James Moffatt Wins the Race

The Marathon Murder
James Moffatt
London: New English Library, 1972
124 pages

On January 12, 1972, Canadian writer James Moffatt appeared on BBC 2's Late Night Line-Up.  The public broadcaster had a habit of wiping tape back then – most famously David Bowie's January 3, 1973 Top of the Pops performance of 'The Jean Genie' – but footage survives. At the time, Moffatt was the biggest paperback writer living in Britain. Skinhead was his greatest success.

The Encyclopedia of Pulp Fiction Writers describes Skinhead as a "million-copy seller." I don't doubt it. Every Brit I know around my age has read Skinhead.

Skinhead was published in 1970. By the time of his Late Night Line-Up appearance, Moffatt had followed it with Suedehead (1971) and Boot Boys (1972); Skinhead Escapades (1972), Skinhead Girls (1972), Top Gear Skin (1973), Trouble for Skinhead (1973), and many more followed, all published under "Richard Allen."

Moffatt once claimed that as a child he'd earned third prize in a Toronto Star short story competition. In one interview he spoke of studying law at Queen's, but in another he said it was chemistry. Moffatt talked about writing for pulps in New York, living in Hollywood, and being the publisher and editor of a bowling magazine.

Was any of this repeated on Late Night Line-Up? Segments of the 12 January1972 broadcast were used in the 1996 BBC2 documentary 'Skinhead Farewell,' but not enough to get a real handle on all that went down that night.

Because the episode itself hasn't been posted online, I rely on the publisher's note:

Added to this is Moffat's four-page author's note, in which he claims that The Marathon Murder began as a sort of spur of the moment thing with host Will Wyatt throwing out an an idea. "I had precisely five seconds in which to think of a title and write the first few sentences ON CAMERA!" writes Moffatt. 

Here are those first few sentences:

Munich was but two weeks away. This left Harry Nolan with two weeks solid training to get himself in shape. He had not been too keen of late to keep himself in shape because he had problems.

It's not much of a start. This gruff Canadian, a self-described veteran of hard-boiled American pulps, writes: "Munich was but two weeks away" and "He had not been too keen of late to keep himself in shape." Reading these words, I'm almost surprised that Moffatt used "two weeks" and not "a fortnight."

Anyway, here's my fix:

Munich was two weeks away. This left Harry Nolan fourteen days to get in shape, but he had problems.

It may be that Moffatt was going after word count; his thirty-seven to my nineteen. New English Library describes The Marathon Murder as a novel, but at 38,000 words it is more accurately a novella. The low number surprises in that, when divided by seven, it amounts to fewer than 5400 words per day. Two months earlier, in a Daily Telegraph Magazine profile, Moffatt claimed ten thousand words as his daily output. He repeated that very same figure on the Late Night Line-Up appearance.

The writer at his desk.
Late Night Line-Up, 12 January 1972

The Marathon Murder was written when the Olympic ideal of amateurism still held. Hero Harry Nolan, who ranks amongst the very best long distance runners on the planet, is an English office worker. His wife, Emily, has left him for another man. He worries that this will... um, affect his performance. 

Terry Grayson is the other hero. A BBC journalist with no background in sport, for whatever reason he's been assigned to cover the marathon. Where Harry pines for Emily, Terry is stuck on some bird named Gloria. He just can't get over her, yet happily accepts leggy Sandra into his bed: "He had no illusions regarding their relationship. It was fleeting like fame. A fast, furious, fornicating union that had no basis in fact." Terry is surprised when Sandra follows him to Munich.

The Marathon Murder was written seven months before the start of the 1972 Olympic Games. It imagines violence, but in no way anticipates the actual horrors. At time of publication, Moffatt's likening the Olympic Village to a hastily constructed kibbutz would not have been chilling.

At some point in his Late Night Round-Up appearance Moffatt stands next to a New English Library spinner-rack."These are some of the 250 books I've written these past twenty years," he says. "During the last year I've written eight, nine books, due to the fact I haven't been too well." The words hint at his future. A drinker, Moffatt's addiction got the better of him. His final book, Mod Rule, appeared in 1980, after which he went silent. He died thirteen years later at the age of seventy-one.

James Moffatt (right) in the Daily Telegraph Magazine, 19 November 197

The Marathon Murder is no speedy read. A tough slog, it took me two weeks to reach the end.

I was outpaced by the author.

Trivia: Harry Nolan is a fan of James Bond and Silas Manners, the latter being a British spy who features in Moffatt's The Sleeping Bomb (1970) and Justice for a Dead Spy (1971).

Object and Access: A cheap mass market paperback, typical of its time, the last four pages are given over to other New English Library titles, including Skinhead, Suedehead, and Boot Boys. 

I purchased my copy last October for £5.00 from a Lincolnshire bookseller. As of this writing, all of two copies are listed for sale online. 

WorldCat suggests that no library, Canadian or otherwise, holds a copy.

