Of a Petite Prima Donna (and her pretty little feet)

Judith Moore; or, Fashioning a Pipe
Joanna E. Wood
101 pages

A very slim paperback printed on demand at Amazon's Bolton, Ontario fulfillment centre, I'm to blame for this book's existence. It was ordered in the Covid spring of 2022, just after I'd finished Joanna E. Wood's debut The Untempered Wind (1894), a book I described on the Lost Ladies of Lit podcast as the only novel, ever, where I actually wept." You can hear me begin to go on about it at 36:45.

Had it not been for The Untempered Wind, I might never have read Judith Moore. Had I read Judith Moore first, its unlikely that I would've read The Untempered Wind or anything else by Joanna E. Wood.

Judith Moore is the author's second novel. It shares something with The Untempered Wind in being set in rural Ontario, yet features little of the small town cruelty, hypocrisy, dogmatism, and pious conceit that makes the earlier work so involving and affecting.

The titular character, a literal prima donna, has completed her first European tour to great success and requires rest before taking on the United States. She finds room and board with Mr and Mrs Morris, whose homestead is nestled in a hollow outside fictional Ovid, Ontario.

Why Ovid? Why the Morrises? How had Judith Moore so much as heard of Ovid? These are questions left unanswered. Mrs Morris is of no help in solving the mystery:

"She and a little black-a-vised chap came driving up the lane one day last week, and before I just rightly could make out what they were, he was driving off and she was there for keeps. Next day there came a whole waggon [sic] load of trunks."

The need of such a respite – an entire summer – is concerning in one so young and at the very start of an exciting and promising career. Might it be because Judith Moore, petite, pale, delicate, and fragile, lacks the physique of the diva commonly associated with what Mrs Morris calls "the opry?"

No, the cause of Judith's fatigue is something else entirely, and is worth quoting at length:

Blind fools who could not see it was the passion of an empty heart, the yearning of a solitary soul, the unutterable longing of a woman's nature for love, that rendered her marvellous voice so passionately and painfully sweet. She herself never suspected it; only she believed what the doctors had told her manager and teacher, the good man who wore such big diamonds and used such bad language, that she must have rest, quiet, complete and absolute change. So she and this man had come to Canada, and had driven on and on into the heart of the country till they came to this village in the valley, and there she had elected to stay – a caprice not nearly so extravagant, and certainly more sweet and wholesome than the freaks indulged in by some others of her ilk. So here she was, lying perdu, whilst her picture was in every paper in the country, with marvellous tales of her triumphs abroad and whispers of the wonderful treat in store for the music-lovers of America. And her little, good-hearted manager flashed out his biggest diamonds, swore his worst oaths, hoped the child was getting strong, and never dreamed he was killing her.

Enter handsome Andrew Cutler. Healthy, wealthy, young, and of Loyalist stock, his land borders the Morris homestead. Andrew is literally sowing seeds when "assailed by a succession of the sweetest sounds he had ever heard – note after note of purest melody, flung forth unsyllabled, full-throated to the air, inarticulate but eloquent. Again and again it came, liquid, rich, and with that pathos which perfection always touches."

Assailed again the following day, he follows the call:

"I have come," he said, half dreamily – stepping out from the shelter of the trees.

   The pale-faced singing siren changed to a startled, blushing girl, and in swift sequence Andrew's rapt gaze altered to one not altogether without daring. "Oh, so I see," she half gasped, then laughed outright, looking at him with shy eyes, but mutinously curving lips. The laugh robbed the scene of its last illusion of mystery.

This fin de siecle meet cute begins well, but is spoiled by Judith's habiliment. Not being "up in chatelaines," the farmer's "masculine horse sense and the instinct of protection" gets the better of him:

"Why in the world do you wear shoes like these?" he asked. "And such stockings! and standing on that damp moss! You had better go right into the house and get on decently heavy shoes."

   This was too much. Miss Judith Moore fancied her own feet, and fancied open-work silk hose, and high-heeled wisps of shoes. Most of all, she liked the combination. In fact, in a harmless little way, she rather liked people to have a chance to appreciate these beauties, and at the very moment Andrew spoke, she had noted his downward glance and felt a righteous peace settle upon her. To be well shod is such moral support, and, lo, this heathen, this wretch, this abominable, conceited, brazen young farmer, had actually dared to suggest a change; more than that, he had spoken of "stockings"—disgusting!

   So, with a dignity that reduced Andrew to despair, even whilst it roused his ire (she was so slight to be such a "defiant little cat" he told himself), she drew herself up, in a manner to do the traditional Duchess credit, and left him, saying: "Since you don't approve of my feet I'll take them out of your way."
   "You mean they'll take you," said Andrew, wrathfully conscious that she was, to use a good old figure of speech, "turning up her nose at him."
   "You are extremely rude," she called back.
   "And you are a bad-tempered little thing," he answered.

