The Great Lost Canadian Mystery Novel?

'Four To Go'
Kay Grant [Hilda Kay Grant]
The Star Weekly (24 - 31 March 1973)

I once thought that Hilda Kay Grant's bibliography could be divided neatly into two unequal parts. The first spanned thirteen years, beginning in 1951 with The Salt-Box, a fictionalized memoir of her youth published under the name "Jan Hilliard." Five novels followed, all using the very same nom de plume, the last being 1964's Morgan's Castle. The second part, which lasted from 1967 to 1969, consisted of three works of non-fiction written or co-written under the name "Kay Grant."

And then silence... Again, this is what I once thought.

Last autumn, while working on the Ricochet Books reissue of Morgan's Castle I stumbled upon a reference to a novel by "Kay Grant" titled Four To Go published over two 1973 issues of Toronto's Star Weekly.  

Surely this couldn't be same Kay Grant. It had been nine years since her last novel. Besides, all her fiction had been published as being by "Jan Hilliard." Could this be the other Kay Grant, the one who wrote wartime verse like It's 'ard to Keep Straight in the City (1941) and It's 'ard to Be Good in the Blackout (1944)?*

Rural life can be 'ard. I was spoiled during my Montreal, Vancouver, and Toronto years in having ready access to resources. It took some effort to access those old issues of the Star Weekly, but the heart leapt when I did. Here's why:

The Niagara Peninsula! Why, Morgan's Castle is set in the Niagara Peninsula! So is her 1956 novel The Jameson Girls! I next came across this:

The Star Weekly, 17 March 1973

Written by Gwen Beattie, it's an author profile published in anticipation of the next week's publication of Four To Go. In it, Kay Grant is identified as Jan Hilliard, the author of "earlier Niagara-based novels – The Jameson Girls and Morgan's Castle."

I would've felt confident in declaring Four To Go as the work of Hilda Kay Boyle just the same. Location aside, it contains two elements found in each and every Jan Hilliard novel: dysfunctional family and an unusual house.

Twenty-five-year-old widow Katie Gaylord is narrator and protagonist. Maiden name Whitney, she'd thrown off her family-pressured engagement to stable second cousin Charles Davis, a lawyer, and had eloped with freewheeling Harry. During their two-year marriage, Katie's husband promised much, delivered little, and brought it all to an end by drowning off the coast of California. Left with next to nothing, Katie packs her clothes in cardboard boxes. gets in a pale green convertible – "purchased during a brief period of affluence" – and drives the more than four thousand kilometers home to Cragsmore, the grand Whitney family home on the Niagara Escarpment.

Katie knows that her 87-year-old grandmother Beatrice will accept her back. The prodigal granddaughter  reappears as Beatrice is entertaining two other elderly ladies:

"Well, Katie," she said, as matter-of factly as if I'd left home that morning. But she clutched my hand tightly as she lifted her face to be kissed. "Sit down and have some tea. You know everybody. Mrs. Kemp, Mrs. Taylor. They're collecting for the unmarried mothers."

Grandmother Beatrice will never say a word about Harry or his tragic death. He will be forever forgotten, expunged from the Whitney family history.

* * *

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

— Leo Tolstoy

Katie's family isn't particularly happy or unhappy, though its history is tinged with tragedy. Only one of Gran's children lived beyond infancy, that being Shane O'Neill, described by daughter Katie as a "philanderer and amateur sadist":

Three years later, forty-something Shane married eighteen-year-old Rose, then three months pregnant with Katie. Gran liked this second wife and was heartbroken when Rose's car plunged over a cliff not a half-mile from the family home.

Shane was the next to go (boating accident), but not before fathering a son, Conn, who was left on the doorstep by the teenage daughter of an itinerant fruit-picker.

The Whitney fortune came from jam.

* * *

If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don't put it there.