Related posts:

Walking in on Virginia Box and Baird Rodd

The Queer Queen Kong

Nazis Threaten from Beyond the Grave!

Double Fantasy

One Day's Courtship and The Heralds of Fame
Robert Barr
New York: Stokes, 1896
219 pages

Novellas both, "One Day's Courtship" and "The Herald's of Fame" were first gathered for book publication with a third tale, "From Whose Bourne." That the resulting volume was titled From Whose Bourne, etc. says much, I think.

"From Whose Bourne" is one of the earliest attempts at marrying the supernatural with what was then the emerging mystery genre. In the story, the spirit of a murdered man, William Brenton, follows the investigation of his widow, Alice, who is accused of having committed the crime.

From Whose Bourne, etc.
Robert Barr
London: Chatto & Windus, 1893

"One Day's Courtship" and "The Heralds of Fame" are lighter fare and aren't nearly so groundbreaking. Both are woven from tired worn threads we continue to today in today's romantic comedies. Each relies heavily on coincidence and unfortunate misunderstandings. Neither is recommended, though both may appeal to those interested in nineteenth-century depictions of artistic and literary life. Lovers of rom coms will find more satisfaction with Netflix.

"One Day's Courtship" concerns landscape painter John Trenton, who returns to Shawinigan Falls – "Shawenegan Falls" in all editions – with the intent of capturing its beauty on canvas. He was first made aware of the natural wonder through a letter sent by an admirer and lesser talent.

Shawinigan Falls, 1904

As it will turn out – I spoil things a bit here – that letter came from a young woman named Eva Sommerton. A very pretty, very wealthy American, Miss Sommerton has hired a canoe and crew to take her to the falls. Owing to a comical mix-up, John Trenton has hired that very same canoe and crew. Each thinks the other the interloper! What's more, neither knows the identity of the other!

You can imagine to possibilities.

"The Herald's of Fame" is lighter still, though I enjoyed it more. It's hero, Kenan Buel, is a young Englishman with two published novels under his belt. Neither did all that well, so it comes as some surprise when American publisher L.F. Brant expresses interest in his third. Brant reads the proofs when visiting Buel's London publisher and pays £20 for the American rights. Because he'd entered negotiations with the expectation of paying £100, Brant gives the author the difference.

It's all too wonderful. Buel now has more money than he's ever had, and so accepts his American publisher's invitation to visit New York. At the dock, the novelist enters W.H. Smith and Sons, where he spies a young woman looking over the "New Books" shelf. She hesitates over Buel's latest before settling on a title written by our hero's idol, the great novelist J Lawless Hodden. Owing to a comical mix-up, that young woman – a very pretty, very wealthy American named Caroline Jessop – finds herself with a copy of Buel's new novel.

Buel himself ends up sharing his ship's cabin with none other than J Lawless Hodden. The latter proves a mean, cheap, and deceitful bastard, and pretends that he paid for a private cabin. Miss Jessop, who just happens to be in the neighbouring suite, overhears the conflict and clasps her hands together in glee at the drama of it all. Of a sudden, Hodden, whose work she'd admired, is out; Buel is her new favourite. And so begins the flirtation.

I found this exchange between Miss Jessop and Mr Buel clever:

“I only wish I could write. Then I would let you know what I think of you.”

     “Oh, don’t publish a book about us. I wouldn’t like to see war between the two countries.”

     Miss Jessop laughed merrily for so belligerent a person.

     “War?” she cried. “I hope yet to see an American army camped in London.”

     “If that is your desire, you can see it any day in summer. You will find them tenting out at the Metropole and all the expensive hotels. I bivouacked with an invader there some weeks ago, and he was enduring the rigours of camp life with great fortitude, mitigating his trials with unlimited champagne.’’

     “Why, Mr. Buel,” cried the girl admiringly, “you’re beginning to talk just like an American yourself.”

     “Oh, now, you are trying to make me conceited.”

     Miss Jessop sighed, and shook her head.

     “I had nearly forgotten,” she said, “that I despised you. I remember now why I began to walk with you. It was not to talk frivolously, but to show you the depth of my contempt!      Since yesterday you have gone down in my estimation from 190 to 56.”

     “Fahrenheit?”

     “No, that was a Wall Street quotation. Your stock has ‘slumped,’ as we say on the Street.”

     “Now you are talking Latin, or worse, for I can understand a little Latin.”

I was never nearly so good at flirting, but imagine my readers are.

For that reason, I cannot recommend.

You heartbreakers have nothing to learn.

Object: A very attractive book with frontispiece by Edmund Frederick (above). Following the two novellas, the publisher tacks on five pages of adverts. The earliest are the most interesting, but only because of the series title:

The twentieth century, then several years in the future, didn't treat any of the titles well. Robert Barr's In the Midst of Alarms, a semi-comic novel of the Fenian Raids, saw no editions in the twentieth century. The same is true for his short story collection The Face and the Mask, despite high praise from Arthur Conan Doyle. The other books are unfamiliar – even the Ouida – but I'd buy I Married a Wife for the title alone. The author's name is a bonus.

