N is for Nablo News

All kinds of activity here this past weekend in preparation of Friday's Gwethalyn Graham plaque dedication and Saturday's John Glassco event, but I somehow managed to slip in a bit of work relating  to James Benson Nablo. I can now report that The Long November, the Niagara Falls writer's only book, will be returning to print this coming spring as part of the Véhicule Press Ricochet Books series.

I could not be happier.

Set in Toronto, Chicago, Moreland Lakes (read: Kirkland Lake, Ontario), an unnamed Italian village and the author's hometown, The Long November is one of the most interesting novels of the post-war period. News Stand Library pitched it as "a tale of passion and virile drive". It's all that and more.

One of the unexpected pleasures of this exercise, this stroll through the neglected writing of our past, is that it has often brought contact with the children, grandchildren, nephews and nieces of the writers concerned. It was my good fortune that the daughter and grandson of James Benson Nablo spotted my posts on The Long November, the novel's paperback history and the author's career in Hollywood.

So it is that I spent an enjoyable few hours yesterday reading through five James Benson Nablo manuscripts on loan from Nancy Vichert, his daughter. As far as I've been able to determine, all are unpublished and have no connection with the stories that were adapted by Hollywood: Drive a Crooked Road, A Bullet for Joey, Raw Edge and China Doll.

After the success of The Long November – five editions in six years! – the native of Niagara Falls made his way to Hollywood. The duo-tang for one of the of the manuscripts features an address that places him within walking distance of Laurel Canyon Boulevard, not too far from Chateau Marmont:
 

8401 Ridpath Drive, Hollywood, CA
(cliquez pour agrandir)

James Benson Nablo's time in Tinseltown was not long, but he left his mark. Drive a Crooked Road, adapted by Blake Edwards and Richard Quine, was Columbia Pictures' great attempt to turn Mickey Rooney into an adult star. A Bullet for Joey places Edward G. Robinson and George Raft in Montreal as, respectively, a French Canadian detective and infamous gangster.

Nablo's talent was such that further adaptations appeared after his untimely death at the age forty-five.

I'm pleased to be involved with the return of The Long November. It's been more than a half-century. Long overdue.

Related posts:

The Mysterious Mister Nablo

Nablo in Hollywood

Nablo in Paperback

Sex, Violence and Some Very Strong Language

Torch of Violence
Gerald Laing [pseud. Tedd Steele]
Toronto: News Stand Library, 1949

Torch of Violence holds a secure place in literature as the first Canadian novel to feature the word "shit". History is made on the fifty-ninth page:

"You know me, Alf. I'll take so much and that's all. I don't care who it is... I'll take just so much shit and that's all. Am I right or am I wrong? Am I right or am I wrong, Alf?"

You expect some rough stuff in crime fiction, but here the language is particularly coarse and the violence extreme.

The novel opens with the bloody beating of a bar owner by mob boss Goldie Vincetti's boys. "Dirty dago bastards. Dirty bitches," mutters an elderly drunk. A kick to the stomach is quick to come. I'm not saying that the old man deserved it, but his slurred comment was hardly fair in that one of Vincetti's boys is a WASP by the name of Eric Benedict. A year or so earlier, young Eric, who has a bit of a record, was looking at ten years after the cops found drugs in his flat. He was saved by clean-living, married brother Chris, who took the rap and was sentenced to a year in Kingsville (not Kingston) Penitentiary for his trouble. The deal between the brothers was that Eric would go straight, finish high school and then study to be a chemical engineer. Instead, he's become tighter the ever with Vincetti and has added adultery to his list of sins by messing around with another man's wife.

Eric doesn't feel at all bad about the beatings or his brother, but the guilt and self-loathing brought through sleeping with "the bitch" weighs heavily. His retreat to a "beverage room" provides for the most interesting pages in the novel. Eric sits, beer in hand, watching others fight for a change:

     "I'm a Canadian. Jack. I don't give a dog damn whether you're a Scot or a Britisher or a Hungarian or a Chink. I'm a Canadian and that's what it said on my shoulder when I went overseas and this is Canada and if you don't like it           off back to lower Slobbovia where you come from." 