—Anton Chekhov

Though it has been just two years since she left, Cragsmore is much changed from the house Katie knew. Thirty-three-year-old Martha, a woman who had never once garnered a second look from a man, is now married to local lothario Joe Bennett. Mrs Baines, the long-time cook is gone. Joe replaced her with a man named Horace. He lives with his "cousin" Dickie in an apartment above the old coach house. Dickie is employed as Gran's chauffeur.

Martha has taken to wearing makeup and now cares more about her dress. Katie doesn't even recognize seventeen-year-old Conn. He's grown his hair and bought a motorcycle, but really only as an act of rebellion against Martha. Conn's also taken up with a runaway named Sue, who he has hidden away in a room above the old barn. It also contains his rock collection. At night, he uses the old dumb waiter to sneak out of the house. It works on a pulley system that involves ropes and lead weights running from the cellar to the second of Cragsmore's three storeys. Originally used to carry coal, now used to carry laundry, Martha has the dumb waiter inspected every March and September by old Mr Bennett. He died in April. 

You'd be right in thinking that something's going to happen with that dumb waiter.

I'll leave it at that.

Four To Go is a conventional mystery. An argument can be made that it is the author's only mystery. I'm happy to have found it, all the while being disappointed. Four To Go just doesn't reach the level of the Jan Hilliard novels. Black humour is absent, the pacing is off, and the denouement seems so very long.

In that old Gwen Beattie Star Weekly article she describes Four To Go as a condensed version of the author's "latest Niagara novel."

The uncondensed version has yet to be published. The manuscript has yet to be found.

Is Four To Go the Great Lost Canadian Mystery? 

I don't suppose we'll ever know. Are there other lost Canadian mystery novels? 

Is Four To Go worth republishing as is?

Of course, it is.

* What little I know of Australia's Kay Grant comes from the brief author bio found on the rear jacket of the American edition of the intriguingly titled It's 'ard to Keep Straight in the Navy.

cliquez pour agrandir

Related posts:

The Jan Hilliard Ricochet
A Nova Scotian Writes Ontario Gothic
As He Lay Dying

The Jan Hilliard Ricochet

Let the revival begin!

I first read Jan Hilliard three years ago. The book was Dove Cottage, her third novel. It may not be the best place to start, but Dove Cottage is very good, so good that I purchased and read all her others.

Morgan's Castle was Jan Hilliard's most successful book sales-wise. Published in 1964 by Abelard-Schuman, it received enthusiastic reviews. Anthony Boucher championed the novel in the pages of the New York Times. Unlike her other books, it enjoyed second, third, and fourth lives in mass market paperback.

Fifty years have passed since Morgan's Castle last hit drug store spinner racks.

It returns to print this week as the nineteenth Véhicule Press Ricochet Book.

As series editor, I'm proud to have played a part. In my opinion, Jan Hilliard stands with Phyllis Brett Young (whose 1962 thriller The Ravine was Ricochet #16) as the two most unjustly neglected Canadian authors of their generation.

Jan Hilliard (Hilda Kay Grant) in a 1973 Star Weekly profile.

This new edition, with introduction by yours truly, can by purchased at the very best bookstores, the usual online sources, and through this link to Véhicule Press. 

Related posts:

A Crooked Cousin in a Cunning Cottage

A Nova Scotian Writes Ontario Gothic
Nature as the Devil's Playground
Phyllis Brett Young's Ricochet

The Ten Best Book Buys of 2025 (and five gifts!)

This year, Simon Thomas of Stuck in a Book and Tea or Books fame made a fourth stab at what he refers to as "Project 24," his goal being to purchase only twenty-four books "for myself" throughout the year. The "for myself" bit is important. Why deprive friends?

As most of my books are stored in one of our outbuildings – there's no way they would all fit in the house – I chose to follow Simon's example. My Project 24 had a different carve-out: I would not be counting books purchased at a certain charity shop in nearby Smiths Falls. My justification for the exception had to do with my support of the charity... and, admittedly, the ridiculously low prices. One 2024 visit yielded three signed Margaret Atwood first editions from the 'seventies for two dollars in total.