My copy was purchased earlier this year from a bookseller in Florida. Price: US$9.95.

Access: Copies of One Day's Courtship and The Heralds of Fame can be found at Library and Archives Canada, the Canadian Museum of History, Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, and thirty-three of our academic libraries. 

No copies are listed for sale online.

My edition can be read through this link thanks to the good folks at the Thomas Fisher Library and the Internet Archive.

Related post:

Getting to the Fenian Raids

Reading Gérard Bessette on His Hundredth

Not for Every Eye [Le libraire]
Gérard Bessette [trans. Glen Shortliffe] 
Toronto: Macmillan, 1962
98 pages

Yesterday marked the centenary of Gérard Bessette's birth. I spent an hour or so reading this translation of his most celebrated work. A novella – not a novel, as Macmillan claims – it isn't very long.

Bessette's title, Le libraire (The Bookseller), refers to narrator and protagonist Hervé Jodoin. It takes the form of a journal written on Sundays, when the bars are closed. The first entry involves Jodoin's arrival in the fictional Quebec town of Saint Joachim, where he has accepted a job in a bookstore. In truth, it's as much a bookstore as, say, Indigo; the better part of the establishment has been given over to toys, stationary, and religious articles. The book department is in the rear, allowing Jodoin to pass a good portion of the day in a quiet snooze.

Killing time is Jodoin's main occupation. He quickly settles into a routine – "book shop, beer parlour, room; room, book shop, beer parlour." At the end of each workday, he heads for Chez Treffelé, a working class bar where he drinks alone at a table located conveniently near the lavatory. After that – meaning, after the bar closes – Jodoin makes for his rooming house bed.

A crack appears in what Jodoin describes as "the monotony of my life" when the store's proprietor, Léon Chicoine, determines that his new bookseller is a believer in liberty and is a proponent of free thought. Chicoine unlocks a door to what Jodoin had thought was a closet, revealing the "sanctum sanctorum," a small, windowless room lined with books found in the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, and listed by Abbé Bethléem and Père Georges Sagehomme.*

Chicoine demands Jodoin's discretion, and asks him to sell the volumes (at inflated prices) to "serious purchasers." Our hero agrees, and starts off for Chez Treffelé "caressing the innocent notion that perhaps after all I was not yet completely useless, that perhaps my life might have a meaning."

Sadly, Jodoin's new customers fail to give meaning to his life:

They sidle up to me with a conspiratorial air and murmur into my ear the name of some author or book, all this in the same tone of someone asking for a condom or a suppository in a drug store. Others are more evasive still; they shower me with meaningful glances and ask me to recommend "something a little out of the ordinary" or "something with a kick to it."

Jodoin quickly comes to resent the extra work involved in retrieving volumes from the sanctum sanctorum, recognizing most aren't at all interested in liberty and freedom of thought: "If these jokers are looking for an aphrodisiac, they can find more effective ones."

The crack widens and drama begins with a pimply-faced boy he recognizes as a student of the Saint Roch School, "located a couple of miles from the town in open country, in the middle of a vast domain belonging to  a community of clerics who combine the dairy industry with the rearing of young men." The student asks for a volume by Voltaire, and whether "through curiosity or a kind of fellow-feeling produced by nostalgia for my own school days," Jodoin retrieves a copy from the sanctum sanctorum.

Le libraire was first published in Paris because Bessette was unable to find a Quebec publisher. This was in 1960, mere months before the Quiet Revolution began. Within two years, the novel had found a Quebec publisher, and had been translated and published in English.

I received this copy of Not for Every Eye as a gift on my twenty-third birthday. I read it the very same summer. A university student at the time, I used its story, and the story of its publication, in writing papers on the Quiet Revolution.

Much of the revolution took place when I was asleep in a crib.

I have people like Gérard Bessette to thank that it did.

* Researching this piece, I was amused to discover that Georges Sagehomme's Répertoire alphabétique de plus de 7000 auteurs avec leurs ouvrages au nombre de 32000 (romans et pièces de théâtre) qualifiés quant à leur valeur morale (1931), was revised nine times; the last – published twenty-nine years after his death – is Répertoire alphabétique de 16700 auteurs 70000 romans et pièces de théâtre cotés au point de vue moral.

Trivia: There is an actual St-Joachim, Quebec, located roughly thirty kilometres downriver from Quebec City, but it bears no resemblance to the town depicted in Bessette's novel.

More trivia: Adapted by M. Charles Cohen for CBC Television (1963) and CBC Radio (1967). The former starred Jack Creley, Larry Mann, and Barbara Hamilton.

Object: A slim volume consisting of white boards with purple type, as an objet Not for Every Eye is my favourite Macmillan of Canada book. Credit goes to Leslie Smart. Arnaud Maggs designed the jacket.

