A Fair Thriller

A Fair Affair
Paul Champagne
Winnipeg: Greywood, 1967
190 pages

The Canadian Government has reason to believe there is a vast conspiracy working to sabotage Expo 67. This being the summer '66 and James Bond being all the rage, stylish Serville Gart is brought in expose and defeat the villains. After all, why send in a team when, as Hollywood has shown, the right man can readily handle the job himself. As newly-minted Secret Service Agent 18 dash 67 (irritatingly, never simply "18-67"), Gart receives his assignment in a Privy Council Chamber meeting attended by various government ministers, Quebec government officials, the Mayor of Montreal, and Expo's Commissioner General.

Why Serville Gart?

Well, to begin with the man served in the Canadian Army Special Services and earned a Victoria Cross during the Korean War in rescuing fallen comrades and "single-handedly grenading a North Korean pillbox." A university swimming and wrestling champ, he was scouted by both CFL and NHL teams and once declined a hockey scholarship offered by an American college. Lest you dismiss Gart as all braun and no brain, he is also a chess master and accomplished pianist with two scholarly books to his name. 

From the start, it's clear that Gart has the goods. During the Privy Council Chamber meeting he notes something suspicious about an attache case carried by a man named Conrad, aide to the Minster of Finance. Minutes later, Conrad, who has proven himself a baddie, is lying dead with a broken neck in his Centre Block office. Conrad's innocent teenage secretary suffered a bullet to the shoulder, and is whisked off the Ottawa Civic Hospital. Our hero follows:

Gart's TR4 sped off Parliament Hill to Wellington Street. He was not sure which route would be quickest to the Civic Hospital. Some roads had been torn up by construction while others had been patched so often that they resembled backwoods hunting trails. He wondered if the Nation's Capital would ever do anything about them.
   He decided to take Wellington, then south on Bronson. He would turn left on to six-lane Carling Avenue and continue straight out to the hospital.
   At the hospital he parked his car on the emergency parking area in front of the old red building. While approaching the main entrance, he admired the colourful 12x35 feet mosaic tile mural beside it. Gart recalled that the abstract work is meant to depict the various systems of the human body and was donated by the Ottawa Civic Hospital Architectural Association. It was created by an Italian craftsman who placed the two million cut stones by hand.
   He pushed open the glass doors and strode to the reception desk. After he identified himself, the nurse buzzed a young intern, who led Gart to the elevator. They both got on.
Gart could not help noticing the pretty but efficient-looking nurse who shared the elevator with them. He mused that patients – men anyway – would probably heal much more quickly if nurses like her would wear uniforms which were not quite so, well, starchingly official.

   The elevator doors hummed open at the third floor and they all got off. The nurse turned to the right. Gart and the intern to the left; the intern kept looking right.
   They reached the appropriate room and the intern said, "Well, here we are Mr. Gart, Room 365-F," and walked briskly away.
   Gart walked into the room. The doctor was sitting alongside the girl's table. When he saw Gart, he got up and greeted him.

A first time novelist, Champagne has real problems with pacing and needless digression, the former being particularly lethal in the thriller genre.

About those digressions – here I myself digress – one gets the sense that the author is keen on including his own observations. This too features driving:

Gart drove on Carling Avenue until he spotted a "Queensway East" exit, then sped around the turn exceeding the 30 m.p.h. ramp speed by 15 m.p.h. He slowed down to let a car pass on the outside lane. He held the little sports car at seventy-five. He could see a black and white Ottawa Police car approaching on the other side of the boulevard. He recalled that for a while the City officials had thought of painting them a bright orange – an experiment. Gart thought they probably did not adopt the suggestion because a policeman from Ontario would not let a French-Canadian ride in an orange squad-car.

Given Champagne's political background (see below), the most interesting of these are five-pages of memorable campaign quips made by John Diefenbaker the "Opposition Leader" in a past election as recalled by Gart.

To be clear, that's five pages devoted to entirely irrelevant statements made by a politician during an irrelevant election campaign that occurred years previous. The Opposition Leader never appears in the novel.

