Poldrate Street Garnett Weston New York: Messner, 1944 256 pages
The first resident of Poldrate Street to die is Sarah Reckon. She's killed by two of her neighbours while stealing flowers from their gardens. Sarah's murder has nothing to do with theft, rather her discovery of a missing dog. Though she doesn't realize it – and never will – the mutt is key in a scheme involving extortion, embezzlement, fraud, mutilation, and sexual slavery.
Three more Poldrate Street residents will die over the next few days. A fourth will be drugged, kidnapped, and then drugged again. That's a lot of activity for a cul de sac consisting of just five houses.
Eleven people live on Poldrate Street – ten after Sarah is killed. She lived in the first and most modest of its houses. Next to her were Mr and Mrs Gordon and their pre-adolescent son nicknamed "Face." To the reader, theirs is the most mysterious household, but only because the parents are never depicted. Face, on the other hand, plays a prominent role in the novel, despite his young age. He sees a lot of what others miss, mostly because he's a voyeur. It's Face's dog that is missing.
Doctor Ivor Palling lives in the middle house with a raven-haired bombshell named Violet. Everyone believes her to be the doctor's wife, but they're not actually married. Palling spotted Violet waiting at a bus stop one rainy night and offered her a lift. You could call her a pickup.
The fourth house is the home Jacob Sleep, the most elderly resident of Poldrate Street. Sleep had been living his final years alone when he received a letter from an old schoolmate asking whether he might care for her granddaughter. The poor girl had been orphaned, and the grandmother feared that she herself was not long for this world. Turned out she was right. And so, that is how nineteen-year-old Kitty McKay came to live with an old man on a dead end street. Sleep's interest in the girl begins and ends with her sizeable inheritance (of which she has no knowledge).
The last house belongs to Mafia Breene; it's also his place of business. An undertaker, Breene struggles to make a living dealing in the dead. He has some support from Cora, his live-in maid. In her quarters lies the tenth resident of Poldrate Street, Cora's motionless, voiceless, nameless, suffering child known only as "Him."
Of the Garnett Weston novels I've read, Poldrate Street is the very best. As far as I can tell, it's the only one to have enjoyed multiple editions. The second, published in 1945 by American Mercury, gives something away in providing a new title: The Undertaker Dies.
The last, published in May 1950 by Harlequin, uses the original title. Seven decades later, it remains the only Canadian edition. Its cover art, by Max Ralph, captures something of the book.
Violet does bathe in the nude in her backyard fountain, though her hair should be black. Kitty McKay witnesses this and a whole lot more from a tree in Joseph Sleep's garden. Her hair should be red. The houses on Poldrate Street are Victorian, but not nearly so large as that depicted. The juxtaposition of the imagined house and the brewery makes perfect sense; the street has houses on one side and a brewery wall on the other. Most peculiar. The dining couple in the lower left-hand corner are something of a mystery. The scene doesn't feature in the novel. I'm certain that the lower right-hand corner is meant to depict Cora shooting her boss, though she is described as a rather large woman.
Things are revealed by the American Mercury title and in the Harlequin cover illustration. I've revealed even more myself – but not so much as to spoil the novel. Poldrate Street is populated by uncommon characters with unusual names. Pleasure comes in their interactions.
Not every character is a success. Kitty isn't much more than a pretty face. Her attraction to Jimmie Lane, Sarah Reckon's boxer nephew – it was in anticipation of his visit that she was gathering flowers that fateful night – exists only to elevate the burgeoning rivalry between her and Violet.
Ah, Violet... Violet is a full-bodied character. A femme fatale when first encountered, she gradually reveals herself as insecure and self-hating. Violet's greatest fear is that her exotic beauty might mean she had parents from different races. Her sexual encounters with Mafia Breene and Jimmie Lane – two last spoilers – have everything to do with her desire to be desired. She goes so far as to flirt with young Face, and thinks of him as a future prospect.
Awful things happen to awful people.
Despite its flaws – which are minor – Poldrate Street is by far the most interesting and entertaining novel I read this summer. Published just two years after Garnett Weston quit Hollywood, I very much doubt he had motion pictures in mind when formulating the plot – there's no way it could have passed the Hays Code. And yet, reading the novel I couldn't help but imagining Poldrate Street onscreen. The novel has all the ingredients of a brilliant limited series.
Now is its time.
It's a shame that Poldrate Street is so obscure.
Dedication:
R. Rowe Holland was chairman of the Vancouver Parks Board and treasurer for the Liberal Party. A barrister, he represented Vancouver theatre owners. In 1932, he was part of a failed campaign to build a large movie studio in the city. In short, he wanted to make Vancouver Hollywood North.
Trivia: Max Ralph holds distinction as the cover artist for Wreath for a Red Head, the very first novel by Brian Moore. Canadian Fly-By-Night has a very good series on Ralph's work for Harlequin.
Beware!: The American Mercury edition is abridged.
I suspected the Harlequin – 185 pages of text to Messner's 248 – to also be abridged, but Canadian Fly-By-Night's bowdler has convinced me otherwise. The word-count of the Messner is roughly 380 words per page, while the Harlequin is at least 500 per page.
Object: A hardcover with yellow boards, all evidence indicates a single Messner printing. The jacket illustration is uncredited. The figure is meant to be young Face Gordon. The flashlight he carries was a reward for selling magazines door-to-door. Weston describes the beam it casts as white, not yellow.
I purchased my copy for US$37.50 from a New York bookseller. The shipping set me back a further US$25.00.
Access: Copies of the Messner Poldrate Street can be found in Library and Archives Canada, Queen's University, the University of Toronto. the University of New Brunswick, the University of British Columbia, and the University of Victoria.