When June hit I was feeling quite proud of my myself. I'd purchased just eight books. I'd been picky, even at the charity shop, Between Friends/Entre Amis being my only purchase.

All fell apart two days later when I visited a different charity shop, this one in Brockville, where I came across twelve seemingly unopened Folio Society Anthony Trollope novels at $2.50 each. I bought the lot. This meant that to get back on track I would have to keep my wallet in check until November.

Of course, I paid no mind to that constraint, continuing apace until late August when contractors appeared at our door, bringing the year's book buying to an abrupt end

Home renovations will do that.

I ended up purchasing twenty-nine books in 2025, which is far from a disgrace when one takes into account the twelve Trollopes. This year's list of best buys is atypical in that it features two Canadian books I already owned, and another that is Canadian in title only: 

The Victors
Robert Barr
New York: Stokes, 1901

There are real bargains to be had with Robert Barr. Most titles listed online are dirt cheap – so cheap that booksellers can't be bothered to provide a photo. Such was the case with this novel. I have no idea what it is about, but the subtitle, A Romance of Yesterday Morning & This Afternoon, intrigues.

The Girl from Toronto
Hugh Clevely
London:

   Amalgamated, 1954

A last minute addition to an order placed with a UK bookseller, the title caught my eye. Hugh Clevely was a Brit. Nothing in the two-columned 64-pages suggests he ever so much as visited Toronto. But that cover!

Lantern Marsh

Beaumont S. Cornell

Toronto: Ryerson, 1923

A novel set in a "provincial city" modeled on Brockville, Ontario, I'd been looking for a copy since buying a home in the area seven years ago. Cornell was born in nearby Athens Township and became a leading figure in cancer research. The jacket promises a "motif of woman-interest introduced in a rather unusual way." Intriguing!

Murder in a Road Gang
Hugh Cresswell
London: Sampson Low,

   Marston, 1936

Long a subject of interest, I tracked down a copy of this early Canadian murder mystery, likely the very first to be set on the Prairies. Illicit drugs figure!

Hearts and Faces

John Murray Gibbon

New York: John Lane, 1916

The scarce debut novel from the same man who would one day write the brilliant Pagan Love (1922).  This one appears to have been inspired by the Parisian art world. I'll let you know. A fortuitous eBay find, I was surprised and delighted to find that the copy I received was inscribed by the author.

A View of the Town
Jan Hilliard [Hilda

   Kay Grant]

New York: Abelard-

   Schuman, 1954

I already owned a copy of Nelson, Foster & Scott first Canadian edition, but this was signed! The author's first true novel, it is one of only two set in Nova Scotia, the author's home province. 

Trespass Against None

Eric Cecil Morris

Montreal: Whitcombe &

   Gilmour, 1950

Morris should be remembered for having co-written 1965's The Squeaking Wheel, but that bigoted screed is as forgotten as his quirky debut novel A Voice is Calling (1947). I was going on about Morris to a friend when I remembered this second novel. The only copy listed online was signed. An easy sale.

Looking Forward

Hugh Pedley
Toronto: William Briggs, 1913

Early 20th-century Christian science fiction inspired in part by early 19th-century Washington Irving, in Looking Forward a pious man of science hibernates for decades, awakening to a Canada made utopian by the union of its Protestant denominations.

Sister Woman
J.G. Sime
London: Grant Richards,

   1919

This book is in horrible condition, but is so very rare that I had to rescue it. The Quebec bookseller had no idea what he had.

Unrecognized in its day, the novel has since been returned to print by Tecumseh Press (sadly, also unrecognized).

Anything Could Happen!
Toronto: Longmans, 1961
Phyllis Brett Young

A thing of beauty, I first purchased a copy in Toronto six years ago. This memoir of sorts inspired by a summer spent as a girl in Muskoka is not only signed by the author but also inscribed by her mother as a gift to an English relative. 

