Showing posts with label Fenwick. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Fenwick. Show all posts

26 December 2019

The Very Best Reads of a Very Strange Year



It's been a disorienting and disruptive year. The home we'd expected to build on the banks of the Rideau became entangled in red tape, an inept survey, and a tardy Official Plan. In our impatience, we left our rental and bought an existing house a ten-minute drive south. We may just stay. If we do, an extension is in order. I'm writing this on a desk at the dead end of a cramped second storey hallway.

All this is shared by way of explanation. I reviewed only twenty books here and in my Canadian Notes & Queries 'Dusty Bookcase' column. Should that number be boosted to twenty-three? Three of the books were reread and reviewed in translated, abridged, and dumbed down editions.

Yes, a strange year... made doubly so by the fact that so very many of the books reviewed are currently available. Selecting the three most deserving of a return to print – an annual tradition – should've been challenging, but was in fact quite easy:

The Arch-Satirist
Frances de Wolfe
   Fenwick
Boston: Lothrop, Lee &
   Shepard, 1910

 This story of a spinster and her young, beautiful, gifted, bohemian, drug-addled half-brother poet is the most intriguing novel read this year. Set in Montreal's Square Mile, is it a roman à clef? I'm of that city, but not that society, so cannot say with any certainty.
M'Lord, I Am Not Guilty
Frances Shelley Wees
New York: Doubleday,
   1954

 A wealthy young widow moves to a bedroom community hoping to solve the murder of her cheating husband. This is post-war domestic suspense of the highest order. I'd long put off reading M'Lord, I Am Not Guilty because of its title, despite strong reviews from 65 years ago. My mistake.

The Ravine
Kendal Young
     [Phyllis Brett Young]
London: W.H. Allen, 1962

The lone thriller by the author of The Torontonians and Psyche, The Ravine disturbed more than any other novel. Two  girls are assaulted – one dies – in a mid-sized New England town. Their art teacher, a woman struggling with her younger sister's disappearance, sets out to entrap the monster. 
The keen-eyed will have noted that The Ravine does not feature in the stack of books at the top of this post. My copy is currently in Montreal, where it's being used to reset a new edition as the fifteenth Ricochet Book.


 Amy Lavender Harris will be writing a foreword. Look for it this coming May.

Of the books reviewed, those in print are:


A succès de scandal when first published in 1895, The Woman Who Did is Grant Allen's most famous book. It doesn't rank amongst the best of the fifteen Allen novels I've read to date, but I found it quite moving. Recommended. It's currently available in a Broadview Press edition.


The Black Donnellys is pulpmaster Thomas P. Kelley's most enduring book; as such, it seems the natural place to start. Originally published in 1954 by Harlequin, this semi-fictional true crime title been in and out of print with all sorts of other publishers. The most recent edition, published by Darling Terrace, appeared last year.


Experiment in Springtime (1947) is the first Margaret Millar novel to be considered outside the mystery genre. Still, you'd almost think a body will appear. See if you don't agree. The novel can be found in Dawn of Domestic Suspense, the second volume in Syndicate Books' Collected Millar. 


The Listening Walls (1952) ranks amongst the weakest of the Millars I've read to date, which is not to say it isn't recommended. The 1975 bastardization by George McMillin is not. It's the last novel featured in The Master at Her Zenith, the third volume in The Collected Millar.


I read two versions of Margaret Saunders' Beautiful Joe in this year. The first, the "New and Revised Edition," was published during the author's lifetime; the second, Whitman's "Modern Abridged Edition," was not. The original 1894 edition is one of the best selling Canadian novels of all time. One hundred and fifteen year later, it's available in print from Broadview and Formac.


 Jimmie Dale, Alias the Gray Seal by American Michael Howard proved a worthy prequel to Frank L. Packard's Gray Seal adventures. Published by the author, it's available through Amazon.

 This year, as series editor for Ricochet Books, I was involved in reviving The Damned and the Destroyed, Kenneth Orvis's 1962 novel set in Montreal's illicit drug trade. My efforts in uncovering the author's true identity and history form the introduction.


Praise this year goes to House of Anansi's 'A List' for keeping alive important Canadian books that have escaped Bertelsmann's claws. It is the true inheritor of Malcolm Ross's vision.


And now, as tradition dictates, resolutions for the new year:
  • My 2018 resolution to read more books by women has proven a success in that exactly fifty percent of books read and reviewed here and at CNQ were penned by female authors. I resolve to stay the course.
  • My 2018 resolution to read more French-language books might seem a failure; the only one discussed here was Le dernier voyage, a translation of Eric Cecil Morris's A Voice is Calling. I don't feel at all bad because I've been reading a good number of French-language texts in researching my next book. Still, I'm hoping to read and review more here in the New Year.
  • At the end of last year's survey, I resolved to complete one of the two books I'm currently writing. I did not. For shame! How about 2020?
  • Finally, I plan on doing something different with the blog next year by focusing exclusively on authors whose books have never before featured. What? No Grant  Allen? No Margaret Millar? No Basil King? As if 2019 wasn't strange enough.
Bonne année! 

