The Double Flame Mystery

The first of five sent by Welland bookseller Steven Temple, this photo of James Benson Nablo's The Long November has had me pouring over old notes. Four years ago, my nose was to the ground in dogged pursuit of the figures behind its publisher, Double Flame of Hollywood, California. I enlisted help in the hunt from my man in L.A., Stephen J. Gertz. We got so far as to amass a list of suspects, but then I got hungry and was forced to return nose to grindstone.

Canadian writers should be ever mindful of the fate of John Richardson.

What's someone so focussed with things Canadian care about a Tinseltown publisher, anyway?

Good of you to ask.

Double Flame issued just three books – The Long November, Port of Call by Stephen Mark, and Serge C. Wolsey's Call House Madam – each of which had appeared six or seven years earlier as News Stand Library paperbacks. There's got to be a link between the two fly-by-night publishers, right?

The Long November is by far the best of the three titles, but it's Port of Call that holds my interest. It first appeared – more or less – as Overnight Escapade, one of the strangest books I've read this year. It's not a novel, but a very long short story packaged with some very short short stories and others of a conventional length. Port of Call and Other Selected Stories on the title page, the Double Flame edition not only renames the lead, but drops a couple of others.

It's easy to see why Double Flame was so attracted to the Nablo and Wolsey titles. First published by Dutton in 1946, The Long November enjoyed three hardcover printings and numerous mass market editions (and is back in print with a new Introduction by yours truly). Call House Madam, purportedly the story of the career of L.A. brothel keeper Beverly Davis, enjoyed even greater sales with all sorts of editions stretching from the very early 'forties to the very late 'sixties. "Over 400,000 copies sold at $3.95 " claims the 1963 Popular Library paperback.

But why Overnight Escapade? The book came and went in April 1950; unlike many of its titles, News Stand Library never even bothered issuing an American edition. The 1957 Double Flame repackaging is the second and last we've seen of Stephen Mark and his strange stories.

Looking over these photos has me itching to reopen the Double Flame file.

But now, it's time for lunch. Gotta eat, you know.

Note: My thanks to Steven Temple for the photographs. Those interested in purchasing the Nablo and Mark Double Flames are encouraged to contact the bookseller through his website.

Related posts:

The Mysterious Mister Nablo

The Long November in Late August

A Sailor's Story

Milton Douglas, Canadian Author?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Toronto is mentioned.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Sailor's Story

Overnight Escapade

Stephen Mark

Toronto: News Stand Library, 1950

The publisher comes clean on the title page. "Overnight Escapade" is no novel, but the longest of a number of stories bound in a cheap paperback that is sure to come apart in your hands. 

I admit to being shocked by its beginning: "The glory hole stank more than usual from the sweat of men".

No seaman, I was unaware of "glory hole" as a nautical term.

"Overnight Escapade" is less about ships than shore leave. Central character sailor Steve Green is a man adrift with no attachment to anyone or anything:

Ten years I'd been going to sea – looking for something. I didn't know what when I started – I still don't know, but there's that lousy feeling I get in my stomach and in my brain every now and then.  

Now, some might call that a hangover, but Steve is no boozehond. While fellow crewmen check out the public houses of London, the latest port of call, he continues his aimless wandering on dry land. He's taking a breather in front of the Criterion Theatre at Piccadilly Circus when a long black Daimler draws up. Inside a veiled woman with voice "like Margaret Sullivan [sic] only a thousand times more sexy" beckons.

Who can resist!

The mystery woman takes him to a Regent's Park mansion, up a darkened staircase, through a gathering of men and women in evening dress, and into her warm bed.

Seconds of pleasure follow.

This is no slight on Steve – such is the pace of his overnight escapade that there's barely time for a quickie. He hasn't even hitched up his pants before the mystery woman, Elspeth, asks for a favour. He soon finds himself smuggling a package past the well-dressed group. Per instructions, he takes a cab to Denman Street, where he delivers same to one Anthony Masker, the most unattractive transvestite I've yet encountered in our literature.

This was a fruit factory and it looked as if I was the guy about to be served for dessert.

Though Steve is rather rude in declining Anthony's invitation to a bit of fun with a "pretty young queen" in Chinese pyjamas, he politely accepts a drink… which turn out to be a mickey finn. When he comes to, he finds Anthony gone and the queen "as cold as a prostitute's kiss – dead as yesterday's news." Not one hour has passed since our hero enjoyed the pleasures of Elspeth's flesh.

(cliquez pour agrandir)

As I say, "Overnight Escapade" is fast paced. Before the night is up, Steve will have run into a pal in a pub, accompanied a floozy to a hotel room, and been abducted no less than three times. He'll have travelled by train, cab, ship and submarine. Our hero will have also visited a secret island full of Nazi planes and atomic bombs one hundred or so metres off the English coast.

Reading Steve's story I was reminded of the overnight escapade in Douglas Sanderson's Flee from Terror. It only works if the reader accepts a world in which ships bound from London reach the North Sea in well under an hour, and one can travel by rail from Clacton-on-Sea to Liverpool Street station in fifteen minutes. It only works if one believes that the House of Commons is 24/7 and Scotland Yard inspectors are at their desks by five in the morning. It only works if…

Of course, "Overnight Escapade" doesn't work at all. That is, unless the reader recognizes that Steve, our narrator, loses consciousness three more times in its telling – twice from blows to the head.

Favourite passage: 

Just as she gets to me she raises her arm and lifts her veil off her face.
     ZING!!!!
     I don't know what I was expecting but it sure didn't measure up to what I got. Hedy Lamarr is a bag compared to this – and I would never kick Hedy Lamarr out of bed. 

Favourite sentence:

When I reached the end of the dock I glanced back at my ship, squatting black and ugly, like an old woman relieving herself.

Bloomer:

The dames had to force themselves to follow Frank around the glory hole.

Object: A poorly produced 160-page mass market paperback, edited in typical NSL style.

Cover by Syd Dyke!

Access: News Stand Library printed separate editions for the Canadian and American markets, then let the novel slip away. Only one copy of the Canadian, the true first, is listed online. A Very Good copy at US$10, it's a bargain. Three copies of the American, all Very Good, are on offer at US$15 to US$20. They are to be considered if the Canadian is gone.

WorldCat lists one copy – the American edition – held at Library and Archives Canada. C'est tout.