A Pulp Writer's Challenge to Canadians

Original Detective Stories
Volume 1, Number 1
April 1948

Can a magazine written entirely by one person be considered a book? Of course not, but it does come close. Original Detective Stories was published Voyageur Press, which was owned and operated by author Horace Brown. As far as I've been able to determine, he was the only staff member and only writer. The debut issue features two works of fiction – both by Brown, of course – the first being 'Murder à la Carte.' A "BOOK LENGTH NOVEL – NEVER BEFORE PUBLISHED," I first wrote about 'Murder à la Carte' fourteen years ago, wondering whether it may have found a second life as the 1950 News Stand Library novel The Penthouse Killings.

After finally managing to find a copy of the magazine, I can now report that 'Murder à la Carte' and The Penthouse Killings are in fact one and the same.

It wasn't so wild a guess; the covers suggested as much.

I have no idea who provided the cover illustration for The Penthouse Killings, though the style reminds me of several other News Stand Library titles. The Original Detective Stories cover is credited to Jackson Heise, a man who began his career as a child. The 1931 census finds him living at 281 Milverton Boulevard in Toronto with his mother and father. Seventeen at the time, Heise had already left school and seems to have been making decent money through his art, earning $520 in the previous twelve months:*

Original Detective Stories features four more illustrations, masthead included.

The contents page is interesting in that it ignores 'On the Blotter,' the very first piece in this very first issue. A four-paragraph, half-page editorial credited to "The Sergeant," whom I have every reason to believe is Brown himself, it begins:

The bane of a policeman's unhappy lot is the one world "Unsolved."

   The aftermath of War, the spiritual and moral letdown that follows brutal conflict has unleashed murder throughout Canada. Many of these cases are sex crimes of the most atrocious sort. 

In fact, the homicide rate decreased in the years immediately following the Second World War.

'On the Blotter' calls for more police funding and "a tightening of the Law in the matter of of detaining known perverts until cure."

Lest you think you have Brown pegged, as a Toronto alderman he became a staunch defender of hippies and a promoter of tenants rights. We have Brown to thank for helping raise money for the Henry Moore sculpture in Nathan Philips Square after the city council had voted it down.

Horace Brown also founded of the Canadian March of Dimes (now March of Dimes Canada). He himself was stricken with polio at the age of eight months and walked with the aid of crutches. The disease influences 'The Scarf' the second of the magazine's two stories, written under the nom de plume "Leslie Allen."** 

The issue has no ads. Its back cover is taken up with a challenge and appeal: 

Canadian readers and advertisers did not respond. Were the magazines themselves to blame or the distributors and retailers? Frankly, I think the fault lies with Brown himself. The venture was unstable from the start. Original Detective Stories' second issue was the last. It appeared in July 1948, three months after the first. 

Brown's magazine empire had one other title in its fold. Like Original Detective Stories, All Star Western Stories debuted in April 1948, published a second issue in July 1948, and then disappeared.
   

Brown believed that Canadians would rally to the support of Canadian publications and publishing.

He wasn't wrong.

We saw this through much of the second half of the last century and into the early years of this one. I worked for a library wholesaler and major chain for the last fifteen of those years and remember well the number of Canadian titles on the weekly Globe & Mail bestseller lists. 

The newspaper's most recent hardcover fiction list features not one Canadian title. The non-fiction hardcover list has just one, Omar El Akkad's One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. Not one title is published by a Canadian publisher.

A question for Canadians: We're boycotting American produce, booze, and travel, so why are we not boycotting American cultural product? 

* Sadly, Jackson's father, a piano salesman, was not working. All evidence suggests that the boy was the family's sole breadwinner. According to the Bank of Canada Inflation Calculator, $520 in 1931 is roughly the equivalent of $10,425 today, which may explain why the Heise family was sharing the small duplex with young marrieds Timothy and Elma Breuls and the bride's mother. 

** Brown had previously used "Leslie Allen" for his 1946 golfing mystery Murder in the Rough.  

Related posts:

Horace Brown: From Penthouse to Pavement

Horace Brown: Fritzi in Flight or a Coincidence
No Whack on the Side of the Head

Quebec City Noir
Whispering City: Horace Brown's Second Encore

Sunshine Scandals of a Little Town

A View of the Town
Jan Hilliard [Hilda Kay Grant]
Toronto: Nelson, Foster & Scott, 1954
269 pages

There is no town of Inverness on Nova Scotia's mainland. That I wasn't sure says as much of my shaky knowledge of the Maritimes as it does the author's talent. Her Inverness seems real. At first, I thought it might have been inspired by an actual town – as Southport in Hilliard's Miranda (1960) is modeled on Yarmouth – but I've since come to realize that it is based on no one town, rather seventy or eighty of them.