Focus on footwear, flaunting of feet, and pride of pieds aside, Judith and Andrew's contentious early exchange is conventional, as recognized by Elvis Costello:

          Chapter One, we didn't really get along

          Chapter Two, I think I fell in love with you

Judith and Andrew's romance is a touch different in that their first encounter takes place in the second chapter. They have no contact in the third, but are very much in each other's thoughts. In Chapter Four, Andrew rescues Judith from an apple tree, setting their relationship on a firmer footing. 

Pacing aside, what makes Judith Moore an unconventional romance novel is also what makes it so tedious. From the moment Andrew returns Judith's high-heeled wisps to terra firma, they walk a path free of obstruction, falling further in love with each meeting. It isn't until the ninth of the novel's eleven chapters – the last taking the form of a very brief epilogue – that anything occurs to threaten Judith's happiness.

She has only herself to blame.

Judith writes a letter to her manager asking to be released so that she may marry Andrew.

Released from what exactly? There is no contract, but innocent Judith feels an obligation towards this "little black-a-vised man with big diamonds [and] profane tongue" for recognizing her talent and taking her under his wing after her widowed father died . She writes that she will understand if he wishes her to return to the stage.

The manager shows up at the Morris homestead the very next week, accompanied by a French maid "of the real Parisian stripe," and Judith is whisked away without Andrew knowing.

There is no spoiler in sharing the conclusion; it's pretty much as one would expect. Judith is sent out on out on the American tour singing her little heart out. In New York, she surprises with a song, unaccompanied by orchestra, seemingly of her own composition:

                    For the peace which you crave;

                    For the end of your quest;

                    For the love which can save;

                        Come! Come to me!"

Hundreds of kilometres away, "in the silent spaces of a virgin forest," a  heartbroken Andrew is thinking of Judith:

Where was she? It was not her wish that he should know. He hoped her little feet trod pleasant paths. Oh, Judith, Judith! Then, explain it as we may, or leave it still a mystery, there came to him, faint, aëry, bodilessly, the words of a song—a song that ended in a plea, "Come! Come to me," and when it died away, Andrew Cutler sprang to his feet with a cry that echoed far between the icy tree trunks of the forest, "I come, I come." And that same night, at the same hour, at the same pulse of the hour, Judith Moore, with a look of ineffable joy upon her face, fell fainting upon the stage.

Judith Moore has a remarkable, entirely avoidable flaw in that Andrew is portrayed as a reader. "He's got a crank on books–took that off his mother," Mrs Morris says to Judith after the meet cute gone bad. And yet Andrew has no idea what has become of his love, despite her tour being covered by the papers.

Andrew returns from the virgin forest to Ovid, where he learns, quite by chance, that the swarthy manager lives in New York. And so he purchases a train ticket:

As the Canadian trains reach New York, the morning papers come aboard. Andrew bought one of each, and sat down turning them over with tremulous hands to search for a sign. He had not far to seek—"JUDITH MOORE DYING, THE END APPROACHING." That was what he read in big "scare head" type; that, and its narrations in the other papers, with the usual platitudes telling of the "short but bright career," and so on. With the calm of despair he searched for definite information as to where she was. It seemed every one knew so well that definite detail was superfluous. But at last, in a different part of the paper, he found: "In the corridors of the Brittany Hotel last night, Miss Moore's manager, who had just left her bedside, said all hope was gone." The train was in New York, slowing up in the Grand Central station by the time he found this.

Andrew reaches Judith with hours to spare. 

Marriage follows.

FIN

I laid down my cheap print on demand paperback with a sigh. The Untempered Wind, the author's first novel, is so very good, as is her third, A Daughter of Witches (1899). Judith Moore lands between the two with a dull thud. The disappointment is made all the worse with the knowledge that Wood produced just one more novel, Farden Ha' (1902). Apparently, it takes place in the Scottish mining town in which the author was born.

Types of Canadian Women
Henry Morgan, ed
Toronto: William Briggs, 1903

"Meteor-like, her career plunged into obscurity after 1902," writes Barbara Goddard in Wood's Dictionary of Canadian Biography entry.

Perfectly put, I remembered those words from when I first read them. What I did not recall is Goddard's discovery of two Wood novellas published in the New York pulp magazine Tales from Town Topics. The earlier, A Martyr to Love (1897) "recounts the adventures of a femme fatale ironically wounded in her heartless conquests." The later, Where Waters Beckon (1902) "draws symbolically on Niagara’s whirlpools and local Indian legends as the setting for a dark tale of a woman married off to a madman by her father and later destroyed with her lover, an engineer developing hydroelectricity."

I'd purchase print on demand editions of either in a flash.

Farden Ha', too.

About the epigraph:

Elizabeth Barrett Browning never wrote a poem titled 'Fashioning a Pipe,' the words are taken from her poem 'A Musical Instrument' (1860) beginning with the first two lines of the second stanza. From there, we skip to the second word of third line of the third stanza, ignoring the opening "And."

The epigraph includes twenty of the poems forty-two lines (in whole or in part), ignoring structure, adding and deleting punctuation, touching down here and there. It reminded me of nothing so much as a K-tel album track.