 Addendum: As if the year wasn't strange enough, I've come to the conclusion that Arthur Stringer's debut novel, The Silver Poppy, should be one of the three books most deserving a return to print.

But which one should it replace?

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17 April 2019

Canadian Notes & Queries in Springtime



Behold, Canadian Notes & Queries #104 has arrived! Here it is on the hood of our aging Jeep Liberty.

I look forward to each and every issue, but am particularly keen on this one because it features "No Country for Old Books," my essay on Canada Reads. I think it's important, not so much for my opinions, but for exposing what our "literary Survivor" has hidden from CBC listeners. The show's letter to publishers, sent this past fall, is revelatory – and is printed in full. CNQ made the essay available online last month:
No Country for Old Books
But wouldn't you rather subscribe?

Of course you would. You can do so through this link.

I've also been looking forward to Ian Coutts' article on James Moffatt, the boozy middle-aged Canadian expat behind the bestselling skinhead novels of 'seventies Great Britain.


And then there's Michel Basilières' piece on the great Émile Nelligan in translation.


As he often does, Seth surprises; this time with a spread on The Children's Book about Pulp and Paper and other "little marvels of design and illustration" by Jacques Gagnier and Leonard L. Knott.


Also featured is a new short story by Cynthia Flood!

Other contributors include:
Myra Bloom
Andreae Callanan
Paige Cooper
Jason Dickson
André Forget
Stephen Fowler
Alex Good
Brett Josef Grubisic
Cynthia Holz
Ben Ledoucer
Dancy Mason
David Mason
Marko Sijan
Fiona Smyth
Pablo Strauss
Souvankham Thammavougea
Joshua Whitehead
and
Bruce Whiteman
My Dusty Bookcase column for this issue looks at The Arch-Satirist by Frances de Wolfe Fenwick. Regular readers of this blog may remember mention of this book in a previous post and on Facebook (yeah, I'm on Facebook). "How is it that a 1910 Montreal novel that begins with the ramblings of a drunken, drug-addicted teenage poet disappoints?" I asked my Facebook "friends."


Those who think I've been unfair to Miss Fenwick may wish to consider this from the July 1910 issue of Canadian Magazine:


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04 March 2019

Miss Fenwick's Good Old Hockey Match



More than a fortnight has passed since my last post, but I haven't been lazy. It's been a hectic time, centred around our third move in seven months. To think that we lived over a decade in our last home. Our new house is much smaller, but an addition is planned. Right now, bookcases are the priority.

During all this activity, I somehow managed a couple of pieces for next issue of Canadian Notes & Queries. The longer of the two concerns Canada Reads, CBC Books' "literary Survivor" (their words, not mine). The shorter is a review The Arch-Satirist, a 1910 novel by elocutionist Frances de Wolfe Fenwick. I wish I could say that I liked the novel. Set in fin de siècle Montreal, it begins with great promise by introducing a degenerate, drug-laden teenage poet, only to shift focus to Lynn Thayer, another of those self-sacrificing female characters that are all too common in early Canadian literature.

The Canadian Bookman, July 1910
Still, the novel managed to hold my interest; in part, because of its cynical depiction of Montreal Society (Miss Fenwick was a member). It's not much of a stretch to conclude that scenes involving the Golden Square Mile set were inspired by actual events, particularly given the fact the author's second novel, A Soul on Fire (1915), features a character so clearly modelled on Sir Andrew Macphail.


Perhaps the greatest value in The Arch-Satirist comes in its depiction of a late-nineteenth-century "hockey match." I've never seen this novel referenced in histories of the sport, and so encourage chroniclers of the early game – Stephen Harper is one – to follow this link., which leads to a six-page description of the match and the building in which it was played.


Read "Caruso" for "Calvé."

Constructed in 1898, the Montreal Arena stood at the corner of St Catherine and Wood, and is thought to have been the first building designed specifically for hockey. The match described by Miss Fenwick is played between the Wales and the Conquerers – likely the Wanderers and the Canadiens, both of which called the Arena home.