The history of Inverness is important to the plot. It was on 15 May 1781 that Captain Joshua Ward of Virginia landed on Nova Scotia's western shore, taking possession of five hundred acres of virgin soil he'd been awarded for his loyalty to the Crown. Two months later, the immigrant ship Holly arrived from Scotland bearing the Mackays, Fifes, Camerons, Loves, Leckeys, and Macdonalds. The leader of the expedition, Fergus Mackay, who'd spent much of the voyage below deck "guarding" the scotch, emerged in time to yell "I name thee Inverness!"

A View of the Town is not a historical novel, it takes place in 1930 as the sesquicentenary of Inverness approaches. Simon Ward is troubled. Pioneer Day, which celebrates the arrive of great-great-grandfather Joshua, has long been in the shadow of the Holly Day celebration of the Highlanders' arrival. This is easily understandable, after all, the Scottish ship brought the Mackays, Fifes, Camerons, Loves, Leckeys, and Macdonalds, whereas Joshua Ward brought only his family, crew, and a dozen slaves:

"The Wards, who had a weakness for begetting females, were outnumbered in no time."

Simon himself has two offspring, both female. Primrose, named for her late mother, is the eldest. An unmarried innocent of twenty-six, she

spends her days indoors caring for her skin and reading Ruth Fielding novels. Helen, Prim's younger sister, is the more grounded of the two, though recent history suggests otherwise. Wed at nineteen to Denis Cameron, son of the wealthy foundry-owning Camerons, she was abandoned a year later. Her estranged husband is thought to be in California trying to paint. 

Simon is trying to write. He has spent the past two decades working on a history of Inverness in a small octagonal room perched atop the otherwise three-storey Ward family home. The only intrusion he allows comes in late afternoon when the women of the house bring tea. Prim and Helen take their turns, as do Simon's sister-in-law Marlow, and housekeeper Katharine Macdonald (known to all as Katie Wee Duncan):

Nobody had ever caught him actually seated at his desk writing. He might be found taking a nap or reading a book, looking at something in the town, or simply waiting.

Simon means to set things right. Great-great-grandfather Joshua is the true founder of Inverness. It was the Ward family that built the foundation of this proud Nova Scotia town. Neighbour Mary Mackay, president of the Inverness Argus Society, wouldn't dare challenge Simon on this view – she's far too savvy. The play between the two in the months leading to the Pioneer and Holly Day sesquicentennial celebrations is something to see, but there's so much more.

There's Helen's failed marriage, of course. But what of spinster aunt Marlow, who lives in the Ward home next door to the fiancé who threw her over? That old beau went on to father Ian Cameron, Helen's missing husband. Unmarried Katie Wee Duncan, the Ward's housekeeper and cook, is the mother of Rose, who is Mary Mackay's unacknowledged granddaughter. Newly arrived lawyer Percy Mattheson divides his attention between Mary's daughter Florence and Prim Ward until the former runs off with her sister's husband. 

Capping it all off is a climactic scene clearly inspired by "The Sinking of the Mariposa Belle" (aka "The Marine Excursions of the Knights of Pythias"). Harmless fun, A View of the Town is the most gentle of Hilliard's five novels in that no one dies and there are several happy endings. The black humour, very much present in the others, is here pale grey. This 23 October 1954 Globe & Mail ad is the very example of truth in advertizing:

Trivia I: Inverness, Nova Scotia is located on the western shore of Cape Breton. The Inverness of A View of the Town is described as being on the mainland, some one hundred miles north of Halifax. 

Trivia II: Prim's Ruth Fielding novels are just the beginning! Early in the novel, much to her horror, Marlow discovers a copy of Lady Chatterley's Lover hidden under the mattress of Helen's bed. Confronting her niece, Marlow threatens to burn it, but puts the marches away when Helen tells her that it belongs to Mary Mackay's daughter Florence.

About the author:

Sadly, the author would never write or illustrate a travel book.

Object and Access: A green/grey hardcover, split-run with American publishing house Abelard-Schulman (for whom the author worked as a fiction editor). The jacket illustration is credited to George Thompson about whom I know nothing. I bought my copy in early 2024 from a southern Ontario bookseller. Price: $15. I purchased a signed Abelard-Schulman edition early this year. Price: US$30. It is guaranteed to place on my 2025 list of best book buys.

You too can own a signed copy! As of this writing a Calgary bookseller is offering not one but two at $40 apiece!

Get 'em while you can!

Related posts:

A Crooked Cousin in a Country Cottage

A Nova Scotian Writes Ontario Gothic

Growing Up With Mother
As He Lay Dying

Looking Back on Looking Forward

The Daily Witness, 16 May 1913

An addendum to last week's post on Looking Forward by Hugh Pedley.

Looking Forward features cub reporter Billy Scooper. We also meet a disreputable promoter named Humphrey Hustleman. There aren't really any laughs, but there is fun to be had. 

A 1913 novel set in 1927, Looking Forward reminded me of nothing so much as Tim Ososko's 1979 book Wasn't Tomorrow Wonderful?

Oh, boy, was it!

