The Sudden Violent Deaths of Arthur Stringer and His Family (and Their Respective Resurrections)

One of the earliest Canadians to really make a killing in the writing game, Arthur Stringer led a pretty eventful life. More than sixty books bore his name and twenty-three movies were made from his work – no one has yet come up with an accurate count of his hundreds of magazine appearances. 

And then there was his marriage to exciting Amazonian Jobyna Howland, Gibson Girl, Broadway babe and minor Hollywood star.    

Yes, an eventful life, so much so that the drama detailed below – front page news in Montreal, Toronto and New York – doesn't rate so much as a footnote in Arthur Stringer: Son of the North, Victor Lauriston's 1941 biography: 

The Pittsburgh Press, 21 May 1912

In fact, Stringer had no home in Niagara Falls, New York. He and his family then divided their time between a flat in New York City and "Shadow-Lawn", their house in Cedar Springs, Ontario. Though described in the Canadian Bookman as a "summer home", it was at the northern address that the Stringers spent the better part of the year. 

The Canadian Bookman, August 1909

"Shadow-Lawn" figures in the curious correction that went out over the wires hours later:

The Regina Morning Leader, 21 May 1912

Caught off guard, The New York Times, which had somehow missed all the excitement, published a modest piece:

The New York Times, 21 May 1912

Stringer, Stockton... Cedar Springs, Niagara Falls... so easily confused.

Sadly, Stringer and the beautiful Jobyna eventually went their separate ways. In 1936, the actress was found dead of a heart attack on the kitchen floor of her Hollywood home. Stringer lived on until 1950, before being felled by same.

I've not been able to track down anything concerning their daughter.

Entertainment: Yes, I've posted this before, but after the horrors above isn't something a bit cheery in order? Here's Jobyna Howland with Wheeler and Wolsey in The Cuckoos. Oddly appropriate, I think.

Lilian Vaux MacKinnon and Her Critics

A fleeting follow-up to the previous post:

Lilian Vaux MacKinnon earned a English B.A. (Honours) at Queen's, though I don't see much evidence of this in Miriam of Queen's. What the university's website describes as a "critical success" received a mixed bag of reviews. The harshest appraisal comes from an anonymous critic in the December 1921 edition of Canadian Bookman:

The book gives one the idea that Mrs. MacKinnon enjoyed her student life under "Geordie" Grant to the full, and wants to enable others to see it as she did, but is handicapped in her effort by a desire to stick to literal facts. It is somewhat as if one were to attempt to describe  the life of a great university by reproducing a sophomore's diary.

There's more, of course, but I've chosen these words because they touch on the autobiographical nature of the novel. It's this reading of Miriam of Queen's – as a roman à clef – that brought the most positive reviews, like this one in The Ottawa Citizen:

Many of the characters in "Miriam of Queen's" will be recognized. There is for instance her father, a good civil servant. "Roderick Campbell had been in the government employ in increasingly responsible positions since he had moved to Ottawa from the Island of Cape Breton. Highly esteemed, reserved to the point of austerity, a scholarly man, books were his favorite pastime." The Campbell's lived "in a substantial brick house set among the trees" in the Capital.

Like Miriam, Lilian Vaux MacKinnon called Ottawa home, and like her heroine she travelled widely. The Citizen review describes Marion of Queen's as being "almost Dominion-wide in its scope, the scenes extending from the countryside to Cape Breton to the cities of eastern, middle and western Canada."

And so I'm left shaking my head over this:

Canadian Bookman, June 1922

Never assume that a reviewer has actually read the book in question.

Related post:

Back to School with Miriam of Queen's

That's Entertainment, Part III

A bit of a change of pace this month as I work toward a deadline. Expect fewer words and more pictures – a bit like the revamped Maclean's or Canwest's treatment of the old Southam papers.

Let's begin the visual feast with six books by man of the week Arthur Stringer. The most interesting, I think, is Without Warning (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1924), a novel he co-wrote with Russell Holman. The project began as a publicity gimmick put together by Paramount, which released a film without a title – actually, it was called The Story Without a Name – and encouraged moviegoers to submit suggestions. The plot centres on an idealistic young scientist who invents a death ray, is kidnapped by pirates, but escapes when he is able to create a second death ray out of old junk. An attractive cover, I suppose, but where's that death ray?

The Prairie Child. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1922.

The standard line on Stringer is that he's remembered for his Prairie Trilogy: Prairie Mother (1915), Prairie Wife (1920) and Prairie Child. This isn't at all true; Stringer is a forgotten writer. The last any of these titles saw print was in 1950, when two appeared in a bind-up called The Prairie Omnibus. To find all three, you have to go back even farther, to 1939, and another bind-up, The Prairie Stories.

Power. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1925.

The story of John Jusk, a determined man who makes his fortune in the railroads. Though it would make for an interesting book, I'm assuming that's not our hero on the cover.

Power was hated by Frederick Philip Grove, Stringer's rival in the area of prairie fiction. Grove's review for Canadian Bookman misidentifies the novel as an 'autobiography', and concludes: 'Whenever John Jusk says a thing, he does so "with his jaws clamped". That is sufficient advertisement for one class of readers; a sufficient warning for another.'

Wolf Woman. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1927.

The daughter of a bush ranger, Dynamite Mary is 'three-quarters timber wolf and one-quarter angel'. Hers is a simple, uncomplicated until one day she is 'transported suddenly out of the forests of Canada to the fever and tumult of life on the banks of the Hudson and the castled shores of Long Island.'

Fun.

Marriage by Capture. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1933.

Stranded in the Canadian wilderness, a beautiful young heiress believes she's found rescue in a mysterious man, only to find that he refuses to help her return to civilization.

Creepy.

The Wife Traders: A Tale of the North. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1936.

In this fantasy set four decades in the future, citizens of 'Suburbia' gather to play a strange game in which car keys are placed in a bowl and... Well, not really, though the novel does deal with adultery, a topic that prevented magazine serial sales.

Reprinted by Harlequin in 1955, to this day The Wife Traders remains the very last Stringer title to have appeared in print.

Related posts:

That's Entertainment!

That's Entertainment, Part II

Pay No Need

Canadian Bookman, March 1922