As I write this, no copies of Poldrate Street in any edition are listed for sale online. Ditto The Undertaker Dies.
The jacket illustration suggests a gothic romance, but Legacy of Fear is a thriller. Its protagonist is no-nonsense American war vet Duff Catleigh. With the fighting over, he's returned to the States vowing to never again leave its borders. And yet, the novel's opening scene finds Duff on the cabin deck of the Princess Marguerite, a passenger ship of undetermined size, as it makes the short voyage from Seattle to Vancouver Island. Duff was talked into making the trip by Callender, his business partner: "You've got a knack of finding things, I haven't."
Their business is antique furniture.
"We haven't had a shipment of English or European antiques for years," says Callender. "We're stocked up with Colonial and New England and Mexican and a lot of hybrid junk I'm ashamed to have around." Because he's the tougher negotiator – so insists Callender – Duff makes from their New York office to the American West Coast, thence to Canada.
Aboard the Princess Marguerite, he spots a woman, "tall and slender with a curious rhythm, faintly undulant, in her walk, as if she moved to the sound of music audible to her ears alone." Duff pretends not to notice – and pretends not to notice again when the woman ejects a man from her cabin. That man as Temple Moxx, an inquisitive lawyer whom Duff had met earlier.
The Princess Marguerite reaches its destination early that evening. Duff decides to walk to the hotel at which he's made a reservation. Along the way, he interrupts a kidnapping attempt. The intended victim, Temple Moxx, flees the scene, leaving the newly arrived antique dealer to deal with Bob Brown, the constable walking the beat.
Later that same evening, Duff accompanies Brown to Moxx's flat in the Thunderbird Arms. The constable is looking to investigate the thwarted abduction, but finds the lawyer something less than forthcoming.
Duff is disgusted by it all. He makes for his hotel, and dodges a knife thrown by a "Chinaman" he recognizes as one of Moxx's attackers. Duff retrieves the knife, returns to the Thunderbird Arms, tosses it it on Moxx's dining room table, and again leaves in disgust. Back at his hotel, Duff sees the woman from the Princess Marguerite getting into a limo. As the car drives away, he notices she's being followed. Turning around, Duff again sees the Chinaman – this time stealing out of the hotel with the woman's luggage. The thief disappears into a fish-and-chips restaurant. Duff follows, orders a meal which turns out to be drugged, and loses consciousness.
Our hero awakens bound in a storeroom. He's rescued by Constable Brown – now off-duty – and together they uncover a brothel/opium den. Brown returns to the station to alert his superiors. Duff returns to his hotel room to find his luggage gone.
That's an awful lot for one evening.
Thrillers with this much action have little room for character. As a tough guy with a passion for antiques, Duff is atypical, right? Brown is an honest cop, who likes to do detective work in his leisure time. That's different, right? What of the woman from the Princess Marguerite? Well, her name is Maureen O'Donnell. Curious gait aside, she's a conventional young Irish lass of a type that will be familiar to the reader. Maureen has made the journey to Vancouver Island after learning that her long-lost great-uncle, Philem O'Donnell, is alive.
Well, barely alive.
Philem lies in his death bed, believing that there is no kin to whom he can leave his vast estate. Moxx, who happens to be Philem O'Donnell's lawyer, has his eyes on his client's land, and so tries to prevent Maureen from seeing her great-uncle.
He's not alone.
Amongst other characters are John Hambly, Moxx's law partner (he's bad), sea captain Victor Mycroft (also bad), crime boss Sin Gun Pow (bad, obviously), Eurasian courtesan Vera (bad), calligrapher Mr Wu (bad), and Philem O'Donald's servants Donald and Morgan (both bad). Moxx too has a servant, Ling Chi, a seventy-year-old "houseboy." I can't say whether he's good or bad, though I certainly recognized him from old American movies and comic books:
"Missie Hambly, he call. Come after you have chow. You eatie quick now for he come. He catch you at chow, he say. 'No thank you; no have chow. Not hungry at all,' he say. Then he sit down an' eat allee sammee pig."
Ling Chi surprised me greatly because Garnett Weston wrote both the story and screenplay for Daughter of Shanghai(1937). Praised for its portrayal of Chinese-Americans, in 2006 it was added to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress.
I really like this film. If you have the time:
To be fair to Weston, Sin Gun Pow is no stereotype, nor is Vera, nor the girls working in the brothel. This is not to say that they have much flesh. How could they? As I've suggested, action crowds character. Things happen in Legacy of Fear, but too much for the four days in which the novel takes place. Both Maureen and Duff are drugged twice and kidnapped twice. Moxx too is drugged. He's rescued by Duff. May as well add that Duff suffers two blows to the head, and loses consciousness both times. Duff falls for Maureen, a woman he'd not so much as spoken twenty-four hours earlier. He proposes. She accepts. They're in love.
Like everything in this novel, the climax comes fast. It spoils nothing to reveal that Brown again comes to the rescue.
The final chapter isn't so much a denouement as a postscript. Callender shows up at Duff's hotel. He was worried by about Duff. The last paragraph – just two sentences – occur after Duff introduces Maureen to his business partner:
Smiling, he lifted the Irish girl's hand and kissed it gracefully. Only a man with a Vandyke beard could do it so well.
I have no idea what this means.
Is Callender bad?
Dedication:
Edward T. Lowe is best remembered as a producer and screenwriter. In the latter role, his greatest accomplishments are House of Frankenstein (1944) and House of Dracula (1945); both penned in late career. Lowe and Weston's overlap in writing Bulldog Drummond films. Though they never wrote together, Lowe did produce the Weston-penned Bulldog Drummond in Africa (1938) and Bulldog Drummond's Secret Police (1939).
Lowe also produced Daughter of Shanghai.