Returning to the plot, microfilm of the Canadian Pavilion's blueprints are found in the Conrad's trouser cuff. Gart's investigation leads to international steel corporation Uni-Dom, which is supplying much of the material used at Expo. Uni-Dom is headed by a man known only as "Center," who is also the mastermind behind the conspiracy. Remembering the dead man's pants, my first thought was that the plan had something to do with the supports of the pavilion. Imagine one failing! This old postcard will give some idea of the disaster that might befall:

But no, the sabotage in play is far more complex and expansive. Uni-Dom is just one component of something called the Association of Insular Degaussity. The name of this highly secretive organization –unknown to all secret service agencies – comes courtesy of Endico Novak, an operative who has worked her way into the Expo offices. A Hungarian whose family fled after the 1956 revolution, she has mixed feelings about AID and mixed emotions about Gart. The two take to bed, but what he really wants is for Endico to reveal less of her body and more about the conspiracy.

And so, two days into their relationship, he slaps her around.

Endico tells him what he wants to know, sharing information about a hidden submarine base off the Gulf of St Lawrence and a secret three-acre compound beneath the Expo site housing hundreds of trained martial artists and millions of lethal shadflies.

With the aid of scuba gear, Gart infiltrates the hidden base, commandeers a sub, and enters the secret three-acre compound, only to be caught and brought to Center.     

In true Bond villain fashion, Center provides a lengthy, detailed explantation of the conspiracy and its purpose.

Here we get the first of two elements that render this otherwise botched thriller noteworthy. 

Center tells Gart that AID is funded by Europeans who are concerned that Canada is flexing its muscle as a soft power. Blame Lester B. Pearson, I suppose. Their concern is that Canada has broken from the Old Country and is setting off on an independent course that will leave it vulnerable to American influence and annexation, thus creating political imbalance. The thinking goes that the humiliation of so grand a project as Expo would put an end to Canada's aspirations.*

The second, which is far more interesting, concerns Endico Novak. She clearly has feelings for Gart, and seemed on the verge of sharing everything she knew about AID when he hit her. In the end, she betrays him for that very reason. He hit her. 

Center sends Gart off to a death that involves those lethal shadflies. He's taken to a sealed room where every two minutes increasing numbers are released. To give him a sporting chance, Gart is provided a newspaper to swat them. I like to think it's the Montreal Star; it usually had more pages than the Gazette. 

Agent 18 dash 67 manages to escape, of course.

The final pages are the best because they feature the most action. The last sees Gart leaving bickering politicos in Privy Council Chambers "with a warm understanding and smile which said that while there are many frailties in this system of government, it is still the best." 

Mine was the smile of a man who was happy to be done with this thing, yet also happy that he'd read it.

* Two comments: 

1) Canada's stance during the Vietnam War and Pearson's 2 April 1965 address at Temple University don't lend credence to AID's concerns, but then Champagne was a Tory who supported maintaining the Union Jack on our flag.  

2) That Center is not "Centre" suggests a further layer to the conspiracy, one I don't believe the author intended.

Worst passage: Longtime readers know how much I enjoy good dialogue. In this A Fair Affair fails – not so much as He Shall Return, but it is very bad. The worst comes from Expo's Commissioner General, a man who comes off like Lorenzo St. DuBois in The Producers. Here he responds to a comment made by the Minister of Finance before before assembled federal ministers and provincial office holders:

"Minny, Minny. Like, honey-baby, we're all hip to your cool efficiency. We love your pads, we love your pencils; we love your pitcher and glasses; as a matter of fact, we even love that vase of Saskatchewan lillies [sic] over there – that was expansive man expansive..."

It goes on, but I feel I've tortured enough with those detailed descriptions of Gart driving through the streets of Ottawa.

For the record, the Commissioner General of Expo was career diplomat Paul Dupuy (1896-1969). Here he is at the fair with Grace Kelly and her daughter Caroline. 