Object and Access: A floppy paperback, so poorly designed that the spine is blank. 

Judith Moore was first published in 1898 by the Ontario Publishing Company. It has been out of print ever since. The novel entered public domain in 1978. It is available for download here courtesy of Project Gutenberg.

I've never come upon a copy of the Ontario Publishing Company edition in the wild. As I write, two are listed for sale online at $160 and $250 respectively. Judging by the sellers' descriptions, the least expensive is the superior copy.

Related posts:

May Agnes Fleming: Lost Lady of Lit
A Woman Who Did
The Witch is Back

A Romance of Toronto: CanLit Most Verbose

A Romance of Toronto (Founded on Fact)

Mrs Annie G. Savigny
Toronto: William Briggs, 1888
229 pages

The first chapter, 'Toronto a Fair Matron,' begins:

Two gentlemen friends saunter arm in arm up and down the deck of the palace steamer Chicora as she enters our beautiful Lake Ontario from the picturesque Niagara River, on a perfect day in delightful September, when the blue canopy of the heavens seems so far away, one wonders that the mirrored surface of the lake can reflect its color.

Dale and Buckingham are the two gentlemen friends. In their sauntering, the former teases the latter for being a bachelor. Dale brags that he has not only wed, but has managed to father a child, whilst friend Buckingham prefers the company of his gentleman's club.

I describe this opening scene because it suggests an intriguing read.

Sadly, A Romance of Toronto is not.

Buckingham has joined Dale, Mrs Dale, their child, and pretty governess Miss Crew on a voyage from New York to Toronto. His presence aboard the Chicora is something of a mystery, but then the same might be said of the Dales and young Miss Crew. All may or may not involve a certain Mrs Gower, who has put to pen "a letter descriptive of Toronto." Dale reads it aloud as the palace steamer approaches Ontario's capitol. Four pages are consumed, these being the middle two:

Cliquez pour agrandir.

A Romance of Toronto is not a long novel but it demands a good amount of time and a great deal of concentration and patience. The reader may feel lost in the early chapters, but will eventually come upon a path. That same path will split in two, and then come together in the final pages.

In her introductory note, Mrs Savigny describes A Romance of Toronto as a novel consisting of two plots.

Dale and Buckingham have nothing to do with either.

The first involves young Charles Babbington-Cole. He knows Mrs Gower through his father, Hugh Babbington-Cole. A widower in frail health, Babbington-Cole père was once engaged to a wealthy Englishwoman. Tragically, the union was prevented through conniving and lies told the bride-elect by the sister of his late wife. The Englishwoman instead married her guardian with whom she had a daughter. When the sister-in-law's malfeasance was exposed Hugh Babbington-Cole and the Englishwoman – identified only as "Pearl" – vow that their offspring will one day wed and together inherit her riches.

And so, Charles Babbington-Cole bids Mrs Gower adieu, embarking for England and a storyline that reads like a very bad imitation of May Agnes Fleming; kidnapping, false identity, forced marriage, and a gothic manor house will figure.

The second plot – much more absurd, yet somehow less interesting – concerns Mrs Gower herself. A woman who has has twice worn the black robes of widowhood, she is cornered into accepting a marriage proposal from Mr Cobbe, by far the most repellent of her social set. Mrs Gower tells Mrs Drew how this came to be in 'The Oath in the Tower of Toronto University,' the novel's sixteenth chapter. This is its beginning:

Cliquez pour agrandir.

Several more pages pass in Mrs Gower's telling, but it comes down to this: Cobbe, who has been pestering Mrs Gower to marry him, fools her into believing that they've become locked in the tower overnight. Fearing scandal, Mrs Gower promises to marry Cobbe if he can only find a way out of their situation. The two descend only to find that the tower door isn't locked, and yet she holds herself to the oath.

Is Mrs Gower doomed to marry Cobbe? Is there not a means through which she can be released from her promise? Might the mysterious woman who has been haunting the grounds of Mrs Gower's home hold the key? The situation is made all the more dire when she meets and falls in love with Alexander Blair, a barrister newly arrived from Scotland.

Nothing is spoiled in reporting that all ends happily; the first of the novel's two epigraphs suggests as much.

Mrs Savigny's note makes it plain that A Romance of Toronto (Founded on Fact) is a roman à clef. but who are its models? Her two plots – "one of which was told to me by an actor therein; the other I have myself watched" – are "living facts." Who are the originals?  

A Montrealer, I hope to hear the answer from one of Toronto's fair children.

Trivia: The epigraph attributed to Charles Darwin – "I would like the Government to forbid the publication of all novels that did not end well." – is a false quote. Sleuthing led to the December 3, 1887 number of The Illustrated London News, which cites "Darwin's delightful biography [sic]" as the source. In The Autobiography of Charles Darwin (1887), the naturalist writes of the pleasure he receives from novels, adding: "A surprising number have been read aloud to me, and I like all if moderately good, and if they do not end unhappily—against which a law ought to be passed."

