The Year's Best Books in Review – A.D. 2016; Featuring Three Titles Deserving Resurrection

Still more than two weeks left in the year, but not too early for this list. Given my schedule these days, I know the book I'm reading right now will be the last finished before the ball drops in Times Square. I also know that it won't make the grade.

What's the book? I'll let that remain a mystery, though the sharp-eyed will spot it amongst other 2016 reads pictured above.

This year, I reviewed twenty-seven books – here and in the pages of Canadian Notes & Queries. That's just three more than in 2015, and yet I had a much harder time deciding on the three most deserving of a return to print. These are they:

The Midnight Queen
May Agnes Fleming

Who'd have thought this 19th-century novel of the Plague Year, would be such good fun. It's a fast-paced, crazy ride featuring a masked medium, a killer dwarf, long-lost siblings, and highwaymen and whores playing at being aristocrats. It's also quite well written.

There Are Victories
Charles Yale Harrison

An ambitious, daring novel by the man who gave us Generals Die in Bed. Set in Montreal and New York, this isn't a war novel, though it does deal with its devastating effects. Flawed, but brilliant, the novel's scarcity adds to the need for reissue.

For My Country [Pour la patrie: roman du XXe siecle]
Jules-Paul Tardivel

In this 1895 novel, Satan looks to secure his hold on the Dominion of Canada, only to be thwarted by divine intervention and something resembling a fax machine. The original French remains in print, but not this 1975 translation by Sheila Fischman.


Regular readers know that nearly every Margaret Millar I read is recommended for republication. This year, I read only one of the Grand Master's novels: Do Evil in Return. It would've made the list had it not been announced for republication as part of Syndicate Books' Complete Margaret Millar. Look for it in March.

Three books reviewed here this year are currently in print:

The Man from Glengarry
Ralph Connor [pseud. Charles W. Gordon]
Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2009

The Type-Writer Girl

Olive Pratt Raynor [pseud. Grant Allen]

Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2003

The Cashier [Alexandre Chenevert]

Gabrielle Roy [trans. Harry Binsse]

Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2010

I helped usher two titles back into print this year, both as part of Véhicule's Ricochet Books series:

Gambling With Fire
David Montrose
[Charles Ross Graham]

The fourth and final David Montrose novel. Here private investigator Russell Teed, hero of the first three, is replaced by the displaced Franz Loebek, a once wealthy Austrian aristocrat caught up in Montreal's illegal gambling racket.

The Keys of My Prison
Frances Shelley Wees

In the 2015 edition of the Year's Best Books in Review I made reference to a book I was hoping to revive. "If successful, it'll be back in print by this time next year," I wrote. The Keys of My Prison is that book. A novel of domestic suspense set in Toronto, it should appeal to fans of Margaret Millar...


And on that note, as might be expected, praise this year goes to New York's Syndicate Books for The Complete Margaret Millar. The Master at Her Zenith  and Legendary Novels of Suspense, the first two volumes in the seven-volume set are now housed in the bookcase. The next, The Tom Aragon Novels, is scheduled for release on the tenth of January.

Great way to start the new year.

Related posts:

Falling Hard for May Agnes Fleming

Of War, Peace and Montreal's Writers' Chapel

Desperately Seeking Violet

Grant Allen Dons a Woman's Blouse

Bad News for Modern Man
A Neglected Author's Neglected Novel
A Rival for Margaret Millar?

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