Bibliophiles will appreciate the adverts for other Macmillan titles on the back cover. I own three, but have read only one.

Access: The translation may be neglected, but it is not rare. Very Good copies are offered online for as little as ten dollars. I've seen some evidence of a softcover edition that may have been a rebind. It would seem that in 1977 the novella was absorbed into Macmillan's moribund Laurentian Library, though I've yet to encounter a copy. I have, however, seen the 1984 edition, issued by Exile (right). It is still available for purchase.

A second English translation, which I've not read, was published in 1999 by Guernica Editions. Its translator, Steven Urquhart has written a very interesting essay about the need and process:

Retranslating a Quebec Classic

The Urquhart translation is also still in print.

Remarkably, there is a Czech translation, Skandal V Knihkpectvi (Scandal in the Bookstore; Prague: Odeon, 1974). Collectors may be interested in a copy inscribed to Bessette by translator Ea Masnerova on offer from an Oregon bookseller.

Copies of Le libraire are plentiful. The cheapest copy I've seen offered online is going for one Yankee dollar. Few copies of the first edition, published in Paris by Jilliard, are in evidence.

Grant Allen's Breezy Read

An Army Doctor's Romance
Grant Allen
London: Raphall Tuck & Sons, [1893]
113 pages

The publisher lowers expectations with a note presenting this novella as part of its Breezy Library, "an attempt to dissociate a shilling from a shocker." Rafael Tuck & Sons would like the reader to know that this is no Shilling Shocker, rather it is a "Shilling Soother." The unpleasant elements of other Grant Allen tales – adultery (A Splendid Sin), fraud (Miss Cayley's Adventures), arson (The Devil's Die), rail disasters (What's Bred in the Bone), suicide (Under Sealed Orders), assassination (For Maimie's Sake), poisoning (A Terrible Inheritance), and cannibalism (The Cruise of the Albatross) – will not feature. No man will be butted off a cliff by a savage moorland ram (Michael's Crag).

I don't believe I've read so slight a story as An Army Doctor's Romance since childhood. We open on "fresh English rosebud" Muriel Grosvenor, the object of affection of two men serving in the Royal West Badenochs. Oliver Cameron, the first we meet, is a handsome doctor of modest means. His rival, Captain Wilfred Burgess, is just as handsome, and has the advantage of being enormously wealthy. Of the two, Muriel's mother prefers the latter, but the heart wants what the heart wants. During an English garden party on an idyllic English summer's day, the army doctor professes his love and proposes marriage. Muriel in turn declares her love, but stops short of accepting the proposal for the reason that she promised her mother she would not. Her promise to Oliver Cameron is that she will accept no other proposals.

Thwarted by scheming widow Mrs Talbot, who threw Muriel and the doctor together, Capt Burgess has no opportunity to make his own play for Muriel's hand, and so has to resort to a proposal sent by Royal Mail. Mrs Grosvenor pressures her daughter into accepting by post. After the response has been sent, Muriel writes a quick follow-up, breaking off the engagement and "blaming herself not a little for her moral cowardice." But she misses the postman! To make matters worse, Dr Cameron, Capt Burgess, and the rest of the Royal West Badenochs have shipped out to deal with the Matabeles in Matabeleland!

Curiously, surprisingly, in something touted as a "Shilling Soother," there is unpleasantness in the form of a Matabele attack on the Badenochs. Cameron is captured and Burgess is injured horribly. Each thinks the other has been killed. The doctor is released by the enemy and eventually makes his way back to England. Meanwhile, the captain is nursed back to health by Miriam, the beautiful daughter of a famous missionary. Burgess falls in love... but what to do about his engagement to Muriel? The situation is resolved with ease, and everyone goes off happily.

Breezy indeed, An Army Doctor's Romance passed before my eyes without once causing me to pause and give thought. Following Eden Phillpotts'  Summer Clouds and Other Stories (1893), it was the third volume in the Breezy Library. Only three more followed.

I'm not surprised.

Trivia I: By far the least imaginative of the fourteen Allen novels and novellas I've read to date, I was surprised to discover that An Army Doctor's Romance was well-received by contemporary reviewers.

The Publishers' Circular (Christmas 1893)

The most puzzling was a review in The Speaker (25 November 1893), which describes the plot as "distinctly ingenious."

Trivia II: In reading this novel – written for the money, surely – I came to believe that Allen was having some fun with the Breezy Library name because the words "breeze" and "breezy" appear four times in the text. However, research revealed that the words appear no less than nineteen times in the The Devil's Die (1890), my favourite Allen novel.

Object and Access: An attractive, somewhat unusual volume, the image and writing on the flexible chromolithographic cover are raised. The character depicted is Dr Oliver Cameron. His actions are a mystery to me. The interior features seven more images. All are by military artist Harry Payne.

Six of our university libraries hold copies, but not Library and Archives Canada. I've found five copies listed for sale online US$70 to US$250. I won my copy for US$16.99 in an online auction. As is often the case with things Allen, I was the only bidder.