Mrs Savigny attributes her second epigraph – "What would the world do without story-books" – to Charles Dickens. I've not been able to find this quote or anything resembling it outside the pages of her novel.

Trivia II: The University of Toronto is referred to only once as such; "Toronto University" is used throughout the rest of the novel. I asked Amy Lavender Harris, author of Imagining Toronto, about this. She suggests that "Toronto University" might have been used to connote familiarity.

Bloomers: There are two, both expressed by Mrs Gower. The first is upon learning of Charles Babbington-Cole's departure for England:

"Don't you think, Lilian, that the opposite sex is usually chosen to lend an ear?" she said, carelessly, to conceal a feeling of sadness at the out-going of her friend; for she is aware that the old friendly intercourse is broken, now that he has gone to his wedding.

In the second, Mrs Gower is speaking of the man she loves:

"I am so glad he has come into my life: I feel lonely at times; and he is so companionable, I know. What dependent creatures we are, after all—houses and lands, robes a la mode, even, don't suffice. Intercourse we must have."

Object and Access: A deceptively slim hardcover. Fifty years after publication, my copy was added to the library of the Department of the Secretary of State. One wonders why. Might it have something to do with the suggestion that A Romance of Toronto is a roman à clef? I'm guessing not, but like to imagine otherwise. 

I don't know what to make of the binding, which is markedly different than Harvard University's copy:

I purchased A Romance of Toronto three years ago. As I write this just two copies are listed for sale online. The least expensive – $65 – is "good only." At $247, the alternative is "very fine." Take your pick.

A Romance of Toronto was reprinted in 1973 by the University of Toronto. If anything, that edition is even more rare. Long in the public domain, it continues to be picked over by print on demand vultures. This cover is my favourite by far:

Related post:

Susanna Moodie's Bloomers

Reverend King's Slow and Simple Swan Song

Satan as Lightning
Basil King
New York: Harper, 1929
280 pages

Basil King is the only Canadian to have topped the year-end list of bestselling novels in the United States. He accomplished this in 1909 with The Inner Shrine and came close to doing the same the following year with The Wild Olive.

Satan as Lightning came later – so much later that its author was dead.

William Benjamin Basil King
26 February 1859, Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island -
22 June 1928, Cambridge, Massachusetts

RIP

King's flawed hero is John Owen "Nod" Hesketh. The son of a prominent New York City Episcopal minister and precentor, Nod has been able to get away with a lot in his twenty-nine years. Consider the time bosom friend Edward Wrigley "Wrig" Coppard altered a two-dollar cheque to read "two hundred dollars." Nod and Wrig used their ill-gotten gains to shower girls with gifts and – ahem – "give them money." The forgery was eventually discovered, but as the cheque was issued by Wrig's father, wealthy businessman William Coppard, the two chums weren't brought before the law.

Sons of privilege – obviously – both Nod and Wrig attended schools of higher learning. After graduation, Rev Hesketh and Mr Coppard pooled funds to buy their boys a garage.

A garage?

The purchase makes no sense, though it does play an important role in the backstory. After their first year in business, Nod and Wrig found themselves two thousand dollars in debt. William Coppard wrote a cheque for nine dollars – something to do with the balance owing on a church organ – which Rev Hesketh gave to his son for deposit. On the way to the bank, Nod handed the cheque to Wrig, who then altered the amount to nine hundred. Nod used his half of the money to pay the garage's creditor; Wrig kept his half for himself. When caught, the reverend's son fessed up; not so, the rich man's son. Wrig feigns ignorance, and so the full weight lands on Nod. Rev Hesketh is of the belief that his son would do well by paying the penalty for his crime.

Call it tough love.

After serving a sentence of three years and nine months, Nod emerges from fictional Bitterwell Prison a changed man. No longer "devilish," the clergyman's son is intent on doing good, which includes paying off debts to former garage employee Tiddy Epps. Nod does not return to the Hesketh family home for fear of causing embarrassment. He lodges instead with the Bird family in a hovel not far from Gracie Mansion. Danny Bird, an accomplished pickpocket, is a friend met in prison. Wise Katy Bird, Danny's unattractive "lame" sister shares the abode, as does the matriarch, Mrs Bird. Mr Bird died some years earlier in the electric chair.

The ex-con's new life is modest with modest expectations, save one: Nod is intent on destroying former bosom friend Wrig Coppard. "I want other people to find out what he is," Nod tells Katy. 

Tension is heightened with the introduction of beautiful Blandina Vandertyl – named after the the patron saint of those falsely accused of cannibalism – whose secret engagement to Nod ended when he was convicted. On the rebound, she married Walter Frankland, who was killed in the Château-Thierry salient. Just as well, Blandina knows she would've grown bored with him. Walter was too good and she has a thing for bad boys. The wealthy war widow is now being pursued by none other than Wrig Coppard.

