Born Again Infidel

The Right of Way

Gilbert Parker

New York: Grosset & Dunlap, [c.1907]
419 pages

I don't like it when a novel opens with a line of dialogue; seems so lazy. The first sentence of the The Right of Way has got to be the worst:

"Not guilty, your honor!"

And yet, I really enjoyed The Right of Way. The story begins in a crowded Montreal courtroom on a sweltering August day. The acquitted is a mystery man. Charged with the brutal murder a timber baron, he'd offered nothing more than his name. Through much of the trial, Charley Steele, the prisoner's counsel, had appeared indifferent to his client's fate, only to rise, "quietly, unnoticeably drunk," and give a most brilliant defence... which, of course, leads back to the novel's first sentence.

After returning to his office, Charley considers his victory:

"I was dull, blank, all iron and ice; the judge, the jury, the public, even Kathleen, against me; and then that bottle in there — and I saw things like crystal! I had a glow in my brain, I had a tinge in my fingers; and I had success, and” — his face clouded — “he was as guilty as hell!”

Charley drinks a great deal. Perhaps the most interesting aspects of this interesting novel, composed as the temperance movement was growing, is its depiction of alcohol as something that can both inspire and destroy. In Charley it does both. 

He marries the aforementioned Kathleen, though he does not love her. To Charley, she is "the most beautiful thing he had ever seen, but he had never regarded her save as a creation for the perfect pleasure of the eye; he thought her the concrete glory of sensuous purity, no more capable of sentiment than himself."

In other words, Kathleen is a trophy wife.

It makes sense that of the sixteen illustrations that decorate this edition, only one features Kathleen. Even before the marriage, Charley had a reputation as the most brilliant lawyer in Montreal. As his practice flourishes, his marriage withers. Unbeknownst to his wife, Charley has taken to slumming it at Charlemagne's, a working man's tavern to the east of Montreal's east end. Here Parker's omniscient narrator turns discreet. Sure, Charlemagne's serves drinks, but for Charley barmaid Suzon is the greater draw. The regulars, primarily farmers and river-drivers, put up with Charley's presence until the night he decides to make a grand show of his intellect.

Badly beaten, he's thrown into the St Lawrence, only to be pulled onto a raft piloted by the very man who's acquittal features on the novel's first page. The two drift eastward toward the outskirts of the town of Chaudiere, at which the supposed murderer – “he was as guilty as hell!” – has a lonely cabin. Charley is nursed back to physical but not mental health. A head wound has left him as a child. He remembers nothing of his past and lives each day as something of an innocent, until operated on by a "great Parisian surgeon," who happens to be visiting his brother, the local curé.

Charley regains his memory, and with it his ability to read. And this is how he discovers, by way of a newspaper story, that seven months have passed, that he's been declared dead, and that his wife is now married to Captain Thomas Fairing, a former rival for Kathleen's hand.

Charley faces a dilemma:

What was there to do? Go back? Go back and knock at Kathleen’s door, another Enoch Arden, and say, "I have come to my own again”? Return and tell Tom Fairing to go his way and show his face no more? Break up this union, this marriage of love in which these two rejoiced? Summon Kathleen out of her illegal intercourse with the man who had been true to her all these years?

I believe that last sentence counts as a bloomer.

Charley chooses to stay in Chaudiere, where he finds work with the town's elderly tailor. The locals are suspicious if not hostile, particularly after the stranger lets slip that he is not a Catholic. His acceptance comes gradually, aided by his friendship with the curé and numerous good deeds. He gives to the Church, he gives to those in need, he provides free legal advice, and he saves a man's life by leaping on the back of a runaway horse (as soldiers look on). Oh, and he also translates Oberammergauer Passionsspiele to French, provides illustrations to go with the text, and designs and sews the costumes for Chaudiere's passion play.

What risks becoming a tiresome train of good deeds, is saved through the introduction of lovely Rosalie Evanturel, the postmaster's daughter. Charley is in love for the first time, but knows he cannot marry her. He also knows he cannot share his reason. And so their love is accompanied by tension and, on Rosalie's part, a measure of resentment. Though this illustration suggests otherwise,  their scenes together are oddly contemporary, rising well above Victorian melodrama.