I gobbled up every detail of Rev Pedley's future Canada no matter how small, as in this description of a Montreal streetcar:

This carriage of the common people was not without its touch of the beautiful. Instead of the long row of heterogeneous advertisements above the windows was a series of fine reproductions of great masters. The city authorities had evidently decided that a ride in a street-car might be a phase of the aesthetic education of the people. They had come to the conclusion that, the suggestion of beauty was better for the health of the people than the suggestion of disease as furnished by the advertisements of patent medicines.

Montreal plays a central role in Looking Forward. It is the city in which Fergus attends university, it is the city in which he befriends those of different faiths, it is the city in which he meets and falls in love with Florence Atherton, it is the city in which he solves the mysteries of hibernation, and it is the city in which he marries Florence Atherton's daughter.

Its best not to focus on that last bit.

Some of Rev Pedley's predictions, like the Mount Royal Tunnel, would've been safe bets. Work began in 1911, two years before Looking Forward was published.  

Construction of the Mount Royal Tunnel, c.1912.

He also anticipates the amalgamation Port Arthur and Fort William, a done deal by 1927, which in reality did not take place until 1970. Rev Pedley's unified city is called Portchester, not Thunder Bay.

Most remarkably, this 1913 novel describes "magnificent new government buildings, which a devastating fire had rendered necessary." It was not three years after publication that the seat of Canadian government went up in flames.

The Globe, 4 February 1916

Telephones, automobiles, paved streets, aeroplanes, and dirigibles, the author plays it safe with his predictions. The outlier is a mountain built in the heart of Winnipeg by wealthy bachelor Irish-Canadian Teddy Ryan. I get the feeling that its existence is meant to be a joke. 

Being a student of the Great War, and noting that this novel dates from 1913, I looked for recognition that  Armageddon might be in the offing. I found it when Billy Scooper tells Fergus that news of his quarter-century hibernation has broken in the eastern papers. “Is it likely to make a stir?” our hero asks:

“Stir! Stir!” said the man excitedly. “Stir! The biggest ship on the sea might go down with all on board, the navies of Britain and France might have a battle with those of the Triple Alliance, Teddy Ryan’s mountain might turn into a volcano, and there wouldn’t be a bigger stir than there’s going to be over this.”

Reference to the Triple Alliance sent a bit of a chill.

Looking Forward was published the year before the start of the Great War. On 30 May 1915, when the conflict was in full force, Rev Pedley preached a sermon titled 'War and the New Earth,' in which he said these words:

Forget not, O forget not, that which is perhaps the noblest sacrifice of all, the surrender by parents of their sons, by wives of their husbands, to the hardships and deadly perils of war by land and self.

Hugh Pedley and his wife Eliza (née Field) had three sons. The eldest, Norman Field Pedley (1884-1909), a civil engineer, died when he was struck by a train in Springfield, Illinois.

Old McGill, 1906

Once war was declared, youngest son, Frank Gordon Pedley (1892-1972), enlisted and served ten months before returning to McGill to continue his medical studies.

Old McGill, 1913

Born in 1888, middle brother Hugh Stowell Pedley, a lawyer, served twenty-nine months. He was killed on 31 January 1918. His body rests at Villers-au-Bois, Departement du Pas-de-Calais, Nord-Pas-de-Calais, France.

Old McGill, 1912

Both men Frank and Hugh were recipients of the Military Cross.

Their father died on 26 July 1923, not two years before the realization of the union of of Canada's Presbyterian, Methodist, and Congregationalist churches.

  

The Gazette, 27 July 1923 

The United Church of Canada celebrates its centenary today.

 

Would that Rev Pedley had lived to see it. Would that son Hugh had lived nearly so long.

Reprise: In the epilogue, the reader is presented with this passage which takes place in a future 1927 on the lookout of the steel structure lookout atop Mount Royal:

A couple of German merchants who are in Canada with a view to trade extension stop for a moment, and one says to the other: “Ach Gott! gegen diese zu fechten ware eine schande” (Good heavens! To fight with such as these would be a shame.)

Related post:

Towards a Canada of Light

Pardonable Levels of Violence

Tolerable Levels of Violence
Robert G. Collins
Toronto: Lester & Orpen Dennys, 1983
241 pages

Four years ago, while driving home from a grocery run in Kemptville, Ontario, I happened to tune into North Country Public Radio, Canton, New York... then pulled onto the shoulder of County Road 43 and phoned my wife.

The station was broadcasting a live report of a violent assault on the American Capitol.

Two weeks ago, the man behind that failed insurrection was sworn in as the 47th President of the United States of America. On the very same day that felon, who treats his oaths of office as he has his marriage vows, pardoned men and women who had assaulted police officers. The Capitol Police stood by their oaths; had they turned away, it is entirely possible that Members of Congress, Senators, and the Vice-President would have been killed that day.

Senator Josh Hawley, who'd urged on the insurrectionists, ran for his life like a little boy as Officer Daniel Hodges served to protect him.

Of all I saw on 6 January, 2021, this is the footage that most haunts:

Paul Williams lookalike Patrick McCaughey III is one of the insurrectionists who very nearly killed Officer Hodges.

