One Woman's Boy's Own Adventure

Gold in Mosquito Creek
Dickson Reynolds [Helen Dickson Reyonds]
London: Museum Press, [1952]
192 pages

Strapping fifteen-year-old Randy Piers and younger brother Tom are preparing Old Pete the pack pony for a three-day fishing excursion to Mosquito Creek when up pops Lester Barnes. The Piers boys are none too pleased. A softie from New York City dolled up in a dude ranch outfit (here I'm paraphrasing Tom), Lester asks if he can come along. Good Canadians, Randy and Tom are far too polite to deny the visitor's request.

Lester's investor dad shells out dough for additional grub and the trio set out from Copperville. The town is a product of the author's imagination, but British Columbia's Mosquito Creek, is very real. And there is gold.

The fishing party is crossing a railway bridge when sounds the "wailing hoot of a train whistle." Old Pete is so spooked that all four of his legs fall between the ties. I was certain that one or more would be broken, which shows what little I know about pack ponies. Pete is just fine. I also learned that I don't know a lot about locomotives. This one manages to stop before reaching Pete, and the boys raise the pony with the aid of ropes and a blanket. Just how this is done isn't described in detail; after several readings, I'm still not sure exactly how it worked.

The trio manage to reach Mosquito Creek without further incidence, but once there Lester slips on a rock and is carried away by a fast moving current. Randy tries to save him, only to be swept away himself. Both are rescued by surprisingly spry old sourdough Jake Olsen. Once the boys are safe and on solid ground, he suggests they get out of their wet clothes.

Make nothing of that, Jake doesn't want them to catch cold.

The old man makes a living, of sorts, panning for gold in Mosquito Creek. Lester learns that Jake once sought fortune in the Klondike, leading to my favourite line of dialogue: 

"Oh boy! Were you up there?" Lester almost squealed with excitement. "Tell us some yarns, oh please!"

Jake shares a chilling story about a friend freezing to death, but nothing more. With winter a few months away, the old man is more focussed on building a cabin. He hires the Piers brothers to pan for gold while he gets to it. Lionel can't join in because he and his father are returning east to what I'm assuming is a Park Avenue penthouse. 

As the jacket illustration suggests, Gold in Mosquito Creek is a novel of adventure and danger. The railway bridge and slippery rock provide something of a template; if something can go wrong, it will go wrong. Randy fails to tie a tent flap, so wakes up to sleeping skunk. Jake fells trees to make his cabin, until a tree falls on him. Thoughts that a bear might eat their provisions are followed by a bear eating their provisions. At a Copperville picnic, Tom worries over keeping his new ice cream pants clean, only to have them stained by grape juice. Back at Mosquito Creek, he doesn't wear hiking boots, and so strains his ankle. Will the boys encounter another bear? You can bet on it.

Lurking in the background is a "tough-looking hombre" (here I'm quoting Tom), whom the Piers brothers first encounter in Copperville, just as they're beginning to work for Jake:

The swarthy man is a foreigner, but not a good one like Lester's wealthy investor dad. The reader is made aware of just how bad the earring-wearing man is by the fact that he's been tardy in paying a dentist's bill.

As it turns out, the swarthy foreigner is the leader of the Gold Ring Gang; a "saturnine" man serves as his number two. They've been moving about Copperville for some time. The third member of the gang was shot at the Bodega Hotel – reason unknown – and ends up sharing a hospital room with Jake (who almost lost a foot on account of that dang tree). This is how the bad men learn that the old sourdough has two or three thousand dollars worth of nuggets squirreled away at his camp.

It's at this point that Gold in Mosquito Creek shifts gears, revealing Dickson Reynolds as Helen Dickson Reynolds, author of He Will Return. The plot turns ridiculous, the dialogue laughable, and I felt I was finally getting my money's worth. 

