Yeah, I Know the Muffled Man

The Mystery of the Muffled Man

Max Braithwaite

Toronto: Little, Brown, 1962

160 pages

Fifty-five years ago, The Mystery of the Muffled Man vied with Joe Holliday's Dale of the Mounted in Hong Kong as a Christmas gift for young, bookish nephews. I doubt either won, but it would not surprise

me if the former achieved greater sales. After thirteen volumes, Holliday's Dale of the Mounted books were getting tired; I think it worth noting that the Hong Kong adventure would be his last. Braithwaite's, on the other hand, was part of the Secret Circle, a new and exciting series driven by a survey of booksellers, librarians, teachers and, most importantly, Scarborough school children and their parents.

Results in hand, General Editor Arthur Hammond, set about recruiting what was described in a November 1962 press release as "the best available Canadian authors."

It seems that most were too busy.

The Secret Circle stable was very small,  containing veteran workhorses like Robert Collins, Lawrence Earl, David Gammon, and Scott Young. Hammond himself contributed two of the series' twelve books, while dictating length, plot points, and endings for the others.

The extent of Hammond's influence on The Mystery of the Muffled Man might make for an interesting paper, but I'm not the one to write it. Braithwaite's first novel, preceding Why Shoot the Teacher by three years, this one is a bit of a bore. It begins with a chilly wait for a train in

a northern Ontario mining town. Young Chris Summerville has been sent by his parents to meet his cousin, equally-young Carol Fitzpatrick, who will be visiting while her parents spend the Christmas holidays in Bermuda. Eventually, the train arrives, but before Chris meets Carol there is an altercation that will hang over the remainder of the novel. Chris's overly-friendly dog, Arthur, runs to greet the new arrivals, only to be clubbed by a "muffled man" who had emerged from the train. Carol later tells her cousin of some suspicious behaviour the muffled man exhibited on the train: pouring over maps, avoiding RCMP officers, and pretending to have a broken left arm.

There's little more worth reporting, except to say that The Mystery of the Muffled Man is a novel bereft of mystery. The character who clubs a dog is obviously the villain. Why is he in the northern Ontario mining town? Well, the only thing we know of the area's history is that there had been a bank robbery ten years earlier, and that the money was never found.

By far the most interesting thing about the novel is how little the muffled man figures. Accompanied by friend Dumont LePage, Chris and Carol decide to go ice fishing, get lost in the woods, climb an old fire tower to get their bearings, and discover an abandoned gold mine. After a cave-in separates him from the rest of the group, Chris sees the muffled man digging to retrieve the stolen loot and empties the bullets from his unattended rifle. Chris's father and two RCMP officers show up in the nick of time, resulting in this climactic passage:

"You stay here with the boy," Constable Scott said to Mr Summerville. "We'll deal with him." And, holding their guns at the ready, the two uniformed men moved down the tunnel.
     In five minutes it was over. The muffled man, trapped by the wall of fallen stone, and with an empty gun in his hands, was quickly overpowered.

Before dismissing The Mystery of the Muffled Man as the weakest novel read this year, it's only fair to acknowledge that it wasn't written with me in mind. The survey that informed the Secret Circle was conducted before I was even born. What's more, I've never so much as considered living in Scarborough.

Trivia: Jack McClelland once encouraged a hard-up Norman Levine to contribute to the series.

Object: A compact hardcover with eight illustrations of varying quality by Joseph Rosenthal. My copy, not nearly so nice as the one pictured above, was purchased three years ago at a London book store. Price: 60¢

Access: WorldCat records a grand total of two Canadian libraries holding the Little, Brown edition. It also lists a 1981 Bantam-Seal paperback, and something titled The Muffled Man (Scarborough: Nelson, 1990).

Interestingly, no copies of the Bantam-Seal and Nelson editions are on offer from online booksellers. The original Little, Brown came and went with a single printing. Though not many copies are listed online, it is cheap. Very Good copies begin at US$8.00. At US$30.10, the most expensive is an inscribed copy offered by an Ontario bookseller.