Judge Trevor N. McFadden, a Trump appointee, found McCaughey guilty of:

• three counts of aiding or abetting or assaulting, resisting, or impeding law enforcement officers, including one involving a dangerous weapon;
• one count of obstruction of an official proceeding;
• one count of interfering with a law enforcement officer during a civil disorder;
• one count of disorderly and disruptive conduct in a restricted building or grounds with a deadly or dangerous weapon; 
• one count of engaging in physical violence in a restricted building or grounds with a deadly or dangerous weapon;
• disorderly conduct in a Capitol Building;
• committing an act of violence in the Capitol Building or grounds.

On April 14, 2023, McCaughey received a seven year and six month sentence. The felon apologized to the police officers, adding that he was unworthy of the rights he'd once enjoyed. 

On January 20, 2025, President Donald J. Trump restored those rights by pardoning McCaughey and more than 1500 other tried and convicted insurrectionists.

Tolerable Levels of Violence takes place over a period of several days in the summer of 1999. The setting is not far from where I live in the Ottawa Valley. John Cobbett, professor of English at National University ("what had been known as the University of Ottawa"), is burying the body of a man who'd managed to elude his family's security system. The intruder's head was blown off by Anne, John's pregnant wife, who'd walked in on the attempted rape of her nine-year-old son. Care is taken in disposing of the body; the dead man's friends will soon come looking. 

John and Anne's mornings begin with CBC reports of violence forecasts:

It will be another day at least before public transportation begins again and schools and theatres reopen. The National Capital Region computer forecast for today remains at Unacceptable Levels of Violence. But we're only one point below that red line, and I think we can promise our audience a socially active day tomorrow... and probably for a few days after that, with Tolerable Levels of Violence for the rest of the week.

This optimism counters the trend. Economic crisis and declining living stands have spurred violence and lawlessness, bringing an end to parliamentary democracy. Canada and the United States have been in decline for well over a decade. Their combined populations – no one pays much attention to the border anymore – is officially 120 million, with a further 35 million roaming the continent grabbing what they can and doing what they want.

When conditions are deemed tolerable, John commutes to Ottawa as the as part of an armed convoy. He's as dedicated to his profession as he is to securing the family home. When possible, he works on his latest essay: "Moral Illusions in Renaissance Literature." Anne what she can to contribute to the household income by writing optimistic children's books featuring young brothers named Tony and Toby.

The Cobbett family lives in Braeside, an unfortified hamlet roughly fifty-six kilometres west of what was once Parliament Hill. The church is a ruin, as is its gas station; most neighboring homes are burnt out shells.

In his 10 December 1983 Globe & Mail review, published three weeks to the day before 1984, William French writes:

The chilling message of this futuristic novel is that Orwell and the other doomsayers were wrong in predictions of man's fate. It's not the tyranny of totalitarian governments we have to fear, or the prospect of nuclear wasteland, but merely the escalation of the kind of random violence and terrorism that are already established throughout the world. 

I was a young pup at the time, steeped in the music of Bertolt Brecht, Pete Seeger, Neil Young, Gang of Four, the Mekons, and Heaven 17.

I'd read George Orwell, Hannah Arendt, John Stewart Mill, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Hobbes, and watched SCTV religiously. Even then I knew that William French, for whom I have great respect, was all wrong; totalitarianism, random violence. and terrorism are an unholy trinity, as evidenced by Trump's release of Enrique Tarrio, Stewart Rhodes, and even so insignificant a figure as Patrick McCaughey III. 

This past Sunday, after another grocery run, this time to Brockville, Ontario, I looked across the St Lawrence to Morristown, New York. You could see its scattered houses quite clearly, not two kilometres across the water. Morristown was so close that I could make out the green letters on the water tower.

I hope to visit the United States again in 2029.

I have no idea what to expect.

About the author: The jacket provides scant detail – "Robert G. Collins is Professor of English at the University of Ottawa. This is his first novel." – but there is a photo.

Robert George Collins (1926-2010) was born in Danbury, Connecticut. He served in the US Navy and was a veteran of the Second World War and the Korean War. After service, he emigrated to Canada where he taught at the University of Manitoba and the University of Ottawa. Tolerable Levels of Violence was his only novel. This obituary has more.

Object and Access: A deceptively slim hardcover bound in off-white boards, anyone familiar with much-missed publisher Lester & Orpen Dennys and its much-missed International Fiction List will remember the format. Tolerable Levels of Violence was #16 in the series, sandwiched between D.M. Thomas's Ararat and Childhood by Jona Oberski.

Though there was no second printing of the Lester & Orpen Dennys edition, the novel enjoyed a second life in 1985 as a Totem paperback.

I rolled my eyes at the cover, but I now see that it is faithful to the novel. The Cobbetts do indeed live in something that looks like a Confederate plantation house. I don't know whether it is based on an actual residence, but do recognize that Braeside has some unusual dwellings, the old Usborne residence being a prime example. My only complaint is that the motorcycle should be purple.