     "Ha, ha. A Canadian? What was your father... an Indian? This place might be called Canada, lad, but you're either an Englishman or a Frenchman or God knows what. The only Canadians here are the Indians, and if you're an Indian, they shouldn't be serving you in a beverage room. It's against the law."  

This may be hell of a sort, with brimstone that smoulders to this day, but it's a whole lot better than Kingsville Penitentiary. Behind its impenetrable walls, Chris shares a cell with a man who is descending into madness. You see, cellmate Trent Richards, just can't deal with the knowledge that Shirley, an old flame, once attended a petting party.

Cover copy pitches Torch of Violence as not just a crime novel, but "an intelligently sympathetic treatment of an important subject." That subject, infidelity, is one that pretty much every character must face. Chris has his own chance to cheat when Trent's replacement, a man named Bill English, tries to lure him into his bunk. After this fails, the new cellmate shares a rumour going around that Helen, Chris's wife, is sleeping with brother Eric. Big mistake. Chris beats English to a pulp, moves his bloodied body to his bunk, and covers it with a blanket.

Meanwhile, across town:

He screamed once as a bullet smashed against bone and then another bullet struck him full in the face and the red liquid made a hideous mask of his features. Only the eyes remained discernible and they were frightfully unhuman, wide open, staring as if at some nameless horror.

I won't reveal the victim's name, the identity of the assailant or the twist that brings this all about – don't want to spoil everything – but I can't resist sharing the novel's abrupt and absurd ending.

Chris has just tucked English into bed when he's brought to the warden under guard of a man named Baker. Readers who have no stomach for violence or poor punctuation will want to skip Chris's internal monologue:

I haven't any faith in God anymore, how could I have, but in case there is something, maybe the devil, I'll ask him for a special request. Let me find you two together, naked in each other's armsthe way you've been doing all this time. Oh, God, I hope I find you together . I'll kill you first Eric with Baker's gun... not easily... in the stomach so you can know how it feels to have an ache in your guts that won't come out and then I'll take care of you Helen. I know exactly what to do with you. I'll rape you first, you dirty bitch. A husband should have his wife when he returns from such a long absence, so I'll rape you while you're listening to my brother cough his blood and entrails all over the bed. And then I'll tear out your hair and slap you in the face with the bloody roots and then I'll put some bullets into you where they should go.

Chris is handed a near-perfect opportunity to escape, but chooses not to because Baker says something about trusting him as much as he does his wife. This makes the imprisoned man reconsider his own lack of trust, thus sparing Helen from horror. More reevaluation takes place when the warden introduces him to Shirley, Trent's old girlfriend. Seems she behaved herself at that petting party and can't quite understand why her old beau won't believe her. Enter smug prison psychiatrist Dr Ferguson, who between bemused chuckles explains that all Trent needs is a trusted person to tell him that Shirley is as chaste and true as she claims. It's Ferguson's opinion that Chris Benedict is just the man for the job:

He welcomed the task before him and knew he would be successful. His thoughts went to his wife Helen and he blessed her name... He had the vision of Helen's face before him. It was sufficient.

FIN

Now, I don't pretend to know much about the mysteries of the human mind, but I do question that Trent's psychosis can be so easily cured. Frankly, I'm not convinced that there isn't something more to his issues with Shirley and the petting party.* Doctor knows best, I suppose, but what with his mad (albeit internal) monologue and his dead or dying cellmate, it seems to me that a psychiatrist would detect something amiss in Chris. I don't know, call all it a "torch of violence".

Am I right or am I wrong?

Trivia: A second edition, credited to "David Forrest", was published the very same year for the American market. Sensitive readers will prefer this version:

"You know me, Alf. I'll take so much and that's all. I don't care who it is... I'll take just so much dirt and that's all. Am I right or am I wrong? Am I right or am I wrong, Alf?"

More trivia: The novel contains what just might be the longest sentence of any book covered in this blog:

A night breeze came over the north wall in gay contempt of the guard towers, stirred the dusty sand of the prison yards, climbed the sheer stone side of the prison and thrust little inquiring fingers of fresh air into the rows of barred holes that broke the blankness of the stone, then recoiling at the heavy breath of the imprisoned men, the fingers withdrew as if from the touch of death and the breeze slackened, dropped lower, moved faintly across the prison yard and tried to scale it to the freedom of the night, then fell back and died in little swirls of dust above the flat emptiness of the prison yard.