Remarkably, the novel has been translated into Dutch (Avontuur in een goudmijn) and Swedish (Mysteriet med den maskerade mannen).

Related posts:

Braithwaite's True First

Condensed CanLit
Dale's Dumb Luck; or, A Mountie Messes Up

The Paratrooper, the Professor and the Publisher: The Nasty Public Battle Over The Quebec Plot

The first review of my first book was negative. The reviewer's disappointment had to do with my having written the book I wanted to write rather than the book he had wanted to read.

The second review of my first book was written by a man who was identified in same as the model for a throughly dislikeable character in George Galt's novel Scribes and Scoundrels. The reviewer made no mention of this, though he did question my existence.

"Do not respond," a senior writer friend advised.

I didn't.

The reviews that followed were very positive. I remember nothing of them other than that – very positive – but I do remember the two negative reviews in detail. For example, I can tell you that the first reviewer got the price and page count wrong. I can also tell you that I was taken to task for not including an index. The book has one, but he'd read an advance copy. His was an amateur's mistake, published in the closest thing Canada has to "the organ of the trade".

Bad reviews stay with you in a way good reviews don't. I know not to read them. I don't read good reviews either. Every now and then I feel bad for not acknowledging a reviewer's kind words... and here I'm certain that they are all kind words.

"Do not respond."

Good advice I pass on to others. And yet all these years later I still fantasize about taking on the critics in question, which is why I so enjoyed Leo Heaps' thrust and parry with Patrick O'Flaherty found in 38-year-old editions of the Globe & Mail.

A professor at Memorial University, Patrick O'Flaherty was tasked with reviewing The Quebec Plot for the paper (22 July 1978). I have no idea why; I don't see that O'Flaherty had reviewed thrillers in the past. His opening sentence betrays a certain ignorance of the genre: "Leo Heaps, who has been reading James Bond stories and learning a little Canadian geography and history, has decided to write a thriller, some would say a roman a clef about the Quebec situation."

Ignoring the obvious (The Quebec Plot owes nothing to Ian Fleming), what irks is the insinuation that Heaps, then living in London, needed something of a refresher in things Canadian. This is very same thinking the most stupid of our cultural nationalists once employed against the great Mavis Gallant. Winnipeg-born Leo Heaps was the second son of A.A. Heaps. He was educated at Queen's and McGill, and lived most of his life in Toronto. At the risk of being accused of racism – more on that later – I find this quip about Heaps "learning a little Canadian geography and history" a bit rich coming from a man whose early education pre-dated his province joining Confederation. It's not O'Flaherty at his worst, but it's pretty bad. His lowest and laziest comes when he quotes two lines of dialogue out of context:

• "I hope to God there's no armed revolution in Quebec."
• "Let's get down to business."

This is a cheap trick that we've all seen before; indeed, Heaps himself recognizes it as such in his response. But before I get to that, O'Flaherty's conclusion is worth presenting in full:

Now, I'm the first to recognize that it is not always easy to come up with a decent conclusion to a review – look no further than mine of The Quebec Plot for evidence – but this one is a real head-scratcher. On the other hand, I'm no academic, which is why I so appreciated the University of Toronto's June V. Engel, who in a letter the Globe & Mail (1 Aug 1978) refers to Prof O'Flaherty's conclusion as "incomprehensible."

Engel wasn't alone in her criticism of the critic. An earlier letter found in the 28 July edition describes the professor's review as " jumbled, incoherent." The writer was someone named Caruso, who may or may not have been an academic him or herself.

By that time, Heaps had responded to the critic. In the 26 July 1978 edition of the Globe & Mail, he shrugs off everything to do with his knowledge of Canada, associations with Ian Fleming, Marian Engel, Charles Templeton and Little Orphan Annie creator Harold Gray, then presents a parting shot:

I have been away from Canada for some time and have grown accustomed to having my books read by literate people who are concerned both with their prose and the philosophical content of their reviews. If Mr. O'Flaherty is a professor of English in Newfoundland who is there to protect us from the academics who teach in our schools?