Trivia: The Princess Marguerite docks in "Port Albert," which is clearly Victoria. Duff stays at an unnamed hotel, which is clearly The Empress. I think the obfuscation is explained by Weston's portrayal of Victoria as a city in which tourists and their belongings disappear with regularity (often from the unnamed hotel).
Humour: The increasingly unreliable WorldCat provides this information on Legacy of Fear:
Summary: A third baseman is sick with anxiety about whether or not to help his team by using his knack for knowing where the batter is going to hit the ball.
Rating: (not yet rated) 0 with reviews - Be the first.
Subjects: Baseball — Fiction
Object: Bound in red boards, typical of its time. To these eyes, the uncredited dust jacket anticipates Psycho. The rear flap has an advert for Poisonous Relations by Joanna Cannan. The back cover provides a second sales pitch for Poisonous Relations, then tries to sell three more Morrow Mysteries:
My copy was purchased in May from Scene of the Crime Books in St Catharine, Ontario. Price: US$40.00. Access:Legacy of Fear first appeared as an eight-part serial in The Saturday Evening Post (6 May - 24 June 1950). James R Bingham did the illustrations. Here's the first:
The rest are just as good (see the illustration above in which Catleigh strikes a similar pose when dodging a knife).
As far as I can determine, the Mill/Morrow edition enjoyed just one printing. There have been no other editions, though the novel did join Christianna Brand's Cat And Mouse, and Erle Stanley Gardner's The Case of the One-Eyed Witness in the Detective Book Club's January 1951 3-in-1 omnibus.
Library and Archives Canada has a copy of the Mill/Morrow, as do the Toronto Public Library, the Vancouver Public Library, the University of New Brunswick, McMaster University, the University of Alberta, the University of British Columbia, and the University of Victoria.
As of this writing, no used copies were being offered for sale online.
Arthur Stringer's first novel, 1903's The Silver Poppy, concerns a young woman named Cordelia Vaughan who passes off a manuscript left by a dead man as her own. When published, the stolen work tops the bestseller lists, and its supposed authoress becomes the toast of Manhattan The narrator of The Silver Poppy, English poet John Hartley, discovers Cordelia's fraud, but is too much of a gentleman to destroy her life.
I thought of The Silver Poppy often when reading The Devastator, Arthur Stringer's final novel. It too features a male narrator who becomes enmeshed in the life of a seemingly successful female novelist. This time out, the novelist is authentic.
It's narrator, Paul Ruxton, is not an aspiring writer, rather a New York attorney who'd once handled a copyright infringement case for London publishers Dearness & Dengate. Some time has passed, and now Mr Dengate has asked Ruxton to assist Sibyl Sencourt, one of D&D's more lucrative authors, as she disembarks for a new life in the New World. Ruxton acquiesces, waiting three hours on a windy Hudson River wharf. The reader is meant to understand that the lawyer's patience has much to do with Miss Sencourt's most recent novel, The Night of Denial, which he's found "sufficiently interesting, with its frankness and phrasing and its rather manlike sturdiness in exploring the timeworn paths of illicit passion."
Sibyl Sencourt is not quite the woman Ruxton was expecting; petite and practical, there's a whiff of tweed about her. In the months following their meeting on the wharf, they share nothing more than two unmemorable lunches, which accounts for Ruxton's initial surprise by Sibyl's request that he accompany her to a New Year's Eve celebration. Things soon become clear:
What she wanted, she explained, was a first-hand picture of that bacchanalian American evening in one of New York's most bacchanalian hotels. And if I would shepherd her through that night of tumult she'd expect, in the circumstances, to pay all costs.
On the evening in question ‐ 31 December 1939 ‐ the attorney is gobsmacked when Sibyl appears made-up and dressed-up in a low-cut gown. She's definitely on the prowl, but only for material. "It was more ink than wine we spilled that night," Ruxton reports, noting that his date spent the evening observing others, often removing a fountain pen and pad from her clutch in order to jot down a sentence or two.
The authoress's investment in a New York New Year's Eve pays off when a highly-spirited man commands the attention of a neighbouring table. He's Leo Ortell, a handsome, charismatic, self-absorbed, showy, dimwitted Hollywood actor who just happens to be one of Ruxton's clients. In the recent past, the attorney has had to "untangle him from a couple of petticoats." Sibyl is intrigued, seeing in Ortell the inspiration for her next novel, and so follows the actor west by taking a job in Hollywood. Months pass. Ruxton hears nothing from Sibyl until she reappears in New York for a Book-of-the-Hour Club launch. There she tells Ruxton that she must get closer to Ortell to write her novel, and so is set on marrying the actor. "You mean," says the attorney, "that you want to carry the watch home and take it to pieces and find out just what makes it tick."
The first of many weak points in this novel comes in that marriage. Setting aside his history as a philanderer, Ortell had always maintained that matrimony would hurt his box office appeal. How Sibyl manages to land the actor is unexplained, as is the subsequent revelation that she's fallen in love with her new husband. One of the strengths of the The Devastator is what happens next. In keeping with his past, Ortell quits Sibyl for Dorinda Perraton, a supple bathing beauty and aquatic queen he'd met on the set of his most recent film. But Dorinda proves unstable, causing scenes at the Mocambo Club and at the Trocadaro... and then she leaves him.
The Mocambo Club in 1941, the year in which it opened.
That a woman gives up on Ortell ‐ and not vice versa ‐ should mean something, but Stringer doesn't make much of it; his focus is in reuniting the actor and his writer wife. Ruxton performs as unenthusiastic go-between in bringing estranged couple together: "no particular credit attaches to the agent who reunites two individuals already hungering for union."