In his time, Basil King was known for his ability to weave a complex plot, but that talent isn't much in evidence here. This novel trods a fairly straight path with few obstacles. The conflict between Nod and Wrig never takes place because Nod finds religion – not through his father's church, rather at an ecumenical weekly gathering known as the Sinners Conference.

The novel's epigraphs.

Basil King's spiritual journey was every bit as unconventional. An Anglican clergyman, he served as rector of St. Luke's Pro-Cathedral (Halifax, Nova Scotia) and Christ Church (Cambridge, Massachusetts), eventually resigning from the ministry due to failing eyesight and ill-health. During the Great War, King became interested in spiritualism, The Abolishing of Death (1919) being his clearest statement on the matter. Supernatural elements feature in much of his fiction, most notably in the novella Going West (1919), the novel The Empty Sack (1921), and in his script for the by all accounts great lost silent film Earthbound (1920).

Of the ten King novel's I've read to date, Satan as Lightning seems the most personal. Its plot is slowed and dulled by discourse on religion and Nod's writings about prison, punishment, reform, and redemption. but this Anglican Church of Canada congregant was more than satisfied. That said, as with Sunday sermons, I was happy when it was over.

Trivia: Though the place of worship is not mentioned by name, Nod's father, Rev Hesketh, serves at New York's St John the Devine.

Coincidence: Satan as Lightning follows Ralph Connor's Corporal Cameron of the North West as the second novel I've read this year in which a young man finds himself in hot water over an altered cheque.

Was the crime really so common?

Trivia: This is the first King novel I've read to include a character from the author's home province: "Effie, a Scotch-Canadian from Prince Edward Island."

Note: I read Satan as Lightning for the 1929 Club.

Other 1929 titles covered at the Dusty Bookcase:

All Else is Folly - Peregrine Acland

Relations and Complications - Gladys Milton Palmer Brooke

The Runner - Ralph Connor

The Woman Who Couldn't Die - Arthur Stringer 

Object and Access: A green hardcover, my copy lacks the dust jacket. It was purchased for six dollars at a failing London, Ontario bookstore. Marked down from $45.95.

All of three copies are listed for sale online, the cheapest being a copy – lacking jacket – at US$4.95. The other two, both of which have jackets, are offered at US$119.95 and US$125.00.

Take your pick.

Related posts:

Not Very Occult

The Barefoot Fugitive and Other Mysteries

A Wild Olive on Nitrate

The Retired Reverend King on the Abolishing of Death
Reverend King's Great War Novelette
The Great Canadian Post-Great-War Novel?
The Mission of Sex: Canadians, Do Your Duty!
Basil King's Silent Unseen World

Ralph Connor's Canada Dry

They Fell in Love With the Actress

The Darling Illusion
Margerie Scott
London: Peter Davies, 1954
246 pages

Olivia Thompson's dead body lies in a slowly growing pool of blood, an apron belonging to her housekeeper, Mrs Baker, covering the head. Looking down, Inspector of Detectives John Sims believes the death a suicide, but Doctor Jordan Plant, the coroner, suggests otherwise: "I've been thinking—John, have you ever known a woman to shoot herself in the face?"

Olivia's final days favour the doctor's opinion. A young actress who had spent much of the Second World War in London, she'd returned to her Canadian hometown only four days earlier. In the short time between arrival and death, Olivia had purchased and moved into her childhood home. She'd hired Mrs Baker, ordered new furniture, and had started in on plans to renovate. No, nothing speaks to suicide, which made this reader question the inspector's rush to judgement. I didn't know what to think of the coroner, who has this to say about the murderer: "It's more likely to be a woman than a man to do a thing like that to another woman."

Is it? I honestly have no idea.

Save the housekeeper, Olivia had no contact with anyone except Louise Brand, Edith Temple, and Mary Anne Nesbit, each of whom had visited in the days leading to her death. Names from Olivia's past, they all have reasons to hate her. The novel's structure, coupled with Dr Plant's conviction, encourages the expectation that one of these women did the bloody deed. But which one?

Don't look to Doctor Jordan Plant or Inspector John Sims for the answer, they feature only in the first of the novel's five sections. "Louise," the second section, serves to introduce a living Olivia and her family. Mother Meg, was a music hall performer in the Old Country. Father Tom was a smitten medical student, disowned over his choice of mate. Together Meg and Tom emigrated to a small Canadian city (read: Windsor), where they raised their children, Olivia and Gerry, and earned a reputation as a couple of carefree oddballs.

But what of Louise? Though this is her section, she features hardly at all. It's instead given over to Reg Barnes. The son of a rumrunner who made a fortune during American prohibition, he's expected to marry pretty, buxom blonde Louise Williams, a member of a prominent family that had achieved its riches in the very same manner. The Barneses and Williamses have money and pretense, but Reg is attracted to Meg and Tom's way of life... and their daughter. On the eve of the announcement of his engagement to Louise – invitations are back from the printer – he asks Olivia to marry him. She declines, Reg marries Louise, and in the section's climax, calls out Olivia's name on his wedding night.

