Three Little Women and One Big Spoiler

Frederick Niven wrote The Flying Years. I learned this as a teenager through a list of New Canadian Library titles printed in a copy of Philippe-Joseph Aubert de Gaspé's Canadians of Old.

The Flying Years was series title #102.

Frederick Niven... The Flying Years... I never saw mention of one without the other, and I never saw either in a bookstore.

For a long time, I thought Niven had written no other books, when in fact, he'd published more than thirty; from The Lost Cabin Mine (1908) to The Transplanted (1944), they span the better part of his life.

At some point last decade, I ordered a copy of The Flying Years, sight unseen, from an online bookseller – surely, it was the place to start in on things Niven – but when it arrived, it looked deathly dull. The publisher's assurance that its logo was a "SIGN OF A GOOD POPULAR NOVEL" did not sway, and I set it aside.

I continued to keep an eye out for Niven titles, but the only offerings I found were online. The Porcelain Lady sounded interesting. Who can't help but feel excitement in a title like Hands Up! One lone copy of Niven's 1927 novel Queer Fellows (US title: Wild Honey) was listed at £68 (with a further £11.21 in shipping), but I couldn't justify the expense.

So, imagine the thrill in finding a copy of The Three Marys (London: Collins, 1930) in an ill-lit, musty antique store not thirty kilometres from our home.

I paid $7.50!

There are so many things to like about this book. Let's beginning with it being a fifth impression. Who would've thought that Niven's readership was so large!

I like advert for Kolynos Dental Cream.

And if you lose the jacket, a second ad is stamped on the book itself.

I also like that the price intrudes on the spine and cover illustration.

And what of that illustration? Does the towering artist not intrigue? How about the petite women of increasing elegance?

Forget The Flying Years, The Three Marys was the novel for me! A little research found that H.E. Bates liked The Three Marys, placing its author at "the front rank of contemporary story tellers." Writing in Everyman, Bates praised Niven's ability to create "real characters."

This past weekend, I sat down with The Three Marys. Not two minutes later, I put it aside, having read this:

And now I try to forget.

Should I have warned you? Chances are you'll never come across a copy.

I've never read a spoiler quite like the above. Can you blame me in sharing it?

So, I pick up my copy of The Flying Years and, after all this time, notice this on its cover:

Should I have been reading The Flying Years all along?

Related post:

Old Folks

The Year's Best Books in Review — A.D. 2015; Featuring Three Books Deserving Resurrection

Yes, the year's best books in review… the best reviewed here, anyway. These past twelve months haven't been the most active at the Dusty Bookcase. Truth be told, I'd planned on closing up shop last January – and even wrote a post to that effect – but then I heard from readers asking me to go on. I felt the love and returned on Valentine's Day.

And so, this casual exploration continues, if more casually. Between this blog and my column in Canadian Notes & Queries I managed to review twenty-four books this year. That's not nothing, right?

Of the twenty-four, I see four worthy of a return to print, but tradition dictates that I choose three:

The Plouffe Family [Les Plouffe]
Roger Lemelin [trans. Mary Finch]

Roger Lemelin's 1948 best seller spawned an excellent film and our two most popular early television series. A monumental work of cultural and historical importance, I still find it hard to believe the translation is no longer in print.

The Fiend
Margaret Millar

A remarkable novel that dares centre on a sympathetic portrayal of a registered sex offender. That I read no other Millars this year is likely the reason only one of her novels features on this list. In 2012, the Kitchener native took all three spots.

The Adventures of Jimmie Dale
Frank L. Packard

Intricate and cleverly-woven adventures starring the Jimmie Dale – bored playboy by day, crime-fighting Gray Seal by night. Enormously influential and surprisingly entertaining.



I'm right now at work at reviving the unnamed fourth. If successful, it'll be back in print by this time next year. If not, my heart will be broken and I will never speak of it again.

In what must be a record, three of the novels covered here this past year are currently in print:

The Town Below [Au pied de la pente douce]

Roger Lemelin [trans. Samuel Putnam]

Toronto: Dundurn, 2013

The Three Roads

Ross Macdonald [pseud Kenneth Millar]

New York: Black Lizard, 2011

Night of the Horns

Douglas Sanderson

Eureka, CA: Stark House, 2015

I may as well add that The Damned and the Destroyed, Kenneth Orvis's "Relentless Story of the Hell of Drug Addiction", is right now available as an ebook from Prologue Books.

I was involved with three reissues this year, all titles in the Véhicule Press Ricochet Books series:

The Mayor of Côte St. Paul
Ronald J. Cooke

A novel about a young writer working for a crime boss in Depression-era Montreal. Is his motivation the need for material? Money? A dame? All three, it seems. I wrote the Introduction.