Object: A poorly produced mass market paperback, this is typical News Stand Library, except that it tends to fall apart more easily than most.

Access: No library carries the Canadian edition, though the University of Calgary has a copy of that intended for export. Given the historical import – by which I mean the use of the word "shit" –  it's the Canadian you'll be wanting. Right now, just three copies are listed online at prices ranging from US$3.99 to US$32.00. Condition is an issue. The American edition is a bit more common, though prices are similar.

*Great name for a band, by the way.

From Femme Fatale to Dewy-eyed Dame

Pagan
Jack Romaine [pseud. Tedd Steele]
Toronto: News Stand Library, 1949

The Pagans
Jack Benedict [pseud. Tedd Steele]
Toronto: News Stand Library, 1949

Time has come to reveal my envy of our early paperback writers. Money was good, work was easy, and as all evidence indicates, some publishers were prepared to print pretty much anything.

Consider Pagan, which News Stand Library published twice, under two different titles and pseudonyms, in July and August of 1949. My twelfth NSL read, Pagan/The Pagans is by far the weakest. In a list that includes The Penthouse Killings and Artists, Models and Murder, it stands out as particularly inept.

That Steele was an editor at Export Publishing likely explains much about the quality of this and other books issued under the NSL imprint. How much is anyone's guess. I'm willing to bet good money that he had something to do with this highly misleading cover copy:

“They” don’t pick Carl Chantrey up in a bar, rather he’s brought home by Marcia Havilland. A wealthy femme fatale who delights in treating men to one night of passion – but nothing more. Such is her body or technique or something that past paramours follow like puppies hoping for more teat or treats or something. More than a few have ended up at Marcia’s Satyr Lake villa, where they live off largesse that comes courtesy of an inheritance left by her mother.

Here I mention that Marcia’s father owns a struggling pharmaceutical company. And now, in homage to the novel's structure, I'll say no more about this until the end of the review.

Back to Carl. The “fledgling alcoholic” concert pianist passes out before Marcia can have her way. She hunts him down the next day and, removing her bikini, seduces him by the "amber pool":

   "Good Lord your [sic] beautiful, Marcia."
   His sentence was prematurely punctuated by the pressure of her lips against his and her body against his and once more he knew nothing but a shaking urge of ecstatic excitement. She was in his arms, eager, insisting.
   The little golden chipmunk looked down from his perch on the tree above and scolded vigorously.

Cover copy has it that the encounter "shook Carl to his soul", but it's Marcia who was most affected by the good vibrations. Owing to his body or technique or something – it can't be his personality – she falls in love with Carl and becomes all clingy and smoochy and stuff.

Marcia may be a babe, but she's certainly not “a breath-taking [sic] beautiful pagan queen”. And she can't be a “condoner of all the unbridled paganism that was practiced at her villa", because there is none. Pagan has nothing to do with religion or ritual, unless one counts end of day tipple.

On his second evening at Satyr Lake, Carl sneaks away as Marcia sleeps, and dodging bullets fired by the local police, manages to hop a train. Feeling abandoned, the former femme fatale is comforted by horsewoman friend Evelyn, whose wandering hands and words follow the finest lesbian pulp tradition:

"Yes, Marcia. I love you... don't go away from me... please... you'll understand... it's not evil... men are brutes they don't know... please Marcia... honey... you'll never worry about a man again."

Not evil? Oh, c'mon, Evelyn, we know it's your breast that has "a strange and evil passion burning fiercely within", and that this is meant to be the "Shocking Climax" sold on the front cover.

But there is no climax.

Horrified and disgusted, Marcia kicks Evelyn out of her bed and Carl returns on the next train.

Remember that pharmaceutical company that belongs to Marcia's father? Seems it was about to go under, taking Marcia's investments with it. Carl wasn't running from Marcia at Satyr Lake, rather he was running to his uncle, Senator Thomas Chantrey, in Washington. After Carl explains the situation, adding that he plans to marry Marcia, Uncle Tom awards the troubled company a large government contract.

