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 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-Schulman,

   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

The Ten Best Book Buys of 2024... and many gifts!

What a year! On day two, while returning from a grocery run in nearby Brockville, I stopped at a thrift store and found first editions of Gilbert Parker's The Judgement House and Pardon My Parka by Joan Walker. They set me back all of four dollars.

The Judgement House had been on my radar only two months, but I'd been looking for Pardon My Parka well before my 2022 tear through Walker's East of Temple Bar, Murder By Accident, Repent at Leisure, and the condensed Repent at Leisure. It completes my collection of her works. 

I arrived home from Brockville to find this gift from my friend James Calhoun my mailbox:

More on that below.

The strangest book buying experience occurred during a May visit from our daughter. She'd just moved to her first flat and was looking for inexpensive pots and pans, so the family set out for a favourite thrift store in Smiths Falls. During the drive I began talking about Jan Hilliard whose novel Miranda I'd set down to make the trip. I went on about her background, her rascal of a father, her art school education, what a good writer she was, and how unfair it is that she's so forgotten. When we got to the store, mother and daughter went off hunting kitchenware. I made for the books, where I found – within seconds – a first edition of Hilliard's The Salt-Box. I'd never before seen any of her books in a store. The copy doesn't have a dust jacket and is a library discard, but at 66 cents I shan't complain. It completes my collection of her works. 

That Judgement House, Pardon My Parka, and The Salt-Box didn't make this year's list gives some idea as to how good 2024 was in terms of book purchases.

This years top ten were bought from booksellers in Canada, Austria, England, Scotland, and the United States:

A Fair Affair
Paul Champagne

Winnipeg: Greywood, 1967

"A chilling mystery with a James Bond-Simon Templar flavour, and devilish spoof on Canadian politicians," says the cover copy.

We'll see.

Set around Expo '67, this was purchased after reading the disappointing So Long at the Fair.

The Woman Who Didn't
Victoria Cross

   [Annie Sophie Currie]

London: Lane, 1909

An 1895 novel written in response to Grant Allen's scandalous The Woman Who Did. I like Allen's novel, but understand that Victoria Cross was highly critical. 

I'm ready to hear her out.

Harsh Evidence
Pamela Fry
London: Wingate, 1953

Reviewed here in July, Fry's debut did not disappoint; I'd read The Watching Cat (1960), her second and last novel, so expectations were low.

This one is a murder mystery set amongst well-paid people working in Toronto's lucrative magazine industry. Different times. I grew jealous.

The Conquering Hero

John Murray Gibbon

New York: Grosset & Dunlap, [c. 1921]

Judging a book by its cover, I'm not sure this is for me. Still, Gibbon wrote Pagan Love (1922), which is easily the most unconventional and challenging Canadian novel of last century's 'twenties.

When I found this Gibbon book – signed – I leapt.

Three Weeks
Elinor Glyn
New York: Macaulay,

   [c. 1924]

A novel that would've appealed as a very young man. Don't know why I didn't buy it then, but I have it now... and in a photoplay edition!

It says everything about my reaction that I bought two other Glyns after reading it.

A View of the Town

Jan Hilliard
Toronto: Nelson, Foster &

   Scott, 1954

It's difficult to pace oneself with Jan Hilliard; she wrote only five novels. I'm saving A View of the Town, the only one I've not read, for next year. Seventy-year-old reviews suggest it is her funniest. By now, I feel I know Hilliard; much of that humour will be black.

Miranda
Jan Hilliard
New York: Abelard-

   Schuman, 1960

My favourite read of 2024!

Given that I read two other Hilliard novels this year it was not an easy choice.

Morgan's Castle
Jan Hilliard
New York: Abelard-

   Schulman, 1964

The author's biggest selling novel – there was a Dell paperback edition – and I can see why. Where previous novels could get very dark indeed, Morgan's Castle is the only in which murder figures.

And more than one! 

Chipmunk
Len Peterson
Toronto: McClelland &

   Stewart, 1949

I once read a very enthusiastic review of this novel, but where?

I have no idea who wrote it or what was said, but it was so positive that I've kept an eye out ever since.