The gang is successful in stealing Jake's gold. In doing so, one or more of their members tries to shoot Randy and Tom goes missing. It's assumed that the younger of the two Pierce boys has been kidnapped or killed. Their parents are not consulted when Copperville Constable Denny Day enlists young Randy to spy on the gang's hideout. Somehow he assumes the men won't recognize the boy they tried to kill. It's all bit of a disaster, as reflected on these two pages. The dialogue is worth the read:

cliquez pour agrandir

Everything in Gold in Mosquito Creek is fairly cut and dry. It's not a mystery novel, yet mysteries remain, the foremost being that an American criminals might cross the border, driving thousands of kilometres in a stolen car to a remote region of British Columbia. The Gold Ring Gang spend weeks in Copperville, taking rooms in the Bodega Hotel. The town's police know they are there and do nothing; not even when one of the gang is shot.

That's something, right? Someone shot in a small town

Maybe not.

All this for a haul of nuggets amounting to between two and three thousand dollars ($33,000 - $49,500 today).

Was that really worth it?

They tried to kill Randy.

I'll never understand the criminal mind.  

Object and Access: Gold in Mosquito Creek was first published in 1946 by Thomas Nelson & Sons, New York, NY. A bulky book bound in red boards, the Museum Press edition shares nothing in terms of design. The Nelson edition features a cover and six illustrations by American artist Grattan Condon. His rendition of the scene depicted on the British jacket is superior.

There has never been a Canadian edition.

My Museum Press copy was purchased earlier this year from a British bookseller. Price £2.50. Evidence suggests that it was a Christmas gift.

Library and Archives and seven of our academic libraries hold copies of the Museum and/or Nelson editions.

As I write, one Museum copy is being sold online. Price: £8.00.

The Nelson edition is nowhere in sight.

Related posts:

But Why Would You Want Him To?

The Very Strange Story of a Disulusional Abandoned Wife

Worst. Dialogue. Ever.

Arthur Stringer Unshackled (then bowdlerized)

The Wife Traders: A Tale of the North
Arthur Stringer

Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1936

319 pages

Tooloona: A Novel of the North

Arthur Stringer

London: Methuen, 1936

248 pages

There's a good chance that anyone who's read more than a couple of Arthur Stringer books has been here before. I don't mean Iviut Inlet, the Inuit community in which The Wife Traders is set, I refer instead to the novel's premise. Like A Lady Quite Lost (1931), Man Lost (1934), and Intruders in Eden (1942), it involves a privileged American who, having suffered a crisis, seeks sanctuary and spiritual cleansing in the most remote regions of Canada.* This time out, that man is Owen Winslow, who flees his Park Avenue apartment and expansive Long Island house for a cramped cabin in Ungava.

Richard Stendal, not Owen Winslow, is the novel's main character. He's been pursuing Celina, the beautiful, leggy wife Winslow abandoned. Though Celina appreciates Stendal's assistance in these trying times, referring to him as her "knight," she remains faithful to her husband. Stendal likes to think Winslow is dead, while Celina is certain that he's alive.

Turns out Celina right.

By chance, the missing man's image is captured – if only fleetingly – in a film of an Inuit walrus hunt in Ungava. When screened, months later at a meeting of Explorers' Club, one of the men in attendance recognizes Winslow in the footage.**

Celina asks Stendal to travel to Ungava, find her husband, and convince him to return to New York.

It seems a rather large request, but then Stendal has been so very helpful in the wake of Winslow's disappearance, right?

The Wife Traders begins with Stendal's arrival at Iviut Inlet, at which the walrus hunt had taken place. There he finds the errant husband shacked up, quite literally, with a young Inuit woman by the name of Tooloona. Winslow considers her his wife.

Now, given Stendal's thing for Celina, one might think that he'd let matters lie and report the bigamy upon his return to New York. If so, one would be mistaken. Instead, Stendal does all he can to break up the couple, going so far as to bribe Ootah, the local shaman, into telling Tooloona that she must leave Winslow.