Ruxton invites both to his home, then pretends that he's been called away. Returning two hours later, he finds a reconciled couple given to gush. Before long, Ortell begins going on about Sybil's stalled work in progress:
"It's a wonderful book, Ruxton... And it's going to top everything Sibyl's already done."
"What's it about?" I was foolish enough to ask.
"It's about a two-legged vampire who feeds on the flesh of every friend he ever had. You understand ‐ a character study. He thinks he'd a mental wonder, while all the time masquerading as a moron ‐ just a shop window if you get what I mean."
I proffered the opinion that it wasn't easy to make morons interesting.
"But that's where Sibyl's a wonder, maintained her husband. "She turns him inside out and makes him so real you carry away the feeling he must have lived in the next block to you."
I still wonder why some spirit of perversity should have prompted me to question: "Then who's the model?"
I caught Sibyl's imploring look, and catching it, was glad Ortell had not seen it.
She had none," he triumphantly proclaimed. "The bounder came out of her head. But I can't understand why she doesn't get busy and wind things up."
This is going to get good, right? Having fallen in love with Ortell, how can Sibyl finish her novel? Does she even want to finish her novel? If she does, will the reading public recognize what her actor husband doesn't ‐ that Ortell is the moron's model?
Sadly, just as The Devastator looks about to take flight, it takes an unexpected turn, skids about, and comes to a choking halt.
Against character, Ortell decides to join the war effort. Older than the average serviceman, the actor is rejected by the Air Force, the Navy, and the Army, but is somehow accepted in the Marines, becoming a member of the 1st Battalion, otherwise known as Edson's Raiders.
Here I note that the author's son, Hugh Arthur "Barney" Stringer (1919-2002), served as one of the Raiders. In fact, The Devastator is dedicated to the man:
Barney Stringer's all-too-brief obituary is well worth reading, but not The Devastator. In the novel's second half, focus shifts to Ortell's own engagements in the Solomons, where he proves himself a hero and leader of men. The transformation from egoist to self-sacrificing altruist is not convincing. Pages devoted to praising Major General Merritt Austin Edson, Sr, under whom the author's son was then serving, are out of place. Still, what struck this reader as most incongruous where four pages of aphorisms drawn from Sibyl Sencourt's novels.
They're not bad ‐ "Genius seems to be the faculty of having faith in everything, and especially one's self," for example ‐ though one wonders why they go on and on and on. My theory is that, at age seventy, Stringer saw The Devastator as perhaps his last opportunity to set in print pithy notes he'd made but had never used.
I may be wrong.
Either way, would that I had his stamina!
I admire Arthur Stringer's industry.
I always have.
Trivia: In The Silver Poppy, plagiarist Cordelia Vaughan is likened to a vampire for the way she exploits others. The same description is used twice in The Devastator, one of which is quoted above. The earlier occurs when Ruxton questions Sibyl's decision to marry the model of her novel: "'I'm not exactly a vampire," she protested, "I think I can give Leo something that he needs.'"
Object: Cheap wartime paper bound in blue boards. My copy was purchased last year from a bookseller in Chatham, the Ontario town in which Arthur Stringer was born. Price: US$21.59. It's inscribed, signed, and dated by the author.
The rear dust jacket lists thirteen recent Bobbs-Merril titles, the most famous being The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand.
Access: Library and Archives Canada has a copy, as does the Toronto Public Library, the London Public Library, the Chatham-Kent Public Library, the Vancouver Public Library, and eleven of our universities.
Only one copy is currently listed for sale online. Price: US$23.00 (w/ US$30.00 shipping!). A library discard, sans dust jacket, it is not recommended. Give it a pass. You can do better.
Blood on My Rug E. Louise Cushing New York: Arcadia, 1956
223 pages
Miss Talmadge visits her St Catherine Street bookstore on a Sunday afternoon. This being Montreal, the decade being the 1950s, her business is closed for the day, but she's looking for something to read... because, I guess, the bookseller doesn't have much of a home library. Her choice is Anne Morrow Lindbergh's Gift from the Sea. Miss Talmadge is about to leave when she remembers that there's a letter that must be answered, and so she enters her back office, where she finds a man lying "messily dead" on her treasured rose Khalabar rug.
Miss Talmadge phones the Homicide Bureau, stirring a napping telephone operator, who in turn sets bored policemen into action. A siren is heard, a car draws up, and Detective Inspector Richard MacKay emerges. Miss Talmadge finds reassurance in the "laughter lines at the corner of his eyes and quirk at one side of his mouth."
Within fifteen minutes, Inspector MacKay has learned the victim's name (George Albert Smithins) and hometown (Red Deer, Alberta). He shares both with Miss Talmadge, whom he's already determined had nothing whatsoever to do with the murdered man.
Blood on My Rug is the third of E. Louise Cushing's five murder mysteries. Having read the first and second, I knew to expect little by way of intrigue. Mackay, who is so sharp in his first quarter-hour on the case, turns a sluggish dullard. Accompanied by Miss Talmadge, he interviews four of the five young women who work in her bookstore. The fifth, Ellen Pope, left Montreal on the evening of the murder. It's most unlike her, but MacKay doesn't follow up. Why should he? After all, two days later a telegram arrives to say that she's in Lachute caring for sister who has taken ill.
As in Cushing's previous mysteries, the most suspicious character – indeed, the only suspicious character – will be found to have committed the crime. Though presented as a hero, MacKay errs repeatedly in dismissing evidence pointing to the murderer as "the long arm of coincidence."
