The Dusty Bookcase: Doherty

Showing posts with label Doherty. Show all posts

20 May 2024

A Poet's Pulp Novel

The Winter of Time
Raymond Holmes [Raymond Souster]
Toronto: News Stand Library, 1949
160 pages

Anyone looking for a good story is sure to be disappointed. The plot is so thin, so unsurprising, so uninspired, that I have no hesitation in sharing it in full.

This shouldn't take long.

It is March 1945. Harry Byers, our hero and narrator, leaves Halifax for a war that everyone knows is all but over. Bournemouth, his destination, is the primary reception depot for RCAF personnel. Harry has barely set foot on English soil before being pressed by a new pal to go on a double date with WAAF gal Helen Noble. They hit it off and are engaged within days. Germany surrenders. Harry and Helen wed, honeymoon in Scotland, are separated due to respective service obligations, but are reunited in London. To borrow from F Scott Fitzgerald, Harry did "get over," but he never sees action.

Not that kind anyway.

Come Christmas, Harry is back living with his parents in Toronto. War bride Helen is with her parents in London, awaiting passage on a ship to Canada. They write each other daily, though Harry struggles to fill the pages. In one of her early letters, Helen announces that she's pregnant. The news encourages Harry to return to his boring old job at a Bay Street brokerage. When not writing letters and sending provisions overseas, he goes out drinking with old friend Paul Hannah. One memorable evening, he ends up in the back of Paul's 1938 Ford with new friend Vera (Harry never learns her last name). Pretty Betty Anderson is another new friend, but she's far too good a girl for him to make a move.

The baby, a boy, arrives in August. All seems fine until Harry receives a cablegram that Helen is very ill. He flies to New York, then across the Atlantic, arriving in London too late. After the funeral he's back in the air, leaving his son in the care of his in-laws. Harry stays in New York for a couple of weeks, visiting pal Pete Adams and taking up with Clair Thompson, a tall brunette who looks good in a sweater and slacks. He never tells either of his dead wife. After that, it's off to see Montreal writer friend Walter Green in Montreal, then he catches a train to Toronto. Once home, Harry makes a play for Betty, but she tells him she's taken. He goes on a bender with Paul, which ends in a car accident that should've killed them both. They decide to rent a cottage up north, and maybe work on a book, but the plan is cut short by Clair's sudden appearance in Toronto. She tells Harry that she's pregnant, so he proposes: "I guess I thought about the two of us getting married since the first time we met, so the it doesn't sound strange or something unexpected, now."

And that's pretty much it.

The New Stand Library cover copy paints The Winter of Time as a sprawling epic:

What veteran, accustomed to regimentation and suddenly thrown on his own resources to take his place in the way of life for which he had fought, didn't experience a strange mixture of hope and despair, relief and nostalgia, determination and frustration, joy and bitterness, as did Harry in these two symbolic years?

But can we really expect so much from so slim a volume?

It's best to approach The Winter of Time as a first novel that attempts much while adhering to strict confine enforced by the publisher's standard 160-page format. As evidence, look no further than the final three pages, in which Clair turns up unexpectedly in Toronto, announces that she's expecting, and becomes engaged to Harry. This rush of events, typical of News Stand Library endings suggests a writer who realizes the sudden need to wrap everything up. Souster proves himself superior to other NSL authors by applying the brakes with a closing descriptive paragraph that has Harry raising the blinds of his apartment "for no reason" and looking down on sunlight playing on once cloud-covered Sherbourne Street.

Three things make The Winter of Time worth reading, the first being the collision of life during wartime with the impetuous folly of youth. Harry and Helen decide to marry on their third date. The stuff of Las Vegas misadventure today, it was not so unusual at the time, particularly given the circumstances. My grandparents, who lived to celebrate their sixtieth wedding anniversary together, were one such couple. It has been claimed that service leads to maturity, but this is not the case with Harry. A married man in his mid-twenties, he cheats on his pregnant wife of one year with a woman he doesn't even like. Keep in mind, Harry is the narrator of this story.