"Edith," the novel's second section is named for Edith Temple. A frigid widow with a fetish for cleanliness, she'd once married a younger man, and had endured sex until pregnant. Her unfortunate husband was mercifully shot to death whilst running rum to thirsty Americans. Edith gave birth to a son, Jack, whom she raised with her cold, cold heart. It's no wonder that he's drawn to Meg and Tom's warm, loving home. Like Reg, he develops a thing for Olivia. Things take a turn when Jack learns of Olivia's plans to study theatre in London. He pleads with her to stay, is met with derision, and kills himself.

Though only sixty pages in length, "Mary Anne" may be worthy of a paper. Historians will find interest in its portrait of a family, Meg and Tom's, in wartime London, but the real value comes in its depiction of homosexuality and attitudes towards same. We begin in Canada. Mary Anne Nesbit and younger brother Bill are orphaned in their early teens. Against all odds, with the use of an otherwise useless aunt, they manage to maintain their independence. When comes the war, Bill is sent to fight overseas. Mary Anne joins the Canadian Red Cross so as to be closer to her brother. On leave, Bill visits Meg and Tom, now living in London, and surprises everyone by proposing to Olivia. She accepts, only to frustrate her betrothed by deferring the wedding for the stage. Bill goes on a bender, ending up in a King's Road pub. A man named Christopher Bentley sidles up to him at the bar and, when Bill gets too drunk to stand, takes him back to his flat. From this point on, despite initial "self disgust" on Bill's part, he and Christopher become a couple.

Mary Anne cannot accept her bother's new relationship, as evidenced in this exchange:

"It's your fault, " Mary Anne jumped up and stood facing Olivia, her face working, her hands balled into fists. "I didn't want him to marry you because I knew you'd never make him happy; I know as much about you as you know about me, and I know you'e selfish and cruel and always have been, but you did get engaged to Bill and you should have kept your promise instead of making him so miserable that he went off and got drunk and took up with... this..." she paused, thinking, and Olivia said with deadly sweetness:
     "Is 'pansy' the word you're looking for?"

Citing this passage out of context is deceiving; Olivia can be mean, but here she's defending Bill. His relationship with Christopher is not only accepted, but embraced by Meg, Tom, Olivia, their upstairs neighbour... really, everyone except his sister.

Olivia's defence of Bill is made more interesting in that it is so uncharacteristic. She's depicted as a dislikable, selfish, self-centred, uncaring woman whose only desire is stardom on the stage. In this she's supported by her parents. Meg and Ted's return to England has nearly everything to do with helping Olivia to achieve her dreams, though they'd be quick to point out that it also has something to do with the overseas wartime service of their son Gerry.

Remember Gerry?

The male characters in The Darling Illusion serve no purpose other than to propel the plot. Ted is nothing more than the most adoring of husbands, happily supporting his wife's whims, including her sudden decision to return to England. Gerry, at best the ghost of a character, provides additional reason for Meg and Tom's relocation. Once his parents are reestablished in London, he is – quite literally – killed off. Reg, Jack, and Bill exist only to provide Louise, Edith, and Mary Anne with reasons to hate Olivia.

It wasn't until I'd finished the novel that I read this in the jacket copy: "The Darling Illusion is not a thriller or detective story, but a penetrating novel of character."

A bold claim, it is both true and false.

It's true that The Darling Illusion is not a thriller or detective story; Inspector of Detectives John Sims and coroner Jordan Plant are nowhere to be found after the eighth page. It is not true that The Darling Illusion is a penetrating novel of character. Of its population, only Meg, Edith, and Mary Anne live. This is an unusual novel in that its protagonist, Olivia, exists as little more than a sketch; she's not nearly so realized as the secondary female characters. In this lies the novel's great flaw. Reg, Jack, and Bill all fall in love with Olivia, but the reader will be hard pressed to understand.

Midway through the novel, the omniscient narrator shares this about Bill's feelings for Olivia: "He loved her, but didn't like her."

I've never quite understood how that works.

I didn't love her, I didn't like her, and I didn't hate her; she never seemed real. It's no wonder then that Louise, Edith, and Mary Anne didn't kill Olivia.

I spoil little in revealing that her death can be blamed on a mouse.

I'll leave the rest to your imagination.

Epigraph:

The lines come from Roberts' "The Tantramar Revisited," first published in 1883.

Query: In the years after the war, would Olivia have been able to fly into Canada with a loaded revolver?

The novel's final page hinges on the answer.

About the author:

In fact, The Darling Illusion was the author's third novel, following Life Begins for Father (London: Hutchinson, 1939) and Mine Own Content (1952).

Object: A slim hardcover featuring mustard-coloured boards. The jacket illustration is uncredited. I think the artist captured something of Olivia, a woman whom Dr Plant describes as a woman who "could give the impression of beauty."

My copy was purchased for nine American dollars from an Australian bookseller in mid-March. It arrived two weeks ago. As you might imagine, I'd pretty much given up.

