Mrs. Brown in the Conservatory with the Lead Pipe

In Passion's Fiery Pit
Joy Brown
Toronto: News Stand Library, 1950

In Passion's Fiery Pit features a misprint unlike any other I've seen:

Not Joy Brown's fault, of course, but it does say something about her publisher. News Stand Library didn't much care what it published or who it published. In its stable, Joy Brown stands as lone mare alongside Hugh Garner, Ted Allan, Al Palmer, Raymond Souster and H. Gordon Green in having had something of a writing career. Given her early struggles with punctuation, this is truly remarkable.

In Passion's Fiery Pit was Brown's second novel. The first, Murdered Mistress, had been published by News Stand Library a few months earlier. Night of Terror, her third, was a pre-romance Harlequin. It hit the stands about eight weeks later.

Three novels in one year. Do not be impressed.

This one begins with a bit of a cheat. What's depicted as murder will later be revealed as assault. The victim, Alicia Wallace, turns up dead on the very next page just the same. Her body is discovered amongst the exotic plants in the conservatory of wealthy bachelor Robert Roget.

Yes, a conservatory. Roget builds upon the cliché, sniffing: "It's damned embarrassing… I mean with a houseful of guests."

Houseful? Well, there's Paul Stewart, wife Gwyneth and brother Bridge. The Greys – Tim and Trixie – are also there. That's five, right? Not really a houseful, not for a mansion, though things get a touch more crowded when the police show up. Detective Dan Weaver leads the investigation.

Dan's an interesting fellow. The novel's hero, when first seen he's drinking in the beauty of Alicia's cooling corpse… the curve of her cheek, her full lips and her shapely calves. "She was the kind of girl Dan Weaver had been wanting to meet for a long time. Unfortunately, she was dead."

The trail leads straight to the Three Bells nightclub:

Dan Weaver did a double take. The somebody sitting on the piano should have been lying in a steaming conservatory with her skull crushed. But here she was singing in a hushed, tuneless voice. Nobody seemed to care what sort of a singer she'd make.

Here the author dodges cliché by making Alicia's doppelgänger, torch singer Phyllis, a younger sister. Alicia may have been as bad, but she was no evil twin.

Because Dan clearly has a type, he falls for Phyllis, and redoubles his efforts to solve the murder. He's not afraid to cut a corner in getting at the truth. This Canadian is fully prepared to walk into a room without knocking first.

Sergeant Cummings, Dan's superior, is infuriated by this maverick behaviour:

"I've mentioned that to you before. You're still on the force, you know, even if you're not in uniform, and the rules are that..."
     "But you find out more this way. I make a few exceptions to a few rules. I like a variation of a theme. And see what happens? I find two boudoir scenes in one afternoon." Dan waved his hand, "What is this thing called procedure."
     Cummings frowned. He had mentioned things like this to Weaver before, but the younger man paid no attention.

The two boudoir scenes aren't all that much – a fully clothed woman walks out of a bedroom, a man comforts a grieving widow – and neither is pertinent to the case. Dan is overselling things. He really has no idea what he's doing. I'm not sure Brown did, either. In the course of his investigation, Dan settles on Alicia's former husband Jeff Wallace as the murderer, for no other reason than they divorced. You know, acrimony and all that. Blackmail, too, though this makes no sense.

As Alicia's ex doesn't seem to be around, Dan becomes convinced that one of the men present on the night of the murder is in actuality Wallace. He's proven wrong in a most public way by Phyllis, but feels no embarrassment. Dan's big break comes at the end of the novel when the murderer drinks too much and spills the beans. Sergeant Cummings is impressed.

In truth, Dan isn't much of a detective, and In Passion's Fiery Pit isn't much of a mystery. It's no wonder that News Stand Library tried to sell the thing as something spicy: "GREEN EYES - RED HAIR - and FLAMING LIPS", but no mention of murder. Sadly, the hottest action involves women primping before mirrors and crossing rooms in varying states of undress. There's lots of lingerie, though much of it is superfluous:

She scampered ahead of him into the bedroom, and then proceeded to dress before his interested eyes in such a flurry of panties, garter belts, bras and stockings that she was fully clothed in a brief moment.

Brief moment.

No pun intended.

To my great surprise, the word "diaphanous" doesn't feature.

