Old Lady Harlequins: The Wicked, the Suicidal, the Murdered, the Petticoated, and the Headless

The Wicked Lady Skelton
Magellan King-Hill
1949

Die With Me, Lady
Ronald Cocking
1953

Lady - Here's Your Wreath
Raymond Marshall [pseud. James Hadley Chase]
1953

Lady Doctor
Peggy Gaddis [pseud. Peggy Dern]
1957

The Lady Lost Her Head
Manning Lee Stokes
1958

Related posts:

Harlequin Librarians: So Many Secrets
Harlequin Blondes: Terror Struck Them Dumb
Suggestive Harlequins: A Romantic Threesome

AC/DC Nurse: Another Harlequin Threesome
Harlequin: The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name

Harlequins, Ranchers and Redheads: A Threesome
Another Wreath for a Redhead

Dope Rings in Canada! Oh My!

Cocking in Bed

The House in Brook Street
Ronald Cocking
London: Hurst & Blackett [1949]

Wives who wish their husbands to fall asleep at a reasonable hour should not allow them to take this title to bed; it is one of the 'to be read at a sitting' variety, and liable to bring about marital crisis.

– Bruce Graeme, jacket copy for The House in Brook Street

Started in bed, moved to an armchair and ended up on the living room couch. I fell asleep several times. All in all it was very disappointing. I'm ashamed to say I paid for it.

My third Cocking, The House in Brook Street opens at Washington's Hotel Statler on the evening of V-J Day. Our hero and narrator, Inspector George Crawley of Scotland Yard, emerges from an elevator; that it isn't referred to as a "lift" is the novel's first and greatest surprise. George has been in the United States for three years, on loan to the FBI in its battle against wartime counterfeiting and the illegal transfer of bonds. Over a celebratory drink, G-Man pal Barney asks about future plans.

          "What'll you do now? Go back to England, I suppose?"
          "I suppose."

George isn't what you'd call a man of action, which may explain why he's never responded to G-Gal Norma Jean Travers' flirtations. A week after V-J Day she tries one last time, sitting on the corner of his desk, "one nylon leg crossed over the other," before giving up and seeing George off on the train that will take him to New York, the Queen Mary and, eventually, dear old London.

Aboard train, a beautiful blonde named Brenda Walsh asks to share his private compartment. He watches as she fiddles with her purse, and then their coffee cups. "I began to feel nervous," reports George. The coffee tastes bitter. His final thought before losing consciousness: "I had fallen for the oldest trick in the world."

George is revived by a porter – "My, my sah! You sho' do sleep heavy!" – to find that the compartment has been ransacked. Though he recognizes that someone at the Bureau has leaked his itinerary, George proceeds as planned, checking into the hotel at which he has a reservation.

Wouldn't want to lose that deposit.

George sees that he's being trailed by a cream-coloured 1942 Chrysler, but that doesn't prevent him from stopping in on his pal Lou Rogers, a captain in the NYPD. Lou reminds George that he promised to give him a glossy of Scotland Yard. After that, it's off to a penthouse overlooking Central Park, where Jacob B. Rand – "The Rand! Rand's First National Bank of New York!" – thanks him for catching a counterfeiter, then drones on about his enthusiasm for something called the Society of the Friends of Peace. Rand sends George back to the hotel in a cream-coloured 1942 Chrysler, something our hero dismisses as an "odd coincidence." His room has been ransacked.

The next day, aboard the Queen Mary, George picks up a newspaper and reads this:

"That's what you have to get used to in America", George tells us. "Anything can happen there – and usually does."

It was at this point that I lost what little faith I had left in George. Nothing that followed caused me to reconsider –  not even Scotland Yard's remarkable belief in their man.

Back in London, George is promoted to Chief Inspector and entrusted with security for the opening session of the United Nations General Assembly, scheduled to take place – as it did – on 10 January 1946 in London. Barney and Norma Jean arrive in town to ensure the safety of the American delegates. Good thing, too, because their English friend proves himself entirely inept. Twice he's lured to meet strangers who offer undisclosed information, twice he's warned that the meeting is suspicious, and twice he's ambushed. His worst beating comes after Brenda Walsh, the very same woman who slipped the Mickey Finn on the Washington-New York train, asks to meet him in Place Pigalle:

"The Place Piguelle!" I said."That's a hell of a place to meet anybody."
     "I know," she said, "but we've got go to a house near there. I'll explain when I meet you."
     "All right," I said. "I'll take your word for it. See you at eight."

After that particular ambush, George forgets to retrieve the gun that was knocked from his hand.

Cocking forgets, too.