Fair question. I've been asking variations since my graduation from Beaconsfield High School.

Leo Heaps' letter drew no response from Patrick O'Flaherty, though Jack McClelland weighed in with a letter (4 Aug 1978), which reads in part:

At first I thought it was a bad Newfie joke. Then my reaction turned from disbelief to anger. Mr. O'Flaherty's judgement, in my opinion, ranks slightly below that of a Rhesus monkey and I have nothing against monkeys. 

Was the publisher being disingenuous? "It happens that although I am not the publisher, I have read The Quebec Plot," McClelland writes of a novel he would publish within a year. Might as well add that he also published the novel about the cardinal who doesn't want the world to know about the discovery of Jesus' bones and the one in which a woman tries to copulate with a bear.

Curiously, it was McClelland's letter that brought a response from professor. Notably tardy, here he is from the 24 August 1978 edition:

The letter from Jack McClelland (Aug. 4) comes out with abusive, racist talk – "Newfie," "monkey," etc. This letter, contemptible though it is, merits a few words of reply.
     In recent years I have reviewed a number of silly books published by McClelland and Stewart Ltd. rather harshly. Looking back over my reviews, my only regret is that they were not harsher.
     What does a reviewer do when he is sent a trashy book to review? Normally, I, for one, return the item to the editor with a note saying that it is not worth reviewing. But there is so much writing in Canada – especially at the "creative" level – and so much of it is published with the assistance of the Canadian taxpayer, that it is hard to resist occasionally damning bad books. And so I stand by my review of Leo Heaps' book.

I imagine the professor does to this day, ignoring the simple facts that The Quebec Plot received no taxpayer support and was never sold as anything other than a thriller.

The last word is owed Leo Heaps himself, as published in this letter in the 4 September 1978 edition:

I cannot resist taking a parting shot at my friend Patrick O'Flaherty who reviewed my book The Quebec Plot in your columns. I will miss the professor from Memorial College, Newfoundland, at his departure.
    Professor O'Flaherty has in his letter to your newspaper on Aug. 24 presented such a perfect and inviting target that I felt it was irresistable. His remarks either hide a character of infinite subtlety and wit or one of enormous pomposity and self-righteousness. Personally, I am inclined to favor the latter view. Mr. O'Flaherty has sounded like the budding parliamemtary candidate he is when he protests against the waste of taxpayers' money on behalf of Canadian authors struggling to make ends meet. (Unfortunately, I have never had any grants. All my books have been published abroad, except one, which won a Governor-General's Award.) Perhaps the professor might tell us where the subsidy came from to publish his somewhat obscure anthology of Newfoundland and Labrador writing, which he co-edited some years back.
     If Patrick O'Flaherty remains as severe as he is, "untroubled," as Browning said, "by the spark," and if he is allowed to indecently expose himself in book review columns, then one can begin to understand his concern about Canadian prose. One only has to read what the professor writes.

Yes, Heaps is owed the last word... but I can't quite bring myself to let him have it.

In January 2009, at a dinner celebrating the sixtieth birthday of the aforementioned senior writer, I was introduced to the second critic of my first book. On learning my name he paused – here it comes, I thought – and then said: "You wouldn't be any relation to Reverend David Busby? I was one of his altar boys."

"Yes," I replied, "he was my uncle."

"Nice man," said the critic.

"Yes, very nice," I said.

And then we parted.

Related post:

Thriller Most Foreign

Langevin's Masterpiece; McClelland's Disappointment

Orphan Street [Une Chaîne dans le parc]

André Langevin [trans., Alan Brown]

Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1976

287 pages

This review now appears, revised and rewritten, in my new book:

The Dusty Bookcase:

A Journey Through Canada's

Forgotten, Neglected, and Suppressed Writing

Available at the very best bookstores and through

Biblioasis, Amazon, Chapters/Indigo, and McNally-Robinson.