And make no mistake, The Right of Way is a Victorian novel. What's more, it was a popular Victorian novel, bringing with it coincidence and contrivance. Sleepwalking does figure. It is a fever fantasy about a man who is given a second chance at life. For it to work, the reader must believe that Charley not only acknowledges his wrongs, but cares so much for Kathleen, a woman he never loved, that he cannot return to reclaim his wealth and his social standing. 

The Charley of Chaudiere is not the Charley of old. Might it be that his brain surgery wasn't wholly successful?

Trivia: The working title was Charley Bell.

Trivia II: In a candid introduction penned for the twenty-volume Works of Gilbert Parker, the author reveals that Charley Steele was based on someone – sadly unnamed – whom he'd known as a boy.

Trivia III: The Right of Way was adapted for the stage (1907) and twice to the silent screen (1915 and 1920). Both films are lost. In 1931, it returned to the screen as a talkie. In this clip Loretta Young (Rosalie) and Fred Kohler (Jo, the murderer) bravely attempt French Canadian accents.

  

Probably better as a silent film.

Object: One of the nicer Grosset & Dunlap's in my collection, this "SPECIAL LIMITED EDITION" uses the plates and A.I. Keller illustrations from the 1901 Harper first American edition. The novel proper is followed by twelve pages of ads for other Grosset & Dunlap titles. I purchased my copy earlier this year from a Las Vegas bookseller. Price: US$12.99.

Access: Anything but a rare book, in 1901 The Right of Way was the fourth biggest selling novel in the United States. The following year, it held the sixth spot. I'm betting it did even better in Canada

Online prices range from US$1.89 to US$185.01. As expected, there's nothing at all special about the most expensive, a Grosset & Dunlap reprint lacking jacket. A New York bookseller lists the 1931 Grosset & Dunlap photoplay edition for US$76.00. The most intriguing is a Nelson Library edition "in RARE Color DustJacket of Dead Man on Floor & Woman Kneeling with Apron, Holding Back a Large Brown Dog with Sharp Teeth," offered at US$60.00 by a California bookseller. Something similar does feature in the novel, but the scene is inconsequential (and the man involved isn't dead).

Several editions are available for download at the Internet Archive.

Best Books of 1920: Beware the Bolshevik Poets

The Globe, 4 December 1920

The 1920 Globe round-up of the year's best books was published on the first Saturday of that December. Twenty-four months had passed since the Armistice, and the introduction takes pains to position the conflict in the past:

This bold pronouncement follows:

The war has passed into history and even the "aftermath" is over.

   

Sure, but a good many titles concerning the Great War feature, and a new category makes its debut:

No, the conflict is still very much felt. Loss and sacrifice continue to inspire poetry, such as Our Absent Hero by Mrs Durie, the widow of Capt William Arthur Peel Durie.

Captain Durie died at Passchendaele on 29 December 1917 in an effort rescue wounded comrades in No Man's Land. 

Capt William Arthur Peel Durie
1881 - 1917
RIP

Another of the newspaper's poetry selections, J. Lewis Mulligan's The Beckoning Skyline and Other Poems (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1920), includes fifteen pieces of verse inspired by the war.

The 1920 Globe list recognizes a total of seven Canadian books of poetry, the others being:

               Acanthus and Wild Grape - F.O. Call

               Leaves on the Wind - Rev D.A. Casey

               Apple Blossoms - Carrie Wetmore McColl

               Lady Latour - Rev W.I. Morse

               Rhymes of a Northland - Hugh L. Warren

This is something of a return to form. Where in 1918, the paper gave notice to eight Canadian volumes of verse, the 1919 list featured all of two (one of which, Pauline Johnson's Flint and Feather, had been published seven years earlier).

As is so often the case in the paper's annual book list, the "Poetry" section brings columns of comment, much if it designed to distance we Canadians from our American cousins:

We usually write in metre and dislike poetical as well as other kinds of Bolshevism. It is merely the affectation of free verse that makes American 'poetry' more distinctive – or notorious – than Canadian. It is a cheap substitute for originality.