Object and Access: A typical News Stand Library production with requisite 160 pages. The cover is by Syd Dyke.

My copy was purchased in June from a New York bookseller. Price: US$4.00. I was lucky. Just four copies are listed for sale online, the cheapest of which goes for C$20.00. At C$140.00, the one you want to buy is graced with another of those odd and uncommon NSL dust jackets.

Not listed on Amicus or WorldCat.

My thanks to Bowdler at Canadian Fly-By-Night for the image of Murdered Mistress.

Related post:

Ontario Gothic (with the scent of Brut)

The Heiress, the Hooker and the Mystery Woman

Daughters of Desire
Fletcher Knight
Toronto: News Stand Library, 1950

"This is the most colourful and perhaps zaniest city in Canada," Montreal newspaperman Al Thomas says in the opening pages. So why move the action elsewhere?

Most of Daughters of Desire takes place on a private island in the Bahamas or aboard a yacht bound for same. Al is not along for the ride. We see the reporter only in the first and final chapters. Our initial sighting has him trying to make Dorothy, his wife's hot cousin, in a Montreal nightclub. Al's role is to provide backstory for the main characters seated at the next table: spoiled rich girl Carol King and high-class hooker Summer Day. An unlikely pair, they've been brought together by Lester Ogden, the latest in Carol's long line of frustrated fiancés. "She's probably Lester's idea of a bizarre and sophisticated gesture for the evening," says Al in reference to Summer.

The promised ménage à trios never materializes; Lester's only trying to shake things up a little. Carol wants to break off their engagement and he just can't have that. To Lester, Carol is much more than a redheaded looker, she's an heiress who will act as insurance if he's ever cut out of his own inheritance.

"This is my last night of the season and I always get drunk on the last night of the season," says Summer. Carol's drunk, too, which may explain why she's making a play for one of the club's "pansy" dancers. Lester interrupts his fiancée's pursuit by appealing to her penchant for gambling. He bets Carol $5000 that she won't be able to get the captain of his Uncle Henry's yacht to propose marriage. Carol, who thinks she's all that, ups the ante by promising to marry Lester if she fails.

The rich are different from you and me.

Uncle Henry, one of Montreal's wealthiest men, was a handsome fellow until polio disfigured. Now he stews cruising here and there in a magnificent yacht manned by a crew of mangled men. Captain Michael Cameron, he of the strong jawline, is an exception. A man with mommy issues, Michael was on a path to the priesthood before being knocked off-course by a nineteen-year-old temptress. To get back on track he's limited his contact to the crew of ugly men. Effeminate fourteen-year-old Cabin Boy Tommy Buttons – yes, Buttons – does not tempt.

Drunken Carol and her new BFF, bleached blonde Summer Day, sneak aboard the yacht. Though they're discovered the next morning, the voyage continues uninterrupted. They won't be afforded an opportunity to disembark before the next port of call: Uncle Henry's secluded Bahamian island.

Daughters of Desire is meant to be a mystery, I guess. The yacht's cook, goes missing, and Carol is attacked repeatedly by a man whose face is hidden by a "seaman's helmet". Some credit is due the author in that the sole suspect ends up being the baddie. The only surprise comes with the reappearance of newspaperman Al and his wife's sexy cousin in the final chapter. One year later, they find themselves sipping cocktails in the very same Montreal nightclub. At Dorothy's urging, the reporter fills her in on everything that happened between Carol and her fiancé, thus bringing the reader up to date.

Daughters of Desire bored. Setting it down, I couldn't help but wonder about the cover. Illustrator D. Rickard depicts three women: redhead Carol, faux-blonde Summer and… well, the third can only be "darkly glamorous" Dorothy. The scene depicted does not feature in the novel; she never so much as meets Carol and Summer. Why elevate her to such a level? Dorothy features in just fifteen of the novel's pages, though her bit part is crucial. It's her notice of the heiress in the opening chapter that prompts Al to launch into Carol's story:

"What a beautiful woman," Dorothy said suddenly, looking over her shoulder, "with the gorgeous red hair."

Dorothy seems positively fixated on the heiress, pressing Al for information:

     "I gather she hasn't a marriage to her credit."
     Al drew expansively his cigar and coughed a little. "Nope. A clean slate. And I'm not even sure she sleeps with her boy blues. There are those who say yea and those who say nay."
     "Tried it once and didn't get it," Dorothy murmured.
     "Eh?"
     "Nothing, nothing, just mumbling," Dorothy smiled sweetly.