St Catherine Street, 1956
It all makes for a frustrating read, which is not to suggest that it isn't fascinating. What makes Blood on My Rug a real page-turner is its depiction of Montreal as an exclusively English city. There are no francophones. There are no French street names. There are no French newspapers. Every business has an English name. Cushing's Montreal is also one in which the discovery of a dead body might cause distress, but recovery is quick. Here's Miss Talmadge and her maid on the morning after the murder:
Miss Talmadge wakened early Monday morning, which was most unusual for her. She lay looking at the morning sun which glimmered coldly on her white curtains and decided to get up. After all, it was hardly fair to let the burden of any excitement that there might be at the store that morning fall on the girls.
She stretched out a lazy arm and rang for Daisy, thereby startling that damsel greatly.
"Did you ring?" she asked uncertainly.
Miss Talmadge grinned at her. "I did," she said cheerily. "I think I'll go down to the store early, Daisy. Will you shut the window and bring me my breakfast, please?"
The missing Miss Pope's body will be found stuffed in a trunk at neighbouring Brown's Luggage Shop, but none of her co-workers are particularly disturbed. The luggage store closes for the day and police investigate, but business at the bookstore continues as if nothing has happened.
Trust me, Montrealers aren't so cold.
I spoil little in revealing that the solution to the murder comes courtesy of a note the victim hid in the copy of Gift from the Sea Miss Talmadge took home that bloody Sunday. The discovery drew my interest as I'd earlier found this within the pages my copy of Blood on My Rug:
A note found inside a book in which a note is hidden in a book. Whatever can it mean?
The directions continue on the reverse. I'll happily scan the back and send it on to anyone who requests on the understanding that if it leads to treasure we split it 50-50.
If it leads to a body, you're on your own.
Favourite sentence:
"I know it's not very pleasant for you," he said pleasantly.
Dedication:
Irene Love Archibald, who was dead eleven years when Blood on My Rug was published, wrote under many names. As "Margaret Currie," she had a long-running column in the Montreal Star, at which her husband was editor. She left us with one book: Margaret Currie: Her Book(Toronto: Hunter Rose, 1924).
Trivia: Miss Talmadge tells Inspector Mackay that on the evening of the murder she was at the "Capital Theatre," which I take to be a reference to the Capitol Theatre, also on St Catherine Street. It was torn down in 1973. MacKay doesn't ask the name if the movie. I've read enough mystery novels to recognize his laziness.
Object: A squat book bound in light green cloth. I'd been looking for a copy for about a decade. The one I purchased was first listed last month on eBay with a US$99.95 opening bid.
There were no takers.
The seller relisted at US$9.95.
I was the lone bidder.
An ex-library copy, it's in far better shape than might be expected. Sadly, the catalogue card has been removed. What attracted most was the dust jacket, which features a pitch for The Sting of Death by Perry D. Westbrook and these "RECENT ARCADIA MYSTERIES":
Run from the Sheep - Eline Capit The Crime, the Place, and the Girl - D. Stapleton
A Few Drops of Murder - Isabel Capeto
Access: As far as I can tell, the only publicly available copy in this country is held by Library and Archives Canada. The book is more accessible south of the border. According to WorldCat, the Library of Congress, seven American universities, and two American public libraries have copies. What intrigues is that those two public libraries serve Kiowa, Kansas (pop 1026) and Mandan, North Dakota (pop 18,331).
Queen Kong James Moffatt London: Everest, 1977 172 pages
James Moffatt ranks as one of Canada's most prolific novelists – second only to romance writer W.E.D. Ross – but where Ross is pretty much forgotten, even amongst aficionados of the nurse novel (his speciality), Moffatt has developed a remarkably strong cult following. His greatest achievement – and biggest sellers – were commissioned works designed to exploit skinhead culture. The first, Skinhead (1970), written in his late forties, was followed by Suedehead (1971), Boot Boys (1972), Skinhead Escapades (1972), Skinhead Girls (1972), Top Gear Skin (1973), Trouble for Skinhead (1973), Skinhead Farewell (1974), and Dragon Skin (1975); while churning out dozens of other novels, my favourite being 1973's Glam.
All were published under the name "Richard Allen," one of Moffatt's forty-six pseudonyms. It's likely that there were others.
A paperback writer, Moffatt is thought to have written close to three hundred published novels. He shared the secret to his prolificity in a 1972 interview with the BBC:
JM: I like to sit down in front of a typewriter - start writing from the title. Play it by that. The title gives me the idea, it gives me the whole germ of the story, and I continue it right through. BBC: How many words a day do you get through? JM: On an average, I get through about ten thousand words a day, when I'm meeting a deadline. If I have a month to write a book in, I may get through five hundred, a thousand words a day, until the last week - then I shot up to the ten thousand. BBC: Do you ever go back and rewrite stuff? JM: I never go back and rewrite. I don't believe in editing. I don't believe in rereading more than two pages on the following day. I believe a professional writer should have the story in his head, even if he's doing two, three stories at the one time. He should keep all story threads in his head.
In the lengthy James Moffatt bibliography, Queen Kong stands out as an oddity. His lone movie novelization, it challenged the author's method. Here Moffatt was obliged to follow a plot laid down by screenwriters Frank Agrama and Ronald Dobrin.
Queen Kong was meant to exploit King Kong, the 1976 blockbuster starring Jeff Bridges and Jessica Lang. RKO and producer Dino De Laurentiis were not amused. Arguing before Justice Goulding, Their solicitor, Nicholas Brown-Wilkinson, the future Baron Brown-Wilkinson, expressed their distaste:"Our view is that it is an appalling script. It is a script which the plaintiffs feel cannot do anything but repercuss poorly on their reputation if it is thought that King Kong is associated with that."
The lawyer for Dexter Films, which had sunk US$635,000 into Queen Kong, countered that the film was a "light-hearted satire." In this, I think, they encountered an unexpected response from Justice Goulding: "I do not think that in any real sense the relationship of Queen Kong to King Kong can be saids to be that of La belle Hélène to The Iliad. King Kong was not a serious work. It was a film of pure, light-hearted entertainment spiced with horror."