It features this book trade label:

Access: Davies' The Darling Illusion enjoyed only one printing. There was a McClelland & Stewart edition, but I've never seen it. Copies of the novel can be found at Library and Archives Canada, Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, and nine of our university libraries. Serving the city in which the author lived, the Windsor Public Library holds none of Scott's novels, though it does have Beyond All Recompense: The Story of the Honourable Profession of Nursing in Windsor (1954), a booklet she wrote for the Windsor Centennial Festival.

Three copies of The Darling Illusion are currently listed for sale online, the least expensive – ten Australian dollars – being in "Good+" condition. Were I to revisit my March purchase, I'd be tempted by the American bookseller offering The Darling Illusion (M&S edition) and her subsequent novel, Return to Today (Peter Davies edition), for forty-four American dollars.

My thanks to Scott of Furrowed Middlebrow for bringing Margerie Scott to my attention. His writing on the author can be found in this post.

Related post:

In Search of Margery Scott

'A Relentless Story of the Hell of Drug Addiction'

The Damned and the Destroyed
Kenneth Orvis [pseud. Kenneth Lemieux]
London: Dobson, 1962

How many novels begin with the protagonist being summoned to a mansion on Mount Royal? This very thing happens in Murder without Regret, the last book I read. Off the top of my head, I can think of a couple of others: David Montrose's The Crime on Cote des Neiges and Hot Freeze by Douglas Sanderson. Not so The Damned and the Destroyed – here the reader has to wait for the third page. The first two set the stage: The year (unstated) is 1954. Thirty-eight-year-old Jean Drapeau (unnamed) has just been elected mayor of Montreal. His party, the Civic Action League (named), looks to close down the open city of Al Palmer's Montreal Confidential.

Private investigator Maxwell Dent is more than familiar with the city's unseemly underside, which is not to say he's of it. Straight-laced and upstanding, Dent studied law at McGill, then served in the Korean War where he took down "an enemy ring supplying narcotics to U.N. forces for the purpose of troop demoralization."

Huntley Ashton, the man whose mansion the PI visits, knows all this stuff: "I've had you checked, Dent. Screened thoroughly. I respect what I found." Ashton's due diligence is understandable. As one of the city's most respected businessmen, he has to make certain that Dent can be trusted. The case is a sensitive one. Ashton's daughter Helen has turned heroin addict, and he wants Dent to smash the drug ring:

"I know that is a big order. A huge undertaking. Nevertheless, I want the people that are selling blackmarket drugs to my daughter run out of business and jailed. I want them punished to the full."

Good Canadian that he is, Dent gives thought, then responds:

"I must ask you to bear in mind that in Canada offences against the Narcotic Act fall under the jurisdiction of the R.C.M.P. The R.C.M.P. wouldn't like your present attitude."

Despite his reservations, Dent takes the case. I'm not sure why exactly, but I think it has something to do with Ashton's love for his daughter.

"She was beautiful, young, blonde and a junkie…" reads the pitch on the Belmont paperback.  The key word is "was". Helen was beautiful, or so Dent assumes, but those looks are gone by the time he sets eyes on her. Heroin has taken its toll, as it always does, and there's more: scars and weals crisscross her sunken belly, the work of a drunken abortionist.

Orvis – Lemieux, if you prefer – spent five years researching this novel. He hung with addicts and pushers, interviewed counsellors and read a mess of reports and case studies. There's a real feel of authenticity in the descriptions of his damned and destroyed: Frankie Seven, Dream Street Fay and wasted talent Phil Chasen. A classically trained concert pianist, Phil coulda been somebody, instead of a junkie, which is what he is.

Orvis handles these characters well – they appear real, and probably were – but falls flat with others. Drug kingpin Jack Moss, the "Back Man", comes off like a Bond villain. Shadow, his errand boy, is a young rapscallion who is equal parts Dondi and Oliver Twist. Inspector Welch of the RCMP is an inspector with the RCMP, and the only memorable thing about Helen's sister Thorn is her name.

Things fall apart in the second act with the shift from the first group to the second. By this point, I'd long grown tired of Dent, his outrage, his moralizing and his unwavering faith in himself. The PI is never more annoying than when he gets it in his head that he can cure Helen through tough love. He has her witness a police line-up, takes her to the trial of someone charged with possession, and forces her to visit Fay in the Fullum Street Prison:

My fingers tightened determinedly over Helen's shoulder. "Take a good look at her," I said with every ounce of firmness I could command… "Look at her face, her body. Listen to her screams, her agony. Listen and look well, because what you're seeing and hearing now is the end of the road for every addict. For everyone that thinks there's a thrill or an escape in heroin. For you – Helen Ashton!" 

Lee Child is a great admirer of The Damned and the Destroyed. Should I be surprised? I don't know, I've never read Child. But a thriller should thrill, right? At the very least, it should move forward at a good pace. This one stalls. Repeatedly. When it picks up, the reader is treated to lengthy descriptions of hours spent trailing Moss and stakeouts that go on for days and days. The climax, which comes as a relief, involves a risky plan of Maxwell Dent's own design. He gets RCMP support, but keeps the details to himself. "Just issue those orders," he tells Welch. "Issue them and wait."

