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'

Nudism to Buddhism

Skin Dive

Joe Fisher

Markham, ON: PaperJacks, 1977

184 pages

His Holiness the Dalai Lama wrote the preface to Joe Fisher's third book, The Case for Reincarnation. It's said to be one of the better popular studies of the topic. Skin Dive is something else entirely. Fisher's only novel, it revolves around sad sack Clive Conroy, the proprietor of a failing downtown Toronto nudist club. Clive had borrowed good money to buy the place – The Blue Grotto – on a realtor's assurances that it was good investment. It wasn't. "NUDE MR. CABBY CONTEST," Clive's one idea for turning things around proves disastrous when Bertram Sheehy and his fellow brothers in the Taxi Driver's Association of Metropolitan Toronto threaten violence. "Cab drivers are serious people," says Sheehy, the Association's president, "a strata of society earning and deserving respect. If you think we're going to sit here and watch ourselves being deliberately slandered and humiliated you've got another think [sic] coming."

Clive is a serial sucker, the Blue Grotto being just the latest in a string of bad bets. As the club looks about to go under, Clive encounters Henry Bubbins, representative of Esquire Consultants Ltd, who encourages him to invest in the sale of fire detectors. Sucker that he is, Clive soon finds himself being transported in Bubbins' ageing Cadillac to a twelve-hour seminar at a suburban hotel. The whole thing  stinks of a multi-level marketing scheme, but proves much the worse; Esquire Consultants Ltd disappears after Clive hands over a cheque for $2500 ($10,007.71 today).

I felt like a sucker myself. Back in 2014, I paid $20 ($21.76 today) for Skin Dive after reading the back cover copy:

Clive and Mary Anne do not "explore the mad world of Toronto's Sin Strip;" in fact, they're barely ever together.

No pun intended.

Mary Anne, who begins the novel as a Blue Grotto employee, encourages Clive to invest in a dating service cum brothel.

No pun intended.

Clive retreats to his rented flat, distancing himself from the Sin Strip, as money from Mary Anne's business flows.

Skin Dive promises something other than what it delivers. Going by cover copy, I'd expected a portrait, no matter how crudely drawn, of a time, a place, and its people, much like Hugh Garner had accomplished with Sin Sniper (which isn't much of a novel). Instead, Fisher takes a wealth of material and presents a novel composed of dull moments; the Esquire Consultants sales pitch runs seventeen pages.

I can't leave Skin Dive without remarking on the pub date: July 1977, the very same month as the Emanuel Jaques murder.

. 

I was fourteen, two years older that the victim, and living in suburban Montreal, but I knew Emanuel Jaques' name well. His body was found on a Yonge Street rooftop, just across the street from the Eaton's Centre – and I'd been to the Eaton's Centre! In the summer of '77, the killers of Emanuel Jaques vied for column inches with the Son of Sam. His death brought the beginning of the end of Toronto's Sin Strip.

Skin Dive enjoyed no second printing, and is fairly uncommon. It's held by Library and Archives Canada and six of our universities.

No used copies are listed for sale online.

Given the timing, I'm guessing no one was much interested in a rollicking adventure set on the Sin Strip.

Object: A cheap mass market paperback bulked up by six pages of offerings from the PaperJacks catalogue; my favourite, of course, being The Last Canadian:

And doesn't this look interesting?

I read this at fifteen during a family vacation to Cape Breton:

Wish I still had a copy.

Brant Cowie is credited with the cover of Skin Dive. The uncredited model is overdressed. 

Related post:

About Those Awful PaperJacks Covers

A Not So Nice Place to Visit

The Twenty Best Book Buys of 2019

Never has there been a year like this. I visited few used bookstores, ignored library book sales, spent no more than a couple of hours perusing online offerings, and yet somehow came up with the greatest haul of my fifty-something years.

The riches were so many and so great that the pristine copy of Wilson MacDonald's Out of the Wilderness pictured above was overshadowed. Fellow collectors will envy me for owning a scarce, unsigned copy – though it does bear the signature of previous owner Healey Willan. I'm assuming it came from the composer's library. It is now part of mine.

