Shorter Moore

Dear Departed: Selected Short Stories
Brian Moore
[Belfast]: Turnpike, 2020
102 pages

Brian Moore was first and foremost a novelist. He received Governor General's Awards for The Luck of Ginger Coffey and The Great Victorian Collection, and was thrice nominated for the Booker. Dear Departed is the first collection of his short stories. Its appearance last year was so late in coming as to be unexpected. The publisher added to the surprise; there was a time in this country when a collection of Moore stories would have been published by McClelland & Stewart or Knopf Canada.

"Grieve for the Dear Departed," lends the collection its name. It was first published alongside Hemingway, Wilder, Frost, Thurber, and Dinesen in the November 1957 centenary edition of The Atlantic. In the story, a recently widowed woman grieves, but the dear departed of the title isn't so much the husband as the son who had left Ireland for a new life in the New World.

The longest and best of these short stories, "Uncle T," is one Moore salvaged and reworked from the aborted novel that was to have followed Judith Hearne. Vincent Bishop, newly married to Barbara, gazes out of their hotel room overlooking Times Square. The two met in Canada, to which he had fled from a future teaching secondary school in an Ulster town, "forty lumps of boys waiting at forty desks, rain on the windowpanes, two local cinemas, a dance on Saturday nights."

As a refuge, Canada was as good as anywhere. Vincent had applied for work as a clerk in the Shan State, a shipping aide in Takoradi, a plantation overseer in British Guiana, ending up teaching secondary school in Toronto. There's unstated irony in this.

Vincent is convinced Toronto is but a stop on the way to much greater things, and has convinced his bride as much. Uncle Turlough, whom he has yet to meet, has offered him a senior position with his New York publishing house.

There are elements of autobiography in these stories, particularly in the troubled relationships between fathers and sons. Moore described "A Vocation," the first story in the collection, as "about the only thing I can consciously remember writing about my early childhood.

Its first two sentences.

 In the beginning was the Word. And the Word was "No."

Biographer Denis Sampson tells us that "Off the Track," easily the darkest of these stories, reflects a holiday Moore and his first wife took to Haiti. "Hearts and Flowers," easily the lightest, was surely inspired by Moore's time at the Montreal Gazette. A Christmas story set in the "Old Bowerie Mission" (read: Old Brewery Mission), it's a mystery that it hasn't appeared in any collection of Canadian Yuletide stories.

Moore published only fourteen short stories during his lifetime, eight of which are collected here. Added to the remaining six are unpublished stories found amongst his papers. 

One hopes Turnpike is considering a second volume. The press is doing God's work.

Object and Access: A slim trade-size paperback. This collector placed an overseas order, hoping for a first edition. Instead, I received his:

Still, I was pleased to see it had done so well in such a short time.

McGill University has a copy.

Murderers Move In On Montreal

The Executioners

Brian Moore

Toronto: Harlequin, 1951

One year later, another Brian Moore pulp. The Executioners was the author's second novel, published just months after Wreath for a Redhead. Not nearly as much fun or as interesting, it lacks the quirkiness and much of the noirish language of his debut. This isn't to say that these are typical elements in the author's recognized oeuvre – there's not much wackiness in Black Robe, and while its nights were dark, they weren't "as black as a showgirl's mascara" – but here Moore's great strengths are also absent.

While the scenario is fairly pedestrian – a group of foreign agents arrive in Montreal with orders to kidnap or kill an exiled leader – the greatest weakness is that the characters have no flesh. The hero, Mike Farrell, seems to have had some background in boxing, and we know he served in the Second World War. What else can we say about Farrell? Well, we're told that he's a native Montrealer – but this comes from the jacket copy, not the author. Small samplings of candy are provided by Janina, the beautiful blonde niece of the exiled leader. She is "everything you want and don't get, and most of it encased in a sheer blue dress", but not much more.

And then there's the leader himself, who Moore biographer Denis Sampson tells us was inspired by Stanislaw Mikołajczyk, the subject of the author's very first piece of journalism.

The statesman is described as a man with a "huge head". Seems right to me.

The Executioners shows signs of a rushed job. The first chapter, which begins in a pick-up joint frequented by buxom joy kids, is the strongest. In fact, the best line, concerning that same night club, appears on the first page: "The vice squad had closed it up as tight as a ballet dancer's pants two months before and I figured the girls had moved their trade." After this, like the joy kids' clients, we encounter more and more padding – in a book of only 157 pages – provided by frequent drives around town, trips out to Ste-Anne-de-Bellevue and talk of detailed schemes that are never put into action.

It's not at all surprising that Moore's agent succeeded in placing Wreath for a Redhead with an American publisher, but failed with The Executioners. I'm betting that the next pulp, French for Murder (1954) is better, but won't know for sure for another year. After The Executioners, it'll be an easy wait.

Object: A typical Harlequin. Printed on cheap paper, reading may lead to destruction. My copy, bought for two dollars at a bookstore that has since been swallowed up by the Palais des congrès, is in rotten shape. I handle it with loving care.

The cover image depicts two of the ne'r-do-wells outside the statesman's safe house, 26 Chablee Avenue. Though the street doesn't exist outside fiction, I think anyone who knows Montreal will agree that the architecture is, to put it politely, atypical.

Access: A non-circulating item found in rare book rooms and the like. The cheapest copy on offer, which looks to be in as rough shape as my own, will set you back C$50. There are much worse copies that go for even more. In fact, none of the nine currently listed online can be said to be anything better than Good. Most go for between C$60 and C$75. The most expensive copy – C$128 – comes with a signed slip of paper. An insult to both author and collector.

Related posts:

Brian Moore's True First

Parisian French, not Québécois French

No Lady Before Judith Hearne

No Gun for Gloria