Hot Freeze
Douglas Sanderson

The first Mike Garfin thriller sees the disgraced former RCMP officer immersed in Montreal's drug trade. My favourite Canadian post-war noir novel, ow could I not write this Introduction, too?

Blondes Are My Trouble
Douglas Sanderson

The second Mike Garfin thriller. This time the private dick does battle with violent men pushing women into prostitution. The Introduction is by J.F. Norris of Pretty Sinister Books.



Praise this year goes to Wilfrid Laurier University Press and the Early Canadian Literature series edited by Benjamin Lefebvre. Dedicated to returning rare texts to print, there have been six titles to date, the most recent being Frederick Niven's The Flying Years with Afterword by Alison Calder.

Wilfrid Laurier University Press offers a 25% discount on online orders. Amazon and Indigo don't come close to matching those prices.

It's on my Christmas wish list.

Related posts:

Dirty Old Town

The Trouble with Charlie

Whatever Happened to Jimmie Dale?

Discovered Vile

A Man's Struggle with Humiliation

'A Relentless Story of the Hell of Drug Addiction'

A Blockhead Tries Writing for Money

Of Sex and Drugs and Montreal

Dark Blondes

Remembering Ron Scheer… on a Friday

Ron Scheer died this past weekend. He was my teacher. We never met.

A son of Nebraska, for more than four years Ron served as a patient guide through the frontier literature of a century past. His blog, Buddies in the Saddle, opened the eyes of this cynical easterner so that I might recognize that these weren't simple novels of cowboys and Indians, but of commerce, railroads, mining, farming, timber, politics, suffrage, temperance, religion and racism.

Early last year Ron was diagnosed with brain cancer. Buddlies in the Saddle took a turn toward the personal. Ron's posts on books were now punctuated by musing on life, health, beauty, family. Family was the subject of his final post.

Ron posted his last book review seven weeks ago. His subject was Blue Pete: "Half-Breed", a popular 1921 novel by Ontarian Luke Allan (né William Lacey Amy).  The Canadian Encyclopedia has no entry on Allan, nor does The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature, nor does W.H. New's Encyclopedia of Literature in Canada; everything I know about the writer and his work comes from Ron.

In the four years and nine months of Buddies in the Saddle, Ron tagged thirty book reviews with the word "Canada". Most were written by Canadians, while others had a Canadian setting. Some covered contemporary writing, but most came from the days of great and great-great-grandparents:

The Outlander – Gil Adamson
Blue Pete: "Half-Breed" – Luke Allan
The Blue Wolf – William Lacey Amy
Alton of Somasco – Harold Bindloss
The Boss of Wind River – A.M. Chisolm
Desert Conquest – A.M. Chisolm
The Doctor – Ralph Connor
The Story of the Foss River Ranch – Ridgwell Cullum
Woodsmen of the West – Martin Allerdale Grainger

A Man of Two Countries – Alice Harriman
The Promise – James B. Hendryx
Out of Drowning Valley – Susan Carleton Jones
The Stone Angel – Margaret Laurence
A Daughter of the Snows – Jack London
Scarlett of the Mounted – Marguerite Merington

The Lost Cabin Mine – Frederick Niven
Northern Lights – Gilbert Parker
The Backwoodsmen – Charles G.D. Roberts
Breaking Smith's Quarter Horse – Paul St. Pierre
Smith and Other Events – Paul St. Pierre
The Spell of the Yukon and Other Verses – Robert W. Service
The Trail of '98 – Robert W. Service
Raw Gold – Bertrand W. Sinclair
Big Timber – Bertrand W. Sinclair
Wild West – Bertrand W. Sinclair
The Prairie Wife – Arthur Stringer
The Last Crossing - Guy Vanderhaeghe
A Good Man – Guy Vanderhaeghe
Frontier Stories – Cy Warman
The Settler – Herman Whitaker

So many neglected titles. Small wonder that Ron was a regular at Friday's Forgotten Books, that weekly round-up hosted by mystery writer Patti Abbott. His was a unique voice. Friday's Forgotten Books will not be the same without him.

"I read old books so you don’t have to," Ron wrote more than once. The thing was that he made you want to read them. His enthusiasm was infectious. He was a dogged researcher; I suspect he often had a hard time moving on. Ron's thoughts on Raw Gold by British Columbian Bertrand W. Sinclair spanned two posts. His longest review, it begins:

I have this funny habit when I hold an old library book. I wonder how long it’s been sitting on the shelf in the stacks untouched, then of the different hands that have turned its pages over the years.