The novel's greatest riches in come in the details, like the experience of taking a train to London on VE-Day or what it was like going to see Bert Niosi at Toronto's Palais Royale:

There were a lot of girls checking their coats and purses. They had come stag, mostly in two's. They were the usual girls you saw at the Palais, girl who were now in the city and did not have a steady boy-friend. And most of them were nice kids, jus out for an evening of dancing.They were the prey of all the fast boys who thought they were God's gift to women. The fast boys were interested in only one thing, and every one had his own system of leading up to it, the only difference being that some were more subtle than others.

Palais Royale, Toronto, 1946

There are many more references to many more drinking establishments. I was most taken aback by mention of Montreal's Blue Bird Café, which a quarter-century later would be the site of one of the city's greatest tragedies.

As a child, I first read about it in the pages of the Montreal Gazette. It has haunted me ever since

Students of Canadian literature, not true crime, will be more interested in the odd turn the novel takes in the last third, immediately after Helen's death. It begins with Harry's visit with Pete, a Montrealer who is studying at Columbia:

Pete is a good guy and he has written some damn fine poetry. Poetry with guts that was still only grudgingly accepted in Canada. He had been very frankly critical about my work but mine was so close to the thing that he was tying to do himself that I knew he was honestly interested in it, and that was something very rarely found in another writer.

This is the first indication that our hero holds literary aspirations. The second comes on the very same page when Harry describes his address book as being filled with names of publishers and old girlfriends. From this point on, references to thing literary are frequent; Joyce, Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, and Morley Callaghan abound. Harry tells Pete he is impressed by his recent New York-themed verse, though just when and where he read it is a mystery. He is convinced his friend could be a great poet, the kind of poet Canada has needed for a long time, but never produced. As Harry tells Clair, "I'd hate to see his fine talent turned into something unnatural and a mockery after those university professor bastards and C.A.A. parasites got their claws into him."

The digs against the the world of academe and the Canadian Authors Association continue in Montreal:

"I think the whole writing game is a little overrated," I said. "Here in Canada, though, the odds are so much against any decent writer that he's practically buggered before he even starts. I guess we should all be college professors and join the C.A.A."
"I'm seriously thinking of joining," Walter said, "All I've got to do is get rid of my artistic conscience and any pretensions of doing any more honest writing."

Walter is Walter Green: "He was a few years older than I was, and for some years had been writing almost the only honest proletarian writing in Canada, if there really is such a thing as 'proletarian writing.'"

Is Pete Adams modelled on Ralph Gustafson? An even more interesting question is whether Jewish Montrealer Walter Green was inspired Ted Allan. Could be. Souster had to come to News Stand Library somehow. Allan's pseudonymous NSL pulp Love is a Long Shot was published two months before The Winter of Time. Garner, we know, came to NSL through Allan's recommendation. His Waste No Tears appeared eight months later under the name Jarvis Warwick.

The Winter of Time is not to be read for its plot, but it is to be read. It's a shame that it had to end so soon.

I wonder when Harry would've told Clair about his dead wife and newborn son.

On drinking in Toronto:

The bottled beer came and we ordered two more pints. The beer was very good. I was just beginning to appreciate it. You could tell it was Montreal beer. The best beer.

On drinking in New York:

The beer was very amber and clear, lighter than Canadian beer. It was milder and pleasanter to drink, I thought, than our beer if you were only interested in a cool drink and did not want to feel happy after two or three glasses.

A query: Are we really meant to believe that the Sunday Times received an advance review copy of a Canadian pulp novel?

Object and Access: A typical News Stand Library book, except that it has fewer mistakes than most. I caught one sentence that cuts off after the first word. Clair appears variously as "Claire" and "Clare."Buses is misspelled "busses," but that's a common error.

Well done!

D Rickard's cover is strange, even by News Stand Library standards. At no point in the novel does our hero walk down Bloor Street. Neither of the two girls he knows in Toronto has black hair. And doesn't that gal look an awful lot like Rickard's rendition of Gisele Lepine from Sugar-Puss on Dorchester Street (1949). And aren't their dresses very similar?