Related posts:

Another Handful of Dust
Gabrielle Roy at 100 (and One Day)

Hugh Garner: Article Lost, Article Found

Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1962

Toronto: Ryerson, 1968

Markhan, ON: PaperJacks, 1983

Toronto: Dundurn, 2011

A Bonus:

Regarding the sales of "The Silence On The Shore" [sic] I think it has done remarkably well, considering that its publisher didn't want to sell any copies of it at all. I think, however, that had I not wanted to sell it I would have kept its sales down below 1,400, even if I would have to burn the books. 

     My personal feelings to you are friendly, but from a business and professional point of view I think it better that we do not involve each other with the other any more. 

– Hugh Garner, letter to Jack McClelland, 28 August 1963

Dirty Old Town

The Town Below [Au pied de la pente douce]
Roger Lemelin [trans. Samuel Putnam]
New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1948

We open on thieves fleeing the scene of a crime. They scramble, descending on Quebec's Lower Town. Cops wait below, but can't catch them. No surprise there. These crooks are young, spry, and this part of the city, St-Sauveur, is their territory. They take refuge in the Lévesque family's garage; Lise Lévesque provides cover. By way of thanks, she's offered a share of the goods: apples stolen from the Dominican brothers'  orchard.

Lise, belle Lise, has just returned from convent school. Two of the gang, best pals Denis Boucher and Jean Colin, are immediately smitten. I was too, and prepared for a tale of friendship torn apart by the pursuit of the most beautiful girl in St-Sauveur. Instead, I encountered the finest social satire I've read in years. This isn't to say that the rivalry between Denis and Jean doesn't figure, rather that it doesn't dominate. For the better half of the book it is nothing more than another thread in the tangle of relationships, events and interests that clogs this working class neighbourhood.

The Globe & Mail, 12 April 1948

The Town Below is a first novel; as is my habit I made allowances. The chaos of that first scene sets a bad course. Lemelin crams and confuses by trying to accomplish too much all at once. Focus shifts, jarringly, between paragraphs, and there are simply too many characters. But who to cut? All are so fascinating! My personal favourites are Cécile and Peuplière Latruche, spinster sisters who have singled out one of St-Sauveur's dead consumptive kids for sainthood:

Prior to the discovery of their little saint, these parasites, disappointed at being refused admission to the Daughters of Mary and the Ladies of the Holy Family, had felt themselves to be of little importance, without an object in life. In view of this, it is not so hard to understand their sudden and furious devotion to this dead youth, whom they in a manner of speaking had rehabilitated. These elderly spinsters had a purpose now; and if their past was wholly taken up with their virginity, the Ark of the Covenant for them, their future was filled with the disembodied form of a heavenly stripling. 

Avant la découverte de leur petit saint, ces parasites, dépitées d'être refusées parmi les Enfants de Marie et les Femmes de la Sainte Famille, s'étaient senties comme diminuées. Aussi ne songeait-on pas à convaincre de futilité ces vieilles filles dont tout le passé était rempli par le conservatisme de leur virginité et dont tout l'avenir se remplirait des formes désincarnées d'un céleste jouvenceau.

I offer the original French because the greatest problem with The Town Below isn't Lemelin, rather translator Samuel Putnam. An American francophile who, one presumes, knew much more about France than Canada. After misspelling Wilfrid Laurier's name in the Introductory Note, he writes:

The term "restaurant" has here been employed in the Canadian sense, that of a small shop where candies, ice-cream comes, liqueurs, and the like are sold.

I have no idea what he's talking about.

Putnam stinks when it comes to dialogue – "Les flics, les gars!" becomes "It's the cops, fellows!" – but his greatest weakness is verbosity and explication. Au pied de la pente douce is 90,000 words long; The Town Below is 125,000. If anything, one would expect the reverse.