The author's debut, The House in Brook Street is set in an odd world in which a policeman specializing in counterfeiting and financial fraud is tasked with ensuring the safety of hundreds of the world's most important politicians, ambassadors and bureaucrats. George has no staff and meets with no one other than Barney and Norma Jean. He never visits Central Hall Westminster, at which the General Assembly is to take place.

At some point, George is reassigned. We don't know when exactly – he keeps it from us for a while – but I'm willing to accept his story. It seems that banker Jacob B. Rand and his Society of the Friends of Peace friends are up to something, and because George has met Rand... well, who better to figure things out? No one knows just what Rand and the SFP have in mind except that it's being cooked up in the Society's house on... er, in Brook Street, and will take place on the very day the General Assembly is to convene. Sadly, George proves himself to be just as ineffective as ever. Frustrating as it is for the reader, it does include this pretty great passage:

I once read in a book that one of the chief requirements of a novel was that it should have Dramatic Unity. Well, I suppose that in a piece of fiction you can organize things so that the action is smooth-flowing and that the bits and pieces all fuse together in a nice, complete whole.
     My trouble is that I've got to set the facts down just as they happened (and anyway I'm a policeman, not a writer). So I've got to ruin the Dramatic Unity of the story by skipping three weeks or so. Why? Well, simply because the whole case came to a complete standstill.

A serious alcoholic, Barney is of no help. Norma Jean spends all her time cooking for the men, making pots of coffee and changing outfits. As the day of the General Assembly draws near, the trio are kidnapped by Rand. For no good reason, the banker tells them all about his plans for murdering foreign delegates. A forged document will convince the world that the orders came from Downing Street. World War Three will begin with a new Axis led by "fanatical Nazis in hiding in the Bavarian Alps."

That's Rand's plan, anyway.

Convinced that they have no hope of escape, George, Barney and Norma Jean while away the hours playing cards until, quite by chance, they're rescued. 

Really. That's what happens. I didn't dream it.

Favourite sentence:

It was so obvious that the only excuse which I can make for not seeing it before is that I had a lot of things on my mind.

Trivia: The House in Brook Street follows Jane Layhew's Rx for Murder as the second novel read in five months to feature "nigger in the woodpile", an expression I swear I'd never before encountered.

The novel's lone black character is the  railway porter mentioned above. A helpful soul, the last we see him is when Crawley's train arrives in New York:

"We is pullin' out ob dis bay in two minutes, sah." He was looking at me curiously.
     I looked around. Miraculously, my bags were packed and ready.
     "That's fine," I said, "thanks a lot." I gave him five dollars and his shining black face split in a huge grin.

Object and Access: A compact 224 pages in rose-coloured boards. The cover illustration is uncredited. Excited by the opening scenes of Cocking's Die With Me, Lady, in 2012 I purchased my copy for £35 from a bookseller in Winterton, Lincolnshire. The pages were uncut.

The rear flap announces Cocking's second novel, High Tide is at Midnight (1950), which I read and reviewed here two years ago. In turn, the High Tide is at Midnight dust jacket reports that The House in Brook Street has enjoyed three printings. Surprising. I see just one copy of The House in Brook Street being offered for sale online. The UK bookseller provides this description: "Book Condition: Acceptable. Foxing/tanning to edges and/or ends. No dust jacket. Pages tanned. Staining/marking to cover. Staining/marking to pages/page edges. Wear/marking to cover." Price: £74.57.

It's not worth considering.

Not a trace in Canadian libraries, I'm afraid. American cousins will find one lonely copy at Boston University. My English cousins are served by Oxford University and the British Library.

Related posts:

Cocking on the Beach

The Lonely Patience of Kevin Marlow

Dope Rings in Canada! Oh My!

Cocking on the Beach

I possess one of the finest collections of Ronald Cocking material in private hands. Yes, I do. What's more, it was amassed in a matter of minutes.

There is a cautionary tale in this, recounted in my review of Die With Me, Lady. It will not be repeated it here. In its place, I offer these words of advice: Do not judge an oeuvre on eight pages of text.

Now, the collection:

ITEM #1

A glossy 6¼ x 8¼ black and white photograph (above) depicting the author at ease. A refugee from the defunct Miami News, I purchased this photo for US$5.33. The obverse appears to indicate that the image was published on 4 November 1951, a Sunday. 

(cliquez pour agrandir)

It was through this item that I discovered Cocking had once served as Managing Editor for The Hamilton News. The caption reports that J. Arthur Rank is "dickering for movie rights" to one of his three novels. Wish I knew which.