Because this has been such an extraordinary year, my annual ten best buys list has been expanded to twenty. As has been so often the case, I begin with Grant Allen:

An Army Doctor's
   Romance
Grant Allen
London: Raphall Tuck &
   Sons, [1893]

With A Terrible Inheritance, this ranks as one of the very worst Grant Allen books I've ever read. But, oh, isn't it attractive! After winning this copy in an online auction, I came upon a second. I'm offering it to the first person who expresses interest.

The Incidental Bishop
Grant Allen
New York: Appleton, 1898

If the opinion of Allen biographer Peter Morton is anything to go by – and it is – this novel of a young Canadian caught up in the slave trade will disappoint. The Incidental Bishop is longer than An Army Doctor's Romance, and is considerably less attractive, but I won't let that dissuade me from giving it a try.

Heart Songs
Jean Blewett
Toronto: Morag, 1898

The first of the poet's four volumes of verse, this second edition is inscribed. Blewett's verse has featured on this blog many times ( 'Queen Victoria', 'Easter Dawn', 'Thanksgiving Song', 'Thanksgiving Prayer'). This collection promises further riches.

A Strange Manuscript
   Found in a Copper
   Cylinder
James De Mille
New York: Harper &
   Bros, 1888

A "lost civilization" novel read thirty-six years ago in my very first Canadian literature course. Does the fact that I've read nothing more by its author mean anything?

The Wooing of
   Wistaria
Onoto Watanna
   [Winnifred Eaton]
New York: Harper &
   Bros, 1902

Eaton's third novel, penned in the early days of her ill-fated first marriage to Bertand Babcock. Academics suggest that he helped in its composition. They're probably right, which is not to say she wasn't better off without him.

The Heart of Hyacinth
Onoto Watanna
   [Winnifred Eaton]
New York: Harper &
   Bros, 1904

My obsession with the Eatons continues. They were the most remarkable and unusual family in Victorian Montreal. I fear my soul will not rest until someone writes a proper account of their trials and accomplishments.

Waste No Tears
Javis Warwick
   [Hugh Garner]
Toronto: News Stand
   Library, 1949

The Governor General's Award-winning writer's "novel about the Abortion Racket." Five years ago I helped return Waste No Tears to print as part of the Ricochet series, but had ever so much as seen a copy of the scarce News Stand Library edition.

Les songes en équilibre
Anne Hébert
Westmount, QC: Éditions
   de l'arbre, 1942

Anne Hebert's first book, this copy is inscribed by her loving father, poet and literary critic Maurice Hébert:

À mes chers amis Monsieur et Madam Bandwell, ce livre d'une petite canadienne que j'aime beaucoup.

Le temps des hommes
André Langevin
Montreal: Le Cercle du
   livre du France, 1956

Poussière sur la ville and Une Chaîne dans le parc are two of the best novels I've ever read. They're also the only two Langevin novels that are available in translation. I'm looking forward to tackling this one. Signed by the author.

Shackles
Marge Macbeth
New York: Henry
   Waterson, 1927

The fourth novel by the Ottawa writer whose scandalous roman à clef The Land of Afternoon (1927) so entertained five years ago. The main character in this one is a writer!

The Poems and Essays
   of John J. MacDonald
John J. MacDonald
Ottawa: Ru-Mi-Lou,
   1928

Better known as "James MacRae," youngest of the Four Jameses, my interest in this poet began when we moved to St Marys, Ontario, in which he twice lived. I spent more than a decade hunting for a book – any book – by the man. This year, I found one.

Beast in View
Margaret Millar
London: Gollancz, 1955

The first UK edition of the novel for which Millar won the 1956 Edgar Award. James Bridges' 1964 television adaptation is recommended; Robert Glass's 1986 perversion is not.

Queen Kong
James Moffat [James Moffatt]
London: Everest, 1977

A novelization of a movie I've found unwatchable. This was yet another money job from a man better remembered as the celebrated skinhead novelist "Richard Allen". Featuring eight glossy pages of stills!

Flora Lyndsay; Or,
   Passages in an Eventful
   Life
Mrs. Moodie
New York: De Witt &
   Davenport, [1854]

Now seems a good time to confess that I've never read one of Mrs Moodie's novels. On the other had, I've read two or three essays on Flora Lyndsay. The novel features in my first book, Character Parts, as a result.