   There has been a great deal more verse published this year than appears in the publishers' lists. Nearly all of it has been printed at the authors' expense, and it has been circulated largely 'among friends.' This practice is not to be despised or discouraged, unless it raises false hopes in authors who have merely the faculty of rhyming without possessing poetical talent or literary judgement.

There are 264 titles in the 1920 Globe list, fifty-three of which are Canadian. Just six of the fifty-three – all novels, no poetry – feature in my library:

Going by the Globe, 1920 was as good year for the country's novelists and short story writers; twenty of the 114 fiction titles are Canadian:

          Aleta Dey - Francis M Beynon

          The La Chance Mine Mystery - S. Carleton

          Glen of the High North - H.A. Cody
          Sheila and Others - Winifred Cotter

          The Conquering Hero - Murray Gibbon

          Eyes of the Law - Ethel Penman Hope

          Daisy Herself - Will E. Ingersoll

          The Luck of the Mounted - Sgt Ralph Kendall

          The Thread of Flame - Basil King

          A Son of Courage - Archie P. McKishale

          Graydon of the Windermere - Evan McKowan

          Every Man for Himself - Hopkins Moorhouse

          The Forging of the Pikes - Anson North
          No Defence - Gilbert Parker

          Poor Man's Rock - Bertrand W. Sinclair

          Dennison Grant - Robert Stead

          The Prairie Mother - Arthur Stringer

          The Rapids - Alan Sullivan

          The Viking Blood - Frederick William Wallace

          Stronger Than His Sea - Robert Watson

For the first time, the newspaper lumps together Canadian fiction, though it errs in failing to recognize Basil King, Prince Edward Island's second bestselling author, as a fellow countryman. The Thread of Flame, Rev King's sixteenth novel, is listed with This Side of Paradise under the heading "By Other Authors."

I've read all of two of the twenty. The Thread of Flame ranks as my favourite King novel after The Empty Sack. The other, Hopkins Moorhouse's Every Man for Himself didn't make so much of an impression. I found it even less interesting than described: 

Of the remaining novels, The Prairie Mother was reprinted for a decade or so. In 1972, Alan Sullivan's The Rapids enjoyed a brief second life with the University of Toronto Press. It can' be argued that the most enduring Canadian novel of 1920 is Aleta Dey, which was revived in 1988 as a Virago Modern Classic. It remains in print to this day in a Broadview Press edition.

This country fares much worse in other categories. Where in 1919, Canadian authors took six of the coveted "Economics" titles, the 1920 showing amounts to A Study of Canadian Immigration by Prof W.G. Smith and Occupations for Trained Women in Canada by Mrs Vincent Massey. If forced to choose, I guess I'd read the latter. It might be interesting to see what advice Mrs Massey, daughter of Sir George Robert Parkin, wife of one of Canada's most privileged men — a future Governor General, no less — might have for the working woman.

The Canadian titles in the "Historical" category are a touch more tempting:

Hydro-Electric Development in Ontario - E.B. Biggar
The Cross-Bearers of the Sanguenay - Very Rev W.R. Harris

The Evolution of the Oil Industry - Victor Ross
The Life and Times of Sir Alexander Tilloch Galt - O. D. Skelton
The Life and Work of Sir William Van Horne - W. Vaughan

A new edition of Katherine Hale's biography of Father Lacombe and a revised edition of George H. Locke's When Canada was New France. also feature, but the real standout is George T. Denison's Recollections of a Police Magistrate, which is deemed "our outstanding Canadian book of the year."

This is something new; the Globe had never before made such a pronouncement. Here's its description:

I haven't yet cracked open Recollections of a Police Magistrate — copies begin at $245 — but it can be read for free here thanks to the Internet Archive,

I prefer paper, myself.

Consider me old fashioned.

Tempted as I am to leave it there, this being 2020, I can't help but note that the 1920 Globe list — like those of 1918 and 1919 — features not so much a passing reference to the Spanish Flu.

Not one mention,

Not one book.