Totem copies are the least expensive with online prices beginning at US$8.99. The Lester & Orpen Dennys begins at US$15.00. Nothing appears to be in particularly good condition. My copy was purchased last autumn at London's Attic Books. Price: $7.50.

To those who live in Braeside today, I'm sad to report the your local public library does not hold a copy, even though the old library building features in the novel.

The Globe 100 133 of 1924: Hammond's Organ

The Globe 100 was published ten days ago – November 22nd – so this annual look at the newspaper's best book picks of a century past may seem late.

It is not. November is far too early.

The Globe's picks for 1924 were published on December 10th of that year. Eight pages in total, all but one dominated by ads, it was cobbled together by Arts editor M.O. Hammond.

Melvin Ormond Hammond 

It's clear that his heart just wasn't in it. Consider this from Hammond's introduction:

Certain folks like history and biography under the evening lamp. Others – younger and more romantic, perhaps – want poetry. A few ask for essays and fine reading of a reflective type, something different from the cross-word puzzle. Some desire serious studies of a devotional character. Probably the reading preferred by the largest class is fiction.

Ho-hum.

Was the Arts editor behind this dreary headline?

The whole thing makes for exhausting reading, though there is much of interest. For example, the first page features this, which to that time was the greatest recognition of Canada's authors in the annual list:

What's more, only Canadian books feature on the page, beginning with Chez Nous by Adjutor Rivard. 

Chez Nous is listed amongst the works of fiction. I'd been led to believe it is a book of reflection and reminiscence. Archie P. McKishnie's Mates of the Tangle and Yon Toon o' Mine by Logan Weir seem similarly misplaced. I've not read the three, so may be wrong. In fact, I haven't read any of the 1924 Globe picks in Canadian fiction:

La Roux - Johnston Abbott [Edward Montague Ashworth]

The Divine Lady - E. Barrington [L. Adams Beck]

The Master Revenge - H.A. Cody

The Trail of the Conestoga - B. Mabel Dunham

A Sourdough Samaritan - Charles Harrison Gibbons

The Quenchless Light - Agnes C. Laut

The Garden of Folly - Stephen Leacock

 Mates of the Tangle - Archie P. McKishnie

Slag and Gold - Phil H. Moore

Julie Cane - Harvey J. O'Higgins

The Locked Book - Frank L. Packard

Chez Nous - Adjutor Rivard

Jimmy of the Gold Coast - Marshall Saunders

The Smoking Flax - Robert Stead

Lonely O'Malley - Arthur Stringer

The Wayside Cross - Mary E. Waagen

Fireweed - Muriel Watson

Gordon of the Lost Lagoon - Robert Watson

Yon Toon o' Mine - Logan Weir [J.B. Perry]

That's eighteen titles in all – the previous year had only eight! – yet there are absences, the most notable being The Land of Afternoon by Gilbert Knox [Madge Macbeth], the year's grand succès de scandale.

Nearly every year, the Globe errs by including a "new" work that is not new at all. In 1924 it was Lonely O'Malley, a reissue Arthur Stringer's 1905 semi-autobiographical second novel.

Three that made the cut.

What's particularly interesting about the error is that the ever-prolific Stringer published three new novels in 1924 – Empty Hands, Manhandled, and The Story without a Name (the latter two co-authored by Russell Holman ) – the most of any year in his very long career.

Six that didn't.

The list of foreign fiction features all the names one would expect, like Galsworthy, Masefield, and Walpole. This is the one that has really stood the test of time:

Foreigners don't do too well in the 1924 list, contributing just eighty-six titles. Canadian books number forty-seven, more than any previous list. Somehow, Hammond believes there are fewer. He's particularly down on Canadian verse, lamenting that it has been "a rather a slim year in new poetry so far as Canada is concerned;" but then he presents a list of eight titles, seven of which are Canadian:

Canada My Home - Grant Balfour

Dream Tapestries - Louise Morey Bowman

Flower and Flame - John Crichton [N.G. Guthrie]

The New Spoon River - Edgar Lee Masters

Verses for My Friends - Bernard McEvoy

A Book of Verses - Gertrude MacGregor Moffat

White Wings of Dawn - Frances Beatrice Taylor

Eager Footsteps - Anne Elizabeth Wilson

Hammond is far more positive when it comes to Canadian history and biography, recommending titles both familiar (Canadian Federation by Reginald George Trotter) and unfamiliar (Memoirs of Ralph Vansittart by Edward Robert Cameron). I'd forgotten about John Buchan's Lord Minto. As a biography of a past Governor General by a future Governor General, it is probably worth a look, but the book I most want to read is Pioneer Crimes and Punishments in Toronto and the Home District by James Edmund Jones: 

A readable record of early of early methods of administering justice, which shows the progress toward humane treatment made during the past century. The writer, one of Toronto's Police Magistrates readily admits the is room for further improvement.