Twenty-twenty-five brought four generous donations to the Dusty Bookcase:

The Great Canadian Novel

Harry J. Boyle

Toronto: PaperJacks, 1973

A novel I've been meaning to read for over forty years, if only because of the title. When my parents were in university, both Bonheur d'occasion and Two Solitudes were promoted as the Great Canadian Novel. Fifth Business was mentioned most often during my own university years. What are the kids being told today, I wonder.

I have my doubts that The Great Canadian Novel "lives up to its title," as the late Peter C. Newman claimed, but aim to find out. 

Robert Stevenson: Engineer and Sea Builder

Kay Grant [Hilda Kay Grant]

New York: Meredith, 1969

A gift from the author's literary executor, Robert Stevenson was the second of the author's two biographies, the first being  Where the copy of A View of the Town above is signed "Jan Hilliard." this book is signed "Kay Grant." An accomplished lighthouse engineer, Stevenson was the grandfather of Robert Louis Stevenson. 

Beside Still Waters

Edna Jaques

Toronto: Thomas Allen, 1939

This summer, my friend Forrest Pass fed my Edna Jaques obsession with a copy of the poet's fifth collection. Seventy-five titles in total, of those I've read 'To a Radio' is my favourite.

The Poetry of Robert Henri Alphonse McGee

Bob McGee

Sherbrooke, QC: GGEL, 2025

My interest in Bob McGee can be traced back to the 2023 fiftieth anniversary of Véhicule Press. The poet's Three Dozen Sonnets & Fast Drawings was the publisher's very first book. Imagine my surprise in being contacted by Libbey Griffith asking whether I'd like a copy of this new collection.

Would I!

An inscribed copy arrived in my mailbox a couple of weeks later. It's a beautifully produced collection, featuring Three Dozen Sonnets & Fast Drawings and McGee's 1977 follow-up Shanty-Horses, James Bay Poems, along with the previously unpublished 'The Labovrs of Alphonsvs' and 'Votive Haiku,' interspersed with colour illustrations. The cover painting and author portrait are by Libbey Griffith.

Dedicated to the Children of Canada

Mr. Peanut

[Toronto]: Planters Nut and Chocolate Co., [c. 1936]

This past spring, I was contacted by a comic book collector who'd come across a copy of the debut issue of Horace Brown's Original Detective Stories. Apparently, he'd come across a 2011 post about the magazine. After a lively exchange, he offered to sell his copy. It arrived with this unexpected and very generous gift.

I'll be making a second Project 24 attempt in 2026... even though my Abebooks shopping basket holds eighty-nine books.

Thanks to my beautiful wife Anyès for the photo of those Trollopes. 

Related posts:

Thank You for Being a Friend

Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Self-Improvement

Bach to the Future, Part I: A Voice is Calling
Bach to the Future, Part III: The Squeaking Wheel

Towards a Canada of Light

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

The Very Best Reads of 2024: Hilliard's Hat-Trick

With five days left in 2024, there's little chance I'll read and review another neglected book before the calendar turns... and so, the summary!

This was an unusual year for the Dusty Bookcase in that nearly half the books covered – twelve of the twenty-five – were published over a century ago. I don't know that I've reached half that number in the past. This years titles span 173 years, from Major John Richardson's Hardscrabble; Or, The Fall of Chicago (1850) to Richardson biographer David Richard Beasley's Canadian Authors You Should Know (2023). The former is the earliest paperback in my collection; Mark Breslin's Son of a Meech: The Best Brian Mulroney Jokes (1991), also read this year, is the ugliest in both appearance and content.

The best-looking book I've read in the past twelve months is the 1875 Lee & Sheppard edition of The Lily and the Cross by James De Mille. Coincidentally, De Mille's A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder was the most beautiful read last year.