And there you have it, Queen Kong cannot be considered a light-hearted satire of King Kong because King Kong itself is light-hearted; the two are just too similar.
I can't argue.
Queen Kong owes more to the Merian Cooper and Ernest Schoedsack 1933 original, than the 1976 remake. As the title suggests, much of the humour derives from role reversal. It stars Rula Lenska as Luce Habit, a tough-as-nails director in search of a leading man for her next motion picture. She finds one in Ray Fay (Robin Askwith), a petty thief with no acting experience, whom she spots in a London market. Luce drugs Ray, carries him to an awaiting ship, The Liberated Lady, and sets sail for the African nation of Lazanga, Where They Do The Conga. Once there, its native population – primarily women, primarily white, almost invariably blonde – kidnap Ray as a human sacrifice to a gigantic female gorilla they call Kong.
However, Kong falls in love with the would-be actor, keeping him safe and healthy while Luce and her all-female crew plan a rescue. In the ensuing scenes, Kong is captured, is transported to London, and is put on display in chains, bra, and panties. At the event, Luce and Ray do the dance of Lazanga, Where They Do The Conga, upsetting the creature. Kong breaks her bonds and goes on a rampage through the city, destroying buildings and one low-flying 747. She manages to find Ray, and saves him from being molested by Luce in an upscale hotel room. Kong climbs Big Ben, and sets Ray down. He uses a helicopters loudspeaker to call off the attack:
"You cannot destroy her, for she represents all women everywhere; women forced into a mould to satisfy the images of male chauvinism. If you destroy this beautiful beast, you're destroying a lifetime of female struggle. Yes, she represents woman; woman struggling to find her identity in a society viewing her as a kitchen slave and sex object."
Ray's speech is lengthy, but effective. The women of London take to the streets, saving Kong, and transforming society forever. Kong is returned to Lazanga, Where They Do The Conga, with Ray, leaving sad, cast-off Luce tearily hoping that Ray would be interested in a threesome.
For the most part, Moffatt follows Agrama and Dobrin's script, making use of nearly all their dialogue, no matter how bad. These lines, from the novel, are virtually identical to those delivered by Lenska, as Luce, in the film:
"Through the genius of the Kodak laboratories I am able to make home movies that look like the professional films one sees during the second half of the bill in any local cinema. However, the fault with the majority of home movies is that people just smile and wave into the camera lens. In my award-winning pics nobody waves at the camera. That's what I'm famous for – not one wave!"
Even as she finished speaking a gigantic wave hit the small boat, whooshed over the decks and drenched Luce.
"Well," the Habit ruefully admitted, "maybe one wave!"
As might be expected, there is padding, the most obvious being the inclusion of "SOHO", a 48-line prose poem by someone named Tomi Zauner. But the most interesting – and jarring – difference between the film and the novelization concerns the depiction of Ray Fay. Where the film has him as as an asexual pot-head, who looks like a member of The Sweet...
...Moffatt portrays him as a homosexual hippie.
The Ray Fay of the film has no backstory. Moffatt adds a fumbled tumble with a teenage girl, which leaves him with a preference to men. Gay Ray Fay is a "fag" – the word appears dozens of times in the novel – and he's not the only one. The men of Lazanga, Where They Do The Conga are gay, and as Luce laments, "half the blokes you met in London are also queens."
Luce Habit pursues her leading man, dressing Ray in robes and feathered boas, while she wears pant-suits and tuxedos. This passage from the novel, which follows a spanking administered by the director, does not feature in the film:
Ray, unable to keep up his lung-torturing scream, felt himself go all limp – \wrists, too. Like a sad sack he tilted forward into Luce's welcoming arms.
I'll protect you Ray, Luce whispered, hugging him to her gorgeous bosom.
"Oh, God!" the star-in making moaned, feeling queer all over.
This scene does:
A man with the nicest, cleanest bone through his nose rushed from a hut – and called in a bush-telegram voice" "Oh, Mr Tarzan... Mr Tarzan – your wife Jane is on the vine!"
Ray declined to accept the call although he trembled in an anticipation off a Tarzan-Fay link-up. What a Western Union that would be!
He roamed deep into the village complex. The hits with bamboo supports fascinated him. Thatched roofs a la Dorset village cuteness appealed. Weren't they quaint!
What looked to be a village queen's hut loomed large in his sights. He had a feeling about these things. He peered inside, found a villager scrubbing a toilet bowl. The old male "dear" swung, faced him, black teeth in an otherwise normal white set glistening.
"Make your toilet as clean as your mouth," the native fag smiled, thrusting an Ajax bottle at Ray.
Moffatt's ending is different to that of the film in that suggestions of bisexuality and beastialty do not figure. The final chapter ends with Luce Habit going to bed with her female talent agent.
The agent's name is Ima Goodbody.
A thoroughly dislikable novelization to a terrible movie, it's not redeemed by a happy ending.
Trivia: Frank Agrama and Ronald Dobrin collaborated on just one other film: Dawn of the Mummy (1981). It concerns scantily dressed fashion models who disturb an ancient Egyptian tomb.
Dedication and Acknowledgement:
Object: A mass market paperback featuring eight glossy pages of film stills. The author's name is misspelled on both the front cover and spine. The back cover gives indication that the book was sold in Canada, though I've yet to come across a copy. I purchased mine last year from a UK bookseller. Price: £4 (with a further £9 for shipping).
Access: WorldCat lists five libraries with copies, none of which are in Canada. The closest to me is held in the Folke Bernadotte Memorial Library of Gustavus Adolphus College in St Paul, Minnesota.