Information comes fast and furious and the pace fairly exhausts the reader. It's been just two days since Carl was picked up in that bar and even he has trouble catching his breath:

And he doesn't... at least not in the novel's three remaining sentences.

It's a shame that it all ends so soon. Who knows what Day Three would've brought. We might have learned the reason the police were shooting at Carl – or why they ignored his return. A corrupt senator's influence perhaps?

But, you see, we've reached page 160 – and as Tedd Steele could tell you, no NSL book lasts longer than 160 pages.

Object and Access: Poorly produced mass market paperbacks, Pagan and The Pagans achieved just one printing each. While WorldCat shows no copies of Pagan, the University of Toronto's Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library has a lone copy of The Pagans. That's it. The good news is that there are currently four copies of The Pagans listed for sale online, beginning at US$7.50.

A Comic Book Artist's Absurd Murder Mystery

Artists, Models and Murder

Tedd Steele

Toronto: News Stand Library, 1948

141 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.

Pulp Noir à Montréal

The new edition of Canadian Notes & Queries lands, and with it comes another Dusty Bookcase sur papier. This time the spotlight plays upon Ted Allan's Love is a Long Shot. Not the Love is a Long Shot for which he was awarded the 1984 Stephen Leacock Medal, but a cheap, pseudonymous pulp novel from a quarter-century earlier.

Published by News Stand Library in September 1949, two months before newspaperman Al Palmer’s Sugar-Puss on Dorchester Street, this Love is a Long Shot holds the distinction of being the first pulp noir novel set in Montreal. As I write in CNQ, it ain't that pretty at all. The cover depicts, but doesn't quite capture, one of the darkest, most horrific scenes in any Canadian novel.

There's more to the issue, of course, including new fiction by Nathan Whitlock, new poetry by Nyla Matuck and – ahem – praise for A Gentleman of Pleasure from George Fetherling.

Sexy Stuff from Bizarro Superman's Creator

Touchable

Les Scott and Robert W. Tracy [pseud. Alvin Schwartz]

New York: Arco, 1951

184 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.

A Communist's Bodice Ripper?

The Governor's Mistress

Warren Desmond [pseud. Dyson Carter]

Toronto: News Stand Library, 1950

Oh, yes, a bodice is ripped, but I'm not so sure that this novel quite fits the genre. There's little romance in The Governor's Mistress, and passion, though present, is not as pervasive as cover copy would have you believe.

VIRILE - VIOLENT - WARM - WICKED - This was Angeline

Virile? Can a woman be virile? The OED answers in the negative. But then Angeline isn't violent either. She is warm though... and, it is implied, wicked in the sack.

Angeline – referred to as "Angel" on the book's back cover (and nowhere else) – is Angeline Paradis, a beautiful English spy who is sent into the heart of 17th-century New France. Hers, cover copy tells us, "is a tale kept out of school-books". Makes perfect sense; after all, Angeline was the creation of the author, and exists nowhere outside this book. She moves through pages populated by figures from our history... and it is here that this novel begins to falter. There is a supposition that the reader will know these men – they are all men – that is misguided. Frontenac? Yes. Radisson? Yes. But how many of us are familiar with the scandal and intrigue surrounding François-Marie Perrot, who served as Governor of Montreal from 1669 to 1684?

This Montrealer recognized his name.

That's all.

Pity the poor American reader, who I'm assuming has been taught little of the political machinations of New France. After all, it was to these folks that The Governor's Mistress was marketed. Its author, Dyson Carter, a card carrying member of the Communist Party of Canada, hid behind the pseudonym Warren Desmond only so that the novel might be sold south of the border.

The Governor's Mistress isn't so much a bad book as an irritating one. Stuff happens... but so often this takes place off-stage. When Radisson is put on trial for treason, an event that never actually occurred, he escapes the courtroom by painting his face with ghoulish features: "Thus had Radisson used the phosphorus oil he brought with him from Rupert's workshop." And thus we hear for the first and last time of Rupert's workshop.