Stendal's motivation isn't spelled out until quite late in the novel, though I imagine more thoughtful readers than myself might spot it early on. From the start, Stendal sees Tooloona as primitive, a savage, an animal. Even after she saves his life, he compares her to a "faithful dog." Yet, inwardly, he struggles with his growing physical attraction to Winslow's new mate:  

He failed to remember the day or the occasion when he first grudgingly admitted that her body was a beautiful one, that there was something arresting in even the triangulated face with dark tangle of lashes along the smooth cheek, too pale to be called a daffodil-yellow and too dark to be compared to a gardenia. But he had not been compelled to revise his earlier estimate of her. Nothing was gained, he knew by contending that she was an undersized and flat-faced barbarian who exuded the odor of fish oil. It was the white man's duty to be loyal to his white race.

And there you have it.

A bold statement is made on the dust jacket of the American edition:

I've not seen the jacket for Methuen's first British edition, but don't imagine it makes a similar claim. The editor's red pen is found throughout, beginning with the title. The Wife Traders – problematic at best – is replaced with Tooloona. Other changes are much less apparent. Now and then a sentence is struck, and there are occasional word substitutions, like "wonton" for "bitch." The twentieth chapter sees the longest single cut – nearly two pages – in which Winslow criticizes Stendal's assessment of the Inuit as smelly.

The most eye-popping sentence in The Wife Traders does not feature in Tooloona. Anyone curious will find it on page 83, at the very end of Winslow's inept defence of the Inuit woman:  

"I'll concede that she has her own ars erotica. That's imposed upon her, I suppose, by her environment. She has to be warmer-blooded, in a country like this, just as she has to wear warmer clothing. You can write it down to Nature's plan for keeping the race going. Where the soil is thin there must be no mistake about planting the seed. I'm not a medical man enough to know how true it is that the Innuit vulva is more prominent and prehensile than the white woman's."

The Wife Traders is a well-intentioned book, but doesn't transcend the time in which it was written.

Or does it?

The Inuit are seen through the eyes of Stendal, Winslow, and Celina (yes, she eventually shows up). Stendal is a white supremacist. Winslow appreciates Inuit culture, but only when it doesn't cross his own beliefs. Interestingly, it's late-to-arrive Celina who has the greater recognition and appreciation of the Inuit – Tooloona above all. Though Winslow likes to think that he understands the Inuit of Iviut Inlet, his fragile ego leads to tragedy.

Someone is killed.

It wasn't the character I wanted dead.

* Stringer's 1927 novel The White Hands, in which a pair of Jazz Age sisters are sent off North Ontario, provides a bit of a twist on the premise.

** I can't help but note that in Helen Dickson Reynolds' truly strange He Will Return (1959), abandoned wife Constance Owen-Jones discovers her husband is still alive through a newsreel street shot. 

The Critics Rave:

Trash – and not "good trash" –  but none the less will appeal to the vast majority of those who demand nothing but "escape" from their reading. The story of a New Yorker who escapes civilization by joining a tribe of Eskimos in the Far North, "buying" a mate, and evading the claims of wife and home; succeeds in making so-called civilized ideals sufficient excuse for immorality.

– Kirkus, 15 June 1936

Trivia: Iviut Inlet is found nowhere outside Stringer's imagination. It later appears in his 1940 novel The Ghost Plane.

Objects: I have three editions of the novel, the earliest being the Bobbs-Merrill first edition. Bound in green boards, it has stood the test of time. In black boards, Tooloona, the first (and only) British edition, has shown itself a touch more fragile.

To these eyes, the most interesting in my collection is the third. Published in 1955 by Harlequin, it marks the last time Stringer has seen print. As far as I've been able to determine, it's faithful to the Bobbs-Merrill text. Both front and back covers would not make the grade today.

"What secret made him choose the arms of a dark savage instead of the elegance of a penthouse?"

Oh, I don't know. Might it have something to do with being more attracted to women than interior decoration?

Odd that Harlequin describes Tooloona as a "dark savage." Stringer doesn't. 

Access: The Wife Traders was first published in 1936 by Bobbs-Merrill and McClelland and Stewart. Tooloona followed later that same year. And then, of course, we have the 1955 Harlequin paperback.