Related post:

The Globe 100 One Hundred Years Ago: Poets are Struck Dumb

and Capitalism Proves Embarrassing (1919)

The Globe 100 178 of 2018

The Season's Best Books in Review - A.D. 1917:

The String of Canadian Patriotism is Fingered

The Season's Best Books in Review ‐ A.D. 1916

The Season's Best Books in Review – A.D. 1915;

Featuring the Best Canadian Book Ever Published

A Man Forgets His Identity
(but not his manners)

A Foggy Night in Hogtown

Further Along The Lane That Had No Turning

The Lane That Had No Turning
     and Other Tales Concerning the People of Pontiac;
     Together with Certain 'Parables of Provinces'
Gilbert Parker
New York: A.L. Burt, [n.d]
359 pages

In his six-page – six-page – dedication to Sir Wilfrid Laurier, Gilbert Parker writes that he'd first intended to title this collection Born With a Golden Spoon. He gives no reason for the change of heart, but I think it may have something to do with knowing where its strength lies. The title story, with its mix of madness, murder, deformity, and suicide, is so fantastic, so entertaining, that that I felt it warranted its own review. I wrote that review in 2012, posted it here, then pulled it down and rewrote it for inclusion in The Dusty Bookcase book, published last fall by Biblioasis.

What I didn't do is continue on. The twenty-five other tales and parables remained unread. There was little point. The two Parkers I'd bothered with – The March of the White Guard and Tarboe – had me convinced that nothing would be nearly as good as "The Lane That Had No Turning." Picking up this volume six years later, I see that I was spot on, which is not to say that the rest of the volume doesn't offer anything worth your time. These are my three favourite tales:

'The Little Bell of Honour'
Voyageur Luc Pomfrette curses his baptism – "Sacré baptême!" – bringing hushed shock to the people of Pontiac. The Curé demands Pomfrette repent, but he refuses. The little bell of honour worn around the his leg, conferred out of respect by the other voyageurs, comes to serve as a signal of his approach. Restauranteurs will not serve him and shopkeepers will not sell to him. Though Pomfrette learns to be resourceful, milling his own flour and fashioning clothes from rags, he wastes away. Why will he not repent? And what caused him to blaspheme in the first place?

'The Tragic Comedy of Annette'
Log driver Bénoit, the most attractive and charismatic man in all of Pontiac, avoids the girl to whom has promised marriage. The shortest story in the collection, it would spoil everything to describe much more.

'An Upset Price'
As a tale of drug addiction, "An Upset Price" is uncommon for its day. Secord, its main character, left Pontiac to serve as a physician in the American Army. His delicate, indicate operations were praised in the Lancet, and he could've practiced anywhere, but chose to return to his small Quebec hometown. Coincidentally, I saw the doctor's downfall reflected last night in an episode of the German period drama Charité.

This is not to suggest that the other stories aren't without interest, rather that that interest will depend on the individual. For example, "Uncle Jim," concerning a hardworking farming couple who accept the return of their son, now married to a "designing milliner," will appeal to modern readers who wring their hands over boomerang children. The gothic "Parpon the Dwarf" is recommended to readers of the genre and anyone studying dwarfism in literature. Parpon features throughout much of the book and, it should be noted, is the sole person to stay loyal to the damned Luc Pomfrette.

Parker concludes his dedication to Laurier by announcing that the volume contains his last tales of Quebec. I can't say that they're the last I'll read. This volume may be a mixed bag, but I am curious about The Seats of the Mighty, Parker's historical romance of the Conquest. In 1896 it followed Francis Hopkinson Smith's Tom Grogan and A Lady of Quality by Frances Hodgson Burnett as the third biggest selling novel in the the United States.

Though we're loath to admit it, Canadians love it when Americans pay us notice.

Fun fact: In 1899, Doubleday & McClure published a volume of Gilbert's tales of the Pontiac and parables of the provinces – sans "The Lane That Had No Turning" – under the title Born With a Golden Spoon.

Object: A remarkably attractive cloth-bound hardcover featuring four plates by Frank E. Schooner. To think it came from a budget publisher. I bought my copy in 1998 at a Toronto Goodwill store. Price: $1.50. If the scrawl on frontispiece is to be believed, it once belonged to J.P. Butler of Walden, Massachusetts.