The novella can be read online through this link thanks to the University of Alberta and the Internet Archive.

I don't recommend it.

Mister Allen Writes a Murder Mystery

Recalled to Life
Grant Allen
n.p.: Velde, 2009

Una Callingham remembers nothing before the death of her father – and that she remembers with great clarity. A flash of light revealed his bloodied body dead the floor and the back of another man escaping through an open window. The shock of it all rendered Una an amnesiac, famous throughout Victorian England as the one person who might be able to bring the killer to justice. The poor girl's condition was so severe that she was reduced to something akin to infancy. Una must again learn to speak, dress and, one presumes, use the water closet. After four years of seclusion and instruction, she emerges, aged twenty-two, as an inquisitive and highly intelligent woman who is intent on solving the murder of her father.

Recalled to Life is one of Allen's more commercial endeavours; he would've told his friends to give it a pass, but I'll not give the same advice. An entertaining novella, it touches upon the scientific advancements that consumed much of the author's non-fiction. For example, Una's father was working on a camera that takes photographs in rapid succession, much like real-life murderer Eadweard Muybridge. In fact, one of these photographs shows the very scene the poor girl remembers, but from a different angle. It's a remarkable piece of evidence, one that confirms Una's earliest memory.

What so attracted me to Recalled to Life – when I still haven't read The Woman Who Did – is that Una's investigations lead to Canada. In fact, the latter half takes place in the Dominion, then not three decades old, as Una tracks the man she believes to be her father's killer to British Columbia. It is the weaker half, and flirts with melodrama at the end, yet I admit to having been taken by surprise when the murderer is revealed.

Could be that I'm not much of a detective.

Allen isn't exactly remembered as a mystery writer, but the intricacy of his plots and his talent for creating interesting, often quirky characters are just the thing one wants in the genre. Shame he didn't do more... I write of a man who published 51 books in his fifty-one years.

Favourite passage:

"Canada!" Minnie exclaimed, alarmed. "You 're not really going to Canada! Oh, Una, you're joking!"

Trivia: After What's Bred in the Bone, Recalled to Life is the second Allen I've read to feature a railway accident, and the third in which the railway influences the plot (see: Michael's Crag).

Object and Access: A 127-page trade-size paperback with blindingly white paper, my copy is one of two print-on-demand books in my collection. Coincidentally, the other is Allen's Michael's Crag, the work of Whiskey Priest and Caustic Cover Critic JRSM.

Valde Books can't compare. I bought it for the sole reason that in five years of hunting I'd never seen a copy for sale or auction. It's a sad fact that Recalled to Life was not terribly successful. It was first published in 1891 by J.W. Arrowsmith of Bristol, a house Allen biographer Peter

 Morton informs had "a surprising reputation for detecting potential best-sellers: the Grossmiths, Chesterton, Jerome and Edgar Wallace all appeared under its imprint." Sadly, with Recalled to Life Allen didn't join their ranks. The only other English-language edition came from Henry Holt in New York (above), though it has been translated into Swedish (Återkallad till livet, 1911) and Finnish (Elämään palautunut, 1920). Not one copy of any edition is listed for sale online.

English-language editions are held by the Kingston Frontenac Public Library and ten of our universities. Library and Archives Canada fails miserably.

The first edition can be read online here – gratis – courtesy of the Internet Archive.

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Words Fail Me

Grant Allen Dons a Woman's Blouse

The Type-Writer Girl
Grant Allen (writing as Olive Pratt Raynor)
Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2003

Juliet Appleton is a Girton girl; she knows the meaning of "mandragora" and can spell it with confidence. Though Juliet suffered tragedy in her mother's early death, hers was an otherwise happy childhood. Papa was both loving and kind, but now he too is gone. At twenty-two, Juliet finds herself not only alone but facing a life of poverty. The reasons don't matter – Allen barely mentions them – the important thing is that poor Juliet Appleton has hardly a two-bob bit to her name.

What's a Girton girl to do?

This one answers an advert placed by the legal office of Flor & Fingelman, where she secures a position as "Shorthand and Type-writer (female)". That she could supply her own machine – a Bar-lock

– may have played to her advantage, but they would have hired her just the same. Truth is, Juliet is a significant asset to any firm; she's intelligent, creative, and has a wonderful personality. This is not to say that her character is without flaws; criticism may be made that Juliet is prone to throw caution to the wind. "I was born to take no heed for the morrow," she tells us. "I belong to the tribe of the grasshopper, not that of the ant."

Juliet resigns her post within the week, producing one of the greatest letters of resignation ever written:

You see, Juliet had been unhappy in the unseemly offices of Flor & Fingelman. During lunch break on her third day, she happened to sit within earshot of a Cambridge man who was telling his companion of a colony of agrarian anarchists just outside Horsham. Juliet pawns her typewriter and sets off by bicycle to join their number. The colony is not the quite the utopia of her dreams, nor is it the disaster I was expecting. The anarchists know not what they do and toil inefficiently, yet manage to harvest enough to get by. No, the real problem with the Horsham anarchists is found in their leader Rothenburg, who pressures Juliet to "fraternise".