ITEM #2

A first edition of The House on Brooke Street (London: Hurst & Blackett, 1949), Cocking's first novel.  "Written in the best 'Clubfoot' tradition", says the jacket, but I doubt I'll ever read it. Published sixty-five years ago at 8s. 6d., I paid £20 for my copy.

ITEM #3

High Tide is at Midnight, subject of my most recent post. Published by Hurst & Blackett in 1950, this is a first edition of Cocking's second book. This one, originally 9s. 6d., was purchased for £26.

ITEM #4

A second edition copy of Cocking's third and final novel, Weep No More, Lady, published in 1953 by the Mystery Book Guild. This one was a bargain at £7. The first edition was published in 1952 by Hurst & Blackett. 

ITEM #5

Weep No More, Lady recast as Die With Me, Lady for the Canadian news stand. Published in June 1953 by Harlequin, it was this copy – more precisely, the first eight pages of this copy – that led me to drop C$147.10 (incl.  shipping) on the above.

Oh, but didn't those eight pages show such promise!

Addendum: What do I know about Ronald Cocking? Not much ore than is found on the back of that glossy black and white. To be perfectly frank, I haven't been much inspired to take that ninety-minute drive out to Hamilton to see what I might find.

The laziest of searches, conducted from the comfort of my home office, finds Cocking twice mentioned  in The Globe & Mail. Nothing to do with his books, mind. Here's the first, in Bruce West's column of 17 July 1950:

Cocking returned to the pages of Globe & Mail in this 7 June 1952 report from Osgoode Hall:

What else? What else? Well, let's see… That W. stood for William. He was born in 1907 at Portsmouth, and served in the RAF during the Second World War. Cocking emigrated to Canada, but at some point returned to the UK, where he contributed to Parade and Argosy. He died at Surrey in 1999. 

Oh, and it seems he did know his canines. The last piece of Cocking fiction I've been able to find is "It's a Dogs Life!", published in the August 1971 issue of Argosy.

I'm not interested in buying a copy.

Related posts:

Dope Rings in Canada! Oh My!
The Lonely Patience of Kevin Marlow

The Lonely Patience of Kevin Marlow

High Tide is a Midnight
Ronald Cocking
London: Hurst & Blackett, [1950]

If the past is a foreign country, that of a foreign country will seem particularly alien. Still, I wonder if there was ever an England like the one depicted in High Tide is at Midnight. Was there really a time in which unlisted phone numbers were available to anyone who asked? Was there really a time when a simple call to a beautiful young film star would bring an immediate invitation to tea? Really? At the actress's London flat? Even when you refused to say why you were calling?

These are the sorts of questions that played through my mind when, I suppose, the author would've had me thinking about smuggling, rationing, and the high rate of purchase tax. His hero, Kevin Marlow of the Customs and Excise Department's Special Investigation Branch, is perhaps the dullest to ever feature in a thriller. "You know, Mr. Marlow," says his superior, Sir William Lindlay, "I think you are the most patient officer in the Branch. Not the most brilliant, perhaps, but certainly the most patient; and patience often achieves results denied to the purely clever people."

Clever colleague Craddock having failed, Kevin is assigned to take over an investigation into a smuggling ring thought to be working the English Channel. That evening, whilst going through Craddock's notes in his bachelor flat, he finds the calling card of new screen sensation Margaret Lawson. It's an "odd coincidence", Kevin having taken in her latest film, Strange Tomorrow, just hours earlier.

The very next morning, Craddock collapses, whispering these words to Kevin with his dying breath: "Kennington… Near Kennington. And… the… sea… port. They're… all… in… it."

Kevin doesn't bother following up on Craddock's parting tip. Never does. He begins his investigation by getting Margaret Lawson's phone number, giving her a call, sipping her tea, and coming away wholly unsatisfied:

Kevin decided that he didn't understand at all; nothing fitted. For one thing, he ought to be feeling a considerable resentment towards her because of the fact that she was deliberately obstructing him – yet all he could feel was admiration for her loyalty. Yet she had lied about Craddock, and if his vague suspicions about Craddock were right, that tied her up directly with what was going on – which was a vastly different thing to her being an unwilling party. He was thinking in circles, he suddenly realized – and gave it up. He must get a lot more facts first.