Used copies of The Wife Traders begin at US$6.50 (the Harlequin paperback in "Good-Very Good" condition). As of this writing, only two are listed online. Get them while you can! The Bobbs-Merrill appears more common. Asking prices range between US$17.00 and US$85.00. Copies with dust jackets begin at US$30.00.

No copies of Tooloona are listed for sale online.

Library and Archives Canada, the Toronto Public Library, the London Public Library, Memorial University, the University of New Brunswick, Mount Alison University, Acadia University, Dalhousie University, the University of Toronto, McMaster University, Guelph University, the University of Saskatchewan, the University of Alberta, Simon Fraser University, the University of British Columbia, and the University of Victoria hold one edition or other of The Wife Traders.

No Canadian library has a copy of Tooloona.

Note: I was inspired to read The Wife Traders by the 1936 Club week. 

Links to reviews of other 1936 titles can be found through here. I've only ever reviewed one other title from that year: Arthur Meighen's The Greatest Englishman of History.

Related post:

But Why Would You Want Him To?:

The Very Strange Story of a Delusional Abandoned Wife

Ten Dusty Favourites from The Dusty Bookcase

Brian shares ten noteworthy finds on his bibliophilic journey, including gossip about the Eaton family, radish-heavy dialogue, and "the worst sex scene in all of Canadian literature."

The good folks at All Lit Up have just posted my overview of ten favourite Dusty Bookcase finds. You can read it through here.

Yep, the worst sex scene in all of Canadian literature – and it wasn't written by Dan Hill.

Related posts:

The Dusty Bookcase – The Book!

The Dusty Bookcase in the Toronto Star

Worst. Dialogue. Ever.

Over the past week, more than a couple of readers – three, in fact – have admired my ability to get through He Will Return, Helen Dickson Reynolds' 1959 girl-meets-boy, girl-loses-boy, girl-buys-boy-return-ticket novel. In truth, it wasn't such a slog. True, He Will Return spans a quarter-century – and encompasses such events as the Great Depression, the Second World War and the opening of the Vancouver Art Gallery – but it isn't so long a novel. Time moves quickly from the start, picks up momentum, begins skipping over years, then comes to a dead stop on page 256.

My pace in reading He Will Return was more measured: a chapter or two a night until the thing was done. The plot didn't interest much; what kept me going was the dialogue, which I'm certain is the very worst of the 185 novels I've read from The Dusty Bookcase. This exchange, in which girl Constance is introduced to boy Ivor, is so very bad that I can't help but repeat it:

"You know, Ivor, this pretty little girl has just been given a diploma by the Vancouver Art School. I'm afraid you're going to find this city a poor market for pictures, Connie, and this Depression doesn't help."
     "Don't be such a crape hanger [sic], John," his wife reproved.
     "Our new Art Gallery will give young artists a place to exhibit and sell their paintings."
     "Oh sure,"the doctor agreed amiably. "We're a young city, you know, Ivor. It's only forty-six years since this town was completely wiped out by fire."
     "Great Scott! It's inconceivable. The houses and gardens look so well established."

Expository dialogue, right? So much of it is, and yet for all the talking a lot is left unsaid... or isn't said until long after one would've expected. Consider this exchange, which takes place on the first Sunday after Constance and Ivor's honeymoon:

"Darling," said Constance, "you're Methodist and I'm Anglican. Shall we take turns going to each other's churches? I believe the United Church has swallowed the Methodist in North Vancouver, anyway."
     Ivor looked gloomy and stirred his coffee. Constance bit her lip.
     "Dearest, you'd probably like to sing in the choir. I'll go to eight o'clock Communion after this, and to the morning Service to your church with you."
     A deep flush mounted to Ivor's eyes. "I said I was brought up in a strict Methodist family. I didn't say I adhered to the faith. I... I regard Christ as the greatest teacher of ethics, but I have no use for organized religion.
     Constance turned white.

Whiter, anyway.