In the Village of Viger
Duncan Campbell Scott
Toronto: Ryerson, 1945

A controversial choice, perhaps, given the author, this is a more attractive edition than the very rare 1896 American first. The Ryerson edition didn't do a whole lot better, but this hasn't prevented certain critics from holding the collection aloft as highly influential. John Metcalf has proven otherwise.

This year saw a good many gifts to the Dusty Bookcase, beginning with the book that arrived on the second day in January:

The Winter of Time
Raymond Holmes
   [Raymond Souster]
Toronto: News Stand
   Library, 1949

Raymond Souster's third book and first novel, the poet drew something from his wartime experience in the writing, but it is no way autobiographical.

Thank God.

A gift from James Calhoun.

Late Spring
Peter Donovan
Toronto: Macmillan, 1930

A novel set in the Toronto art world by a Montrealer better known as "P O'D." Robertson Davies was an admirer, describing Donovan as "knowingly and intentionally and pointedly funny."

Another gift from James Calhoun, this is sure to be read in 2025.

Michelle Remembers
Michelle Smith and
   Lawrence Pazder
New York: Pocket, 1981

After I'd expressed frustration in being unable to find an affordable copy copy of this Satanic Panic classic, Brad Middleton of My Bloody Obsession sent two copies my way. This one is a first printing of the July 1981 first Pocket books edition.

The Gorilla's Daughter
Thomas P. Kelley
Toronto: News Stand

   Library, 1950

A book I will likely never own, but a book I've now read thanks to bowdler of Fly-by-Night who kindly sent scans and photocopies my way.

A tragic love story.

Finally, I received two large boxes of books from the West Coast sent by my friend Karyn Huenemann containing books by L. Adams Beck, Frances Brooke, Ralph Connor, Muriel Denison, Norman Duncan, Sara Jeanette Duncan, Muriel Elwood, F.T. Flahiff, Grey Owl, Nellie McClung, Frederick Niven, Frank L. Packard, George L. Parker, Gilbert Parker, Charles G.D. Roberts, and Duncan Campbell Scott.

Again, what a year! 

Related posts:

Whither the Canadian American Bestseller?
A Forgotten Novelist's Hidden Debut

Accidents Never Happen in a Perfect World

A Mid-Century Modern Country House Mystery

Three Weeks a Lady
Growing Up with Mother
A Mid-Century Modern Country House Mystery
A Nova Scotian Writes Ontario Gothic
A Poet's Pulp Novel
Thomas P. Kelley's Elusive Gorilla's Daughter

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

A Nova Scotian Writes Ontario Gothic

Morgan's Castle
Jan Hilliard [Hilda Kay Grant]
New York: Abelard & Schulman, 1964
188 pages

An uncredited dust jacket of mysterious design, whatever does it mean? The rear image provides no clue.

The covers of Jan Hilliard's other novels are much more straight-forward. Consider this:

A View of the Town, is "A NOVEL OF SMALL TOWN LIFE IN NOVA SCOTIA," as are most of her novels. Morgan's Castle stands with The Jameson Girls and Dove Cottage as one of three set outside her home province. The Jameson Girls and Dove Cottage are darker than her Nova Scotia novels, while Morgan's Castle is the darkest by far. This is not to suggest that the humour, which runs through all her fiction, is entirely black.

Jan Hilliard's career as a novelist lasted just ten years. One wonders why it wasn't longer. Her novels garnered uniformly positive reviews – I've yet to find an exception – yet Morgan's Castle is the only one to have been reissued in paperback. "A spellbinding novel of romance and suspense in the Du Maurier [sic] tradition," the tagline reads. I was reminded more of Muriel Spark and Margaret Millar, but this may be because I'm more familiar with their respective works.

The heroine of Morgan's Castle is Laura Dean. The youngest member of the Dean family, she lives with her widowed artist father Sidney in a ramshackle house located somewhere in the countryside between lakes Ontario and Erie. Amy Scott, sister of Laura's late mother, isn't at all happy with her niece's situation. Nature can have such a bad influence on a maturing girl. And then there's Sidney, who Amy considers a "rural Dion Juan." For goodness sake, the man gets around on a bicycle! 