Kevin's method is to visit and revisit his suspects with faith that it will all lead to something. I was reminded more of a Jehovah's Witness than a detective. High Tide is at Midnight is a novella made novel through excessive detail, most of which involves getting the protagonist from visit A to visit B:

At eight o'clock the next morning – a Saturday – Kevin was bowling along over Catford Heath, headed south-east. It was more like April than October – the sky was blue, and there was a golden haze in the crisp air. By eight-twenty-five he was in Farmingham, and he pulled up briefly at a café to drink some steaming hot coffee and eat some buttered toast.
     Then he went on down the arterial road until he came to the Sevenoaks-Maidstone Road, where he turned left. In Maidstone he stopped to consult his road-map, then pressed on down the Hastings Road for a mile, turned off south-east again on the Class 2 road, finally coming out in Tenterden. There he asked the way from a passing farmhand, and some five minutes later he coasted down into a hollow, and tucked under the hill on the left, close to a brook, there it was – a cottage with a small board attached to a gate on which was written 'THE DELL'.

Although Kevin is helped along by the odd "odd coincidence" and has the good fortune to stumble, both literarily and figuratively, upon a good many clues, he proves himself incapable of exposing the smugglers. One of his greatest breaks occurs when, quite by chance, he stops in a village in which every single inhabitant is involved with the ring (vicar included). Even this leads to nothing. Shame Craddock is dead; bet he could've figured things out.

Ultimately, it's Margaret Lawson who blows the lid off the smuggling operation, telling our hero everything. In doing so, she exposes family's participation, thereby risking gaol time for herself, her brother and her parents.

Why would she do such a thing?

Well, you see, the beautiful film star had fallen in love with the Customs and Excise man.

Was there ever really such an England?

The romantic Kevin Marlow:

"You know," he said, "I little thought when I was sitting in the cinema watching your last film a few days ago that I would be soon having you all to myself in a country cottage. I admire your acting enormously."
     She said: "Thank you, sir. But seriously – I'm glad. Oddly enough, I want you to… have a good opinion of me."
     "Why?"
     She shrugged her slim shoulders.
     I don't really know – after all, we're practically strangers. But I suppose that it's because intuitively I respect your judgement. Does that sound ridiculous?"
     "No," Kevin said, smiling. "And it does my ego a lot of good." He looked over the rim of his cup. "While the Mutual admiration Society is in session, I should like to mention something else. I think that you're the most beautiful woman I have ever seen – and I mean that very sincerely. I hope you don't mind my saying that; anyway, it's said."

Object: A compact 222-page hardcover in black boards. I purchased my copy last year – avec Crime-Book Society belly band – for £26 from a bookseller in North Lincolnshire. The back cover features a pitch for the publisher's "New and Forthcoming Thrillers", including: The Man I Didn't Kill by Norman Deane (pseud. John Creasey), Fog is a Shroud by McKnight Malmar, and The Lady in the Wood by John Dellbridge. The one I'm most interested in is the ultra-uncommon Under the Quiet Water by Canadian Frances Shelley Wees.

Access: Not found in a single library on this side of the Atlantic. Cousins overseas will find it only at  the British Library, Oxford University and Trinity College, Dublin.

No copies are listed for sale online.

Related posts:

Dope Rings in Canada! Oh My!

Dope Rings in Canada! Oh My!

Die with Me, Lady

Ronald Cocking

Toronto: Harlequin, 1953

224 pages

This review now appears, revised and rewritten, in my new book:

The Dusty Bookcase:

A Journey Through Canada's

Forgotten, Neglected, and Suppressed Writing

Available at the very best bookstores and through

Biblioasis, Amazon, Chapters/Indigo, and McNally-Robinson.

Harlequin's Change of Heart

I've taken more than a few shots – here and elsewhere – at that great Canadian success story known as Harlequin Enterprises and its reluctance to acknowledge its varied past. As evidence, I point to that peculiar corporate exhibit of last May, which included only passing recognition the publisher's first fifteen years. And then there's this bullying of a BC bookseller. Never mind, today I come to praise Harlequin for what it refers to as its 'Vintage Collection'. The publisher hasn't exactly been trumpeting this new 'miniseries' – there doesn't appear to have been any attempt at publicity and no mention is made on its main page (so, I provide this link). Again, never mind. Whoever is overseeing this thing has done a very nice job; and the books, which should appear in bookstores this month, are very reasonably priced.

Looking at the first six titles, it's pretty clear that Harlequin has focused on novels in which women feature prominently. Fine, I understand the concept of branding. Disappointment rears its head only with the realization that there are no Canadian books amongst this first batch. While I'm not expecting Wreath for a Redhead or The Executioners, both disowned by author Brian Moore, I hold out hope that November's offerings will feature something of this vast, fair Dominion.

And so, I present this modest three title wish list.

The Body on Mount Royal

David Montrose

Winnipeg: Harlequin, 1953

A mystery featuring Russell Teed, the hard-working, hard-drinking, Montreal private dick at the centre of The Crime on Cote des Neiges (Collins White Circle, 1951) and Murder Over Dorval (Collins White Circle, 1952). Not only is The Body on Mount Royal the darkest of the three, it has a cover that Harlequin has yet to surpass.