Constance gets to the church on time despite the shock, and is a regular congregant throughout the novel. Project Bookmark Canada will want to consider a plaque at the former site of Vancouver's St John's Anglican Church.

The young marrieds have barely settled into their first home when even younger marrieds Dick and Evelyn Burnett move in next door. One afternoon, between clotheslines, Evelyn tells Constance that Dick will be asking her husband to join his glee club. Just the thing to raise one's spirits in this Depression!

"A glee club sounds rather jolly," Ivor said, rolling a cigarette. He had cut down his smoking to a cigarette after lunch and one after dinner. "If I get a definite invitation from Burnett, I'll accept it."
     The words were hardly out of his mouth before the doorbell rang. Ivor jumped up eagerly to open the door and welcomed Dick Burnett in.
     "By jove, it's good to meet another man who sings, as I hear you do. Will you have this chair? D'you smoke? Afraid I have no tailormades now to offer you. I roll my own."
     "No, thanks." Dick Burnett sat down, glancing at the piano. "I only smoke mentholated cigarettes and not many of them, because of my voice. I dare say it's a superstition."

And I dare say, it isn't.

Never mind. I'm not such a prick about our forebearers as James Cameron. I quote this passage only because it points to the most curious aspect of Reynolds' dialogue. Shall, shouldn't, oughtn't, whether Canadian, Welshman, Irishman or Englishman, every character but one speaks like a proper Etonian schoolboy. The very same Etonian schoolboy. The exception is... well, I'll let him introduce himself:

"Good evening, Mrs. Owen-Jones. I'm your neighbor, Malcolm Macrae. I thought as I was passing I would just look in and see if you could use a wee bunch of radishes. They grow awfully early on my south slope. You'll maybe no care for radishes?"
     "I'm just crazy about radishes. Do come in. Mr. Macrae. It's very kind of you to call and bring us these delicious radishes. Won't you sit down? My husband will be out in a second; he's shaving."
     "I doubt I've come at the wrong time. You and your good man are going out?"
     "Oh, no, we're not thinking of going out. We have two small children, and we never leave them alone."
     "I've seen your two wee boys; they're bonnie laddies. I obsairved your vegetables coming along nicely. I have more tomato plants and cabbage and cauliflower in my hotbed than I can use; I'd be glad if you could take a few off my hands; I'm fashed to throw them away."

Whilst on the subject of hotbeds, those who made it through last week's post will remember the name Stephen Cochrane. A pipe-smoking widower, Stephen spends a chaste summer in Constance's company, only to discover that the woman he thought was a widow is actually an abandoned wife:

"Constance, I knew the children were all away and I came over with the firm intention of asking you to marry me. Now that is shot to pieces. Do you know where your husband is?"
     Her voice shook. "I haven't known for seven years and some months. You are the first person that I have told, and I am telling you because you have paid me the greatest compliment that a man can pay a woman."
     He sat very quiet for a while. "You could have him presumed dead," he said slowly, "or you could have him traced and make sure. You and I are Anglicans and we couldn't marry even if you were to get a divorce."
     "Stephen, I am sorry, I firmly believe that Ivor is alive and that in the course of time he will come back to me."

And, of course, he does... just a matter of waiting another decade, tracking him down in England, writing a pleading letter, and then paying his way back. It's somehow appropriate that the novel's final words belong to Ivor; after all, for most of the book he's not heard from. After Ivor returns, the poor man barely has a chance to speak before Constance loads him in the car for a second honeymoon on Vancouver Island:

"Oh, Ivor, we forgot that you need a driver's license. Now I'm afraid I'll have to keep the wheel."
     "You're the one to have the wheel," Ivor said humbly. "And, Connie, my sweet, from this day on Thy people shall be my people and thy God my God." 

FIN

Ivor quotes Ruth 1:16, but has he found religion? I think not. He knows the passage because he was "brought up in a strict Methodist family." What Ivor has found is a woman who will feed and keep him in neckties and socks. Constance couldn't afford to do that when they first met, but she can now, hence his return.

Ah, romance.