To tweak the early Chapters slogan, great looks are just the beginning. The Dusty Bookcase has always been more about content than appearance. I write this, despite the near certainty that the jackets for this year's list of the three books most deserving of reissue were illustrated by the author herself:

The Jameson Girls
Jan Hilliard
   [Hilda Kay Grant]
Toronto: Nelson, Foster &

   Scott, 1956

The first of the Nova Scotian's books to be set in Ontario, this one concerns four women brought together by the imminent death of their father, once a successful rumrunner. It's about them, not him. 

Miranda
Jan Hilliard
   [Hilda Kay Grant]
New York: Abelard-Schuman,

   1960

This was the very best novel I read this year. The titular character is the focal point, though her story is told through her daughter Rose. An servant in London, in Canada Miranda tweaks her past and takes on airs, while Rose grows to see through it all.

Morgan's Castle
Jan Hilliard
   [Hilda Kay Grant]
New York: Abelard-Schulman,

   1964

Her fifth in ten years, this is the author's final novel. Though Hillard lived a further three decades, she wrote only three more books; all were non-fiction, all were published in the 'sixties.

Sadly, of all the books covered, only one is in print today:

Yellow-Wolf & Other Tales of the Saint Lawrence, Jane Brierley's Governor General's Award-winning 1990 translation of Philippe-Joseph Aubert de Gaspé's posthumous Divers (1893). Copies can be purchased directly from publisher Véhicule Press through this link.

I was tempted to include The Missing Chums (1928), the fourth Hardy Boys book penned by Ontario boy Leslie McFarlane, but that would've been cheating. The edition being flogged today was rewritten in 1962 by James Buechler. As I understand, all that's left of the original is the title. 

This year, I was involved in the publication of only one book, the Ricochet rerelease of Sugar-Puss on Dorchester Street with new cover and revised introduction by Will Straw.

Next year will see a Ricochet reissue of a 1952 Canadian pulp novel that was deemed to spicy for the American market.

I'll say no more.

As for New Year's resolutions, I have but one. I resolve to read more humour. Given the racket from south of the border, I have a feeling I'll be in need of a good laugh every now and then. 

As always, keep kicking against the pricks! Do Johnny Cash and John Metcalf proud.

Bonne année!

Related posts:

The Best Reads of 2023: Publisher's Take note
The Very Best Reads of 2022: Ladies First
The Very Best Reads of the Second Plague Year (2021)
The Very Best Reads of a Plague Year (2020)
The Very Best Reads of a Very Strange Year (2019)
Best Books of 2018 (none of which are from 2018)
The Year's Best Books in Review - A.D. 2017
The Year's Best Books in Review - A.D. 2016
The Year's Best Books in Review - A.D. 2015
The Christmas Offering of Books - 1914 and 2014
A Last Minute Gift Slogan, "Give Books" (2013)
Grumbles About Gumble & Praise for Stark House (2012)
The Highest Compliments of the Season (2011)
A 75-Year-Old Virgin and Others I Acquired (2010)
Books are Best (2009)

My Mistake in Reading Richardson

Of Known Knowns, Known Unknowns, Unknown Unknowns,
and David Richard Beasley

Too Soon?

Acadian Driftwood

As He Lay Dying

Growing up with Mother

A Nova Scotian Writes Ontario Gothic

Last Words of a Raconteur

Here's to Absent Chums

There's a New Sugar-Puss on Dorchester Street

As He Lay Dying

The Jameson Girls
Jan Hilliard [Hilda Kay Grant]
Toronto: Nelson, Foster & Scott, 1956
240 pages

King Jameson is dying and his daughters have gathered for the occasion. Isobel has flown in from New York, where she lives with third husband Eric. Mildred too lives in New York, but with her first husband. She arrived by train.

Isobel and Mildred don't talk.

Fanny, the eldest sister, didn't have travel at all; she lives at the family home with Lily, the fourth and youngest Jameson girl. Meanwhile, King lies semi-coherent in an upstairs bedroom facing framed photographs of his two dead wives.