Our heroine is not long with these people – no longer than she was with Flor & Fingelman – but then The Type-Writer Girl is not a long book. At sixty-six of 119 pages, the third and final act takes up the most

space. However, it is in these same pages that the novella falters and eventually falls flat. Juliet returns to London, where she finds employment in a publishing house run by a romantic figure not much older than herself. She refers to him as "Romeo". Juliet falls in love with her new employer (as she knew she would), while Allen falls back on coincidence (as he invariably does).

The Type-Writer Girl is one of two Allens available from Peterborough's Broadview Press. My pleasure in this is tempered somewhat by the absence of supplementary material of the sort included with other novels Broadview has reissued.

I must add that it is odd Broadview chose to reissue the novella. By far one of Allen's lesser works, its true value lies only as a further sign of

evolution in the author's thought ("evolution" being a word Allen would have appreciated). The Type-Writer Girl may be weak, but its heroine, Juliet Appleton, is strong. As with the title character of his final work, Hilda Wade: A Woman with Tenacity of Purpose, our Juliet is more intelligent, industrious and capable than any who surround her. Both are a far cry from the fragile Blackbird of Under Sealed Orders, whose high education strains to the point at which she takes her own life.

Ultimately, The Type-Writer Girl is as slight as its page count. I find myself agreeing with Allen scholar Peter Morton in judging that The Type-Writer Girl could have been so much more. In his study The Busiest Man in 
England, Prof Morton writes of Allen:

If he (and his readers) had been willing to confront the darker side of sexual harassment, it could have been an effective piece of social realism like Wells' Ann Veronica of a few years later. As it is, it ends as little more than a romantic romp.

Damn, now I've got to track down a copy of Ann Veronica.

Dedication:

Favourite line:

"I am anarchic by nature. Wherever there is a government, I am always against it. Let me join your band – and I promise disobedience."

A critic raves:

Athenaeum, 11 September 1897

Object: A slim trade-sized paperback, feauring an Introduction by Clarissa J. Suranyi. Copies can be ordered for $18.95 through the publisher's website. I purchased mine three years ago at Cheap Thrills in Montreal. Price: $6.00.

Access: The Type-Writer Girl was first published in 1897 by C. Arthur Pearson. The first American edition appeared three years later, courtesy of cheapo publisher Munro (above). Street & Smith put out an even cheaper edition later that same year. The Pearson edition can be read online here courtesy of the University of Alberta and the Internet Archive.

The Broadview edition is held by sixteen of our universities, Library and Archives Canada, and Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec. I don't see any other anywhere. Surprisingly, no copies of any edition is to be found in the Kingston-Frontenac Public Library.

Related posts:

Romance Turns Russian Nihilist Reluctant

Blackbird Dying in the Dead of Night

The Busiest Man in England Lays Down His Pen

Romance and the Psychopath's Daughter

No Pattern for Life
Frances Shelley Wees
The Star Weekly, 11 December 1955

Not so much novel as novella, No Pattern for Life came and went sixty years ago this month, never to see print again. It pains me to write that this is no great loss. Frances Shelley Wees'  mystery The Keys of My Prison, ranks amongst the year's best finds. This is the most disappointing.

The Star Weekly did its best to position No Pattern for Life as a Christmas story – 'twas the season, after all – but the action extends well into the following spring. That said, the story does open on a Christmasy scene: Melinda Elliott, she of the deftly moving hands, decorates mistletoe with bright red ribbon.

See above.

Widowed Sarah Chalmers sits looking on, "absently knitting a white nylon sweater" and passing judgement. Roommates, the two not only share a flat but work together at a Toronto radio station. Their boss, George Johnson, is basically Jack Kent Cooke. And because Johnson is Cooke, he has divorced Agnes, his wife of twenty years, to marry vivacious young Melinda. Sarah doesn't approve.

Good question. Johnson is a balding businessman suffering a mid-life crisis – there's nothing more to him than that. Melinda's fascination has everything to do with his wealth and the many gifts it provides. The first chapter brings a mink coat, but before Melinda can don her dead apparel she trips over Christmas presents and flies face first into the edge of an open door. The story's greatest action – decorating the mistletoe comes a close second – it leads to an operation for a detached retina. The months of convalescence that follow allow Melinda time to contemplate life and reconsider her betrothal.

Priggish busybody Sarah seeks to provide moral guidance while dodging dinner invitations from Jim Malone, Melinda's eye surgeon. Here's a coincidence: not only did Jim and his wife Kitty attend university with Sarah and her dead husband Dick, but he just happens to have grown up in the very same small town as Melinda. Courtesy of Jim, Sarah learns of her roommate's kinfolk:

"I can't imagine how she would get into your orbit. Sarah, With her father and mother, and what must have been her upbringing."
     "That sounds pretty serious."
     "Well… the father, Emmett… he got killed finally, we heard, in some disreputable way – in prison, I think – was a psychopath."