Beware the British bookseller who entices by offering a Fair copy at one American dollar – and then charges US$24.95 for shipping.
Queen Kong – the Sensational Film – can be seen here on YouTube.
Purchased four years ago, The Miracle and Other Poems set me back two dollars and change. That price says much about contemporary interest in Virna Sheard. I imagine her husband, Dr Charles Sheard, would be pleased. According to the poet, he held a "deeply rooted prejudice" against her literally endeavours. A person of public profile himself – Chief Medical Officer of Toronto, Chairman of Ontario's Board of Health, President of the Canadian Medical Association, and Member of Parliament, amongst other things – Dr Sheard disliked the publicity brought by his wife's writing.
Doctor Sheard reflects his time, as does his wife, as does The Miracle and Other Poems (1913). I've shared several examples of its verse – "April", "When April Comes!", "November", and "When Christmas Comes" – but not one has stayed with me so much as that found in its dedication:
Before reading those four lines, I knew nothing of the link between the poet and the Niagara Ice Bridge Tragedy.
The Globe, 5 February 1912
Accounts of the tragedy are detailed and varying, owing, I think, to the number who witnessed and were traumatized by its horror.
On Sunday, 4 February 1912, approximately three dozen people ventured out on the Niagara Ice Bridge, a natural structure spanning the Canadian and American shores. Walking across, an old and popular pastime, was thought safe until that afternoon when the bridge broke apart. All reached the safety of the shore save Eldridge Stanton, his wife, and a sixteen-year-old American boy named Burrell Hecock. The last could've made land, but turned back to help the couple.
It only gets worse.
The boy became separated from the Stantons, finding himself stranded on another ice floe. As it drifted slowly toward the falls, he managed to grasp a rope dangling from one of the bridges. A crew began pulling him up, but the boy lost his grip, plunged into the river, and disappeared.
Anguished reporting in the following day's Toronto Globe concludes with the fate of the Stantons:
The Globe, 5 February 1912
These words from earlier in the reporting cannot fail to move:
Somewhere deep in the great whirlpool to-night; sleeps the man, partially identified as Mr. Stanton, who twice put side chances of rescue in order to remain with his terror-stricken wife, and who, in the shadow of death, spurned assistance for himself and attempted to bind about the woman's body a rope dangling from the lower steel arch bridge. And the lad, Burrell Heacock, is cast from the same mould. Had he not turned back on the ice to give assistance to the man he, too, might have made the shore.
This is rightly the story of the Stantons and Burrell Hecock (often incorrectly spelled "Heacock"), but the literary historian in me can't help but be interested in its connection to Virna Sheard. The poet is mentioned in newspaper accounts, but never as a poet, and always as an appendage of her husband. This paragraph from from the Globe (6 February 1912) is typical:
Because the Stanton family was in the stationary business, the deaths of Eldridge Stanton and his wife were reported in the March issue of Bookseller & Stationer:
Again, his relationship to the poet Virna Sheard escapes mention. Curiously, and for no perceptible reason, the very same issue of Bookseller & Stationer features this portrait:
I shared the Bookseller & Stationer reporting because it too is a reflection of its time. It is no different than other contemporary reports in referring to the dead woman as "Mrs Stanton" or, more often than not, "his wife." Her husband is described as the Secretary Treasurer of O. B. Stanton & Wilson, stationers and printers, the son of prominent professional photographer Eldridge Stanton, Sr, while she is... well... her husband's wife.
The Globe, 6 February 1912
Some digging finds that she was born in Toronto on 13 June 1882 to Lillian and Nelson Butcher. Her given names were Lillian Clara. She was known by the latter.
I wish I could offer more. This doesn't do her justice.
Beautiful Joe: The Autobiography of a Dog [New and Revised Edition] Marshall Saunders Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, n.d. 266 pages
Like The Woman Who Did, I thought I knew this novel.
I did not.
My wife didn't want to hear me talk about Beautiful Joe because she thought too she knew the novel and would find it upsetting. The inspiration for this "autobiography" has a park named in his honour in Meaford, Ontario. Because we've found his story so disturbing, we've never visited.
There are disturbing things in Beautiful Joe – many, many things – but they don't always concern its hero. The worst of it comes in the earliest pages. A nameless cur, he enters this world as one of a litter of seven. His owner, a brute of a dairy farmer named Jenkins, lives in near poverty because he is too lazy to attend to his cows. One of his own children falls ill from his contaminated product, and one of his customers dies, but neither event causes Jenkins to change his ways. Then comes a passage that is not for the sensitive reader:
One rainy day, when we were eight
weeks old, Jenkins, followed by two or three of
his ragged, dirty children, came into the stable
and looked at us. Then he began to swear
because we were so ugly, and said if we had been
good-looking, he might have sold some of us.
Mother watched him anxiously, and fearing some
danger to her puppies, ran and jumped in
the middle of us, and looked pleadingly up
at him.
It only made him swear the more. He took
one pup after another, and right there, before his
children and my poor distracted mother, put an
end to their lives. Some of them he seized by
the legs and knocked against the stalls, till their
brains were dashed out, others he killed with a
fork. It was very terrible. My mother ran up
and down the stable, screaming with pain, and I
lay weak and trembling, and expecting every instant that my turn would come next. I don't
know why he spared me. I was the only one left.
Nothing prepared me for that hellish scene, but I knew enough about the novel to brace myself for more blood and violence.
Beautiful Joe with his mother, brothers, and sisters, as depicted by John Nicholson in the Jerrold's edition (c. 1907).