One last thing:

He Will Return? Shouldn't it be, oughtn't it be He Shall Return?

Related post:

But Why Would You Want Him To?:

The Very Strange Story of a Delusional Abandoned Wife

But Why Would You Want Him To?: The Very Strange Story of a Delusional Abandoned Wife

He Will Return
Helen Dickson Reynolds
Toronto: Ryerson, 1959

Newly-minted art school graduate Constance Manning faces the challenge of making a living as a portrait painter in Depression-era Vancouver, as detailed on the second page of this, Helen Dickson Reynolds' twenty-third novel:

"You know, Ivor, this pretty little girl has just been given a diploma by the Vancouver Art School. I'm afraid you're going to find this city a poor market for pictures, Connie, and this Depression doesn't help."
     "Don't be such a crape hanger [sic], John," his wife reproved. "Our new Art Gallery will give young artists a place to exhibit and sell their paintings."
     "Oh sure,"the doctor agreed amiably. "We're a young city, you know, Ivor. It's only forty-six years since this town was completely wiped out by fire."
     "Great Scott! It's inconceivable. The houses and gardens look so well established."

Pay no attention to crape hanger John and wife – this is their only scene – focus instead on Ivor. He of the title, Ivor Owen-Jones is a thin young Welshman with "jet -black hair brushed back from a good forehead, a well-shaped nose and sensitive, mobile mouth." This is the moment of their meeting... by which I mean the meeting of Constance and Ivor, not nose and mobile mouth.

In the months that follow they play tennis in Stanley Park, swim at Second Beach, visit the Pauline Johnson Memorial and take in cricket matches at Brockton Point. One afternoon by rustic Lumberman's Arch Ivor says something about maybe one day visiting Wales together. For a reason I cannot fathom, Constance interprets this a marriage proposal. Ivor seems equally dumfounded, but goes with the flow just the same. In the second chapter the young couple marry and move into a small bungalow in North Vancouver.

Life isn't easy for the Owen-Joneses – this is the Depression, you'll remember. Ivor has an indescript office job with a firm called Western Imports, while Constance gives art lessons and receives the occasional commission to do a child's portrait. Things would be a whole lot easier if only the groom would make use of his God-given talents. Ivor has a voice like Devonshire cream and an extensive repertory of traditional Welsh songs. Fussy Shaughnessey matrons look to hire him to perform at their soirées – "a refreshing change from the usual ballads and arias" – but Ivor takes offence in not being permitted to mingle with the guests. "Honestly, it was like the Middle Ages, when musicians ranked with scullions," he tells his bride.

The pair live frugally, affording poor Constance precious few opportunities to don her trousseau dresses. Things go from bad to worse when Ivor is fired on the very day Constance announces that she is pregnant. Her father gets him another job, but the firm goes bust just after the baby is born. Constance becomes pregnant again, and Ivor struggles to make ends meet as a door-to-door washing machine salesman. Must've been hell on the back. When the couple fall behind on their bills, losing their electricity, Ivor decides to apply for public relief:

He stared at the window curtained with raindrops. "I'll wait till the mail comes. I've made applications to firms with box numbers... there may be something. Anyway, it's a filthy day."
     The postman came with letters held under his glistening raincoat. He shoved one legal-looking envelope through the slot in the door. Ivor snatched it up.
     "It's from a legal firm in Wales." His fingers shook as he tore the stiff paper of the envelope. "My God, it's a will... Great-aunt Gladys has died... and left me a thousand pounds. I can't believe it."

I could believe it. I'd been waiting for Great-aunt Gladys to kick off ever since Constance had sent the old girl sketches of her babies.

Ivor races to the bank, leaving Constance in the dark with pencil stub and paper figuring out just how to make the inheritance stretch. He returns holding the deed to a farm outside Nelson. "I bought it at a tremendous bargain because the owner, quite an old man, has died recently, and the heirs want to wind up the estate."

Oh, dear.