I'll leave with these remarks made by Estelle Hadwell, Lynn Thayer's closest friend. Those who don't much care for hockey will appreciate:
I do love to be fin-de-siecle,'' she had said. "But, when it comes to hockey or pug dogs — well, I simply can't, that's all.'' Then she had told a plaintive tale of how, when a girl, she had been taken to a hockey match. Her escort had been an enthusiast of the most virulent type; and she had been obliged to feign a joy which she by no means felt.
     "It was ghastly," she observed, ghastly. "There I sat, huddled in grandmother's seal-skin which wasn't a bit becoming, and watched a lot of weird things dressed like circus clowns knocking a bit of rubber round a slippery rink. And all those poor misguided beings who had paid two, three and five dollars to see them do it yelled like mad whenever the rubber got taken down a little faster than usual — oh, you may laugh! but I can tell you that when one of those silly men whacked another silly man over the head when the umpire wasn't looking because the second ass had hit that absurd bit of rubber oftener than he, the first ass, had — why, I felt sorry to think that the human species to which I belonged was so devoid of sense.
Fun fact: "1 Wood," the building that now stands on site of the old Montreal Arena, was designed by my father's friend Ray Afleck, the man who also designed the Beaconsfield house in which I was raised.

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27 December 2018

Best Book Buys of 2018 (four of which were gifts)



Twenty-eighteen was a year of great change. In April, we sold our home of ten years and started packing up our belongings. We moved in early July, settling several hundred kilometres to the northeast. The books that once surrounded now lie boxed in the dark basement of the house we're renting on the banks of the Rideau Canal.

Living in a house without bookshelves is disorienting. Where I once knew where everything was, passing by the same books day after day, month after month, year after year, I now spend hours hunting. This past summer I bought a copy of James M. Cain's Serenade because I wanted to reread it. There's a copy in the basement... but where?

I purchased fewer books this year. Why add to the confusion? This annual list of ten best buys – best acquisitions, really – was made strong through the generosity of friends.

Philistia
Grant Allen
London: Chatto & Windus, 1901

"A NEW EDITION" of Allen's first novel, published two years after his early death, this copy is well travelled. It began life in a Boots Booklovers Library, and somehow made its way to a British Columbia bookseller's shop. The book now sits on my desk, one hundred or so kilometres from Allen's birthplace.
Brother, Here's a Man!
Kim Beattie
New York: Macmillan, 1940

This birthday gift from my friend James Calhoun is the only biography of Joe Boyle. An extraordinary man, had Boyle been born south of the border, there would've been a movie and and a two-part American Experience documentary. We Canadians are so bad at these things.
Murder's No Picnic
E.L. Cushing
London: Wright & Brown, 1956

 The first and only English edition of Cushing's 1953 debut novel, it vies Margerie Bonner's The Shapes That Creep as the worst mystery read this year. And yet my research into this forgotten Montreal mystery writer continues.
Maid-At-Arms
Enid Cushing [and Andre Norton]
New York: Fawcett, 1981

A curious romance about a closeted, corseted, petticoated poet and his masculine twin sister, written by an unsuccessful mystery writer in collaboration with a Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame member. Need I say more?

Rebound
Dick Diespecker
Toronto: Harlequin, 1953

After years searching for the great – only? – Vancouver post-war pulp, I asked my friend bowdler of Fly-By-Night if he might have a spare copy.  He did... and gave it to me as a gift. It didn't quite live up to expectations... but that cover!
The Magpie
Douglas Durkin
Toronto: University of Toronto
   Press, 1974

Reviewing Basil King's The Empty Sack here last month, I wondered whether it might just be the Great Canadian Post-Great War Novel. Beau not only suggested The Magpie, but gave me a copy. To be read after the holidays.


The Arch-Satirist
Frances de Wolfe Fenwick
Boston: Lothrop, Lee & Shepard,
   1910

 A first novel by a journalist and elocutionist who once served as secretary to fellow novelist Sir Andrew Macphail. Described as a "clever novel" in the April 1910 Canadian Bookman.


The Complete Poems of
   John Glassco
John Glassco
London, ON: Canadian
   Poetry Press, 2018

 A gift from Brian Treherne, who worked for over a decade editing this monumental work. Invaluable to any Glassco scholar.
The Street Called Straight
Basil King
New York: Harper, 1912

 I read two Basil King novels this year, both of which made my annual list of three out-of-print books deserving reissue. This book was purchased in error from Babylon Revised Rare Books for US$75. What I'd meant to buy was their signed copy, listed at US$100. Je ne regrette rien
Christie Redfern's Troubles
[Margaret Murray Robertson]
London: Religious Tract Society,
   [c. 1866]

 The most popular novel ever written by an instructress of the Sherbrooke Ladies' Academy, Sherbrooke, Canada East. Despite its commercial success, used copies are uncommon. I was fortunate in spotting this one being offered online from a UK bookseller.

Bonne année!


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