A strong believer in nature over nurture, Sarah determines that her roommate "hasn't got a chance". It's not Melinda's fault, of course, rather her "heritage", which Sarah judges to be "low, cheap, degraded, weak, degenerating." How comfortable she feels in the newfound knowledge that she shares a flat with a psychopath's daughter is left unexplored.

Sadly, No Pattern for Life is no "Murder-Mystery". Given the choices, I'd say it's more "Marriage Problem" than "Romance", though not one marriage features amongst its main characters. The Johnsons' union has ended in divorce. Doctor Jim's marriage to Kitty endured until her untimely passing. As mentioned, Sarah's Dick is dead.

And then we have a secret marriage. At nineteen, Melinda married Bill Blake, of the Toronto Graham-Blakes, but it ended badly because of the bride's frequent, unexplained disappearances from the family home.

As you're unlikely to read No Pattern for Life – copies are scarce and it is not recommended – I'll complete the tale:

Sarah has been declining Jim's invitations because she doesn't know that Kitty died in childbirth a decade earlier. Upon learning the sad news she lays her hand on his and declares her love.

See below.

Melinda visits her grandparents' graves, reads some very complimentary things written on the headstones, and determines that she doesn't really come from such bad stock. Sarah agrees. We learn that Melinda had disappeared from the Graham-Blake home to care for the alcoholic, drug-addicted mother of whom she dared not speak.

Conveniently, Bill Blake returns to the scene because he just can't get over Melinda.

Melinda breaks off her engagement with George, sending the jilted fiancé off in search of his ex-wife. He finds Agnes looking "as she had years and years ago, when they were young." The stress of the divorce had caused a loss of thirty or so pounds in excess weight, so he pleads with her to take him back.

She does.

Lord knows why.

I guess she finds him fascinating.

Favourite passage:

Most boring passage:

Object and Access: Sixteen-pages, fifteen of which feature the novel. The final page is given over to American cartoonist Harry Weinert's "Vignettes of Life". This week's theme: Babysitters.

Anyone looking to read No Pattern for Life is directed to our best reference libraries. That said, old Star Weeky novels do show up from time to time. I pulled mine from a stack being sold by a London bookstore. Price: $4.98.

Related post:

A Rival for Margaret Millar?

Terrible, Just Terrible

A Terrible Inheritance
Grant Allen
New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, [c. 1890]

A Terrible Inheritance is by far the worst Grant Allen I've read to date. That it's so short made it no easier task; in fact, much of what makes the book so very bad is caused by its brevity. Subplot and character development have no space. The twists and turns found in Allen's best are all but absent – there's precious little room to manoeuvre. Coincidence, ever-present in the man's work, is forced to even more absurd heights. I blame the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, which in 1887 commissioned and published A Terrible Inheritance as part of its Penny Library of Fiction.

from Queer Chums by Charles H. Eden
(London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge,  n.d.)

The Society was strict about its Penny Library of Fiction, ensuring that each volume numbered thirty-two double-columned pages. An old pro – he would've been thirty-eight at the time – Allen wrote to measure. Biographer Peter Morton tells us "Allen was able to manufacture featherweight novelettes like these in a few hours, surely without engaging his higher mental processes at all."

A Terrible Inheritance begins with the actions of an idiot, spoiling an otherwise very pleasant garden party at the English country home of Sir Arthur Woolryche. Here are the details: Some upper class twit, a would-be archer seeking to impress, strolls out onto the lawn, draws his bow, and hits the family dog.

The tragedy is made all the worse with the discovery that the arrow, one of Sir Arthur's Guyanese curios, has a poisoned tip.

But wait!

"Mr. Prior's here," somebody answered in haste from the group. "He knows more about poisons and poisoning than almost any other man in all England. He's made a special study of it, as I know. Mr. Prior! Mr. Prior! Come here, you're wanted."

Good luck soon comes to outweigh the bad. Prior is not only an expert in poisons, but is the leading authority on curari, the very one used on the arrow. What's more, just days earlier he had received from South America an elixir that may well prove to be an antidote.

What are the chances!

Prior saves the dog, thus proving the corrective effective. The College of Physicians' awards him its gold medal. Better still, Bertha, Sir Arthur's beautiful daughter, falls for his "manliness and sterling good quality". Father gives his blessing, despite being troubled by the young man's resemblance to… to… Sadly, Sir Arthur can't quite place the face.

Remember, this is the tale of a terrible inheritance, not a happy union. As the wedding day approaches Prior learns that he is the son of a Dr Walter Lichfield, also an expert in curari, who had died in disgrace whilst awaiting trial in the poisoning death of an uncle.

The Terrible Inheritance
Grant Allen
London: E. & J.B. Young, n.d.

