Pulp Noir à Montréal

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

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

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

Kelley Pulls a Fast One

Bad Men of Canada

Thomas P. Kelley

Toronto: Arrow, 1950

Scott Young, Neil's dad, had a pretty good story about Thomas P. Kelley. It begins with the two men taking a morning stroll on Toronto's Wellington Street. A panicked pulp editor interrupts, offering Kelley good money to deliver a story before noon. Kelley accompanies the man back to the magazine's offices, is given a title – "I Was a Love Slave" – and begins typing. He joins Young for lunch $200 richer.

No blockhead, Kelley wrote for money and he wrote rapidly; there were no second drafts. With fiction, he would sprint with an eye on the word count, coming up with an ending only when approaching the finish line.

Non-fiction didn't offer quite the same freedom. It wasn't that Kelley felt bound by facts, more that he tried to keep them in mind. Bad Men of Canada is a typical of his approach. Short on names and dates, filled with imagined dialogue, the stories are excited and repetitive. Reading Kelley's words is not unlike listening to an old-timer – yes, old-timer – down at the local pub. Here, for example, is the writer's description of American serial killer H.H. Holmes:

Physically, he was a weakling. He had buck teeth, his nose was somewhat flattened, and he had a habit of drooling from the corners of his mouth.

In brief, in appearance, H.H. Holmes was an awful mess! And yet, the gals went for him in a big way! Don't ask me why – your guess is as good as mine!

The inclusion of Holmes, subject of the first of the book's ten chapters, is a cheat. True, the man once visited Toronto – he even stayed long enough to murder two children – but Holmes has about as much to do with this country as Charles Ng. Not all the chapters concern Bad Men of Canada, and the pitch line – "A History of the Ten Most Desperate Men in Canadian Crime" – is just as loose. Just who is the desperate man in chapter four, "Four Bad Men"? And what about chapter two, "The Terrible Donnelly Feud"? Is it one of the Donnellys or a member of the mob that killed them?

It was no surprise to see the Donnellys in this book; Kelley mined their sordid story throughout his career. In fact, he'd included the Donnellys in Famous Canadian Crimes, a collection of his New Liberty Magazine pieces, just one year earlier. There's a good deal more overlap between Famous Canadian Crimes and Bad Men of Canada – overlap that goes far beyond subject. Whole paragraphs are carried over unchanged from one book to the other, while others undergo minor rewrites. "It was a spring morning in 1879 when four desperadoes galloped into the small village of Ashcroft, B.C., with gun blazing," in Famous Canadian Crimes, becomes: "On a bright summer morning in 1879, four desperadoes galloped into the small village of Ashcroft, B.C., with guns blazing."

Spring, summer... who remembers? Anyway, it was a morning.

All this recycling seems a bit disingenuous given Kelley's introduction:

To be sure there are other cases that could have been included in this volume. But a volume allows just so many pages – and just so many cases. If the reader, after perusing this volume would like to read the stories of more Bad Men of Canada, a letter to the publisher might encourage a sequel.

That Kelley, already looking to pull another job.

Favourite sentence: "'Here he comes,' he whispered. 'It's Ryan!'"

Object: A fragile massmarket paperback, typical of its time.

Access: Another Arrow obscurity. No copies are currently listed for sale online. It seems that the only library copy in the world is held at the University of Michigan's William L. Clements Library. "The Clements Library contains a wealth of primary sources for the study of early American history," says the university's website.

AL PALMER PLAGIARISM SCANDAL!

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

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

Someone get on the phone to Gads Hill Place.

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

The Scrambled-Eared Gentry

The Broken Leg Brigade

Caprice Chinois

Characters, Characters – Never Any Normal People

The Younger Degeneration

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hard Copy

Mention here is a bit late, but not so much that one can't pick up a copy as a last minute stocking stuffer. The new issue of Canadian Notes and Queries features the debut of The Dusty Bookcase on paper. Subject? Nothing less than John Glassco's most intricate piece of hoaxery: The Temple of Pederasty. Banned in Canada, pulped in the United States, its history is one involving deception, forgery, plagiarism, smuggling and a cold government bureaucrat.

I'll say no more except to point out that the very same issue features a very fine piece by Zachariah Wells' on The Mulgrave Road, Harry Bruce's 1951 collection of verse.

Neglected, not suppressed.