Aunt Amy has sent Laura money for a train ticket to the town of Greenwood, where she lives and breeds spaniels. There is a husband, Uncle James, but he is as irrelevant to the story as he is to Aunt Amy. The focus of her life is Charlotte Morgan, depicted here by Reint de Jonge on the cover of the Dutch translation, Spel met de dood (Haarlem: Staarnrstad, 1966).

Charlotte may just be the most beautiful, most refined, most elegant woman in Greenwood; that she is the wealthiest is not up for debate. The widow of Robert Morgan, heir to a vast Niagara winery, she lives with her twenty-eight-year-old son Robbie and various servants at Hilltop House, known to the locals as "Morgan's Castle." It is located on a bluff above and away from the town and is described as looking something like a castle, though the artist for the Ace edition imagines it as a large Anglican church. 

Aunt Amy sent her niece train fare on the pretence of wanting to give the girl a birthday party. Laura's four brothers and their wives will be there, but not the patriarch. Amy is well aware that Sidney won't be able to afford a ticket.

Because she's turning sixteen, Laura's siblings are concerned about shouldering the cost of further education. Is it not enough that their wives provide her with their castoffs? Sure, those old dresses have frayed hems and missing buttons, but Laura knows knows how to sew. They need not worry. Aunt Amy has a plan – and it has nothing to do with tuition.

Over the past year, Charlotte has taken a shining to the girl. Once so skinny and boyish, Laura is becoming a woman. This, um, development hasn't escaped Aunt Amy's attention either. She criticizes her niece's white dress as being too revealing, even though it's an old thing that once belonged to a brother's wife.

Aunt Amy's attraction to Charlotte is nuanced while Charlotte's attraction to Laura is simple. She would like the girl to marry her son Robbie, produce offspring, and secure the line of succession in the family business. Never mind the age difference, the time is right. It's almost as if the fates had brought them together. Just a few months ago, not long after Laura's last visit to Greenwood, Robbie's childless wife Phyllis died suddenly after having sprinkled arsenic, which she thought was sugar, on a bowl of strawberries.

In his 1995 anthology Investigating Women, David Skene-Melvin describes Laura as a detective.

She is not.

Laura has a handle on her ne'er-do-well father, but is nowhere near so savvy or keen-eyed when it comes to others. There's no surprise here. Despite having had to deal with Sidney's fabrication and deceit, her innocence is such that she believes these traits are unique to Sidney.

Morgan's Castle is in no way a detective novel, nor is it a mystery novel, though there are two murders (and many more in the backstory). The first murderer is obvious. The second murderer is a little less so, though one anticipates the act. 

So much of what happens escapes Laura's attention. Does the girl's innocence have something to do with the rural environment Aunt Amy so disparages?

Could be.

Object: Yellow boards in an uncredited dust jacket. I've mentioned the uncredited bit before, I know, but it is relevant here because Hilliard, who worked for Abelard-Schulman, provided her own covers. The only one I have seen credited is Dove Cottage, which features this illustration by son of Scotland William McLaren:

Access: As with the author's four other novels, the first edition of Morgan's Castle enjoyed one lone printing. What sets it apart is a mass market paperback published three years later by Ace featured above, making it the biggest selling of the author's nine books.

The Toronto Star Weekly published Morgan's Castle in two parts over two issues (July 11-18, 1964). I've consulted various pals about the Ace cover, but have no definitive answer as to who should be credited with the illustration. What I can say is that it is accurate in its depiction of Laura.

As I write, two copies of the Abelard-Schulman edition are being offered online. Both ex-library copies, they're listed at US$5.06 and US$64.67. Take your pick. Two copies of the Ace edition are also listed. The cheaper, at US$7.12, has a cocked spine. The other, which "can have notes/highlighting," is being sold by Thrift Books for US$50.06.

The less said about Thrift Books the better.

Staarnrstad's aforementioned Spel met de dood was republished at some point. Judging by the dress, I'm guessing the second appeared in the 'seventies.

Related posts:

A Crooked Cousin in a Cunning Cottage

Growing up with Mother

Growing up with Mother

Miranda
Jan Hilliard [Hilda Kay Grant]
New York: Abelard -Schuman, 1960
247 pages 

Miranda is the mother of two daughters, the younger being Rose, the narrator of this novel. Rose calls her mother Miranda, as encouraged by Miranda because Miranda would rather be taken for an older sister.