Hawkrest is a grand house located on a wooded crag overlooking the Niagara River. King bought it not long after the Great War, then moved his family from New York. Before the war, the Jamesons had lived in Chicago, in which King's British immigrant parents had settled.

Hawkrest was ideal for King's burgeoning business as a rumrunner. As the years passed, he began pretending that the house had been in the family for generations. King would point to its antique furnishings, collected by the former owner, describing them as objects ancestral.

The true Jameson family history is slowly revealed. The most solacious details belong to King and his second wife, though Isabel and her many marriages provide competition. In stark contrast, Fanny, the eldest Jameson girl, settled into contented spinsterhood as a child. Mildred, the third Jameson girl, obsesses over marital fidelity, while Lily...

Well, what of Lily? The baby of the family, she's the daughter of King's sexy second wife Hazel, who died behind the wheel. Lily was in the passenger seat. She barely survived and hasn't been "right" since.

The Jameson Girls is backward looking, with the real drama existing only in memory. The reader has arrived too late, and so relies on fleeting references to past events. The present, lighter and more comical, takes place under a gathering cloud. It has two stars, the most recent being American Theodore Fairfield, who is summering in the mansion-cum-B&B across the road. A bigamist gold digger who presents himself as a son of Boston's well-to-do, he sets his sites first on Fanny, then quickly shifts to Lily. She's so pretty, so doll like, so innocent, so malleable, he's afraid he's falling in love.

The second star is  Mrs Pringle, who has taken offense in being referenced as "the maid" by King Jameson's night nurse. She is not "the maid," rather "a family friend" who just happens to have taken care of the house daily, for pay, these past thirty or so years. Fanny is so fearful the insulted, indignant Mrs Pringle will leave that she has taken over most housekeeping duties.

It's not all light, of course. Let's remember there is a man dying upstairs. Of this, Mrs Pringle is well aware:

In a burst of optimism on Saturday she had bought a black hat for the funeral: I hope I haven’t gone and wasted my good money, she thought as she ran water into the sink.

Like most Kirkus reviews, its take on The Jameson Girls (1 September 1956) is very short, yet somehow manages to give away too much. I'll share only the final sentence: "For women only, a more credible than charitable chronicle - and this prying, gossipping [sic], niggling world has its authenticity as well as human curiosity."

My interest in this quote relates to an ongoing discussion with friends regarding the "target audience," and how zeroing in on a specific reader, invariably the one most likely to purchase, can alienate others.

Canadian Forum, December 1956

Nelson, Foster and Scott's promotion was gender neutral. Would the Kirkus "For women only" have brought more sales?

Who knows?

What I can say for certain is that this man is all in on a prying, gossiping, niggling world that has authenticity and human curiosity.

You will be, too.

Not quite a bloomer: This passage, in which Fanny reacts to the revelation that sister Isobel, twice divorced, is having an affair, gives some idea of Jan Hilliard's talent:

The critics rave: For all my searching, I've yet to find an unfavourable review of any Jan Hilliard novel. Vancouver Sun critic Elmore Philpott champions The Jameson Girls in his 4 January 1954 review: "It is a witty, genial, sparking satire about the three daughters of the ex-king of the Niagara river rum runners [emphasis mine]."

Did he read it?

Object and Access: One of just two Nelson, Foster & Scott titles in my collection, the other being Jan Hilliard's A View of the Town (1954), The Jameson Girls is a solid hardcover with brown boards and uncredited jacket illustration. All evidence suggests that it was a split-run with Abelard-Schulman, printed and bound in England. Neither edition was reprinted.

There has never been another.

As I write, one copy of the Nelson, Foster & Scott edition is listed online at US$19.00.

In very good condition with dust jacket, it's a steal at twice the price.

Related posts:

A Crooked Cousin in a Country Cottage

A Nova Scotian Writes Ontario Gothic

Growing Up With Mother
Susanna Moodie's Bloomers