The beginning of the novel's fifteenth chapter has Denis walking home, books in hand, when he encounters Lise:

— Les beaux livres! Prêtuez-les moi.
Il eut sourire embarrassé.
— Ils sont à l'index.
Ell masqua son désire plus ardent de les lire.

Putnam's translation adds both dialogue and description:

     "What have you there?" she asked.
     "Some books."
     "How nice! Lend them to me, will you?"
     His own smile was an embarrassed one. "They are on the Index."
     That made her all the more anxious to read them, but she was careful not to let him perceive it.

The exchange serves as a reminder, as if any were needed, that this is a novel written and set in Duplessis-era Quebec. That it was published during that dark time, escaped the censor, sold over 25,000 copies in year one, and received the Prix David and the Prix de la langue française has had me questioning my understanding of the Grande Noirceur.

The Gazette, 15 May 1946

Putnam's translation, published by McClelland & Stewart (Canada) and Reynolds & Hitchcock (United States), garnered a good amount of attention, but soon slipped out of print. In 1961, The Town Below was revived as book number 26 in the New Canadian Library. It was reprinted four times in twelve years before being dropped from the series. One wonders why; there were other titles that didn't perform nearly so well.

Should we blame Constance Beresford-Howe, who in reviewing the NCL edition dismissed the novel as one that had a shock value long past?

Nah.

Margaret Laurence, whose opinion Jack McClelland regarded highly, thought The Town Below "a sprawling and savagely funny novel grotesque and evasive, endlessly interesting."

Lemelin's debut is every one of those things. A bit too sprawling perhaps, but I don't hesitate in recommending. Read it in the original if you can; read it as The Town Below if you can't. What you'll find is one of the finest first novels to have ever come out of Quebec.

It's so good that even a crummy translation is worth your time.

Bloomer:

There was silence, possibly filled by the stammerings of a limp and deflated Pritontin. He was heartbroken over what had happened in the church and no longer counted on anything less than a miracle. That firecracker had destroyed something more than his trousers.

Trivia: The Reynal & Hitchock edition confuses Lemelin's birthplace, Quebec City's St-Saveur, with the town of the same name three hundred kilometres to the west.

More trivia: Janet Friskney's New Canadian Library: The Ross-McClelland Years, 1952-1978, informs that Glen Shortliffe, who penned the NCL introduction, alerted M&S to "lapses in idiom and mistaken translations of particular words" found in Putnam's work. These were addressed by an in-house editor before publication.

Still more trivia: Lemelin's original title was Les grimpeurs.

Object: A 302-page hardcover in grey cloth with burgundy print. The cheap paper stock used by Reynald & Hitchcock makes for a book that is much slimmer than one might expect. My copy once belonged to W.F. Beckwith, who lived at 4194 Melrose Ave., Montreal, two blocks south from where I lived when attending university. It was bought for three dollars in 1988, the year after I graduated.

I can't believe it took so long to get around to reading it.

Access: First published in 1944 by les Éditions de l'Arbre, Au pied de la pent douce has ever been out of print. Its current publisher is Stanké. Samuel Putnam's translation was reissued two years ago with a new Introduction by Michael Gnarowski as part of Dundurn's Voyageur Classics series.

Two copies of the Reynal & Hitchcock edition are listed online; the better of the two – "Good" – is priced at twenty American dollars. The McClelland & Stewart hardcover is nowhere in sight. New Canadian Library copies can be had for as little as a Yankee buck.

Held by the best of our bigger public libraries and nearly all of our universities.

I have three.

Brian Moore: The Last of a Paperback Writer

Murder in Majorca

Michael Bryan [pseud. Brian Moore]

New York: Dell, 1957

158 pages

This review now appears, revised and rewritten, in my new book:

The Dusty Bookcase:

A Journey Through Canada's

Forgotten, Neglected, and Suppressed Writing

Available at the very best bookstores and through

Biblioasis, Amazon, Chapters/Indigo, and McNally-Robinson.