As of this writing, just one copy is listed for sale online. Price: US$195.00.

I received my copy as a gift last Christmas.

The Winter of Time was reissued at some point – when, I'm not sure – by the Battered Silicon Dispatch Box. Whether that edition is still available is up for question as my query has gone unanswered.

Related posts:

Pulp Noir à Montréal

The Return of Hugh Garner's Neglected Novel

'THE NEONS GO UP ON MONTREAL'

12 April 2022

Talking Ted Allan with Dick Bourgeois-Doyle

The second of my two conversations with Leacock Medal scholar Dick Bourgeois-Doyle is now available here on Soundcloud.

The topic is Ted Allan's Love is a Long Shot – in its 1949 and 1984 incarnations – and why I believe the latter was ineligible for the award.

I first wrote about Love is a Long Shot in the 2011 Fall/Winter issue of Canadian Notes & Queries; then reworked the piece for The Dusty Bookcase book. I'm sharing it here for the first time:

NEVER SO DISTURBING

Love is a Long Shot

Alice K. Doherty [pseud. Ted Allan]

Toronto: News Stand Library, 1949

160 pages

Can a writer, even a deceased writer, be stripped of the Leacock Medal? It’s a fair question, particularly when one considers the late Ted Allan, who received the honour in 1984 for Love is a Long Shot. This slight, uninspired novel tells the story of seventeen-year-old David Webber and his sometimes ribald adventures tending the till in a thirties-era Montreal cigar store-cum-bookie joint. It features a cast of characters that are characters; each ultimately and invariably proving themselves loveable types despite earlier indiscretions. Readers familiar with Lies My Father Told Me, the 1975 film that earned Allan an Academy Award nomination, will recognize some of these folks, including David’s frustrated inventor-father and his ideas for moveable cufflinks and permanently creased trousers.

This is not to suggest that there’s anything deceitful here; not with the film, at least. The overlap between Lies My Father Told Me and Love is a Long Shot is trifling, and in no way makes the latter ineligible for the Leacock. The medal’s rules inform: adaptations are fair game, we need only discount works of which “significant or substantial parts have been previously published in book form.”

Like so many tomes, the 1984 Love is a Long Shot includes a list of the author’s previous works. Allan’s first novel, This Time a Better Earth (1939), is followed by The Scalpel, The Sword (1952), the commercially successful biography of Norman Bethune that he wrote with Sydney Gordon. There’s Quest for Pajaro (1957), the science-fiction novel Allan published under nom de plume “Edward Maxwell,” and his children’s book Willie, the Squowse (1973). Also included is a comprehensive list of Allan’s plays and screenplays. What’s missing is telling: an earlier Love is a Long Shot.

Published by News Stand Library in September 1949, two months before newspaperman Al Palmer’s Sugar-Puss on Dorchester Street, this Love is a Long Shot holds the distinction of being the first pulp noir novel set in Montreal. Its setting is a Depression-era city that’s as dark as the second Love is a Long Shot is light. Where in the remake David Webber gets his job through a helpful, good-natured uncle, our desperate protagonist—recently orphaned teenager Katie Doheny—is out of options. Like David, she takes a job in a cigar store that’s little more than a front for illegal gambling. The early pages of the girl’s bleak world are broken by fleeting moments of black humour—all of which Allan reused in his Leacock-winning novel. Here, for example, is the most memorable, a comic scene that features Molly, the wife of the cigar-store owner. It begins with a boast:

“Never wore a corset in my life. Never had to.” She swaggered out from behind the counter. “If you don’t believe me, feel,” she said, offering me her hip.
“I believe you,” I said.
“Feel. Feel. Don’t be shy.”
I touched her quickly with the tips of my fingers.
She started to laugh again, a loud, hearty laugh. “How old are you?”
I dug the broom into the floor, pushed hard and told her my age.
“I bet you never had a man.”

