the City of Buffalo without warning. Twenty thousand people die as a result – the President of the United States included – though everyone agrees that Congress is at fault for not imposing stringent industry regulations. The new president sets things right, spending billions to purchase and retrofit several dozen oil tankers. These in turn are handed over to the very same corporations that had caused the crisis. As the vice-president explains, the government is a great believer in private enterprise. So is Richard Rohmer.

I dwell on Balls! because it was the first Rohmer from General Publishing. In 1979, the company paid $35,000 for the privilege. A year later, it gave Rohmer $75,000 ($210,000 today) as an advance on Periscope Red, Patton's Gap and Triad.

I doubt one of those books earned out.

Poems was set loose by Musson, the General imprint that had forty years earlier published Memory Hold-the-Door. I suggest that its existence has at least something to do with the company's desire to please its bestselling author.

Rohmer the poet is much different than Rohmer the bestseller. The language is different. A man who typically dictates his books – Generally Speaking while driving his car – I suspect he actually wrote Poems; hence "thence" and  hundred or so other words not found in his prose. His style is best described by my Reading Richard Rohmer colleague Chris Kelly, a more accomplished certified insanist than I:

What’s the difference between a poem and an angry diary entry? A poem has arbitrary line breaks. Also, in a poem, whenever you get to something you know two other words for, use all three.
     That way people know you won’t be silenced, censored, cowed.

I haven't encountered a more angry book. Only once, in "Flyer", does one detect another emotion:

I fly
airborne!
free, up
a bird machine
strapped to my ass
in my hands, under
the coordinates of my
concentrating brain 

Poems cannot be easily dismissed. Months have passed since its purchase, and I've still not made my way through the twenty poems contained within its cardboard covers. It is not possible to read one after another; it is not possible to read one stanza after another. My reading for today comes from the eighteenth poem, "Woman", stanza six (of twelve):

womankind, whose exclusive role of potential/actual
re-creation brings usually therewith a
lesser strength, physical, emotion but superior
determined doggedness peppered with erect, stiff,
bitchiness not overpowering for the mate but oftentimes
precipice teetering as equality syndrome
balloons prickly proofing deflatable on the edge-push
of the drive of woman to be her own person,
but just only/merely/something more than a semen
receptacle

Again, I'm lost.

T & A?: Poems by Arthur Henry Ward? Poems by Arthur Henry Ward Jr.? Poems by Arthur Henry Ward, Jr.? I'm going with the Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data.

Object: A slim, 60-page trade-size paperback. Part of Musson's short-lived, not-much-missed Spectrum Poetry Series. The Robin Taviner cover design appears to have been adopted as a logo.

My copy – a review copy – was purchased earlier this year from Paris bookseller Nelson Ball.

I've not been able to find a single review.

Critics!

Access: For a thirty-four-year-old book from a major Canadian publisher, Poems is surprisingly scarce. No copies are currently listed for sale online. Library and Archives has a copy, as does the Toronto Public Library and twelve of our academic libraries. That's it.

Related posts:

Recycling Richard Rohmer

Richard Rohmer Recycles (Again)

Of Thucydides, Themistocles and Richard Rohmer

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".