Related posts:

Brian Moore's True First

Murderers Move in on Montreal

Parisian French, not Québécois French
No Lady Before Judith Hearne

Murders Move in on Montreal… Again

Freedom to Read Week: Norman Levine Accuses Canadian Booksellers of Censorship

The Globe & Mail, 30 May 1959

A baffled reviewer:

Jean Swanson in The Saskatoon Star-Phoenix, 20 December 1958

Advertising Norman Levine

Jack McClelland never tried to hide his dislike for Norman Levine's Canada Made Me; that his house acted as Canadian distributor was the result of an early promise made to its UK publisher. McClelland & Stewart took 500 copies, shipped 300, sent a further thirty or so out as review copies and sat back. There were no ads.

The above, put together by my daughter Astrid for the current issue of Canadian Notes & Queries, was inspired by a 12 December 1958 letter Levine sent Jack McClelland:

Writes Levine: "Do you mind me suggesting the kind of ad I'd like to see appear in those Canadian papers."

No question mark.

I think he knew the answer.

Astrid followed Levine's text and rough layout, all the while considering these McClelland & Stewart ads from 1958... four decades before she was born.

The Gazette, 1 November 1958

The Gazette, 15 November 1958

The Gazette, 13 December 1958

More in the new issue of Canadian Notes & Queries.

Subscribe today!

Recognizing Norman Levine

The new issue of Canadian Notes & Queries landed in my mail box on Friday – a few days late owing, I suspect, to an ill-tempered sorting machine.

My heart sank... until I discovered that everything had arrived intact. Now I boast: "officially repaired". How special is that!

I always look forward to Canadian Notes & Queries, but this issue was more eagerly anticipated than most. Its focus is Norman Levine, a writer who has never received anything close to the attention he deserves. Happily, this issue goes some way in redressing the deficit, with:

"Kaddish (A Sketch Towards a Portrait of Norman Levine)"
by John Metcalf
"All the Heart is in the Things: Mapping Levine-land" by Cynthia Flood
"Chasing Norman: A Book-collector's Memoir" by Philip Fernandez
"Remembering Norman Forgetting" by T.F. Rigelhof
"Fiction, Faction, Autobiography: Norman Levine at McGill University, 1946-1949" by Robert H. Michel

and

Ethan Rilly's adaptation of Canada Made Me, episode six in his "The North Wing: Selections from the Lost Library of CanLit Graphic Novels"

Much more modest, my contribution covers correspondence between Levine, Jack McClelland and Putnum's John Huntington relating to Canada Made Me.

Further riches are found in a new short story by Lynn Coady, poetry by Mathew Henderson and a piece of creative non-fiction by my old pal Andrew Steinmetz.

You'll also find my review of Fraser Sutherland's Lost Passport: The Life and Words of Edward Lacey.

And finally, there's this issue's limited edition collectable, Signal to Noise, an excerpt from C.P. Boyko's forthcoming collection Psychology and Other Stories.

My copy is number 159.

The collectables are only for those with subscriptions.

You know you want one.

Here's the link.

The Mystery Writer Mystery Unravels

'Keeping an Eye Out for Pamela Fry' pays off:

A writer friend informs that Pamela Fry, author of Harsh Evidence and The Watching Cat, is the very same Pamela Fry who once worked as an editor at McClelland & Stewart. Though Miss Fry's years with the publisher were not many – 1965 to 1971 – she did work with several canonical favourites, including Sinclair Ross, Ernest Buckler and Farley Mowat. I imagine she'll be best remembered not for her mysteries, but as the editor of The Edible Woman, Margaret Atwood's debut novel. A high point to be sure.