Trivia: Born and raised on the Island of Montreal, I never once heard mention of shadflies and am not sure that I've ever seen one. That said, research informs that they were a concern of Expo organizers. The shadfly, which in truth is harmless, looks nothing like the cover depiction provided by Jack Jenson and Mark Shop. 

More trivia: Thus far, the only novel I've found that references the Brothers-In-Law (mentioned here previously). This comes in the form of a complaint made by a RCMP colonel about this song:

After the Mountain City Four, the Brothers-In-Law are my very favourite Canadian folk quartet.

Even more trivia: Throughout the novel, Expo is referred to as "EXPO." I can't begin to tell you how irritating this becomes.

The critics rave?: The closest thing I've found to a review of A Fair Affair was published in the 23 September 1967 edition of the Globe & Mail, in which William French remarks on the launch of Greywood Publishing:

The first two titles are A Fair Affair by Paul Champagne, and Canada in Caricature by George Shane. Champagne's book is an Ottawa-based secret-agent send-up about a sinister organization that wants to sabotage Expo. It's really quite bad.

The back cover features what appear to be excerpts of reviews by gentlemen then writing for Time, the Globe & Mail, and the New York Times, but I have yet to find evidence that the words quoted ever appeared in those publications.

About the author: Born in 1936, Champagne was was raised in Melville, Saskatchewan. He attended the Syracuse University. Up to the time of the novel's publication, his working life involved the federal Progressive Conservative Party, much of it as a member of John Diefenbaker's staff. He served as the leader's press secretary during the ill-fated 1965 federal campaign. Here he is with Dief in the pages of the Edmonton Journal (11 September 1964).

Or maybe not. The man identified doesn't resemble one on the back cover of A Fair Affair,  nor does he look twenty-eight (as Champagne was at the time).

In September 1967, the month after the novel was published, Champagne worked against his old boss in an effort to elect Davie Fulton as Progressive Conservative Leader. Following Fulton's defeat, he soon found himself working for successful candidate Robert Stanfield. For how long, I wonder? After 1968, when he would've been in his early thirties, the trail grows very cold.

I'm sure there is more to discover.

Object and Access: A mass market paperback, typical of its time, my copy was purchased last summer from a Manitoba bookseller. At $5.00, it was a real steal. Printed only once, in August 1967, as I write no copies are listed for sale online.

The last page features two ads for "Other Greywood Paperback Originals," Winnipeg editorial cartoonist George Shane's Canada in Caricature being the first. 

The second is My Most Unforgettable Convicts by Dr Leo L. Stanley, who despite having no surgical experience served forty-eight years as Chief Surgeon at California's San Quentin State Prison. How it ended up with a start-up paperback publisher in Winnipeg is anyone's guess. Mine is that no other publisher would touch it.

A dangerous kook, Stanley believed that crime caused disease. He transplanted testicles from executed prisoners and other mammals to living inmates in the belief that they would not only reverse the aging process but cure acne, asthma, and pedophilia. Stanley performed over 10,000 testicular implants on prisoners and injected ground-up testicles into the abdomens of others. He forcibly sterilized homosexual inmates. Stanley was a staunch believer in racial segregation and eugenics, writing: "The right to bear children will in time be reserved to the fit,"

Leo L. Stanley died in 1976 at the age of ninety. He was, of course, childless.

Evil, but nowhere near so evil as Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

Related posts:

An Expo 67 Murder Mystery

Summer of a Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name

A McGill Student's Mild Summer of Love

The Little People of Expo 67
Worst. Dialogue. Ever.
P is for Plus ça change...

E.T. Cash In

P.E.T: Pierre Elliott Trudeau and his unearthly adventures
Jude Waples
New York: Avon, 1983
93 pages

E.T. was the summer blockbuster of 1982. I saw it on my twentieth birthday.

Most embarrassing.

At twenty, Pierre Trudeau was very nearly the only prime minister I'd ever known. He assumed the office when I was in kindergarten and stepped down when I was in university, that long stretch being interrupted by 273 days of Joe Clark.