The Molly of the 1984 Love is a Long Shot, also married to the cigar-store owner, is equally proud:

“Never wore a corset in my life. Never had to.” Weaving from behind the counter, she offered me her backside. “If you don’t believe me, feel.”
“I believe you.”
“Feel, feel, don’t be shy.” She wiggled her behind. I touched her hip quickly with the tips of my fingers. This made her cackle. You have to hear a woman with a bass voice cackle before you can believe the sound.
“So help me, he’s blushing. How old are you?”
“I’m twenty-one,” I lied.
“I bet you’re still a cherry.”

Any further frivolity in the original Love is a Long Shot is soon overwhelmed by the noir. The greatest difference between the two novels lies in their depictions of organized crime. While the Leacock-winning Love is a Long Shot has the “syndicate” as a group of misbehaving boys, the 1949 original comes uncomfortably close to ugly reality.

Young Katie falls for “tall, rugged-looking, tanned” mob boss Hazen Black, a relatively young man rendered impotent by a life of debauchery. In what is surely one of the darkest scenes in Canadian literature, the appropriately-named Black masturbates while instructing his henchman Herbert to rape Katie:

Herbert grabbed me and held his hand over my mouth. I tried to bite it. “Go ahead,” Black was shouting. “Go ahead, damn it, go ahead.” His eyes looked insane. His breath was coming in short gasps, as if he’d been running. He was close to me, but hadn’t touched me yet. “Go ahead. Pick up her dress… do it, do it, do it.”

The original Love is a Long Shot ain’t that pretty at all—nor is it funny. Printed only once, in a fragile, disposable edition that credits the author variously as “Alice K. Doherty,” “Alice H. Doherty,” and simply “Alice Doherty,” it slipped by the judges of the 1984 Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour. The most one can say about the award-winning Love is a Long Shot that is that is was far superior to the previous year’s winner, Gary Lauten’s No Sex Please… We’re Married. Allan didn’t deserve the honour; the $3,500 cheque should have rightfully gone to fellow nominee John Gray, whose debut novel, Dazzled, had been issued by the anaemic Irwin Publishing. It’s a sad fact that the best novel Ted Allan ever wrote was one that he chose not to recognize. A cheap mass-market paperback issued under a pseudonym that the publisher couldn’t get right, it has been out of print for over half a century.

Related posts:

Pulp Noir à Montréal

Love is a Long Shot on the Nose

He and His Arrow

Little Willie, Willie Won't Go Home

11 June 2021

Love is a Long Shot on the Nose

The Calgary Herald, 29 September 1978

This weekend the 29th Toronto Jewish Film Festival presents Love on the Nose.

Do you know it?

I didn't before being contacted by the Toronto Jewish Film Foundation. A made-for-TV movie, Love on the Nose, aired on the CBC in September 1978... and then never again. The screenplay, credited to "John Smith" (read: Ted Allan), tells the story of David (Saul Rubinek), a young Trotskyite who, thanks to his uncle (Paul Soles), lands a job at Keller's cigar store in Depression-era Montreal. The establishment is a front for a bookie joint, which allows David a good amount of time for on-the-job studies of Karl Marx.

Love on the Nose received glowing reviews; I've yet to find a critic who said a bad word. Much of the praise landed on Saul Rubinek. He played a character a decade younger than himself, though you'd never know it. Al Waxman was singled out for playing a crime boss, a character so very different than the Larry King we'd come to love on The King of Kensington. Reading the reviews, it's clear that to that point the critics hadn't recognized the actor's range.

Months later, the Windsor Star was still going on about it.

The Windsor Star, 9 January 1979

I was contacted by the Festival because of my writing on Allan this blog, in Canadian Notes & Queries, and in my most recent book. It was my pleasure to provide a short video postscript to the film in which I discuss Love on the Nose, its relationship to Allan's 1949 pulp Love is a Long Shot, and the lighter 1984 version published by McClelland & Stewart.

What I didn't mention – but should've – is that Love on the Nose is the best of the three.

Tickets for Love on the Nose can be purchased through this link.

You will not be disappointed.