The low? Look no further than Eric Koch's ill-fated satire The French Kiss (1969), which I mention here only because the book just might lay claim to the worst launch in Canadian publishing history. In Jack, McClelland biographer James King tells us that The French Kiss was on bookstore shelves when legal advice came down that members of Quebec's Johnson family might have been slandered in its pages:

The three thousand books were recalled, small slips pasted over the offending passages and the copies then returned to retailers. Jack only learned of the potentially disastrous situation at the book's launch at the home of the book's editor Pamela Fry. He called her aside, told her the book would have to be recalled and acted quickly and decisively to prevent a lawsuit.

According to King, Pamela Fry left M&S in for a position on a federal government task force. In his autobiography, Drawing on Type, designer Frank Newfeld places her c.1980 at the National Gallery of Canada. From there the trail grows cold.

Thanks go out to my "writer friend" and to fellow sleuth Richard Blanchard.

Related post: Keeping an Eye Out for Pamela Fry

NOT FOR RESALE

Many years ago, a publisher friend told me that he never took home advance readers copies. "Such ugly things", he sniffed. True enough back then, but things have changed considerably since. Where once reviewers, librarians and buyers were presented with objects like the above, they're now just as likely to receive something that might at casual glance be mistaken for a trade paperback. Consider the Chatto and Windus "UNCORRECTED BOOK PROOF" for Barney's Version...

... this ARC of Dennis Bock's The Ash Garden...

...or the ARC of A Gentleman of Pleasure, my forthcoming biography of John Glassco.

(Now, I ask you, who wouldn't want to take that home? Publication date: 1 April.)

Its arrival a couple of weeks ago has had me looking over some of the ARCs in my collection. The most interesting by far came out of McClelland and Stewart in the 'seventies. In those days the company didn't issue many ARCs – not surprising, given its reputation for missing pub dates – but those they did produce garnered attention. Take the "ADVANCE PROOF" of Charles Templeton's Act of God, which featured a cover letter cover inviting the recipient to guess the novel's sales.

Both copies in my collection are signed by Jack McClelland (and Charles Templeton); I've seen others upon which the publisher's name is scrawled by an unknown hand.

Act of God was a great commercial success, though I expect the prediction of 47,300 copies sold in Canada before year's end was a tad high. Ever the optimist that Jack McClelland. How else to explain the very generous $50,000 Seal Book Prize awarded in 1978 to Aritha van Herk for Judith, her first novel?

The news was announced in grand style, as reported by the Canadian Press:

Aretha van Herk, a 23-year-old Edmonton housewife and university student, good-humoredly climbed a ladder in a grimy downtown parking lot in Montreal recently to endorse her cheque – displayed on a massive billboard announcing "Congratulations Aritha!"... The Guinness Book of World Records will be asked to verify that the actual cheque – the billboard – is the largest cheque ever made.

The publisher built on the story by offering a signed ARC produced exclusively for women whose first name was Judith. "We want those who share her name to meet her first", says the cover.

Just how limited was this "limited press run edition"? In Jack: A Life with Writers, James King puts the number at 3500 – adding that the publisher received 4500 requests, including a good number from cheats looking to cop free copies.

I paid $3.95 for mine back in 1990. It still has a place in my home.

Atwood et al. Shill for Apple

An advert published twenty-five years ago this month in Books in Canada finds McClelland and Stewart under the sway of the "computer evangelicals of Apple Canada Inc." I had no idea such people existed. Could it be that I was out when they came to call? My first computer, bought the following year, was a PC. I've since seen the light.

The Mysterious Mister Nablo

The Long November

James Benson Nablo

New York: Dutton, 1946

I'm going to step out on a limb here and state, with confidence, that this was one of the most popular Canadian novels published after the Second World War. Evidence? I can offer nothing more than its publishing history, which over six years included three Dutton printings, two News Stand Library editions and a very attractive Signet paperback. And yet, we remember nothing of James Benson Nablo; The Long November, his only novel, has been out of print for over five decades.