Access: The complete collection (see: Fun Fact above!) was first published in 1900 by Morang in Canada, Doubleday, Page in the United States, and Heinemann in Great Britain. Other editions followed, most notably as Volume 11 in the Imperial Edition of the Collected Works of Gilbert Parker (New York: Scribner's, 1913).

Online listings begin at US$2.99 and extend all the way to €86.00. The collection can be read online – gratis – through this handy link to the Internet Archive.

As always, print on demand vultures are to be ignored.

Related posts:

A Nineteenth-Century Céline Dion and Her Horrible Hunchbacked Husband

Bought for Its Beauty

a/k/a Frank Tarbeaux

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.

The Year L.M. Montgomery Became Lucy Maud

The Canadian Bookman, January 1909

I have Erica Brown of the wonderful Reading 1900-1950 to blame for time wasted this past weekend. It was she who demonstrated just how much fun can be had with the Google Ngram Viewer, a tool used in charting words, names and phrases found in the 5.2-million books that the corporation has digitized.

Prof Brown, whose work focusses on the history of popular fiction, used the GNV to trace the rise of the term "middlebrow". I began with "Ontario Gothic" (as with all, click the graph to enlarge):

An interesting result, though one that should be viewed with a cautious eye. As Prof Brown points out, "5.2 million books digitized sounds great – and it is – but it isn’t everything, and it is skewed towards US publications." I'll add that the tool doesn't capture anything published after 2008, and that any ngram that occurs in fewer than 40 books will deliver a rather deceptive 0% flatline. Still, while not entirely accurate, I think it goes far in reflecting trends.

Here, for example, is a search that charts the shift away from "L.M. Montgomery" to "Lucy Maud Montgomery". Interesting to note that the two lines converge in the mid-nineties, when most of her work entered the public domain.

The real fun comes in drawing comparisons between writers. Here, for example, are Canada's Booker Prize winners:

How about this graph featuring mentor Irving Layton and pupil Leonard Cohen:

Better yet, Irving Layton versus Louis Dudek:

Here we see the careers of rivals Ernest Thompson Seton and Charles G.D. Roberts:

The declining interest in Seton and Sir Charles made me curious about Sir Gilbert Parker, our biggest fin de siecle author.

Sobering. Wonder how I'm doing. 

Oh.

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

a/k/a Frank Tarbeaux

Tarboe: The Story of a Life
Gilbert Parker
Toronto: Copp Clarke, 1927

Imagine how old fashioned a fellow Sir Gilbert must have seemed when Tarboe first hit the bookstores. In 1927, the bewhiskered baronet had been a member of His Majesty's Most Honourable Privy Council for nearly a decade. While he'd begun his career in fin de siecle London, the author had had nothing to do with Oscar Wilde, the Decadents and The Yellow Book. In the Jazz Age, Tarboe fought a losing battle against Men Without Women and To the Lighthouse for the reader's dollar.

Published late in the author's life, just five years before the end, Tarboe stands alone in a bibliography dominated by adventure romances and historic novels. What is meant to be "the story of a life" –  another man's life – is in reality nothing more than accounts of encounters Parker shared with a man named Frank Tarbeaux. Like the knighted Canadian novelist, the American Tarbeaux is pretty much forgotten today, but in his time he appeared with some regularity in English-language newspapers.

The New York Times, 21 April 1913

A colourful character, "The King of the Card Sharks", Tarbeaux's portrait is painted here by an unnamed journalist in the 10 August 1895 edition of the Auckland Star:

He is uneducated and quite illiterate, but he is as clever as a monkey at what is called, in thieves' slang, "faking the broads," bunko steering, slim gambling, the gyp game, three-card monte, and is a proficient horse-shark, and an expert in green goods.

Nearly every mention I can find of Tarboe describes the book as a novel. The title – Tarboe, not Tarbeaux – more than hints that liberties have been taken. Parker has changed names to protect the innocent, the not-so-innocent and, I expect, the litigious. Of those we see touched by the card-shark's hand, only three, Hawai'i's King Kalākaua, Prince Consort John Owen Dominis and author George W. Peck are accurately recorded.* I think it no coincidence that all were long dead at time of publication.