Ultimately, The Governor's Mistress is a grand disappointment. The Harlequin set will find little in the way of romance, those seeking something spicy will be left dangling, and readers like myself who'd hoped for an oddball Marxist reading of life in New France will be met with nought but paper, ink and glue.

Object and Access: One of the publisher's more competent productions, the type is actually quite legible. I counted only two typos, which might just be a NSL best. Twelve copies are currently listed for sale online at between US$4 and US$18.29. All appear to have significant flaws, which leads me to think that mine could be the best copy out there. One copy – one – is housed by the University of Toronto's Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library. After that: rien.

Related post: Dyson Carter's Long Exercise in Political Pathology

Another Tie, Another Place

The Canadian and America editions of Neil H. Perrin's Death Be My Destiny, both published by News Stand Library, both bearing covers drawn by the same anonymous hand. How to explain the differences? Do Canadians prefer blondes? Do we choose hard liquor over red wine? Are our ties a touch more garish, our women more modest? Can it really be that our seedy hotels are so luxurious? It all seems wrong... even that bit about the ties.

Still no trigger on that gun, I see.

Update: Over at Fly-by-night, bowdler has posted an image of the uncommon dustjacket that adorned the American edition.

Horace Brown: From Penthouse to Pavement

The Penthouse Killings

Horace Brown

Toronto: News Stand Library, 1950

157 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 post:

Horace Brown: Fritzi in Flight or a Coincidence?

One Long, Tedious Suicide Note

Death Be My Destiny

Neil H. Perrin [pseud. Danny Halperin]

Toronto: News Stand Library, 1949

The most interesting thing about Death Be My Destiny is that it begins with protagonist Karel Martin setting himself up as a teenage bellhop/pimp. The misbehaviour and misadventure that follow can be described with fair detail in five sentences. I know this to be true because I did just that in an early draft of this post. Bland and simple, like the novel, the synopsis isn't worth reading.

That Death Be My Destiny followed This Was Joanna, the first Neil H. Perrin book, by just two months, might explain its failings. Like many pulp novels, it starts strongly, then wanders weakly, eventually becoming nothing more than fragments as it crawls toward the final sentence: "Tomorrow you will read in the papers that I died by my own hand." You see, there's a gimmick to all this; Death Be My Destiny presents itself as the autobiography of a man who is about to put a gun to his head.

To reach that messy ending, Halperin – or Perrin, if you prefer – peppers the novel with some pretty good lines, none of which quite fit. "When you cut a friend's throat never use a dull knife," seems clever until one realizes that Karel has no friends. What's more, the advice is used to close a chapter in which no throats – not figuratively, not literally – are cut.

As with This Was Joanna and the strikingly bizarre The Door Between, the most interesting writing concerns sex:

What happened between us was, technically, absolute perfection. Marcia, in those hushed hours of the night, was mine as completely as she was ever, could ever, belong to anyone. Her little flushed cries of joy were like a sweet oil lavished over my battered ego, and my conceit flowered mightily as, enraptured, she surrendered.

I felt nothing. Her joy was dust in my mouth. Her very real tremors seemed slightly comical to me as if the carnality was a circus with Marcia the fragile clown and I the phony ringmaster cracking his terrible whip.

There is fun to be found in passages like this, but here they are few and far between.

What more to say? Death Be My Destiny passes by like Karel Martin's life, not worthy of mention. So, I leave off – as I always do with Perrin – by recommending The Door Between, that weird and wonderful follow-up to Death Be My Destiny.

Oh, one last thing: Karel's revolver might be loaded, but you'll note that it has no trigger.

Object: I've gone on a bit about News Stand Library's shoddy production standards – here and here and here and here and here and here – but this is the worst of the lot. A difficult book to read in more ways than one, the print blurs, fades and at times disappears completely. Good on NSL for spelling the author's nom de plume correctly.

Access: Death Be My Destiny is an uncommon book, but it's also a bargain. The four copies currently listed online can each be had for under fourteen dollars. Of the world's libraries, academic and otherwise, it appears that only Library and Archives Canada holds a copy.

AL PALMER PLAGIARISM SCANDAL!