I share the very same habit. Now, picking up Ralph Connor's The Doctor, I can't help but think of Ron.

Ron read this novel. 

RIP

Here's to Patti Abbott and Friday's Forgotten Books

It's been well over six years since Patti Abbott launched Friday's Forgotten Books, a weekly round-up of blog posts dealing with buried, obliterated and blown over titles from years past. A latecomer, I first contributed back in December 2011 with Touchable, a novel co-authored by the man who created Bizarro World.

Anyone interested in the obscure will find Friday's Forgotten Books a weekly treat. Last Friday's gathering included neglected gems like Dolores Hitchins' Sleep with Slander and The Deadly Climate by Ursula Curtiss.

Most of Patti's contributors are Americans, and much of the focus is on the American and British, but that doesn't mean there's nothing for the lover of Canadian literature.

It was through Friday's Forgotten Books that I first read Ron Scheer, whose Buddies in the Saddle has served as my introduction to Canada's early frontier fiction. What follows is just a sampling of the Canadian books he has covered through the years:

The Blue Wolf – William Lacey Amy
The Boss of Wind River – A.M. Chisolm
Desert Conquest – A.M. Chisolm
The Doctor – Ralph Connor
Woodsman of the West – M. A. Grainger

Out of Drowning Valley – Susan C. Jones
The Lost Cabin Mine – Frederick Niven
Northern Lights – Glbert Parker
The Backwoodsmen – Charles G.D. Roberts
Smith and Other Events – Paul St Pierre
Raw Gold –Bertrand W. Sinclair
Big Timber – Bertrand W. Sinclair
Wild West– Bertrand W. Sinclair
The Prairie Wife  – Arthur Stringer
The Settler – Herman Whitaker

Patti herself is a great champion of Margaret Millar, as am I, as is John Norris of Pretty Sinister Books. Though we've never met in person, I think John might agree with me that Martin Brett's Hot Freeze is the great Canadian noir novel. At the very least, he shares my opinion regarding Frank L. Packard's influence in crime fiction. I would be doing something of a disservice in not sharing this image from John's post on Canadian Fandom #17. It may well be the ugliest thing published in 1951, and here I'm including Taylor Caldwell's The Balance Wheel.

Returning to Patti, this week saw the announcement of her debut novel, Concrete Angel. Publisher Polis Books describes it as an "unflinching novel about love, lust and greed". Who can resist? Not me. I'll be picking up a copy.

White Circle Canadians (w/ Warning)

In 1943 and 1944, Collins placed some pretty pricey White Circle adverts in the Globe and Mail. I expect these spurred sales, but they appear to have had no effect on editorial – during those same years, there was otherwise no mention of the imprint in the paper. This is known as integrity. Indeed, the "Canadian Classic" piece featured in Thursday's post marks one the very few times White Circle appeared in actual copy. If the somewhat unreliable Globe and Mail search engine is to be trusted, the imprint was last mentioned in its 1 April 1950 edition – and then only in connection with rising star Hugh Garner:

Not much of a notice, but interesting in that Cabbagetown, which White Circle would publish, is the only mass market paperback original found in the Canadian canon. (Should I be counting Neuromancer?) The piece also reflects a significant difference between White Circle and its Canadian competitors. Harlequin's most acclaimed Canadian writer was Thomas H. Raddall, News Stand Library had... well, Al Palmer, but White Circle published Garner, Stephen Leacock, Hugh MacLennan, Earle Birney, Ralph Connor and Roderick Haig-Brown.

(In fairness to News Stand Library, it did publish Garner's pseudonymous 1950 "Novel about the Abortion Racket", Waste No Tears.)

Six decades later, Garner has dimmed, Connor is little read, and Haig-Brown seems relegated to regional writer status – but Leacock, MacLennan and Birney continue to be celebrated and studied.

In keeping with this month of Thanksgiving, what follows is a final visual feast featuring some of White Circle's more interesting Canadian titles. The pitch on the early Barometer Rising is a favourite. "AS EXCITING A NOVEL AS MAY SAFELY BE PUBLISHED", it begins, immediately contradicting itself with this warning: "A NOVEL OF LITERALLY UNENDURABLE SUSPENSE".

There you have it: not safe at all, but literature's equivalent of Ernest Scribbler's killing joke.

1943 and 1951

1945

1945

1950

1951

1951

1952

1952

1952

My thanks to JC Byers, whose thorough Bibliography of Collins White Circle provided images of titles missing in my own collection.