Yeah, I Know the Muffled Man

The Mystery of the Muffled Man

Max Braithwaite

Toronto: Little, Brown, 1962

160 pages

Fifty-five years ago, The Mystery of the Muffled Man vied with Joe Holliday's Dale of the Mounted in Hong Kong as a Christmas gift for young, bookish nephews. I doubt either won, but it would not surprise

me if the former achieved greater sales. After thirteen volumes, Holliday's Dale of the Mounted books were getting tired; I think it worth noting that the Hong Kong adventure would be his last. Braithwaite's, on the other hand, was part of the Secret Circle, a new and exciting series driven by a survey of booksellers, librarians, teachers and, most importantly, Scarborough school children and their parents.

Results in hand, General Editor Arthur Hammond, set about recruiting what was described in a November 1962 press release as "the best available Canadian authors."

It seems that most were too busy.

The Secret Circle stable was very small,  containing veteran workhorses like Robert Collins, Lawrence Earl, David Gammon, and Scott Young. Hammond himself contributed two of the series' twelve books, while dictating length, plot points, and endings for the others.

The extent of Hammond's influence on The Mystery of the Muffled Man might make for an interesting paper, but I'm not the one to write it. Braithwaite's first novel, preceding Why Shoot the Teacher by three years, this one is a bit of a bore. It begins with a chilly wait for a train in

a northern Ontario mining town. Young Chris Summerville has been sent by his parents to meet his cousin, equally-young Carol Fitzpatrick, who will be visiting while her parents spend the Christmas holidays in Bermuda. Eventually, the train arrives, but before Chris meets Carol there is an altercation that will hang over the remainder of the novel. Chris's overly-friendly dog, Arthur, runs to greet the new arrivals, only to be clubbed by a "muffled man" who had emerged from the train. Carol later tells her cousin of some suspicious behaviour the muffled man exhibited on the train: pouring over maps, avoiding RCMP officers, and pretending to have a broken left arm.

There's little more worth reporting, except to say that The Mystery of the Muffled Man is a novel bereft of mystery. The character who clubs a dog is obviously the villain. Why is he in the northern Ontario mining town? Well, the only thing we know of the area's history is that there had been a bank robbery ten years earlier, and that the money was never found.

By far the most interesting thing about the novel is how little the muffled man figures. Accompanied by friend Dumont LePage, Chris and Carol decide to go ice fishing, get lost in the woods, climb an old fire tower to get their bearings, and discover an abandoned gold mine. After a cave-in separates him from the rest of the group, Chris sees the muffled man digging to retrieve the stolen loot and empties the bullets from his unattended rifle. Chris's father and two RCMP officers show up in the nick of time, resulting in this climactic passage:

"You stay here with the boy," Constable Scott said to Mr Summerville. "We'll deal with him." And, holding their guns at the ready, the two uniformed men moved down the tunnel.
     In five minutes it was over. The muffled man, trapped by the wall of fallen stone, and with an empty gun in his hands, was quickly overpowered.

Before dismissing The Mystery of the Muffled Man as the weakest novel read this year, it's only fair to acknowledge that it wasn't written with me in mind. The survey that informed the Secret Circle was conducted before I was even born. What's more, I've never so much as considered living in Scarborough.

Trivia: Jack McClelland once encouraged a hard-up Norman Levine to contribute to the series.

Object: A compact hardcover with eight illustrations of varying quality by Joseph Rosenthal. My copy, not nearly so nice as the one pictured above, was purchased three years ago at a London book store. Price: 60¢

Access: WorldCat records a grand total of two Canadian libraries holding the Little, Brown edition. It also lists a 1981 Bantam-Seal paperback, and something titled The Muffled Man (Scarborough: Nelson, 1990).

Interestingly, no copies of the Bantam-Seal and Nelson editions are on offer from online booksellers. The original Little, Brown came and went with a single printing. Though not many copies are listed online, it is cheap. Very Good copies begin at US$8.00. At US$30.10, the most expensive is an inscribed copy offered by an Ontario bookseller.

Remarkably, the novel has been translated into Dutch (Avontuur in een goudmijn) and Swedish (Mysteriet med den maskerade mannen).

Related posts:

Braithwaite's True First

Condensed CanLit
Dale's Dumb Luck; or, A Mountie Messes Up

Max Braithwaite's True First

We Live in Ontario
Max Braithwaite and R.S. Lambert
[Agincourt, ON]: Book Society of Canada, 1957

Yes, we do! In fact, we arrived seven years ago this week.

Max Braithwaite lived in Ontario, too. He's usually thought of as a Saskatchewan writer, but this province was his home for more than five decades. "I felt like I was born in the wrong place," Braithwaite once said. "Finally I got the hell out of Saskatchewan." The man best remembered for Why Shoot the Teacher? put it this way: "I was a writer, not a teacher, and I figured life's too short to do something you don't like in a place you don't want to be."

Any agent would cringe.

We Live in Ontario was rescued from the books left behind at the end of our public library's most recent book sale. It was an unexpected find. The title doesn't appear in any Braithwaite bibliography. It predates Voices in the Wild, the book regarded as his first, by five years.