One year later, Dorothy remembers Carol well – "She was the most beautiful red head I've ever seen." – and the questions resume.

I'm now wondering whether Al's failure to bed Dorothy might have nothing to do with the fact that she's his wife's cousin? Could it be that Dorothy is a daughter of sapphic desire? Or am I just making this justly ignored novel out to be much more interesting than it really is?

Trivia: The only Canadian novel I've read to feature a "blackface" performance.

 

Object: A 159-page poorly produced mass market paperback. The thing isn't even rectangular.

Access: Just two copies are listed for sale online – at US$2.95 and US$7.50, both are bargains. Library and Archives Canada has one. That's it.

Nothing Says Violence Like Harlequin

Violence sells but I'm not buying, which may be why it's taken me so long to see just how much it was used in pushing early Harlequins.

As near as I can tell, the publisher began using violence as a selling point with its third book, Howard Hunt's Maelstrom. We remember Hunt today as one of Richard Nixon's plumbers, forgetting that the man was once awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship (whereas Truman Capote and Gore Vidal were not). His third novel, Maelstrom, was first published in 1948 by no less a house than Farrar Straus. Sure, the dust jacket was garish, but c'mon, Farrar Straus!

By contrast, the Harlequin edition issued the following June (four months before Hunt joined the CIA), seems bland… that is, until you read the tagline:

Harlequin used 'violence" in flogging all sorts of titles, no matter how unlikely. Its cover copy for Ben Hecht's Hollywood Mystery promises a plot in which "violence and murder intermingle with wacky situations." Lady – Here's Your Wreath by Raymond Marshall is a "story of violence, mystery and sudden death". Marshall's Why Pick On Me? was pitched with promises of "Punch, Action, Violence!" And, in event that you missed it the first time, Harlequin uses the word twice – in consecutive sentences – in describing James Hadley Chase's No Orchids for Miss Blandish:

This is a fast moving very shocking crime story, which tells of a young and glamorous heiress, whose beauty excites a gang of brutal mobsters to such an extent that they leave a trail of death and destruction in their efforts to kidnap and debauch her. The detective, Dave Fenner, is called in to crack the case, and matches the sadistic brutality of the gang with his own particular brand of violence. This is definitely not a book for the faint-hearted who cannot stand explosive violence and action.

Chase is a special case. With I'll Bury My Dead, we're promised a tale of "murder and violence". Figure It Out for Yourself finds hero Vic Malloy "snarled up in a vicious vortex of murder, glamorous women and violent non-stop action". Twelve Chinks and a Woman, the title Harlequin would really like us all to forget, finds sleuth Dave Fenner descending into a "merciless violent Underworld".

Then there are the covers.

The Harlequin cover for Manitoba boy A.E. van Vogt's The House That Stood Still ranks with News Stand Library's Love is a Long Shot and The Penthouse Killings as the most disturbing and violent ever produced in this country. But those News Stand Library books are anomalies; in truth, the covers of Harlequin's early rivals rarely depicted violence. The typical New Stand Library book promises sex. On rare occasions – as with Too Many Women or Overnight Escapade – the two very nearly intersect, but never do. These News Stand Library covers suggest the possibility of violence, while those of Harlequin depict actual acts or the bloody results of same.

The ten Harlequins that follow give good example, each one typical of a time in which the publisher put forth brutal sagas of love and violence – and not slight stories of brutal love.

Maverick Guns
J.E. Ginstead
1950

The Case of the Six Bullets
R.M. Laurenson
1950

The Cold Trail
Paul E. Lehman
1950

Fall Guy
Joe Barry
1950

She Died on the Stairway
Knight Rhodes
1950

Wreath for a Redhead
Brian Moore
1951

The Dead Stay Dumb
James Hadley Chase
1951

False Face
Leslie Edgley
1951

Hunt the Killer
Day Keene
1952

The Body on Mount Royal
David Montrose
1953

Related posts:
Harlequin's Romantic View of the Past

Harlequin: The Love that Dare Not Speak Its Name

Suggestive Harlequins: A Romantic Threesome

Harlequin Blondes: Terror Struck Them Dumb

Touched in the Head by a Telepathic Virgin

Soft to the Touch
Clark W. Dailey
Toronto: News Stand Library, 1949

Caroline Prentiss entertains her male visitors – and she has many – in revealing robes and diaphanous negligees. She loves to kiss and encourages caresses, but don't you go getting any ideas about taking things further. At twenty-six, Caroline guards her virginity like no one, convinced that it is tied inextricably to her independence.