There's no question that Al Palmer's Montreal Confidential (1949) was inspired by New York: Confidential! (1947), but who would've expected the ugly accusation of plagiarism? And yet, here it is, as reported by gossip columnist Fitz (Gerald FitzGerald) in the 14 October 1950 edition of The Gazette:

Combing through both books, I find the charge to be entirely unfounded. I add that no two chapters share the same title, though I did come across this:

Someone get on the phone to Gads Hill Place.

Palmer had no need of Lait and Mortimer; he was much more the wordsmith than either New Yorker. William Weintraub recognizes as much in his forward to the recent Véhicule Press edition: "Al is not content to simply talk about attractive women walking down the Street; for him they are 'local lovelies ankling along.'" Beer is "stupor suds", loose women are "trampettes" – and just look at these Montreal Confidential chapter titles:

The Scrambled-Eared Gentry

The Broken Leg Brigade

Caprice Chinois

Characters, Characters – Never Any Normal People

The Younger Degeneration

Any words lifted from Lait and Mortimer's books come from the cover of their follow-up, Chicago Confidential, which appeared at newsstands just a few months before Montreal Confidential. "The low-down on the big town!" says one; "The Low Down on the Big Town!" says the other. Did the pair even write this cover copy? Did Palmer write his? Never mind – no one bothered to trademark the phrase.

I expect that what upset the New Yorkers was the idea of someone honing in on what they believed to be a borderless franchise – one that exhausted itself well before the 1954 death of Jack Lait.

Palmer wrote no follow-up to Montreal Confidential. Given his ill-feelings about Hogtown and its inhabitants, Toronto Confidential was out of the question.

And Ottawa Confidential? Well, that just sounds silly. Even today.

Your morning smile: This small piece on an A.J. Cronin impersonator – I kid you not – from the very same column:

Related post: '...a helluva town to come back to'

And These Were Her Magnificent Breasts

This was Joanna

Niel [sic] H. Perrin [pseud. Danny Halperin]

Toronto: News Stand Library, 1949

Of all the novels read this past year, not one has left so great an impression as Neil H. Perrin's The Door Between. In the second of two posts about the book, I described it as "one of the most peculiar Canadian novels I've ever read". Here I reconsider: The Door Between might well be the most peculiar Canadian novel I've ever read. It's portrayal of 1948 Toronto as a dark, sexual sin city, populated by stricken, agonizing souls certainly runs counter to the staid and sober images that linger in popular culture.

These same sorry sods would find fit in This was Joanna, which was published twelve months earlier. We never actually meet Joanna – she's found dead on page one by an unnamed fisherman, as depicted on the cover of the publisher's American edition: "...for one witless moment he looked down on the haunting perfection that was Joanna, the closed eyes in a kind of rapture, the long, strained throat, twisted torso, magnificent breasts, profound hips, proud legs, crouched in death like a supple cat."

Profound hips...

This is not the dead woman's story, rather it concerns an ex-lover, a nameless newspaperman who attempts to solve the mystery that was Joanna. His quest brings him into contact with her other past paramours. As with The Door Between, sexual disfunction and perversity pervade. We see this on Joanna's wedding night, as described by her husband Charles:

At last she stood nude before me. When I looked at her I was shocked to see the most brazen smile on her face.

Then, without hesitation, her fingers sure, carefully, slowly, she began to undress me. I went slightly hysterical then. I began to shudder to laugh, to giggle, to squirm. I simply went berserk. In the grip of nameless emotions that shook my whole body and dazed my mind I began to fight with her, to hit her, to drag her toward the bed.

What Joanna thought of this I don't know. We have never discussed it. I only know that later, all passion spent, as I lay beside her in the muttering gloom, I realized that on our wedding night I had gone mad, had beaten my wife and had virtually raped her.