I'm less likely to read Presbyterian Pioneer Missionaries in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta and British Columbia by Rev Hugh McKellar, D.D.

Continuing on a personal note, what surprised me most about Hammond's list is that I hadn't read one of its forty-seven Canadian titles. A Passage to India, on the other hand...

Nope, haven't read that one either.

In my defence, not one of the forty-seven Canadian titles on the 1924 Globe list is in print today.

No surprise there.

Related posts:

The Globe's Best Books of 1923:

'Canadian Authors Can Be Read With Pleasure, Profit and Pride'

Best Books of 1922: Amidst a Flood of Mediocrity

The 1921 Globe 100 206: Don't Mention the War 

Best Books of 1920: Beware the Bolshevik Poets

The Globe 100 One Hundred Years Ago: Poets are Struck Dumb

and Capitalism Proves Embarrassing (1919)

The Globe 100 178 of 2018

The Season's Best Books in Review - A.D. 1917:

The String of Canadian Patriotism is Fingered

The Season's Best Books in Review - A.D. 1916

The Season's Best Books in Review – A.D. 1915;

Featuring the Best Canadian Book Ever Published

A Very Canadian Succès de scandale

Gloria Gets Groped

Jazz Age Death Ray, Baby!

A Mid-Century Modern Country House Mystery

Harsh Evidence
Pamela Fry

London: Wingate, 1953

172 pages

Because this is a Canadian country house mystery, the house isn't terribly old and servants not so numerous. Rocky Crest is located on a private island in a lake somewhere in Northern Ontario. Belonging to wealthy Toronto businessman J.H. Charleston, it is a two-storey mid-century modern, complete with floor-to-ceiling plate glass windows and – here I assume – Danish furniture.

J.H. has invited employees and their spouses for a relaxing weekend, though no one is at all relaxed. Guests include:

• Randy Matthews, the top copywriter with Charleston & Synge Advertising. He's here with wife Ann, who worries that his time at the company is limited.
• Iris Martin, dress designer, owns a Bloor Street shop in which J.H. has chosen to invest. She is the latest in in Randy's "long string of entanglements."
• Peter Fairweather, a commercial artist working within the Charleston business empire, has brought his wife Lois, "a small, bird-like woman in her mid-thirties."
• Gordon Goodman, an accounts executive with Charleston & Co is also present, with his wife, "that silly Marion," in tow.

And then there's protagonist Beth Manley. The daughter of a "Toronto University" professor who died far too young, she's the editor of Glitter, J.H.'s latest and most ambitious publishing venture. Unlike the others, this is her first visit to Rocky Crest. Very much outside her element, she's found a friend in Ann, who warns against "Charlestonitis":

"New arrivals to Rocky Crest are particularly susceptible. First symptoms are a dampness in the palms and an irresistible urge to say 'Yes' every time J.H. opens his mouth."

A cautious soul who is very much outside her comfort zone, Beth is made more tense upon learning that her former lover, journalist Paul Manning, is due to arrive.

She awaits Paul's arrival, just was the reader awaits the discovery of the dead body described in the italicized first paragraph: 

In time she would be found—but not yet. The shock and terror of her discovery were still to come. Now she floated peacefully at the edge of the island, the spreading web of blonde hair framing her clear, pale face, the wet green silk of her dress clinging to breast and thigh. Her ballerina slippers were gone—it had been easy for the water to pull them away. And as the small waves lapped her cheeks, her head moved as though she turned it in her sleep. But she was not sleeping.

It's Beth who finds the body. She'd given liquor to steady herself as things begin spinning out of control.

De döda talar ej [Harsh Evidence]
1956

Harris, Charleston's handyman, fishes the lady from the lake. He takes the body to the toolshed, which everyone somehow agrees is appropriate, and then sets out for the mainland and the police. His departure is followed by a sudden storm, leading all to wonder if he'll be coming back at all.

But, look, a boat!

It's not Harris, nor the police, rather late arrival Paul:

Marion flung herself upon him.
   "Paul, darling! We're so glad to see you! We've had the most dreadful time!

Harsh Evidence may be a Canadian country house mystery, but the characters speak like proper Brits.

Marion's slobbering excitement at Paul's arrival is tempered somewhat by J.H., who tells the journalist about the drowned woman. No sooner has his story ended than Marion stumbles upon a heart-shaped locket in the grass. It would appear to have fallen while Harris was carrying the body to the toolshed. Paul inspects it and turns a whiter shade of pale:

"I think she was my wife." 

Turns out he's right.

Beth had no idea that Paul was once wed. When the two are alone, he relates a sad, sordid story of love and betrayal... and then it's off to dress for dinner!

The women go all out. Ann dons on a white dinner dress that possesses "a rakish charm," Lois engulfs herself in yards of grey velvet topped by a little pearl cap, and Iris has "poured herself into a strapless dress which appeared to be made of black sequins." You'd think the dress designer would have the advantage, but it's Beth who makes the biggest splash:

Gentlemen! Lady! I remind you that this very afternoon a woman, Paul's ex-wife Lizette, was found dead floating not far from this very house. Beth, you were the one who found her. Randy, Gordon, you walked down to the shoreline to help retrieve the body. 