The Three Marys
Frederick Niven
London: Collins: 1935

Forgotten Frederick Niven's twenty-first novel (I think). For the reason laid out here, chances are I'll never read this tragic story of an acclaimed portrait painter and his three lady loves. The book makes the list because I like the way it looks and remember the thrill of uncovering it in a dank antique store in rural Ontario .

Wacousta; or, The
   Prophesy
John Richardson
Montreal: John Lovell,
   1868

The fourth and earliest edition I own. Will 2020 be the year I finally read this novel of the War of 1812?

Probably not.

Hardscrabble; or, The
   Fall of Chicago
Major Richardson
New York: Pollard &
   Moss, 1888

A later edition of John Richardson's 1850 novel of the Siege of Fort Dearborn during the War of 1812. Though popular in its day – and for years thereafter – the work didn't save Richardson from death through malnutrition.

By a Way She Knew Not
Margaret M. Robertson
London: Hodder &
   Stoughton, 1883

The penultimate novel by the woman who gave us Christie Redfern's Troubles, the teariest work in all of Canadian literature. Robertson scholar Lorraine McMullen considers By a Way She Knew Not the author's very best novel. I'm betting she's right.

A Romance of Toronto
Mrs. Annie G. Savigny
Toronto: William Briggs,
   1888

A Victorian novel "FOUNDED ON FACT" by a woman whose previous books include An Allegory on Gossip.

How could I resist!

Hamilton and Other Poems
William A. Stephens
Toronto: Rogers &
   Thompson, 1840

Included here because it is now the oldest book of Canadian verse I own. In Anxious Allegiances: Legitimizing Identity in the Early Canadian Long Poem (McGill-Queen's, 1997), Dr C.D. Mazoff dismisses the "Hamilton" as "rather poorly written." Here's hoping he's wrong.

The Days of Their Youth
Alan Sullivan
New York: Century,
   1928

One of several Sullivans purchased that had once been part of the man's personal library. This novel is particularly interesting in that it has a pencilled notation by the author. Some unknown hand went after it with an eraser, but I bet I can discover what it says.

Related posts:

Best Book Buys of 2018 (four of which were gifts)
Ten Best Book Buys of 2017 (one of which was a gift)

The Ten Best Book Buys of a Very Bad Year (2016)

Ten of the Best; Spanking Good Book Buys of 2015

Done With Buying Books (2014)

Hugh Garner: Article Lost, Article Found

Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1962

Toronto: Ryerson, 1968

Markhan, ON: PaperJacks, 1983

Toronto: Dundurn, 2011

A Bonus:

Regarding the sales of "The Silence On The Shore" [sic] I think it has done remarkably well, considering that its publisher didn't want to sell any copies of it at all. I think, however, that had I not wanted to sell it I would have kept its sales down below 1,400, even if I would have to burn the books. 

     My personal feelings to you are friendly, but from a business and professional point of view I think it better that we do not involve each other with the other any more. 

– Hugh Garner, letter to Jack McClelland, 28 August 1963

The Man Who Hated Toronto

Present Reckoning
Hugh Garner
Toronto: Collins White Circle, 1951

Tom Neelton has arrived too late for the party, but he doesn't care. It's the morning after V-J Day and he has just stepped off a train at Union Station. Outside, steamers hang limply from lampposts and confetti clogs the gutters.

What is he doing here?

Tom hates Toronto. Though born and raised in the city, "it had been something he had had to fight, an enemy of brick and stone and smug condescension." Tom's mother and father are dead. His nearest kin is a dishonest aunt with whom he made the mistake of storing his civilian clothes before shipping out. She'll claim that the moths got to them.

Again, what is he doing here?

At first, I thought the answer lay in Carol Berkett. Seven years ago, when he was twenty-five and she was seventeen, they'd gone out for a bit. She'd even brought him home to meet her mom. Roast was served. Tom and Carol did some necking on the chesterfield. He never called on her again.