Understandably, swains swarm, but quickly fall away in frustration. Only two, playboy Harvey Garrett and lawyer Larry Devlin, show any stamina. Both have been pursuing Caroline for years, each pitching woo and proposing marriage. With a girl on the side, I think Harvey has had an easier time of it; poor love-struck Larry has been leading the life of a celibate.

Caroline is content with the status quo. Montreal's foremost celebrity sculptress – no joke – she takes pride in her ability to make a good living without being tied to any one man. When not entertaining, Caroline throws off robe and negligee so as to admire her naked self in a full-length mirror. The reader is twice told that she is the spitting image of Virginia Mayo.

The great Thomas P. Kelley, King of the Canadian Pulps, once bragged that he never revised a work in progress. I don't mean to suggest that Clark W. Dailey – of whom there is no trace – is Kelley, rather that the two men held similar views when it came to composition.

The fourth of this novel's eight chapters begins with something of a revelation. The celebrity sculptress is shown to be struggling financially. The post-war art boom has proved to be more of a sharp crack, and Caroline is forced to sell her work at bargain basement prices. Good guy Larry offers to pay her rent and bills, but Caroline hesitates. She fears the effect the loan – or is it a gift? – might have on their relationship. Ultimately, the sculptress accepts the lawyer's help.

Then something odd happens: Sans explication, the narrator (omniscient) reverses things, revealing that the lawyer has been paying for everything, Caroline's car included, for many months. A couple of chapters later, the reader learns that she has been passing on wads of Larry's dough to support Harvey. In today's parlance we might describe this as a reboot, with Caroline is reimagined as someone who never was a successful sculptor, despite her celebrity.

It's enough to make you want to throw the book against a wall. I didn't because it was already coming apart, and also because the many weird digressions contained entertained. Here, our omniscient narrator goes off on an awkwardly constructed tirade about the New Look:

How many women try to keep themselves slim, and when they look like a sheet of paper set up on end, with but the merest suggestion of what could be an attractive pair of rising beauties, when what curves they have are shrouded by grotesque "New Look"clothing, when they can walk down the street looking exactly like almost every other woman, that is, they wear a smug expression, because they think they are beautiful! Gawdallmighty! – how the fashion designers and their partners in misleading 'how to be smart' muck, the dress manufacturers, must smiles they purchase another yacht to set sail for Africa to get away from the horrible shapes they have been instrumental in creating, and to gaze in rapture and admiration upon woman as she was made to be – white, yellow or black! 

The book is peppered with rants, observations and other asides. The most repeated topic concerns "thought transference". Brace yourself, the narrator has some pretty harsh things to say:

Sadly, Soft to the Touch isn't worth reading for the plot; I'm not spoiling anything by describing the drama that ensues.

Harvey tries to kill his rival with some sort of poison he brought back from the war. Larry makes it to a hospital, where he lies drifting in and out of consciousness. During one lucid moment he asks Caroline to marry him. The sculptress agrees, but only because doctors have told her that he is sure to die. The bedside ceremony is performed, after which Larry loses consciousness for what looks to be the very last time. Caroline is left alone with her dying husband:

She was thinking. "How wonderfully he rallied after I held his hands for a long time. Perhaps..."
   She rose and, as before, took both his hands in her soft, warm ones. Then she drew all her inner forces and mental resources together and concentrated her thoughts on one short phrase, "I shall live." Perhaps if she could drive this straight from her brain into his, it would affect him.

Affect him it does! After a long night of handholding, Larry bounces back. The attending doctor, "wise, kind and clever, and a man very much interested in natural methods of healing," is pleasantly surprised. He sees nothing wrong with Larry wolfing down bacon, eggs and coffee with his new bride: "Hurrah!" exclaimed Larry, "our first breakfast together."