The 26 September 1953 Globe and Mail review features some backhanded praise:

I didn't think much of J.H.'s guests, Beth included, but these intolerable four-flushing types are what makes Harsh Evidence worth reading. Careerists all, we dodge them in life, but are drawn to them in print.

All enjoy a perfectly lovely dinner, after which Peter tinkles the ivories and Iris does a substandard Dietrich imitation. The host waltzes with Lois in all her velvet, then suggests a game of Kidnapped.

Kidnapped?

Kidnapped is one of Randy's creations. It's something like Hide and Go Seek, but with teams and rhyming clues.

What fun! But how strange.

The novel's great flaw lies in the callous and peculiarly uniform behaviour by a group of people who had mere hours earlier witnessed Harris retrieve of the body of a dead woman. Some of this may be explained away by the slow reveal that Paul was not the only member of the party to have, let's say, known Lizette.

Kuolleet eivät puhu [Harsh Evidence]
1957

It's not often that I share a spoiler. I do so here because Harsh Evidence is unique in Canadian mystery writing of the time.

As the novel's mid-point approaches, Ann tells tells Beth about Iris's tragic history. The father was disinherited for marrying a chorus girl, Iris's mother. After losing what remained of his money in the crash of '29, he took a drive out a window. J.H., a friend of the family, paid for an exclusive girls' boarding school from which Iris was subsequently expelled. It's only in recent years that the two resumed cordial relations:

"It's certainly romantic," Beth said. "Positively Victorian. Somehow it doesn't fit Iris."
   "There are a lot of things about Iris that don't fit," Ann said slowly.
   "Oh? What, for example?"
   "Well, the men she collects – considering how hard she works at being a glamour girl – they're a pretty queer bunch."

I identified the last sentence as a bloomer, but the final chapters led me to reconsider. By this point, the reader has come to see Lizette Manning (née Lily Roberts) for what she was, a femme fatale who had mined men for money and sex. The twist comes when it is revealed that Lizette saw another mark in Iris, who confronts her on the morning of the afternoon her body would be found.

Ultimately, it's Gordon who exposes the murderer:

Interestingly, Iris herself had used sex – or the promise of sex – to get Randy to agree to a scheme involving the sale of insider information to J.H.'s competitors.

For these reasons alone, Harsh Evidence is worth a careful second reading. 

About the author: Following early, lazy research on Miss Fry, the newly released 1931 census provides a touch more information. Pamela Fry is recorded as the 14-year-old English-born daughter of John and Charlotte Fry. The family had emigrated to Canada in 1928. The Frys lived at 46 Spencer Avenue in Toronto, sharing the house with Edward and Freda Jones and their three daughters.

The house still stands, though you can't see much of it in this 2020 Google Maps Street View.

Object and Access: A hardcover consisting of pale green boards and post-war paper, only the dust jacket illustration renders it attractive. Credit goes to Patric O'Keeffe, about whom I know very little.

The novel can be found at Library and Archives Canada, Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, the University of Toronto, McMaster University, New York University, Occidental University, Trinity College Dublin and, most remarkably, the Atmore Public Library in Atmore, Alabama.

Here's to the Atmore Public Library! 

I purchased my copy earlier this year from a UK bookseller. Price: £7.50.  As I write, one copy of the Wingate edition is listed at the very same price I paid. Though lacking the jacket, it seems a good buy.

In 1956, New York's Roy Publishers published the first and only American edition. I've never seen a copy.

Harsh Evidence has enjoyed two translations, the first being the Swedish De döda tala ej (1956). This was followed by a Finnish translation titled Kuolleet eivät puhu (1957). Neither cover depicts a scene that features in the novel. Ditto the frocks.

Harsh Evidence has never been published in Canada. 

Related posts:

Keeping an Eye Out for Pamela Fry

The Mystery Writer Mystery Unravels
Susanna Moodie's Bloomers

Three Weeks a Lady

Three Weeks
Elinor Glyn
New York: Macaulay, [c. 1924]
245 pages

I misread "IMMORTAL ROMANCE" as "IMMORAL ROMANCE," which I expect was the publisher's intent. The very definition of a succès de scandale, when first published in 1907 Three Weeks was denounced, banned, seized, and destroyed. This went on for years. Consider this Toronto Globe. story from 11 April 1911: 

Three Weeks shares something with Fifty Shades of Grey in being a novel read primarily by women. Nurse Sneed reads it to Baby Peggy in The Family Secret. A switchboard operator is shown reading it in Buster Keaton's Seven Chances.

My favourite appearance is in an oft-censored scene from the 1930 Mickey Mouse short The Shindig. 

Horace Horsecaller, Clarabelle Cow's date, pulls on her tail to announce his arrival. The bell around her neck rings, naked Clarabelle hides the book beneath straw and then gets dressed. I will not comment on the scene in which Mickey pulls on Minnie's bloomers because this post is about Three Weeks, which is far more family friendly.