I Never Promised You a Rose Garden
Michelle Le Grand and Allison Fay
Don Mills: Greywood, 1972

P.E.T. followed Sex and the Single Prime Minister, The Naked Prime Minister, and I Never Promised You a Rose Garden; laughs that paired photographs with imagined conversation. This being a jubilee year, I present this example:

P.E.T. is very much a departure in that it relies on illustrations and actual quotations. The concept is that Pierre Elliott Trudeau is an extra-terrestrial or perhaps one of a race of extra-terrestrials who has/have played havoc throughout the centuries. 

I read the last image as a nod to Stanley Burke and Roy Peterson. Those who were twenty or older in the summer of '82 will remember.

Frog Fables & Beaver Tales
Stanley Burke and Roy Peterson
Toronto: J Lewis & Samuel, 1973

The odd placement of Parliament Hill aside, most striking is the near-absence of humour; it's more mean-spirited than anything.

That's meant to be Margaret Trudeau to the right of Joe Clark.

According to the 26 May 1983 edition of the Ottawa Citizen, Jude Waples was provided the quotations, and found them "scary." "I was careful to make sure none of the quotations weren't used out of context," she told journalist Kathleen Walker.

I'm not convinced, though given current times, I found this one particularly interesting.

Well, the man did attend the London School of Economics.

Like Waples' monster, P.E.T. is an awkward thing. Not all the quotes Avon provided belong to Trudeau. Here Margaret Trudeau's words are given to a horse:

Nine years ago, I described P.E.T.: Pierre Elliott Trudeau and his unearthly adventures as the ugliest Canadian book cover of all time. The interior isn't any prettier, though I've experienced far uglier things between the covers.

Is it quibbling to point out that some of the quotations are inaccurate?

Perhaps.

There's no way P.E.T. wasn't a rush job. As exploitation product goes, I like it just as much as this strange Montreal MusicWorks single, which somehow went gold in Canada:

P.E.T. isn't quite so memorable, but is it easier on the ears.

Full disclosure: I voted Liberal in 1988. Not sure about 1997.

Object and Access: A slim, trade-sized paperback. Purchased last year for for US$12, the old World's Biggest Bookstore price sticker was a nice surprise. The five copies currently listed for sale online range in price from US$7.99 to US$115.00. Condition is not a factor. I recommend the copy going for US$7.99.

The Library of Parliament, Library and Archives Canada, Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, and five of our university libraries hold copies.

Related posts:

Pierre Elliot Trudeau, Ladies Man
Sex and the Trudeaus: The Bachelor Canada
Margaret's Marriage in Mass Market
The Ugliest Canadian Book Cover of All Time

The True Crime Book That Spawned an Industry

The Black Donnellys
Thomas P. Kelley
Toronto: Harlequin, 1962
158 pages

Oh you who hail from Ontario
Know the tale of the Donnellys Oh
Died at the hands of a mob that night
Every child and man by the oil torch light
                         — Steve Earle, 'Justice in Ontario' (2002)

Because I hail from Quebec that I didn't know much about the Donnellys until well into adulthood. My introduction came through a work colleague when I was living in Toronto. Together, we made up a very small department in a very large book retailer – so large that it had its own publishing arm.

We were it.

After a few months working together, he suggested we reprint Orlo Miller's The Donnellys Must Die. I nodded in agreement, though Miller meant nothing to me, and I'd never heard of the book. The new edition of The Donnellys Must Die we ushered back into print sold twelve thousand copies in twelve weeks. Its success led us to consider reviving Miller's next book, Death to the Donnellys. We joked about commissioning a third book to be titled Die, Donnellys, Die!