The last we see of Harvey, he's rushing off to the airport to catch a clipper to Bermuda. Larry is quickly discharged and returns to Caroline's Bishop Street apartment. The last pages of the novel are heavy with the promise of sex, but it ends before the act takes place. This reader didn't care; I'd long grown bored of Caroline and her groping admirers. I do miss the haranguing narrator, though, even if he can't be trusted.

Bloomer?:

Keeping one hand on the wheel, his other reached over and brushed her thigh, then touched the purse which lay in her lap.

Object and Access: An extremely fragile mass market paperback. At 159 pages – twelve of which are blank – Soft to the Touch may just be the shortest News Stand Library title. I'm guessing that the unknown cover artist had never seen a photo of Virginia Mayo. I'm certain he'd never seen a naked woman.

Soft to the Touch is nowhere to be found on Amicus or WorldCat. Only three copies are currently listed for sale online, ranging in price from $10 to $25. Condition is a factor. Get it while you can.

A Coupla Canadian Copycats

Carnival of Love [Mardi Gras Madness]
Anthony Scott
New York: Red Circle, 1949
Cover by Ray Johnson

Carnival of Love [Mardi Gras Madness]
Anthony Scott
Toronto: News Stand Library, 1950
Cover by Syd Dyke

The Glass Ladder
Paul W. Fairman
New York: Handi-Books, 1950
Cover artist unknown

The Glass Ladder
Paul W. Fairman
Toronto: Harlequin, 1951
Cover artist unknown

Related post:

AL PALMER PLAGIARISM SCANDAL!

No he didn't.

He Learned About Women
Ted Greenshade [?]
Toronto: News Stand Library, 1949

Tex had lived long enough to realize he had more than average appeal to women. All his life they had either wanted to clutch him to their bosoms and mother him or have him clutch their bosoms and make mothers of them.

Oh, brother.

I won't say that He Learned About Women was News Stand Library's worst book, only that it's the worst of those I've read.

The publisher positioned its author – Ted Greenshade or Ted Greenslade – as a "soldier of fortune who knows whereof he writes", encouraging us all to consider this a roman à clef.

Let's hope it isn't.

He Learned About Women opens on Tex Lane, a mercenary in the employ Israel's "Jewish Army", belly down on the desert sand, facing an unforgiving "arab horde". As he awaits certain death, thoughts drift back to the women of his past.

"A THOUSAND NIGHTS, A THOUSAND WOMEN and ONE LESSON"

A THOUSAND WOMEN? I count twelve, beginning the Methodist Sunday School superintendent's daughter, who let teenaged Tex touch her during a clubhouse initiation. Sexy, sporty Peggy McLean is next; she capped a day at the beach by taking his virginity. Third is the wanton wife of his instructor at Sandhurst.

Wait.

Tex starts out as a lower-middle class, middling schoolboy from Hamilton, Ontario. How did he come to be accepted at England's most prestigious military academy?

More than a soldier of fortune, Tex Lane is a man of mystery. He moves about the globe – London, Paris, Shanghai, Montreal – with impunity. Inexplicably wealthy, Tex can become the rattiest of church mice when plot requires. By turns a journalist, an ad man, an actor, a captain and a carny, he is everyone and no one. Meanwhile, women come and go, each more fully formed than the protagonist. The most interesting to these eyes is Helen Demoskoff, a sympathetic young Doukhobor who was once arrested for removing her clothes as a form of protest.

Helen is a woman of conviction and character. Tex, on the other hand, is the sort of man who will sleep with a woman, then accuse her of being a slut. He's the type who will pressure a woman to give up her child because he isn't the father. Tex is the kind of guy who will abandon a woman, return, then feel betrayed that she has married.

In short, he's not a man you'd want to know.
 
Best sentence:

Looking into her worried face Tex felt like someone who has been caught putting a feather up the nose of a child in an iron lung.

Epigraph:

Ibid?

It's from the Book of Ezra (1 Esdras 4:22).

Speculation: The idea of the trapped soldier revisiting his past may owe something to James Benson Nablo's 1946 novel The Long November, which News Stand Library reprinted in two editions prior to He Learned About Women.

Trivia: Back cover copy refers to a "girl who died in the Cathay Hotel because of a millionaire's lust and passion." No such character features in the novel.

Object and access: A 160-page mass market paperback with cover art by Syd Dyke.