He's now thinking he made a mistake. Tom imagines a better life, one in which Carol would have been waiting at the train station. He returns to familiar digs, a cheap room in the Pentland Hotel (read: Warwick Hotel), determined to track her down. But it turns out that she's not in the phone book. Her mom's not in the phone book either. Then, "like a soft slap against his consciousness", it occurs to him that Carol might be married.

So he gives up and is soon snogging Margaret, the buxom blonde who works the front desk.

Tom guessed right about Carol. We know because Garner devotes several chapters to her marriage.

Happy?

Not unhappy. Husband George, a punch press operator, has come to accept that his passion for amateur radio is not shared. He sometimes gets a good chuckle out of Blondie, which is his wife's favourite comic strip. Carol, who often thinks of her brief romance with Tom, becomes much more contented after the birth of baby Harold.

Clearly, Tom and Carol are destined to meet, but this doesn't occur before the second half of the novel. Until then, the returning veteran kills time drinking with friends in the local beer parlour. Margaret decamps for Kamloops, Tom takes up with bohemian art school student Louise Kramer and Garner runs up the word count.

Biographer Paul Stewe is dismissive of Present Reckoning, focussing in on what he considers a melodramatic climax. In the monograph he penned for the Canadian Writers & their [sic]Works series, George Fetherling describes it as "a little novel which depends far too much on chance meetings, coincidence and on the double-whammy at the end and is nowhere near the level of Garmer's best prose."

I agree with that last bit. That said, I count only two coincidences or chance meetings:

• Louise sees Tom in a museum one week, then spots him a library the next.
• Twelve months after returning to town, Tom encounters old flame Carol on the street.

These things happen.

I won't spoil the ending, other that to say that I found it believable, strong enough, more than a little upsetting and not the least bit melodramatic. But what I really took away from Present Reckoning – what is really of value – is its depiction of Toronto in the months after the war.

Carol lives in a new development, ever aware of the prying eyes of neighbouring housewives. George's company prepares for the new peacetime economy. Tom looks over glasses of beer, gauging the progress of a disfigured drinking buddy's reconstructed face. He'll also make the mistake of returning to an old haunt where he's confronted by "young punks in zoot-suit pants and girls in Eisenhower jackets." Tom later describes the scene to Carol:

"They danced differently than we did, wore their hair in brush cuts and feathered bobs, and stared at me standing on the sidelines as though I was a bouncer. I moved over near the orchestra and spent an hour or so listening to the music trying to recapture the feeling I had in the old days, but it was no use. I didn't belong there."

There's something not to like about Present Reckoning. It meanders in a way that had me wondering whether Garner wasn't drawing from unpublished stories and other jottings. After all, he'd done just that the year before with the pseudonymous Waste No Tears.

Again, I agree with my friend George that this is not Garmer's best prose. And yet passages like this, in which newly arrived Tom is confronted by his first sight of the Royal York Hotel, are just about the greatest things he ever wrote:

The hotel – Largest in the British Empire – squatted sullenly against the opposite sidewalk, daring those leaving the station to pass it by without a glance. He forced his eyes along its self-satisfied exterior and thought back to the days of its opening fifteen years before. There had been much fanfare then, with big-wigs by the score. Ben Bernie's orchestra, a porter for every bag and doormen garbed in coachman's habit. During the depression the coachmen had disappeared along with many of the other opulent ostentations, and for years the edifice had gone on like a bankrupt dowager, bravely pretending that things had not changed and that its hundreds of empty rooms were full of guests. To him it symbolized the city: smug, part good taste and bad, a brave thing formed of a maladmixture of decency and sham.

What was Tom Neelton doing back in Toronto?

Better the hell you know.

He'll come to wish he'd never returned.

A Bonus: Over at Canadian Fly-By-Night, Bowdler identifies the corner depicted on the cover as Bay and Richmond. The scene does not feature in the novel.

Object and Access:: A 158-page novel with a further two pages advertising Peter Cheyney's Lady Behave and One of Those Things. Present Reckoning was Garner's third paperback original, and was printed but once. My copy, a Reading Copy in every sense, was purchased last month at London's Attic Books. Price: $7.50.

Sixty-four years after publication, the novel has become scarce. I've found just three copies listed for sale online – all Fine, they range in price from US$75 to US$100.