We Live in Ontario was not co-author R.S. Lambert's first. A seasoned pro with over forty books to his name, Lambert is one of those worthy writers who have been snubbed by The Canadian Encyclopedia, The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature and W.H. New's Encyclopedia of Literature in Canada. And so, I direct you to Wikipedia – yes, Wikipedia – which has a not so bad article on the man. A fascinating figure, you'll be intrigued. Guarenteed.

I've been meaning to read these Lambert books for years:

• The Prince of Pickpockets: A Study of George Barrington, Who Left His Country for His Country’s Good (London: Faber & Faber, 1930)
• When Justice Faltered: A Study of Nine Peculiar Murder Trials (London: Methuen, 1935)
• The Haunting of Cashen's Gap: A Modern "Miracle" Investigated (London: Methuen, 1935)
• Propaganda (London: Nelson, 1938)
• For the Time is at Hand: An Account of the Prophesies of Henry Wentworth Monk of Ottawa, Friend of the Jews, and Pioneer of World Peace (London: Melrose, 1947)

Instead, I read We Live in Ontario.

Because it was there.

An elementary school textbook, We Live in Ontario explores the province through the eyes of Newfoundland's Baxter family as they settle into a new home "not far from Hamilton." Mr Baxter works for the Greenway Machine Company. Mrs Baxter sets the table. Jenny skips rope. Billy asks questions.

There's no real protagonist, but the Baxter boy does guide the plot. Bill's Ontario is a land of wonder. After breaking a lightbulb, he spends a full afternoon trying to wrap his head around the fact that its replacement will cost just twenty cents. How can that be?

Ask your father.

Mr Baxter is as good as his word. Bill not only visits an electric light bulb factory, but a farm, a bank, an airport and Niagara Falls. The family descend to the depths of a Sudbury nickel mine and help catch fish on a boat out of Port Dover. It's all quite educational.

I learned a lot. Did you know that lightbulbs were once made in Ontario? Electric irons, too. And clothing, refrigerators and farm machinery. Imagine!

The province I know is a very different place.

Object: A 226-page textbook with two-colour illustrations by Robert Kunz.

His works swings so wildly between the competent and incompetent that I can't help but wonder whether he didn't farm some of them out.

Access: Non-circulating copies are held by nine of our libraries (five of which are in Ontario).

Anyone looking to buy a copy – there is no reason why you should – will find three listed online. All in crummy shape, they range in price from US$10 to US$55.84. Had I not grabbed my free copy it would've been pulped.

Related posts:

Condensed CanLit

The Year of Grade School Readers, Cute Kittens and Dead Anglos Hanging in the Streets of Montreal

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.

The LSD CanLit

Regrets? I've had a few. Just last week I passed on a fine Macmillan first edition of Bernard Epps' Pilgarlic the Death that was priced at two dollars. Why? Well, I already had the 1980 Quadrant Edition... and I wasn't thinking straight. Don't get me wrong, I pretty happy to have this:

But I could've also had this:

I don't know that Victor Moscoso or Stanley Mouse had anything to do with that early cover, but they certainly deserve some credit. From the Summer of Love through the first dozen seasons that followed, Macmillan and rival McClelland & Stewart look to have been caught up in a psychedelic grove that embraced the most unlikely of authors.
I'm thinking here of old folks like Stephen Leacock, social conservative and staunch Conservative, who died thirteen years before the word "psychedelic" was even coined. I've said it before and I'll say it again, the David John Shaw cover above looks like it might've graced Joe Rosenblatt's The LSD Leacock (Toronto: Coach House, 1966).

Even writings about Leacock bring the Merry Pranksters to mind.

I don't mean to suggest that our two big publishers were unique, rather that they were more hip than their American and British counterparts. Just cast your glazed gaze upon the McClelland and Stewart edition of Farley Mowat's 1969 The Boat Who Wouldn't Float

...and compare it to the first American edition from Little, Brown

...and the staid first British edition, published by Heinemann in swinging London.

Next to Pilgarlic the Death, my favourite cover of those heady times was drawn by an anonymous hand for Gérard Bessette's Incubation (Macmillan, 1967).

But I don't think there's a greater example of this short-lived trend than McClelland & Stewart's 1969 cover for Never Sleep Three in a Bed, Max Braithwaite's boyhood memoir. Here we see the author's father, George Braithwaite, driving the family car into Pepperland.

That sun on the cover is setting. The new day and new decade would be less colourful. Macmillan was still capable creativity, while M&S decended into what I refer to as "The Letraset Years"

1973

1974

1979

... about which, the less said the better.

Max Braithwaite's Bawdy Book

Humorist Max Braithwaite was born one hundred years ago today in Nokomis, Saskatchewan. His Why Shoot the Teacher was one of the very first Canadian novels I ever read... and the 1977 film adaptation, starring Bud Cort, is a favourite.

So why is it that I haven't so much as picked up another Braithwaite novel?

The titles have something to do with it. The Night We Stole the Mountie's Car and The Commodore's Barge is Alongside gave off a folksy ring that had me covering my ears.

McClelland and Stewart's cover treatments neutered titillating titles...

...or rendered them dull and humourless.

So I passed on his books, offered in plenty at garage sales, thrift shops, and church bazaars, until last week I happened upon this, the one Braithwaite novel McClelland and Stewart did not publish:

Not bought at a church bazaar.