Prior releases Bertha from their engagement the next morning. How could he not? By great coincidence, he and Sir Arthur had once speculated as to what had become of Lichfield's infant children. Said Prior:

"I don't know whether my profession makes me think to much of hereditary transmission, and all that sort of thing; but if I were born with a curse like that hanging over me, I'd give up my life entirely to some good for my fellow-men, and expose me least of all to any possible temptation. And I'd never marry."

Prior's only hope is that the man he now knows to have been his father was in fact innocent. Through his investigations, he comes to believe that Arthur Flamstead, Lichfield's close friend, was the actual murderer. Who is Arthur Flamstead? Why none other than Sir Arthur himself. "He assumed the name Woolrych instead, by royal warrant, on the death of a distant cousin on his mother's side, from whom he inherited a certain amount of property," explains Lady Woolrych.

Sir Arthur? A murderer? I didn't believe it for a second, in part because his daughter Bertha is such a sweet girl. A Terrible Inheritance plays upon Allen's pet theories regarding heredity, something he does to greater effect in What's Bred in the Bone, The Devil's Die and A Splendid Sin. This adds a certain of predictability – a drunkard's offspring will become drunkards, a gambler's offspring will become gamblers, and an expert in curari will spawn experts in curari. Those familiar with Allen will look about the small cast of characters for the true murderer, but find none. Sure enough, the true culprit is introduced in the final chapter.

Do I spoil things more by revealing it all ends with a wedding?

Trivia (for Canadians): Prior doesn't know he is the son of Lichfield because he was an infant at the time of his father's death. His mother soon set sail for Canada, where she and her children lived "under an assumed name in a remote village".

Trivia (for writers): A Terrible Inheritance was the first of three books Allen wrote for the Penny Library of Fiction; A Living Apparition (1889) and The Sole Trustee (1890) followed. Writers for the series earned between 30s and £10 per title – roughly £172 and £1150 today. I'm guessing that Allen's pay was at the upper end. Either way, it's not bad for an afternoon's work.

Object: A slim, 57-page hardcover, my copy, the first American edition, was purchased in August from a Yankee bookseller. The frontispiece, by an illustrator named Gallagher, has been simplified somewhat on the cover. Am I wrong in thinking it a novella? Is it a long short story? The word count is 16,226. You decide.

Access: A Terrible Inheritance enjoyed three editions and was later published in Danish (En underlig arv, 1891), Swedish (Mordet i Erith, 1917) and German (Ein schreckliches Erbteil, n.d.). The Kingston-Frontinac and Toronto public libraries have copies, as do the University of New Brunswick, University of Alberta and Simon Fraser University.

Last century, the Canadian Institute for Historical Microreproductions produced microforms of the Crowell and Young editions. Both can be read gratis at the Internet Archive. As might be expected, they have attracted a wake of print on demand vultures, who in turn excrete all kinds of mess. Miami's Book on Demand demands US$55.78 for theirs; just under a dollar a page.

Advert for Monkey Brand Soap featured in the E. & J.B. Young edtion

Related post:

No Nurture, Just Nature

A Nineteenth-Century What's Bred in the Bone

Victorian Psycho

A 19th-century Céline Dion and Her Horrible Hunchback Husband

'The Lane That Had No Turning'

The Lane That Had No Turning

     and Other Tales Concerning the People of Pontiac

Gilbert Parker

New York: A.L. Burt, 1900

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:

Further Along The Lane That Had No Turning

On Wednesday the Tenth

Today is the eleventh. I don't mean to confuse, but so much of Grant Allen's bibliography bewilders, bedevils and befuddles. The Cruise of the Albatross; or, When Was Wednesday the Tenth?, the subject of  the previous post, is all too typical. It first appeared as "Wednesday the Tenth", serialized in a British girl's magazine called Atalanta. The novella made its American debut with the 1890 Lothrop edition pictured above. Yankee boys were treated to images that had been denied young English roses. Here, for example, are the well-toned men of Tanaki:  

Even in retreat, they appear a very formidable force:

Allen was a recognized name when Wednesday the Tenth first appeared between cloth covers, but not so much that he could carry a British edition. This was, as I've said, a slight work. A mere 121 pages of sparsely-laid type, and still I found it a bit of a chore to reach the end. No surpass, then, that it was republished only once... or twice.

In 1898 Lothrop repackaged the novella as The Cruise of the Albatross; or, When Was Wednesday the Tenth? The title page mentions nothing of the previous title, but it has all sorts of other information, including a credit to "Bridgman" for the illustrations.

This would be the busy L.J. Bridgman (1857-1931), whose work can also be found in works by Rudyard Kipling and a whole lot of forgotten writers like Eustace Leroy Williams and Mary Hazelton Wade. My copy includes two plates. Not profusely illustrated, but illustrated none the less.

A much more common Lothrop edition, also dated 1898, was issued under this cover. More often than not it is this that is described by booksellers as the "First Edition". Some copies have the Bridgman plates, some do not.

Caveat emptor.