All of six university libraries and the Toronto Public Library have the book in their holdings. As might be expected, Library and Archives Canada fails.

Related post:

The Return of Hugh Garner's Neglected Novel

Milton Douglas, Canadian Author?

Sin for Your Supper
Milton Douglas
Toronto: News Stand Library, 1949

Milton Douglas was a friend of John Glassco. If one is to believe the poet – and I don't – the two met briefly as young men in Paris, then recognized each another on a street in small-town Quebec several decades later. Again, I don't believe it, nor do I believe that the author of Sin for Your Supper is the same Milton Douglas.

The time spent reading this cheap paperback, something so clearly beneath me, is part of a renewed effort to uncover unrecognized Canadian novels. My method is simple: look into titles and authors that were published by Toronto's News Stand Library and no one else. Might these authors be fellow countrymen and women?

The great hope, of course, is that something – anything – might be familiar. Lest you think this is folly, consider Ted Allan's pseudonymous  Love is a Long Shot (1949), the News Stand Library title recycled in the 1984 Leacock Medal-winning novel.

Michael P.J. Kennedy has a very good article about the similarities between Waste No Tears, which Hugh Garner (a/k/a Jarvis Warwick) published with News Stand Library in 1950, and his short stories "The Yellow Sweater", "Lucy" and "Mama Says to Tell You She's Out".

(After more than six decades out-of print, Waste No Tears is again available. You'll find more info here. Yes, that's a plug.)

Mine is a summer project…  begun before summer. The first book read in the pursuit of heretofore unrecognized Canadiana was Stephen Mark's Overnight Escapade (1950). Was Mark Canadian? Vancouver, Prince George, Saskatoon, Halifax and Ronald J. Cooke's Craig Street figure in his fiction, but then so too does the segregated American South.

Gerry Martin's Too Many Women (1950) was second. It takes place in Hamilton, Niagara Falls, Buffalo and some undisclosed location on the shores of Lake Ontario.

Toronto is mentioned.

I recognized nothing in the writings of Mark and Martin, and am pretty sure that neither is W.O. Mitchell or Earle Birney. But really… Stephen Mark, Gerry Martin and now Milton Douglas. Those names have gotta be fake, right?

Sin for Your Supper is set apart from Overnight Escapade and Too Many Women in that Canada is barely mentioned. The action takes place almost entirely in  Manhattan, where ne'er-do-well Jimmy Martin – there's another of those names – preys upon rubes, drunks and harried cashiers. More than a grifter, he carries a gun and is not afraid to shoot a woman in order to get what he wants. Or so he says.

I don't think I've ever had less to say about a book – which is good because this post risks running long. Sin for Your Supper drifts aimlessly with Jimmy moving from scheme to scam and doll to dame. On a whim he kidnaps leggy Betty McGregor. Threatening with his Luger, he forces her to drive out to the country, then changes his mind. They become lovers because, I suppose, she has a thing for bad boys. That same evening, over drinks at the Hunt Club, Betty asks Jimmy why he does what he does.

"I don't know," Jimmy explained. "It's just something inside of me. I think the main reason is that it isn't boring."

But it is boring. Jimmy's unpredictability becomes predictable, actions lead nowhere, and the prose is pedestrian. To be fair, there are times when the author really tries, as in chapter ten, which is reproduced here in full:

What more can be said? Well, early in the novel we're treated to the step-by-step process through which Jimmy parleys a dollar bill into a room and steak dinner at the St Moritz.

That was pretty interesting. More than the sex scene, at least.

I suppose I should point out that the real name of Glassco's friend was Milton Kastilo.

Object: Another News Stand Library book – and you know what that means –  this one in particular is poorly produced in that the back cover has a faint print overlay bearing the stylized title for Shack-up Girl (NSL #48).

Access: One of the News Stand Library titles that had separate Canadian and American editions. The cover for the latter is interesting in that features… well, there's no telling which one of Jimmy's women that's supposed to be. A bait and switch, it hints at lesbianism, right? Perhaps that's just me.

WorldCat records just one copy – the American – which is held at the British Library.

I don't see any copies of the Canadian being offered online right now, though there are six of the American, running from US$4.00 and US$22.00. Condition explains everything.