The farm isn't quite as described. The Owen-Joneses manage to stave off poverty just long enough for Constance to give birth to a third child. When Great-aunt Gladys's money runs out, Ivor runs off, leaving behind a note promising that he'll return once he's found work. Constance carries on for several seasons, all the while expecting Ivor to walk through the door at any minute. If only he'd write. She eventually sells the farm, moves with her children back to Vancouver, and secures a position as an public school art teacher.

"The war years passed..." Yes, they did – and still no word from Ivor. Constance, cautious, manages to clothe and feed and her three children. No occasions now to dip into her trousseau. Straight-laced next-door neighbour Stephen Cochrane expresses interest, but is shot down: "Stephen, I am sorry, but I firmly believe that Ivor is alive and that in the course of time he will come back to me."

It was at this point I began to think Constance had become unhinged. After all, it had been more than eight years since Ivor had gone off in search of a job and he hadn't so much as sent a letter. In the fact of this, Constance's love and faith remain constant; she looks forward to the day he too will laugh at their children's antics.

Where once time crawled, then passed, it now flies. "Life went on fairly quietly until David's twenty-first birthday," begins the twenty-first chapter. What happens is this: David, her eldest, announces that he is going to marry a mousy pianist named Mona. The news brings on a dizzy spell. A few weeks later, daughter Faith earns a scholarship to study ballet in far off New York City. Another dizzy spell. Constance, who had demonstrated such fortitude in raising three young children, alone, is suddenly frail. When number two son Robert gets a job as pilot up north, Constance suddenly faces long evenings alone in a house that "echoes with emptiness." She fills her leisure time with visits to her elderly parents and taking shut-ins for drives. One particularly lonely night she decides to go to the cinema. There Constance takes in a bland feature, followed by a cartoon, followed by a travelogue in which she spots Ivor walking in Trafalgar Square.

You caught that, right? Ivor walking in Trafalgar  Square? I nearly missed it myself because I'd pretty much given up on his return. After all, he disappeared in the first half of the novel and hadn't been heard from since. Oh, there were times I thought he might turn up, like in the odd, overly-detailed description of  the VJ-Day crowd in chapter 18, but with just nine pages to go his reappearance was a real surprise.

On the next page, Constance manages to get a letter to her husband:

Come back and take care of me? When did Ivor ever take care of you, Constance? You were better off without him. That Welshman is a leach. The good folks at Western Imports will attest that he has absolutely no work ethic. Besides, what kind of husband buys a farm – sight unseen – without consulting his wife? For that matter, what kind of idiot buys a farm when he knows nothing about farming. For goodness sake, what kind of father refuses to sing for his baby's supper?

Ivor does indeed return. Before he does, "happy as a young bride," Constance shops for his favourite foods, a new tie and new socks. She picks him up at the airport. They embrace. All is forgiven. The next day they go off on what Constance describes as their "second honeymoon."

The ending is so very sudden and so very strange that I began to wonder whether it was all in Constance's head. Could it be that the omniscient narrator isn't? Might it be that this story is told by Constance herself? Is it all an abandoned wife's fantasy?

Nothing so interesting, I'm afraid. The sad truth is that He Will Return is just a very bad novel.

He will return? Sure, but only if you pay his way.

Note: Did not win the Ryerson Fiction Award.

Object: A 256-page novel in unattractive brown boards. The dust jacket illustration is by art school graduate Jon Nielsen. The back of the jacket takes the form of an advertisement for recent Ryerson titles by Will Bird, Ada Pierce Chambers, E.M. Granger Bennett, Gaie Taylor and Myron David Orr. Reynolds' previous novel, McBain's Brier Rose (1957), leads the list.

Access: Though the author's most common book, He Will Return is found in just fourteen of our university libraries. Library and Archives Canada doesn't have it, but the Calgary Public Library does.

The Canadian edition enjoyed one lone printing. The novel was published in the United States by Thomas Bouregy. Copies listed for sale online run between US$10 and US$30. I found mine six years ago at a London Goodwill. Price: $2.99.

Related post:

Worst. Dialogue. Ever.