Three people die as a result.

I'm sure our hero would tell you that it was the best of all possible outcomes.

Pierre Desmarais, Jean Drapeau and Pacifique Plante
25 October 1954

Epigraph:

Dedication:

Coincidence: Amongst those thanked in the Acknowledgements is "Gordon W. Phillips S. Th., Consultant at the Allan Division, Royal Victoria hospital, and Chaplain Montreal prisons." A friend of the my parents, glimpses of Rev Phillips' good work is found in Adopted Derelicts, a pre-romance Harlequin written by his wife Bluebell. My father is named in the Acknowledgements of Mrs Phillips' book.

Object and Access: An unexciting 223-page hardcover in black boards with silver type. The 1962 Dobson is most likely the first, but those who follow the flag will want the McClelland & Stewart edition published that same year. An old Gazette column (29 June 1962) has McGraw-Hill publishing the novel in the States, but I've yet to see a copy. There have been two paperback editions: Digit (1964) and Belmont (1966).

Copies of The Damned and the Destroyed aren't plentiful, but they're not expensive. Those listed for sale online range in price from between £5 and US$30. I purchased mine this past June for £3.50 from a UK bookseller.

The Damned and the Destroyed was reissued three years ago – as an ebook only – by Prologue Books. Lee Child provides the Foreword.

A handful of our academic libraries have copies, as do Bibliothèque et Archives nationals du Québec and Library and Archives Canada.

Related posts:

Of Sex and Drugs and Montreal

This Just In…

Bewitched, Bothered, but Not Bewildered
Dope Rings in Canada! Oh, My!

The Poetic David Montrose

From Ottawa comes a new chapbook of hard-boiled epigrams drawn from the writings of one of our finest noir writers. The words this time belong to David Montrose, whose three Russell Teed mysteries – The Crime on Cote de Neiges, Murder Over Dorval, The Body on Mount Royal – were the first reissues in the Véhicule Press Ricochet Books series.

A limited edition of 25 copies, it follows last year's In The Darkness. Both are the work of J.C. Byers, who has produced what are by far the most elegant treatments of Canadian noir. An Easy Place to Die was printed with a Vandercook SP-15 press on St Armand Old Master, and features fourteen epigrams. My favourite comes from Murder Over Dorval, Montrose's second novel:

     She was a water dryad,
     And she came
     Dripping crystal sparks of light
     From the lake,
     And it was getting brighter,
     And that was good.

Montrealers will appreciate this:

     I couldn't sleep.
          Maybe
          because of the heat.
     It was hotter than hell.
     It was hotter than a fundamentalist
          thinks hell is.
     It was hotter than it had ever been
          before anywhere else in the world.
     It was almost as hot
          as it had been
          in Montreal
          last August.

Also included is a brief biography of David Montrose – Charles Ross Graham – in which Mr Byers considers Teed's misadventures:

Over the course of three novels Russell Teed's investigations taint him as a result of his contact with the criminal underworld. By the time the stories have ended he has been beaten, often, humiliated, and robbed. He has also seen strangers, friends, and lovers killed. He has nearly been killed and he himself has killed more than once, sometimes quite viciously.

"A Private Dick's Disturbing Descent into Darkness", I titled my piece on Murder Over Dorval. As the novels progress, the once upstanding McGill grad fairly comes apart. "The bottle becomes a refuge and it is easy to image Teed disappearing into it", writes J.C. Byers. "Indeed, one can hardly imagine an alternate fate."

Too right. He's done.

Those wishing to obtain copies of An Easy Place To Die may contact the publisher through Wollamshram's Blog.

Update: Back from the Ottawa Small Press Book Fair, Cameron Anstee has posted more photos of An Easy Place To Die. "My favourite purchase of the fair," says he.

Related post:

The Poetic Martin Brett

The Poetic Martin Brett

Cast your eyes on what is surely the most elegant Douglas Sanderson item. Printed with a Vandercook SP-15 press on St. Armand Old Master Rideau paper, In The Darkness is the work of J.C. Byers.

Mr Byers gives us extracts from four of Sanderson's Martin Brett novels "presented so as to highlight the poetic elements of noir novels."

The above, drawn from the opening of Hot Freeze, is a favourite, but the one that really got to me comes from The Darker Traffic:

This was a night
When I needed a friend,
In case I opened my eyes
In the darkness
And had nothing
     intimate and
     familiar and
     trivial
To talk about,
To make me stop
     remembering
That the little kid
With the big eyes
Was dead.

In The Darkness was produced in an edition of twenty numbered copies. I'm told that this is just the first in a series and that the hard boiled epigrams of David Montrose are next.

Those hoping to add a copy to their library can contact J.C. Byers through Wollamshram's Blog.

The photographs do not do it justice.