What Steve Earle refers to as "the tale of the Donnellys" is infused with bloodshed of a sort that we Canadians like to think of as foreign. It begins with the 1842 arrival of Irish farming couple James and Johannah Donnelly in what is today Lucan, Ontario. They had with them a son, who had been named after his father. Six more boys and a daughter would follow, all born on Canadian soil their parents had cleared. The respective births were punctuated by violence and murder. First to be killed was neighbour Patrick Farrell – "John Farrell," according to Kelley – whom patriarch James hit on the head with a handspike. The murderer then hid in the woods, and dared work his fields disguised in his wife's frocks:

Johannah was almost as tall and heavy as her husband; appareled in her clothes, Donnelly was taken for her by those traveling the road and seeing him in the fields, and he was able to get in the seeding. Later, still dressed in women's clothing, he brought in the crops, working with his sons, and did the fall plowing.

Murder by handspike aside, this episode is the lightest part of the Donnelly story. Kelley doesn't do as much with it as I thought he might, though he does go for laughs here and there throughout the book. Poor Johanna receives the brunt:

She looked like and should've been a man; her sex undoubtably robbing the bare-knuckle prize ring of a prospective champion. In later years she sprouted a miniature Vandyke, wore red flannels, and told of never having been "much of a beauty." Her picture proves the words to be an understatement.

In Kelley's account, the matriarch directed many of the misdeeds attributed to her offspring. Beginning in 1855, various members of the Donnelly family were charged with larceny, robbery, assault, and attempted murder, amongst other crimes. The events that most troubled this reader concerned animal mutilation. It all came to an end on February 4, 1880, when a mob descended on the Donnelly farmhouse, beat its residents to death, and set the building alight. They then moved on to the home of second son William Donnelly, where they killed third son, John Donnelly. 

Steve Earle is wrong. Not every child and man died that night. There was a survivor in John O'Connor, a hired farm boy, who hid under a bed when the mob broke in. No doubt that mob would've murdered him, too, just as they did Bridget Donnelly, James' twenty-two year-old niece, who was newly arrived from Ireland. No one was ever convicted of the slaughter.

That Kelley records John O'Connor's surname as "Connor" is typical. He made his living as a speedy magazine and paperback writer. He had a reputation as a man who could be relied upon to fill pages in a pinch. The Kelley technique is on full display in this passage:

The writer first heard of the Donnelly feud – bits of it, at least – more than twenty years ago when travelling around the Lucan area. Twenty at the time – ah, my lost youth – the history of Lucan and its violences of bygone years did not interest him. A pair of blue eyes in the nearby village of Exeter, did. Eventually marrying the owner of the eyes, and as time went on, learning more of the feud, it became apparent at last, however, that mere hearsay, a thorough knowledge of the Lucan district or even the tales of oldtimers, would not be enough to write the true story of the Donnellys.  Seemingly endless hours of research were and did become necessary – the reading of old files, old newspapers, police and court records, etc.

It's unlikely that the seemingly endless hours Kelley spent researching the Donnellys were many, but they were lucrative. They resulted in "The Donnelly Feud," a 1947 article written for New Liberty Magazine. It was reprinted in his book Famous Canadian Crimes (Toronto: Collins White Circle, 1949) and then reworked as "The Terrible Donnelly Feud" for his next book, Bad Men of Canada (Toronto: Arrow, 1950). The Black Donnellys, which followed four years later, is said to have sold more than a million copies.

The Black Donnellys is not the best place to begin reading about the family and its fate; I recommend The Donnellys Must Die or, better still, The Donnelly Album by Ray Fazakas. Kelley's book is a fun read, but is wholly unreliable – which is not to say that it is without value. What I find most remarkable about the book has less to do with its contents than it does its impact. Sure, those who hail from Ontario know the tale of the Donnellys, but this wasn't always so. I don't doubt that Kelley (1905-1982), an Ontario boy who toured the province with his medicine man father, claims he hadn't heard of the family until "travelling around the Lucan area" at the age of twenty. After they faded from the headlines, very little was written about the Donnellys. Published a full seventy-four years after the bloody events of February 4, 1880, The Black Donnellys was the first book about the family and its fate. It's inaccuracies and – here I'm betting – commercial success encouraged Miller to write The Donnellys Must Die. More than a dozen Donnelly books have followed.