Related posts:

Remembering Ted Allan on His Hundredth

Pulp Noir à Montréal

17 October 2016

A List of Montreal's Post-War Pulps: Second Shot

Late last month, I was interviewed by CULT MTL for their cover story on Montreal pulp and the Ricochet Books series. The issue arrived on the stands last week. Since then, I've been contacted by a number of people wanting a list of Montreal's post-war pulps. The only one of which I knew was this 2014 list made for my Canadian Notes & Queries column. I think it has stood the test of time – two years, anyway – but am now wondering whether it shouldn't be expanded.

All depends on one's definition of "post-war," really. For the purposes of the column, I chose the ten years that followed the August 1945 armistice – though, truth be told, I see the period as ending in 1960. Am I wrong? Americans tend to agree... much to do with Kennedy's victory and that torch being passed to a new generation, I expect. Across the pond, certain cousins maintain that it all ended in 1979 when Thatcher moved into 10 Downing Street.

And then a great darkness set in.

This revised list covers pulps set in Montreal and published between the armistice and the end of 1960, the last day of the farthing. Links are provided for my reviews of each. Titles that have been revived as part of the Ricochet Books series are indicated with asterisks.

The House on Craig Street
Ronald J. Cooke
Winnipeg: Harlequin, 1949

The first novel by magazine writer and editor Cooke, The House on Craig Street is about a kid who thinks he'll make a killing in the advertising game. He does, though this real passion is literature.

Love is a Long Shot
Alice K. Doherty [pseud. Ted Allan]
Toronto: News Stand Library, 1949

Allan's second novel – after the recently rereleased This Time a Better Earth – Love is a Long Shot is notable for containing the most disturbing scene in Canadian literature. I've written this before. I'll write it again. It haunts.

Sugar-Puss on Dorchester Street*
Al Palmer
Toronto: News Stand Library, 1949

Newspaperman Palmer's only foray into fiction. A slim novel written with tongue firmly in cheek, its value comes in its depiction of pre-Drapeau Montreal, a time when Dorchester was a street... and was called Dorchester.

The Mayor of Côte St. Paul*
Ronald J. Cooke
Winnipeg: Harlequin, 1950

Easily the best of Cooke's three novels. Heavily autobiographical, like the first, it follows aspiring writer Dave Manley, who joins a crime syndicate in quest of material.

Wreath for a Redhead
Brian Moore
Winnipeg: Harlequin, 1951

The very first novel by Moore, a man who would win two Governor General's Awards and be shortlisted for several Bookers.

"Montreal Means Murder!"

The Crime on Cote des Neiges*
David Montrose
[pseud. Charles Ross Graham]
Toronto: Collins White Circle, 1951

Montrose's debut introduces Montreal private dick Russell Teed. Here he's trying to prove the innocence of a Westmount girl accused of murdering her bootlegger husband.

The Executioners
Brian Moore
Winnipeg: Harlequin, 1951

Dangerous men arrive in Montreal tasked with either kidnapping or killing an exiled foreign leader. Mike Farrell, a veteran of the Second World War and more than a few boxing rings, sets out to stop them.

Flee the Night in Anger
Dan Keller [pseud. Louis Kaufman]
Toronto: Studio Publications, 1952

Unique amongst the post-war pulps, Flee the Night in Anger divides its action between Montreal and Toronto. Beware the 1954 American reprint, which cuts out a good quarter of the text (including the dirtiest bits).

Murder Over Dorval*
David Montrose
[pseud. Charles Ross Graham]
Toronto: Collins White Circle, 1952

The second Russell Teed book, Murder Over Dorval is set in motion when a Canadian senator is clubbed on the head during a particularly turbulent flight from La Guardia.

The Body on Mount Royal*
David Montrose
[pseud. Charles Ross Graham]
Winnipeg: Harlequin, 1953

The third and final Russell Teed adventure is also his booziest. This one involves blackmail, illegal gambling and, of course, a dame... two, in fact.