Miranda has aspirations. She married Alfie Arnold with the expectation that he would raise her above the class into which she'd been born. They are a good match – he loves her dearly, she really loves him –except that Alfie is content with living a modest life on his aunt's small Sussex farm. Miranda will have none of it. At her urging, the family is uprooted, trading Aunt Eliza's farm for a much larger one in Nova Scotia's Annapolis Valley. The Arnolds are able to do this only with the financial assistance of a Government of Canada program designed to bring agricultural labourers to the country. This is not to suggest that Miranda herself has any intention of working herself. She had her fill during the Great War, when she's served as a Park Lane parlourmaid. Again, Miranda has aspirations:

The Arnolds spend three years in Cheswick, living in a small house on the farm of Mr and Mrs Saunders. Alfie, a cheerful soul by nature, is happier than he's ever been. Not so Miranda. In Canada, she'd expected her family would "stand out like a pearl among the stones," but the locals take no particular notice. The farming couple's warmth and friendliness, so appreciated by Alfie and the girls, only serves to irritate. One particular Sunday road trip to Grande Pré, complete with the recitation of select lines from Evangeline and an account of the Acadian Expulsion, was almost too much for Miranda to bear. And then came Mrs Saunders' offer, filled "with such enthusiasm and goodwill," to teach Miranda Canadian ways and customs:

"Why should I learn their damned customs?" Miranda demanded as soon as she got my father home. The story of Evangeline had not gone over too well with her. She suspected Mrs. Saunders was being anti-British. "What's the matter with English customs?
   "She was only trying to help," Alfie said in a placating voice.
   "Saying she'd make real Canadians out of us in no time! I never heard of anything so insulting. I didn't come to the colonies to be one of them."

Miranda avoids Mrs Saunders, but does enjoy the company Dan Murphy, District Representative of veterinary supply firm B.F. Whitney. Whether the salesman sees Miranda as a pearl among the stones is debatable, but he does drop by from time to time, always when Alfie is in the fields. Dan strokes her amour propre, but nothing more. Through the salesman, Miranda gets the idea that Alfie himself might find a district representative position with B.F. Whitney. She prods, eventually applying to the company on her husband's behalf and Alfie is quickly hired. At about the same time his Aunt Eliza kicks the washtub, leaving an inheritance of £200 (roughly $16,000 today). 

"'My husband has fallen heir to his aunt's estate in Sussex,'" Rose hears Miranda tell Mrs Saunders. "She made poor old Great-aunt Eliza, who used to wear men's boots indoors and out and took her baths standing up at the sink in the scullery, sound like an offshoot of royalty."

The family relocates to Yarmouth – "which I shall call Southport" – the biggest town in Alfie's district. This raised concern in this reader, who well-remembers grade six geography class.

Southport is much more to Miranda's liking. She now lives one block from Main Street in a once grand rented house (a deal, owing to it being across the street from the jail yard), and so has frequent opportunity to show herself off. Her flapper dress is thin, and her heels too narrow to be practical, but she really cuts a figure next to the heavy coated, rubber booted fishermen's wives negotiating the slush of Main Street.

Herein lies the problem. There's not much call for veterinary supplies in an area so reliant on fishing. The land is poor and the farms hardscrabble. Alfie is miserable, casting about for customers, as his inheritance evaporates. Miranda tries to help by working part-time at Betty's Beauty Parlor, but all too quickly Alfie's position at The B.F. Whitney Company quite literally kills him.  

Miranda is devastated – again, she really did love Alfie – yet has the strength to rally. She takes in roomers and increases her hours at Betty's.* The job feeds her ego. After all, who better to work in a beauty salon than the town beauty? Without Alfie to rely upon, she reveals herself as a very clever woman, adding layer after layer to her facade, never being caught out on one of her many, many fabrications.

The Calgary Herald, 11 May 1961

This is, of course, Miranda's story, but only as seen by her youngest. As she grows into womanhood, Rose gradually comes to see – and then comes to terms – with not only her mother's imperfections, but how she is perceived, fairly or not, by others.

Reviews of Miranda were without exception enthusiastic; Walter O'Hearne raved in The New York Times (16 April 1961), as did fellow Leacock winner Joan Walker in The Globe & Mail (1 July 1961). Not that any of this meant anything in the long run.