In this way, it is Kelley's greatest achievement as a writer. Would that we could all have such influence. He's owed a debt of gratitude.

Postscript: I left the very large book retailer in 2001, and began writing books that were published under noms de plume. Eight years later, when living in the Ontario town of St Marys, roughly twenty-five kilometres east of Lucan, I was commissioned to write a YA book on unsolved Canadian mysteries. A chapter on the Donnellys – "Who Killed the Donnellys?" – seemed a given. The St Marys Public Library then held seven books on the family, each of which was represented on the shelves by a block of wood bearing its title. Patrons interested in checking out a volume brought the appropriate block to the front desk. This system had been put in place to prevent theft.

Object: A paperback original, The Black Donnellys was first published in 1954 by Harlequin. My well-read copy, a seventh printing, was won for $7.50 in a 2009 auction at a St Marys, Ontario, thrift store.

Access: A 2002 Globe & Mail story reported that The Black Donnellys had to that point sold over one million copies in Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom. I point out that that same article refers to The Black Donnellys as a novel. The only American edition (right) is a 1955 paperback published by Signet. I've found no trace of a UK edition.

The Black Donnellys helped build Harlequin. The original 1954 printing was followed by fourteen others. The last was in April, 1968, long after Harlequin had (otherwise) come to focus exclusively on romances. Subsequent editions have been published by Greywood, Pagurian, Firefly, and Darling Terrace (it's current publisher).

Unsurprisingly, dozens of used copies are listed for sale online. Prices begin at US$2.99.

Easily found in academic libraries, but uncommon in the public. I suggest instituting the St Marys Public Library block system.

Related posts:

The King of the Canadian Pulps Bowdlerized

Kelley Pulls a Fast One

True Crime Stories from David Cronenberg's Dad

Montreal's Murderous Murder Mystery Writer

(and the transvestite brother he passed off as his wife)

Sex and the Trudeaus: The Bachelor Canada

Sex and the Single Prime Minister
Michael Cowley
[Don Mills, ON]: Greywood, 1968

The Naked Prime Minister
Michael Cowley
[Don Mills, ON]: Greywood, 1969

Ezra Levant soiled himself last month. That in itself isn't noteworthy, except that this ended up being another of those times in which his employers had to come in for emergency clean-up.

What happened was this:  On 12 September, Justin Trudeau was meeting at the Markham Hilton when he came upon a wedding party. The groom asked if he'd agree to have photos taken with the bride and bridesmaids. Someone yelled out that Trudeau should give the bride a kiss on the cheek. The Liberal leader asked the newlyweds for their okay, then did just that.

“Look at the photo," Levant shrilled, "a young, beautiful bride half Trudeau’s age – he turns 43 this year. She’s dressed in white, it’s her special day – hers and her groom’s – and Trudeau kisses her. That’s what he does.”

For God's sake, Justin, she's dressed in white! C'mon, man.

"I suppose what you think of this photo depends in part on what you think of weddings and marriages and fidelity and faithfulness," said the twice-married Levant. "If they're no big deal to you, this photo is no big deal, right? The idea of the nobleman of the estate, riding through like in medieval times to deflower whatever maidens he wanted, that's still there in Trudeau."

Never mind that the medieval droit du seigneur is a myth – Levant isn't much good when it comes to history – the man is trying to make a point. The point is this: Justin Trudeau is a son of privilege. He is his father's son. He is his mother's son.

“Both Pierre Trudeau and Margaret Trudeau were promiscuous, and publicized how many conquests they had. They didn’t even pretend to keep their oaths to each other,” said Levant. Justin Trudeau's father "banged anything. He was a slut.” Mom "didn't wear panties."

Watching Levant rant, you'd think we're a land of looney eunuchs. We're not, nor are we nearly so puritanical as the pundit. I think most Canadians would agree that the media have no business in the bedrooms of the nation. Norm Spector will confirm. This is what makes Michael Cowley's Sex and the Single Prime Minister and The Naked Prime Minister so unusual.  The 'sixties had something to do with it, I suppose, as did the sudden elevation of a charismatic. single man to the office of prime minister. Images like this attract:

Barbra Streisand doesn't figure in either book, though The Naked Prime Minister does include a rather flattering photo of Her Majesty the Queen.