He Learned About Women is nowhere to be found on WorldCat. As of this writing just four copies are being offered by online booksellers. The lone copy of the Canadian printing looks to be in about the same condition as mine, but is a bargain at five dollars. The three Americans range from  US$2 (Reading Copy) to US$14 (Very Good - Fine).

Related post:

The Mysterious Mister Nablo

The Gayest Femme Fatale

No Place in Heaven
Laura Warren
Toronto: News Stand Library, 1949

News Stand Library flogged No Place in Heaven as a scandalous memoir, but I think it's a work of fiction. Somehow I can't bring myself to believe that the manuscript of a repentant, dying woman ended up with a crooked, fly-by-night Toronto paperback publisher.

Laura Warren (née Fletcher) looks back on life from her deathbed, beginning with the miracle of her birth, not six months after her parents' marriage. Ma and Pa, vaudeville performers both, shoot for Hollywood stardom, but lose a race with a locomotive. Baby Laura is left to be raised by her Aunt Bessie who runs a New York rooming house catering to artistic types.

"Living in Aunt Bessie's rooming house [sic] was like taking the vow of chastity and then moving into the YMCA", says Laura. "You took a chance just bending over to pick up a bar of soap." It's a little hard to imagine our heroine growing to be such an innocent eighteen-year-old, but there you are. She gets a job as a hat check girl at the Kit Kat Club, where she meets Tony Warren. The reader pegs him as a good-for-nothing louse, but not Laura. She falls for him bad, he takes her virginity and then they marry.

But, wait, isn't he a louse?

Tony joins the Marines, is shipped out to fight the "Japs", and a baby is left on Aunt Bessie's doorstep. Laura cares for the child until old high school friend Marie Gibbs, she of the "moist hour glass [sic] figure", reveals herself as the mother and Tony as the father. Minutes later, Aunt Bessie tells Laura that the Japs have done in her husband. By her own admission, the poor girl goes a bit loopy:

     I sobbed to a shuddering stop.
     "Revenge is mine, saith the Lord," I giggled. "But don't forget Aunt Bessie, the world is full of Tonys… yep, the woods are full of them… like Japs. And little Laura is going out and shoot 'em down," I pointed my finger, "boom, boom, boom, like that, like I had a gun."

It's impolite but accurate to say that little Laura slays the "Tonys" by being a tease. She sends her first victims to find relief with a prostitute known as Syphilis Sal. Laura leads the wealthy wife of a kept man to believe that she is his mistress, and walks out on vain Max Arnott after convincing him that he is far too small to satisfy a woman. Her most interesting victim is gay bookseller John Ossington, whom she tortures by bedding, bedding, bedding and bedding the young object of his desire.*

All is done with a smile on her face.

No Place in Heaven is the fourth title tackled in a focused effort to uncover unrecognized Canadian novels buried in News Stand Library's pulp. While nothing here is reminiscent of NSL authors Hugh Garner and Ted Allan, I wouldn't rule out Thomas P. Kelley.

More than anything, No Place in Heaven brought to mind No Tears for Goldie, Kelley's pseudonymous 1950 novel, with Aunt Bessie sitting in for kind-hearted Aunt Maggie. Both are built of workmanlike prose enlivened by ribaldry – but then much the same could be said about many News Stand Library titles. I could be wrong. Could've been written by someone else. And there's always some slight possibility that Laura Warren was a real person. Hope not. I hate to think of her in hell.

Favourite passage:

     "You're the sexiest looking bast'd I've seen in ages," she slurred, "I'd like to sleep with yoooo."

Object: A poorly produced, 160-page mass market paperback, my copy was printed for the American market. The cover artist – unidentified – does not do Laura Warren justice.

Access: No listing on WorldCat. Two copies are currently for sale online – one Fair Canadian at US$7.95 and one Very Good American at US$20. Can't say which is the better buy. Get 'em while you can.

* "Bedding" isn't quite the word – the trysts take place in a boathouse – but you know what I mean. 

Related posts:

Milton Douglas, Canadian Author?

Heart of Goldie

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.

Too Many Writers

Too Many Women
Gerry Martin
Toronto: News Stand Library, 1950

Maurice Bendrix, the main character in The End of the Affair, is a novelist. I'm more than prepared to allow Graham Greene this conceit; in his twenty-six novels Bendrix alone holds the occupation. I have less time for Ronald J. Cooke, who placed novelist protagonists at the centre of the first two of his three novels.