The Mayor of Côte St. Paul

Ronald J. Cooke

Winnipeg: Harlequin, 1950

Admire the cover, but don't focus too much on the clothing, hairstyles or that typewriter; this novel isn't set in the post-War era, but in 1920s Montreal. Organized crime, bootleggers, smugglers and slot machines... much like today, but with different cars.

Die with Me Lady [sic]

Ronald Cocking

Winnipeg: Harlequin, 1953

And finally, a book that appears to combine the dual dangers of drugs and overhead power lines. I've never felt the urge to read this this oddly titled novel, perhaps because the plot is spoiled by an overly descriptive back cover:

Throughout North America, despite the vigilance of law-enforcement agencies, the deadly traffic in narcatics grows by leaps and bounds.

One of the centres of this vicious traffic is Toronto, Canada - a fast growing city of a million people, facing New York State across the waters of Lake Ontario, and providing a ready link with the United States.

Al Morley, a Toronto newspaper reporter, in covering the apparently insignificant death of a humble newspaper seller, crosses the path of the celebrated and erudite Sir Wilfred Cremorne and his lovely daughter, Valerie.

From then on he finds himself drawn into a tangle web of intrigue with a dope ring at its centre. He watches while respectable people are bought to protect the operations of the million-dollar traffickers.

The story moves towards a terrifying climax where a group of horrified people, doomed by their own avarice, helplessly await death on a luxury yacht cruising on the sunny waters of Lake Ontario.

Update: Caveat emptor.

Related posts:

Covering Up the Past

Hard Lessons in Publishing

Dope, Danger and Dolls

The lure of the lurid. I was hooked when, as a teenager, I came across Lush Lady and The Lady is a Lush next to each other in a used bookstore. Pulps, they were the first titles in a collection that would one day help pay for a move from Montreal to Vancouver.

I was reminded of these titles, lucrative for the collector, by Dope Menace: The Sensational World of Drug Paperbacks 1900-1975, a new book by my pal Stephen J. Gertz. What a pleasure to see these tawdry covers again, with their enticing captions ('A WILD WEEKEND OF JAZZ AND JUNK IN A HOTBED OF SEX'). It's hard to resist these images; they promise so very much. However, as Steve reminds us, these books tease, but seldom deliver. Case in point, Vice Rackets of Soho, which provides the cover image for Dope Menace:

The illustration by Reginald Heade for Vice Rackets of Soho by Ronald Vane (Ernest L. McKeag) with its glorious scene of drug eroticism - a half-naked woman lying supine on a bed in a sheer gown that appears to have been spray-painted on, her head thrown back in ecstasy as she's shot up with junk by a leering miscreant - is a prime example. Though the image suggests artist Heade as a sort of twisted Bernini - the Ecstasy of St. Theresa of Avila as sultry babe meets criminal Christ who plunges His flaming scepter of drug-love deep within her - there is virtually no mention of drugs within the text, nor much sex, for that matter.

Little in the way of sex and drugs... I'm betting the same is true of Frances Shelley Wees' Lost House.

I very much doubt that Mrs Wees, author of the Scholastic paperback Mystery of the Secret Tunnel, wife to the president of omnipresent textbook publisher Gage, wrote much, if anything, about heroin and loose women.

Lost House is one of only two Canadian titles found in Dope Menace, begging the question: Where are our drug paperbacks? This is no oversight on Steve's part. Canada's early mass market publishers all but ignored the money to be had in the lucrative drug paperback trade. Lost House is very nearly unique, and has the further distinction of being Harlequin's second book. The only other Canadian drug pulp - Ronald Cocking's poetic Die With Me Lady - was also brought out by the romance publisher.

Of course, Harlequin wasn't always all hearts, flowers, bosoms and bodices; their history is much more rich and varied. They were the first Canadian paperback publishers of Agatha Christie, W. Somerset Maugham and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Their titles included thrillers, mysteries, westerns, works of science fiction and weird things like Vengeance of the Black Donnellys ('Canada's Most Feared Family Strikes Back from Beyond the Grave') by Thomas P. Kelley. And, as with the pulp houses to the south, the early Harlequin wasn't above using the same deceptive bait - Thomas H. Raddall's historical adventure Roger Sudden was pitched as a 'lusty tale'.

The publisher is currently making a big deal about its 60th anniversary, but you won't find any recognition of the early years. Something to do with branding, I suppose - and yet, Harlequin is so very protective of the very same material they choose to disown.