The premise of Three Weeks is simple. Handsome, blonde, twenty-two-year-old son of privilege Paul Verdayne, "young and fresh and foolish," has fallen for Isabella Waring, secretary to his mother, Lady Henrietta.

And why not!

Isabella shares his passion for sport and the sporting papers, happily washes his terrier Pike, and is in every way an equal partner in the hunt. All is good until "one terrible day Paul unfortunately kissed the large pink lips of Isabella as his mother entered the room."

Lady Henrietta, is horrified; not so Paul's father:

"Let the boy have his fling," said Sir Charles Verdayne, who was a coarse person. "Damn it all! a man is not obliged to marry every woman he kisses!"

Lady Henrietta begs to differ – to her a kiss seals a betrothal – and so she is quite horrified at the prospect of a "daughter of the middle-classes" being brought into the family. Son Paul is is soon sent on a three week tour of the continent "for his health."

The first of three memorable scenes centres on Paul's final meeting with Isabella:

Paul was six foot two, and Isabella quite six foot, and broad in proportion. They were dressed almost alike, and at a little distance, but for the lady's scanty petticoat, it would have been difficult to distinguish her sex.
   "Good-bye, old chap," she said "We have been real pals, and I'll not forget you"
   But Paul, who was feeling sentimental, put it differently. "Good-bye, darling," he whispered with a suspicion of tremble in his charming voice. "I shall never love any woman but you — never, never in my life."
   Cuckoo! screamed the bird in the tree.

Paris bores Paul because he can think of nothing but Isabella. The same is true of Lucerne, until one fateful evening, whilst dining alone, he is seated at a table in view of another lone diner. This is the novel's greatest scene. In its eleven pages there is but one word of dialogue –"Bon" – the rest consists entirely of descriptions of the two people dining at separate tables. One, a woman, is seemingly oblivious as to Paul's presence, while Paul is all too aware aware of her. He is at first judgemental ("Who could want roses eating alone?"), then irritated ("The woman had to pass him — even so close that the heavily silk touched his foot.), and then unsettled:

Her face was white, he saw that plainly enough, startlingly white, like a magnolia bloom, and contained no marked features. No features at all! he said to himself. Yes — he was wrong, she had certainly a mouth worth looking at again. It was so red. Not large and pink and laughingly open like Isabella's, but straight and chiselled, and red, red, red.

    Paul was young, but he knew paint when he saw it, and this red was real, and vivid, and disconcerted him.

Try as he may, Paul cannot help but compare Isabella to this woman. Whether Paul falls in love with the woman then and there is up for debate; that he does fall in love with her is not.

But who is she?

The "lady" – by my count the descriptor is used nearly two hundred times – is never named. An older woman, perhaps ten years older, the lady is very much the dominant in their relationship. She initiates Paul into the ways of love and Paul responds in the manner of most twenty-two-year-old heterosexual males. Three evenings pass between five-star hotel dining and sin on a tiger skin:

This is the scene that made Elinor Glyn famous. It is the scene that inspired these lines of verse (sometimes attributed to George Bernard Shaw):

                                   Would you like to sin

                                   With Elinor Glyn

                                   On a tiger skin? 

                                   Or would you prefer

                                   To err with her

                                   On some other fur?

It's the scene for which she is best remembered today – and it is not at all what I expected. 

Look carefully  and you will see that

is followed by this:

There is no sex in Three Weeks.

How disappointing!

The best scenes now past, Three Weeks shifts its focus to the lady's teachings on the nature of love and, well, nature. These lectures, coupled with extensive travel itinerary, consume much of the middle-third. It all seems a bit slow and repetitive, but the pace picks up in the third period.

What impressed most wasn't the plot, rather the author's ability to mine the male mind. This is best demonstrated in Paul, but extends to Sir Charles and his friend Captain Grigsby, both of whom display unhealthy interest in Paul's relationship with the lady. 

Three Weeks is an immortal romance. It lives on in that it is read, though perhaps not as a work of literature. What I know for sure is that it is in no way immoral. 

Object and Access: A bulky red hardcover with four plates of scenes used in promoting the 1924 Hollywood adaptation. I do like the jacket; not only does California girl Aileen Pringle as the lady feature, the rear flap and cover have advertisements for other Glyn titles.

Three Weeks enjoyed sales in the hundreds of thousands. It is not at all hard to find, which is not to say that I've ever come across a one in a Canadian bookstore. I blame Staff Inspector Kennedy and Detective McKinney.

My copy was purchased earlier this year from a Northampton, Massachusetts bookseller. Price: US$45.00 (w/ a further US$ 30.00 for shipping).

Related posts:

Freedom to Read Week: Embracing Elinor Glyn
Freedom to Read Week: The Police Raid Britnell's
Guelph: City of Galt, Gay, Glyn, Graves, and Girdles

Three Weeks in Thirteen Images