(cliquez pour agrandir)

I've written about this sort of thing before in reviewing I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, which was also published by Greywood. I noted then that the format owes something to Private Eye; I note now that the word balloons aren't quite so clever.

Here are seven more examples, beginning with a nice shot of the space now occupied by Stephen Harper, and ending with a botched reference to Stephen Vizinczey's In Praise of Older Women.

Ribald? You bet!

Trudeau, père, took Cowley's captions in stride, even going so far as to write the author a polite note of acknowledgement. Trudeau, fils, reacted to Levant's tirade in an entirely different way by boycotting Sun News.

It's perfectly understandable.

Levant has been trying to take down for Trudeau for years. That he's proved himself impotent must surely grate. Given the pundit's history, it comes as no surprise that he'd spread a lie or two about a man's family – or even a couple on their wedding day:

I’m pretty sure I can guess what her groom would say, or her groom’s family, or her own father and mother. Justin Trudeau thinks he’s in the movie Wedding Crashers, that sex comedy where slutty men go to weddings uninvited to bed the maids of honour, but even they had enough class to give the bride herself a pass. I’m not saying Trudeau got sexual with this bride. I’m just saying he invaded a personal intimate day.

Of course, Justin Trudeau did nothing of the kind. The person who invaded the couple's "personal intimate day" was Ezra Levant.

Covered in his own filth, the Sun News Network's loudest voice has yet to apologize to anyone... not even the young bride dressed in white.

Bonus:

Emperor Haute Couture, Margaret Sullivan, 2011

The naked prime minister (no sex).

Objects and Access: Surprisingly sturdy staple-bound books, 64 pages in length, I bought both last year from a London bookseller. Price: $3.00 each.

Several copies of Sex and the Single Prime Minister and The Naked Prime Minister are listed for sale online. They range in price from US$3.83 to US$29.95. Condition is not a factor.

As might be expected, few Canadian libraries hold copies. Sex and the Single Prime Minister can be found in the Parliamentary Library.

Related posts:

Sex and the Trudeaus: Son and Hair

Pierre Elliott Trudeau, Ladies Man

Margaret's Marriage in Mass Market

The Harlequin Horror That Just Won't Die!

Vengeance of the Black Donnellys
Thomas P. Kelley
Toronto: Harlequin, 1962

Winnipeg: Greywood, 1969

Toronto: Modern Canadian Library, 1975

Toronto: Firefly, 1995

Canada's most feared family strikes back from the grave!

Related posts:

A Harlequin Halloween

Another Harlequin Halloween

It's Harlequin Halloween Time!
The Horror! The Harlequin Horror!

On Addressing a Duke's Eldest Son's Younger Son

Mind Your Manners

Claire Wallace

Toronto: Harlequin, 1953

A businesswoman, a journalist, a pioneering radio broadcaster and something of a daredevil, Claire Wallace was a remarkable woman with a remarkable story. How curious then that this, her only book, should have etiquette as its subject. The press release tucked into my copy provides something of an explanation:

In her continuous search for stories on Canadiana, Author [sic] Wallace came against a problem. There were no up-to-the-minute reference books on Canadian manners. Etiquette seemed out-dated and stuffy. That's how the idea for this new book was born.

I venture to say that etiquette, by its very nature, always seems out-dated and stuffy. And the claim – implication, really – that this or any reference book is up-to-the-minute borders on false advertising. That said, Mind Your Manners remains a useful little book in that it provides a clear picture of acceptable and exemplary behaviour in the Canada of the early 'fifties. I write here of the days of double weddings, visiting hairdressers and afternoon dress gloves; a time when a polite divorcee (as Miss Wallace was) would make no mention of her failed marriage "except legally and in conversation to personal friends."