Sadly, unfairly, Miranda is yet another novel that was printed once and then never again. In this respect, it is very much a pearl among the stones.

Will a publisher please pick it up.

*The 1931 census, records the author, age 20, as working as a hairdresser

and living in a Yarmouth rooming house.

About the author:

Object and Access: A butter-coloured cloth hardcover with violet type. I'm guessing that the jacket illustration is the author's own doing, though I could be wrong.

I'm pleased to see that Yarmouth's Izaak Walton Killam Memorial Library has copies of all the author's books.

As of this writing, I see just one copy listed for sale online. Near Fine, at US$9.25, it's a steal. The seller is located in Greenwood, Nova Scotia, which I shall call Cheswick.

Related post:

A Crooked Cousin in a Country Cottage

The Best Reads of 2023: Publishers Take Note

The season brings a flurry of activity, which explains why I haven't posted one review this month. Still, I did manage to tackle twenty-four neglected Canadian books in 2023, which isn't so small a number. James De Mille's A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder (1888) was the oldest. Were I judging books by covers it would've been considered the finest. James Moffatt's The Marathon Murder (1972) was the youngest and ugliest. But then, what can one expect of a book that went from proposal to printing press in under seven days.

De Mille's dystopian nightmare is available from McGill-Queen's University Press as the third volume in the Centre for Editing Early Canadian Texts series.  

I first read the novel back when it was a McClelland & Stewart New Canadian Library mainstay. New Canadian Library is no more; it was killed by Penguin Random House Canada. McClelland & Stewart – "The Canadian Publisher" – has been reduced to an imprint owned by Bertelsmann SE & Co. KGaA, but that hasn't prevented the German conglomerate from trying to make a buck – two bucks to be precise – selling it as an ebook.

Dystopia.

Three other books covered here this year are also in print, but from American publishers:

The Weak-Eyed Bat - Margaret Millar
New York: Doubleday, 1942
New York: Syndicate, 2017

The Cannibal Heart - Margaret Millar
New York: Random House, 1949
New York: Syndicate, 2017

The Heart of Hyacinth - Onoto Watanna [Winnifred Eaton]
New York: Harper, 1903
Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000

I'm wrong,  The Heart of Hyacinth is by far the best-looking book read this year; it was also the very best novel I read this year.

Note to Canadian publishers: Winnifred Eaton's novels are all in the public domain. 

What follows is the annual list of the three books most deserving of revival: 

Pagan Love
John Murray Gibbon
Toronto: McClelland &

   Stewart, 1922

A novel penned by a man who spent his working life writing copy for the CPR,  Pagan Love provides a cynical look at public relations and the self-help industry. Add to these its century-old take on gender bending and you have a work unlike any other.

Dove Cottage
Jan Hilliard [Hilda Kay

   Grant]
London: Abelard-Schulman,

   1958 

The fourth of the author's six novels, this once centres on a man, his wife, and his mother-in-law, whose lives are elevated by way of an inheritance. Black humour abounds!

The Prairie Wife
Arthur Stringer
London: Hodder & Stoughton, [n.d.]

The first novel in Stringer's Prairie Trilogy. Dick Harrison describes it as the author's "most enduring work," despite the fact that it hasn't seen print in over seven decades. I'd put off reading The Prairie Wife because I have a thing against stories set on "the farm." What a mistake! An unexpected delight!

Last December's list of three featured Grant Allen's Philistea (1884), Stephen Leacock's Moonbeams from the Larger Lunacy (1915), and Horace Brown's Whispering City (1947). 

Ten months later, Whispering City returned to print as the eighteenth Ricochet Books title. Yours truly provided the introduction. It can be ordered through the usual online booksellers, but why not from the publisher itself? Here's the link.

As for the New Year... well, I'm back to making resolutions:

• More French books (and not only in translation).
• More non-fiction (and not only the work of crazies). 

That's it.

Keep kicking against the pricks!

Bonne année!

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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
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The Highest Compliments of the Season (2011)
A 75-Year-Old Virgin and Others I Acquired (2010)
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By Any Other Name: Onoto Watanna's Hyacinth

Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Self-Improvement
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Go West, Young Woman
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Whispering City: Horace Brown's Second Encore
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