Joanna never forgives Charles, whose desperate attempts to win her back render him a cuckold. The tryst with the newspaperman is just the first in a series of extramarital flings. It's with penultimate lover Ted Wrisley that Joanna's amorous adventures come to a climax. A sensualist who owes much to J.-K. Huysmans' Jean Des Esseintes, Wrisley introduces Joanna to "the arts of which immortal Ovid and the Marquis de Sade have written." He takes delight in showing his "chamber of horrors" to the newspaperman:

On the walls of the room were hung all sorts of gadgets of torture; long needles, small, hairy whips, knouts, knives sharp as razors, silken threads of unbelievable length. Over the mantlepiece were afixed two large peacock feathers; the end of one was a rubber stopper, the end of the other a handgrip. I dared not ask the significance of these feathers for fear of being told.

Suspended from the ceiling were two long cords, obviously used to hold a person up from the floor by his (or her) thumbs. On the floor, as if alive, lay the stuffed corpse of a sinuous cobra. The most unspeakably evil paintings adorned the walls and, in one corner of the room under a blue light, sat the grinning statue of Priapus, the phallic symbol of the ages.

This was Joanna was banned in Ireland.

Wrisley's playroom – which, incidentally, is soundproof – stands as Priapus in what is otherwise a remarkably flat environment. Like an American soap opera, This was Joanna is set in a neutral everyplace that is populated by the pampered and privileged. How bland compared to the torrid Toronto of The Door Between! I can't help but compare – had it not been for one I would not have read the other – and yet... and yet I still recommend the novel. This was Joanna might not be the most peculiar Canadian novel I've ever read, but it's up there.

Trivia: News Stand Library's American edition of This was Joanna, published in November 1949, two months after the Canadian, marks the last time the book saw print. Why Halperin's pseudonym was changed from Neil H. Perrin to Grant R. Brooks remains a mystery.

Object: A mass market paperback that is typical of News Stand Library's shoddy production values. Streaks of black ink run along the edges of a dozen or so pages, making for challenging reading. The author's name is misspelled on the cover and title page (but is correct on the spine and back cover). "I before E, except after C", I suppose.

Fly-by-night provides a thorough account of the publisher's many failed attempts at getting Halperin's pseudonym right.

Access: Only the University of Calgary has copies (both the Perrin and Brooks editions). This was Joanna might be all but absent from libraries, but that doesn't mean it's expensive. Ten copies – all fairly decent – are currently listed online at between US$7.50 and US$30. One bookseller describes his offering as "a bit misscut [sic]". Par for the course, really.

The Messy World of Ronald J. Cooke

The House on Craig Street

Ronald J. Cooke

Toronto: News Stand Library, 1949

158 pages

This review, revisited and revised, now appears 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.

Nablo in Paperback

Not much more to say about the elusive Nablo, though these paperback covers of The Long November are worthy of mention. The first, published by News Stand Library in 1948, juxtaposes a "Vigorous, lusty; a tale of passion and virile drive" with "AN R.C.A.F. VETERAN'S SENSATIONAL NEW NOVEL", as if to say: "Before you label this as smut, the publisher would like to point out that this novel was written by one of our heroic servicemen."

The artwork is a touch better than most News Stand Library covers, but makes the whole thing look like some light-hearted, mildly risqué romp. And where in Canada do leaves begin falling in November?

News Stand Library's second cover, from 1949, isn't a whole lot better. Does it not look like Steffie Gibson is drowning? Poor little rich girl, caught in a whirlpool with tiny autumnal leaves floating above her beautiful visage.

Predictably, the finest of the lot belongs to the 1952 Signet edition. "Too Many Women - Too Little Time" might not be the most original of pitches, but the cover captures the novel's dark mood and does depict an actual scene.

This last beat-up cover was rescued a couple of decades back from a store's 25¢ bin. It was being rained on and, I'm betting, was within an hour or two of being tossed. Appropriate then, that today's James McIntyre poem was inspired by a neglected book happened upon while out for a stroll, its pages "scattered o'er the ground".

Poems of James McIntyre (Ingersoll, ON: Chronicle, 1889)

The volume concerned is The Posthumous Works of the Late George Menzies, Being a Collection of Poems, Sonnets, &c., &c., Written at Various Times When the Author was Connected with the Provincial Press. Published in 1850 by his widow, Harriet, it can't be bought for under two hundred dollars.

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The Mysterious Mister Nablo

Nablo in Hollywood

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?