Tarboe is not a novel; the proof lies in its structure. Parker was far too fine a craftsman to have composed so a rambling story. Here he is constrained by fact, limited by both what he had witnessed and what he had been told by his subject.

The drama takes place far away from the restaurants, art galleries and Parisian streets in which Tarbeaux tells his tales. It's in a comfortable Melbourne hotel room that he claims to be the sole survivor of Custer's Last Stand. His adventures with bounty hunters in the Transvaal are related at the Bodega on the rue de Rivoli.

The years go by and, as Parker notes (with some boasting, I think), encounters become less frequent:

The interests of my life grew wider and I entered the British Parliament but I had travelled before that in Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Greece, Turkey, Austria, Italy, Germany, and nearly all the European States, and since then in America, South America and elsewhere. I met many distinguished and notorious people, but never one with such interest for me as Frank Tarboe.

The final encounter, at a New York restaurant, takes place only through Parker's persistent pursuit of his old acquaintance. "I was called Arizona Frank", says Tarboe, launching into a story of how he once performed with Buffalo Bill.

Parker makes it plain that he has great admiration for the card shark. I'll join in. As portrayed by Sir Gilbert, the Frank Tarbeaux of Tarboe, though a crook, seems a stand-up guy:

Here was a man capable of great things, now a gambler by lack of moral courage, a menace to society while he could have been its benefactor, criminal now though he might have become a saint.

These words, coming early in the book, are followed by this passage in the final pages:

I would sooner have gone to Frank Tarboe in trouble than any relative of mine, or any friend I ever had. I'm not ashamed to have known him, to have liked him much, and here I have put upon record some of his sins, and his folly; but if we would count sins and folly, how many would stand the test? 

Three years after the publication of Tarboe, Frank Tarbeaux told his story to Donald Henderson Clarke, a writer of risqué novels. The resulting "story of a life", published as The Autobiography of Frank Tarbeaux, is much more fanciful than Tarboe. Unlike Parker, Clarke transcribed, he did not question.

In the autobiography, Tarbeaux says this about a man whom he claims was his cousin: "I shot Bob Ford, got him through the right lung down in the Gunnison County, in Southern Carolina."

That's right, Frank Tarbeaux was the man who shot the man who shot Jesse James.

Don't you believe it.

Object: An attractive book in moss green cover with gilt lettering, the Copp Clarke edition features four woodcuts by American illustrator Harry Cimino.

My copy, bought a few months ago from a London bookseller for $3.00, once belonged to the Rodney Public Library. To be honest, I'm not at all sure that it's not their property still; there is no discard stamp. The library card indicates that it was last checked out in 1933.

Access: The Copp Clarke Canadian first is joined by editions published in England (Cassell) and the United States (Harper). I see no evidence that any but the English enjoyed a second printing (peut-être). Very Good copies of the Copp Clarke edition, sans dust jacket, begin at $12.00. While Tarboe is easily found in our universities, patrons of public libraries will have real problems.

* Well, kinda. Parker slips up in recording Peck's name as "James Peck".

POD Cover of the Month: Romany of the Snows

Romany of the Snows – what we sticklers refer to as A Romany of the Snows – another fine product from print on demand house Tutis. Take care, bears are not nearly as cute, cuddly, petite or domesticated as they'd have you believe. From the novel:

I got sick and numb. There on that anvil of snow and ice I saw a big white bear, one such as you shall see within the Arctic Circle. His long nose fetching out towards the bleeding sun in the sky, his white coat shining. But that was not the thing — there was another. At the feet of the bear was a body, and one clawed foot was on that body — of a man.

First edition:

New York: Stone & Kimball, 1896

Runner up:


The Tutis take on Michel and Angele – what we sticklers refer to as Michel and Angèle – Sir Gilbert's romantic tale of two young lovers in 16th-century England.

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POD Cover of the Month: Rila of Ingelside
POD Cover of the Month: The Simple Adventures of a Memsahib