I've not read the third.

Novelists, newspapermen, poets, gag writers and the like are so common in Canadian fiction that you'd almost think everything was set in an alternate universe. My casual journey through neglected and forgotten tomes has led to wannabe novelist Clive Winston (The House on Craig Street), frustrated novelist Dave Manley (The Mayor of Côte St. Paul), washed up novelist William Marshall (Exit in Green), and successful novelists Mortimer Tombs (I Hate You to Death), George Sloan (A Body for a Blonde) and Gabrielle Lubin (The Best Man).

Ron Simpson, the main character in Too Many Women, belongs with Tombs, Sloan and Lubin. His debut, Two Loves Have I, is a best seller, "a book a lot of old maids are crazy about." Tall, handsome and talented – though, let's be frank, that title implies otherwise – he should be living the dream.

So, what's the problem?

Well, first there's wife Sue, who talks on the phone and has the radio tuned to soaps when genius requires silence to write. For goodness sake, she won't even answer the damn door! And let me tell you, those callers are persistent. A kid selling magazines rings and rings, while brother-in-law Arch will hold that goddamned button down for a ten-minute stretch. No exaggeration.

It's kind of a mistake to let Arch in the house. Ron's old college pal, he's part of the reason they were expelled. What's more, the guy's a boor, a braggart and a womanizer. How he ended up married to Sue's sister is a mystery.

Could alcohol have had something to do with it? I'm not so sure. There's more drinking in Too Many Women than in any other novel I've read, yet no one gets drunk. This is not to say that bad decisions aren't made. For example, Ron agrees to an early morning game of golf with Arch, which is something I'd never do.

The next day, Ron takes three swings and loses two "dollar and a quarter balls" to a gully and another to some bushes, then returns to the club house where Arch introduces him to Dell Whitney. She falls for the writer's pouting, petulant ways as he drones on and on about the love he may or may not have for his wife.

(cliquez pour agrandir)

Everything that follows is a bit of a blur; this has nothing to do with alcohol but Martin's inability to handle time and place. The story itself is really quite simple: a man drinks, drives, eats in restaurants, goes to nightclubs and attends parties, all the while going back and forth on whether to leave his wife for another woman. That he ends up returning to Sue at the end seems dictated by page count; had there been room for another chapter it would've been Dell.

The idea that "Ron flits happily from woman to woman, heavily sampling the nectar of each", as cover copy would have you believe, is absurd. Ron doesn't so much as kiss young Cynthia and rejects Maxine outright. Yes, he does. Even though she's got the body of a Grecian goddess… and a gun.

Not to worry, the scene between Ron and Maxine, depicted somewhat inaccurately in Syd Dyke's cover, begins and ends in less than half a page.

Anyone who bought Too Many Women based on the back cover would've been disappointed to learn that there is no "three day [sic] orgy" – in part because there is no character named "Charlie the Greek". The professional party girl is, I suppose, Maxine, though there's no "play and run" talk. The calibre and mark of the gun she pulls on Ron are never mentioned, but then Martin is not one for details.

Hey, the publisher was only trying to sell books. A novelist should understand.

Main Street, Hamilton, Ontario, 1 August 1947.

Trivia: Too Many Women is the first novel I've read that is set mainly in Hamilton, Ontario. Main Street is mentioned. Buffalo, Niagara Falls, Sainte-Agathe-des-Monts and Ron's beach house (location undisclosed) also figure.

Favourite passage:

Ron watched Arch clean the dust off his shoes with a towel.
     "I must admit she's attractive," he said.
     "Attractive hell!" said Arch. "She's good enough to eat."
     "Then how come you never made a play for her?" asked Ron.
     "I'm not her types," said Arch. "She's the queen. I'm only the cat that can look at her. She doesn't like cats. She likes writers…"

Every writer's fantasy.

Object and Access: Could this be the best produced News Stand Library title? There are few typos, no dropped lines and the text is a uniform dark grey.

Published in single printings for the Canadian and American markets, Too Many Women draws a complete blank on WorldCat. Three copies are currently listed online: a Very Good American at US$9.00 and two less than Very Good Canadians (the true first) at C$25.00.