The grieving mother never recovers from the loss of her pups. Though only four years old, poor nutrition has worn her down and made her weak. Beautiful Joe brings his mother scraps, but she only turns them over with her nose... until one day, she licks him gently, wags her tale, and dies:
As I sat by her, feeling lonely and miserable,
Jenkins came into the stable. I could not bear to
look at him. He had killed my mother. There
she lay, a little, gaunt, scarred creature, starved
and worried to death by him. Her mouth was
half open, her eyes were staring. She would
never again look kindly at me, or curl up to me at
night to keep me warm.
The milkman gives Beautiful Joe a kick. When the dog fights back, Jenkins calls for an axe:
He laid my head on the log and pressed one
hand on my struggling body. I was now a year
old and a full-sized dog. There was a quick,
dreadful pain, and he had cut off my ear, not in
the way they cut puppies' ears, but close to my
head, so close that he cut off some of the skin beyond it. Then he cut of the other ear, and, turning me swiftly round, cut off my tail close to my
body.
Then he let me go and stood looking at me as
I rolled on the ground and yelped in agony.
A cyclist hears the dog's cries, comes upon the scene, and beats Jenkins to a pulp. This passerby, Harry, takes the maimed creature to the home of his uncle and aunt, Rev and Mrs Morris, where he is slowly nursed back to health.
To be frank, I wasn't sure I could take too much more, but then I didn't know Beautiful Joe. I had thought it was the story of a maimed dog, who after a near lifetime of trials, tribulations, and adventure finally finds a loving home. I did not expect the manse be that home. An enlightened couple with five children, Rev and Mrs Morris believe that care for the lower creation teaches kindness, generosity, empathy, selflessness, and all sorts of other good things. Our hero joins a menagerie, consisting of rabbits, canaries, goldfish, pigeons, bantams, a guinea pig, a cat, and another dog. He's given the name Beautiful Joe because he's so ugly.
In many ways, Beautiful Joe's story ends in the third of the novel's thirty-five chapters, with his arrival at the Morris home. While he does experience a few moments of adventure – a train derailment, the rescue of abandoned farm animals, an encounter with a burglar (who turns out to be Jenkins!) – the great dramas of his life are in the past. The dog leads a quiet, uneventful life, largely in the company of Miss Laura Morris, devoting the bulk of his autobiography to relaying conversations he's heard regarding the proper and improper treatment of animals.
Beautiful Joe is at its heart a work of propaganda, written with the hope of winning an 1893 contest sponsored by the American Humane Education Society. In this Saunders was successful. I wonder whether this dedication would've featured had the novel lost:
As old novels go, Beautiful Joe offers the twenty-first-century reader a particularly focused glimpse of another time. I'll take away some knowledge of Bands of Mercy, organizations that were entirely new to me. I'll also remember the distaste shown fox hunting.
(I have a hard time these days listening to "Slave to Love.")
The novel ends abruptly with Beautiful Joe as an old dog: "I thought when I began to write, that I would put down the events of each year of my life, but I fear that would make my story too long, and neither Miss Laura nor any boys and girls would care to read it." The last adventure Beautiful Joe describes begins when he hears an amusing account of a man named Bellini and his performing animals. Curious, he visits the troupe – monkeys, dogs, ponies, goats – who are penned in a stable adjacent the town's hotel. Beautiful Joe is on his way home when he learns of a fire at that same hotel. He runs back:
In front of me I heard such a wailing, piercing noise, that it made me shudder and stand still.
The Italian's animals were going to be burned up,
and they were calling to their master to come and
let them out. Their voices sounded like the voices
of children in mortal pain. I could not stand it.
I was seized with such an awful horror of the fire,
that I turned and ran, feeling so thankful that I
was not in it.
The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature informs that the version I read was revised so as to make it less violent.
I don't have the fortitude of an nineteenth-century child.
Object and Access: One of the biggest selling Canadian novels of all time, there are over eight million copies out there. Mine was obtained in 2017 through a small donation to the St Marys Public Library (a two hour and fifteen minute drive from Meaford's Beautiful Joe Park). Most of the twenty-two uncredited illustrations have been coloured in by a previous owner. Might it be Georgie, who in 1944 received it as a Christmas gift?
Beautiful Joe entered the public domain decades ago, and the print on demand vultures have moved in. Formac publishes the only one of the few editions coming from a real publisher. Part of its Fiction Treasures series, it features an introduction and notes by Gwendolyn Davies. Price: $16.95.
Prices for used copies of Beautiful Joe are all over the place. Three booksellers are offering true first edition, published in 1894 by the American Baptist Publication Society, beginning at US$250; of these, at US$500, the one to buy is a copy inscribed by Saunders to "a fellow Nova Scotian."
The most expensive copy is a print-on-demand edition offered by a crooked Texas bookseller at US$1207.17.
Addendum: Karyn Huenemann of Canada's Early Women Writers points out that Broadview publishes an illustrated edition edited with an introduction by Keridiana Chez. Price: $18.95. The cover suggests Beautiful Joe before Jenkins reached for that axe.
A writer, ghostwriter, écrivain public, literary historian and bibliophile, I'm the author of Character Parts: Who's Really Who in CanLit (Knopf, 2003), and A Gentleman of Pleasure: One Life of John Glassco, Poet, Translator, Memoirist and Pornographer (McGill-Queen's UP, 2011; shortlisted for the Gabrielle Roy Prize). I've edited over a dozen books, including The Heart Accepts It All: Selected Letters of John Glassco (Véhicule, 2013) and George Fetherling's The Writing Life: Journals 1975-2005 (McGill-Queen's UP, 2013). I currently serve as series editor for Ricochet Books and am a contributing editor for Canadian Notes & Queries. My most recent book is The Dusty Bookcase (Biblioasis, 2017), a collection of revised and expanded reviews first published here and elsewhere.