Mind Your Manners was indeed "the first Dictionary [sic] of Canadian etiquette" – here the copy doesn't lie – though I think those in the know would have deferred to DeBrett's. Would Lady Eaton have consulted a 50¢ paperback sold only at newsstands?

Really, Mind Your Manners is as much about dreams as it is about place cards. In this more egalitarian post-war world, one might be invited to dine with a duke, mightn't one? Best to know the proper form of address – and let's not forget the Duke's daughter, his eldest son's daughter, his eldest son's eldest son, his eldest son's younger son, his eldest son's wife, his younger son and his younger son's wife. Miss Wallace covers all these possible encounters, along with eventualities like this one:

Mind Your Manners sold out its initial printing, returning to press just two months after release – a rare reprint in Harlequin's first decade. In 1960, the guide was reborn as the awkwardly titled Canadian Etiquette Dictionary. "COMPLETELY NEW" trumpets the cover, while the interior quietly informs that the guide was originally published as Mind Your Manners. Both statements mislead. No, the book is not "COMPLETELY NEW", but it is updated and does feature a previously unpublished section on travel etiquette. Miss Wallace revised the book a third time for a 1967 edition, titled simply Canadian Etiquette, issued by Winnipeg's Greywood Publishing. The guide appeared again in 1970, with an "up-to-date" travel section, even though its author was two years dead.

Back to 1953.

I admit to being thrown by the dedication in Mind Your Manners: "To Our Parents...".

Our?

Turn the page and we find the Foreword: "A book like this could never be written by two women alone..."

Two?

The other woman is Joy Brown*, who is credited as editor on the cover and title page. It's true that Brown was a writer – Night of Terror (1950), one of Harlequin's earliest titles, is hers – but did she actually pen any of these entries... or is it that Miss Wallace was just being overly polite?

Object and access: With cheap glue and cheap paper, typical of early Harlequin's, the book isn't exactly designed to reference use. This may explain why so few copies are listed for sale online. Uncommon, though not dear, it usually lists for $8 or so. Mind Your Manners is held by the Toronto Public Library, the Royal Ontario Museum and a handful of our academic libraries. I bought my copy – inscribed – last week in a London, Ontario thrift store for 33 cents.

* The wife of Jock Carroll, Joy Brown was better known as Joy Carroll, author of Soul's End (1974), Satan's Bell (1976) and a handful of other "popular priced paper backed books".

Related posts:

More Manners Minding

A Final Word on Manners

Pierre Elliott Trudeau, Ladies' Man

I Never Promised You a Rose Garden:

A Study in Public Seduction

Michelle Le Grand and Allison Fay

Don Mills, ON: Greywood, 1972

It was ten years ago today that Pierre Trudeau died. Does he haunt us still? I suppose so, though his influence has diminished... as has the country's. Let's face it, the man never encountered a reception like this from last week:

Enough.

I Never Promised You a Rose Garden is a sequel of sorts – "a study in public seduction" from the same publisher that four years earlier told us "how pierre elliott trudeau seduced canada with the lights on". Readers of Private Eye will be familiar with the content: a photo with wacky word balloon. This one looks like it could have come from the magazine's 18 December 1970 issue (cliquer pour agrandir).

You get the idea. The picture sets the theme, mixing politics with personality, casting Trudeau as Casanova.

The pseudonymous authors, apparently "two very political and disillusioned housewives", pitch some pretty varied attempts at humour. At times they venture into sensitive territory...

... before descending into jokes one would not dare make today.

There are no knee slappers here, though political types will be interested in the photos, most of which I've not seen elsewhere. Thumbing through the thing I caught myself ignoring the captions, returning in time to catch this:

Poignant and prophetic, n'est ce pas?

Object and Access: A 64-page staple-bound paperback. Ten copies sit on university library shelves, with a further two at Library and Archives Canada and the Toronto Public Library. A half-dozen copies are listed online at between US$4 and US$10. One Winnipeg bookseller has pulled away from the pack, asking US$25 (and adds US$12.25 shipping when three bucks will more than cover it).

Fuddle duddle.