Intent to Kill
Bernard Mara [pseud. Brian Moore]
New York: Dell, 1956

The last of Moore's Montreal pulps. A thriller set in a building modelled on the Montreal Neurological Institute. The basis for a more than competent 1958 feature film of the same name. Both are recommended.

The Deadly Dames
Malcolm Douglas
[pseud. Douglas Sanderson]
New York: Fawcett, 1956

The first Sanderson to be published as a paperback original, The Deadly Dames sees the return or Montreal private dick Mike Garfin (see below), but under another name. By pub date, Sanderson had quit Montreal for Alicante, Spain.

Related titles:

Noirish novels not included because they were first published in hardcover or because they don't take place in Montreal.

Daughters of Desire
Fletcher Knight
Toronto: New Stand Library, 1950

A mystery of sorts that begins in a Montreal nightclub, but quickly shifts to a yacht bound for the Bahamas; the novel itself is directionless. Promises of sex come to nothing, despite the presence of a hooker and a promiscuous heiress.

Dark Passions Subdue
Douglas Sanderson
New York: Avon, 1953

The author's debut, this "story of the men who don't belong" deals with homosexuality and the angst of a privileged Westmount boy studying at McGill. Sanderson's "serious novel," it was first published in 1952 by Dodd, Mead.

Hot Freeze*
Martin Brett
[pseud. Douglas Sanderson]
New York: Popular Library, 1954

The greatest work of Montreal noir... and it's written by a transplanted Englishman. Go figure. Hot Freeze marks the debut of private dick Mike Garfin. It was first published the same year by Dodd, Mead.

French for Murder
Bernard Mara [pseud. Brian Moore]
New York: Fawcett, 1954

Moore's third pulp, the first not set in Montreal. American Noah Cain stumbles upon a murder scene and spends the rest of the novel running around France trying to find the girl who can clear his name.

Blondes Are My Trouble*
Martin Brett
[pseud. Douglas Sanderson]
New York: Popular Library, 1955

The second Mike Garfin novel – very nearly as good as the first – sees the private dick doing battle with a Montreal prostitution ring. Originally published in 1954 by Dodd, Mead under the title The Darker Traffic.

A Bullet for My Lady
Bernard Mara [pseud. Brian Moore]
New York: Fawcett, 1955

Josh Camp arrives Barcelona to search for his missing business partner. A treasure hunt ensues. By far Moore's weakest and silliest novel (writes this great admirer).

This Gun for Gloria
Bernard Mara [pseud. Brian Moore]
New York: Fawcett, 1956

Disgraced journalist Mitch Cannon, down and out in Paris, is approached by a wealthy American matron who wants his help in finding her daughter. He refuses, but does it anyway.

Hickory House
Kenneth Orvis
[pseud. Kenneth Lemieux]
Toronto: Harlequin, 1956

By a Montrealer, but set in an anonymous city on the shores of Lake Michigan. I'm reading it right now and would appreciate hearing from anyone who knew the mysterious Mr Orvis.

Murder in Majorca
Michael Bryan [pseud. Brian Moore]
New York: Dell 1957

The last Brian Moore pulp, published between The Feast of Lupercal and his very best Montreal novel, The Luck of Ginger Coffey. Moore left the city for New York in 1959, much to our loss.

The Pyx
John Buell
New York: Crest, 1960

An unusual, highly impressive first novel in which Catholicism, the occult, prostitution, heroin, wealth and privilege all come into play. The basis for the less impressive 1973 film of the same name, it was first published in 1959 by Farrar, Straus & Cudahy.

C'est tout.

Have I missed anything?

Let me know.

26 January 2016

Remembering Ted Allan on His Hundredth

Today marks the centenary of Ted Allan’s birth. Though our lives overlapped by more than three decades, the only time I actually laid eyes on the man was at the 1993 Richer Roast. The venue was the Oval Ballroom of the Ritz-Carleton, the very same space that would one day serve to host the Panofsky wedding reception in Barney's Version.

Would that I could remember Allan's speech. The only bit – and it was a bit – that has remained with me is the end: "Mordecai,” said Allan, turning to the roastee, “do me a favour. Next time someone compliments you on Lies My Father Told Me, would you please correct them."