Nablo's narrator is Joe Mack, a wounded, unarmed Canadian soldier hiding from Nazis in a half-destroyed Italian home. Don't be fooled, this is not a war novel, but Horatio Alger's nightmare. As Joe waits out the enemy, he looks back on his 34 years, playing particular attention to his efforts to make something of himself. It isn't that Joe cares so much about money, rather he sees it as a means of winning the love of his life, beautiful blonde Steffie Gibson. Like Duddy Kravitz, who would follow, Joe realizes his riches by "borrowing" the last bit of money he needs to achieve his dream – and, as with Duddy, he loses the girl as a result.

The Long November is a rough book, told in a style that resembles tough guy film noir narration; only Nablo uses words that would not pass the Hays Code. In a 1949 letter to Jack McClelland, Earle Birney provides a list: "Jesus Christ, Christ Almighty, By Jesus, for Christ's sake, goddamit, Bugger all, sonofabitch, suck-holing, stumblebum, crap, shacked up, quickie, a lay, shove it up your keister, tired of being screwed-without-being-kissed." May I add that in one of his many moments of self-recrimination Joe describes his work as "of much use as a tit on a spinster"? Writing in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, John D. Paulus complained: "If this is modern 'realistic writing,' this reviewer will take vanilla."

And I'll take Rocky Road.

Nearly everything that's been written about Nablo is found on the book's dust jacket. Other references to the author are precious and few. In Imagining Canadian Literature, editor Sam Solecki provides nothing more than a fleeting footnote, referring to "J.V. Nablo [sic] (b. 1910)", an author who has not "been traced". Nablo was indeed born in 1910, making him exactly the same age as his protagonist. Here the future author is recorded in the 1911 census, as the daughter of George and Margery Nablo of 8 Centre Street in Niagara Falls.

I've found little else, though I can say that he never published another book. It seems Nablo left the world of letters for a life in film. In 1954, his short story "The Wheel Man" was adapted by a young Blake Edwards as Drive a Crooked Road. The flick has Mickey Rooney as an honest auto mechanic who finds himself driving the getaway car in a bank robbery. Blame it on a dame.

The god-awful A Bullet for Joey (1955) followed. Of the films made from Nablo's stories, it's by far the most interesting. Why? Well, for one it stars Edward G. Robinson as a French Canadian RCMP detective named Raoul Leduc. Need more? It's a Cold War thriller set in Montreal, and features George Raft as an American mobster who is hired by the Reds to kidnap a nuclear scientist. Who can resist?

A Bullet for Joey was followed by a forgotten western, Raw Edge (1956), which starred Vancouver beauty Yvonne de Carlo (née Peggy Middleton). One wonders whether Nablo lived to see it; industry reports from the autumn of 1956 refer to "the late James Benson Nablo".

The writer's executor seems to have had a busy time of it, selling options for Nablo stories like "Morning Star", which was to have been James Cagney's directorial debut. In the end, there was only one more film: a Victor Mature vehicle entitled China Doll (1958). Its release coincided with a "novelization by Edgar Jean Bracco of a screenplay by Kitty Buhler". Published as a 35¢ Berkley paperback, it makes no mention of James Benson Nablo.

Object: A fairly slim hardcover in green cloth with light brown lettering. What makes the book interesting is that Dutton changed covers for the second and third printings – both in March 1946 – replacing the battlefield landscape with an image of Steffie Gibson looking like a well-covered streetwalker.

Access: Fourteen copies are held in Canadian public and university libraries. It seems that the uncommon first edition exists only in rotten condition. The best copy currently listed online is a bargain at C$30; others lack dust jackets or are ex-library. Decent copies of the News Stand and Signet editions can be had for under C$10. I've yet to come across the 1957 Double Flame paperback.

Related posts:

Nablo in Hollywood

Nablo in Paperback

Edward G. Robinson Gets His Man

The Long November in Late August
The Last of James Benson Nablo?