Laughter.

Two decades after the man's death, it's still for Lies My Father Told Me – as short story, film and play – that Allan is best remembered. So many other works have fallen by the wayside, but there is reason to hope. Where seven years ago not one of his books was in print, we now have two: The Scalpel, The Sword (Dundurn, 2009), the Bethune biography he co-authored with Sidney Gordon, and This Time a Better Earth (U of Ottawa Press, 2015), Allan's 1939 debut novel. The latter is particularly welcome… so rare was it that the author himself didn't own a copy.

In celebration of the day, recognition of the five Ted Allan books that remain out of print. All are worthy of revival, but none more so than Willie, the Squowse. Honestly, how is it possible that it isn't in print?

Love is a Long Shot
Alice K. Doherty [pseud Ted Allan]
Toronto: News Stand Library, 1949

Quest for Pajaro
Edward Maxwell [pseud Ted Allan]
London: Heinemann, 1957

Willie the Squowse
Ted Allan
Illustrated by Quentin Blake
Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1978

Love is a Long Shot
Ted Allan
Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1984

Don't You Know Anybody Else?
Ted Allan
Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1985

Pulp Noir à Montréal

04 November 2014

Nothing Says Violence Like Harlequin

Violence sells but I'm not buying, which may be why it's taken me so long to see just how much it was used in pushing early Harlequins.

As near as I can tell, the publisher began using violence as a selling point with its third book, Howard Hunt's Maelstrom. We remember Hunt today as one of Richard Nixon's plumbers, forgetting that the man was once awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship (whereas Truman Capote and Gore Vidal were not). His third novel, Maelstrom, was first published in 1948 by no less a house than Farrar Straus. Sure, the dust jacket was garish, but c'mon, Farrar Straus!

By contrast, the Harlequin edition issued the following June (four months before Hunt joined the CIA), seems bland… that is, until you read the tagline:

Harlequin used 'violence" in flogging all sorts of titles, no matter how unlikely. Its cover copy for Ben Hecht's Hollywood Mystery promises a plot in which "violence and murder intermingle with wacky situations." Lady – Here's Your Wreath by Raymond Marshall is a "story of violence, mystery and sudden death". Marshall's Why Pick On Me? was pitched with promises of "Punch, Action, Violence!" And, in event that you missed it the first time, Harlequin uses the word twice – in consecutive sentences – in describing James Hadley Chase's No Orchids for Miss Blandish:

This is a fast moving very shocking crime story, which tells of a young and glamorous heiress, whose beauty excites a gang of brutal mobsters to such an extent that they leave a trail of death and destruction in their efforts to kidnap and debauch her. The detective, Dave Fenner, is called in to crack the case, and matches the sadistic brutality of the gang with his own particular brand of violence. This is definitely not a book for the faint-hearted who cannot stand explosive violence and action.

Chase is a special case. With I'll Bury My Dead, we're promised a tale of "murder and violence". Figure It Out for Yourself finds hero Vic Malloy "snarled up in a vicious vortex of murder, glamorous women and violent non-stop action". Twelve Chinks and a Woman, the title Harlequin would really like us all to forget, finds sleuth Dave Fenner descending into a "merciless violent Underworld".

Then there are the covers.

The Harlequin cover for Manitoba boy A.E. van Vogt's The House That Stood Still ranks with News Stand Library's Love is a Long Shot and The Penthouse Killings as the most disturbing and violent ever produced in this country. But those News Stand Library books are anomalies; in truth, the covers of Harlequin's early rivals rarely depicted violence. The typical New Stand Library book promises sex. On rare occasions – as with Too Many Women or Overnight Escapade – the two very nearly intersect, but never do. These News Stand Library covers suggest the possibility of violence, while those of Harlequin depict actual acts or the bloody results of same.

The ten Harlequins that follow give good example, each one typical of a time in which the publisher put forth brutal sagas of love and violence – and not slight stories of brutal love.