The Very Best Reads of 2024: Hilliard's Hat-Trick

With five days left in 2024, there's little chance I'll read and review another neglected book before the calendar turns... and so, the summary!

This was an unusual year for the Dusty Bookcase in that nearly half the books covered – twelve of the twenty-five – were published over a century ago. I don't know that I've reached half that number in the past. This years titles span 173 years, from Major John Richardson's Hardscrabble; Or, The Fall of Chicago (1850) to Richardson biographer David Richard Beasley's Canadian Authors You Should Know (2023). The former is the earliest paperback in my collection; Mark Breslin's Son of a Meech: The Best Brian Mulroney Jokes (1991), also read this year, is the ugliest in both appearance and content.

The best-looking book I've read in the past twelve months is the 1875 Lee & Sheppard edition of The Lily and the Cross by James De Mille. Coincidentally, De Mille's A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder was the most beautiful read last year.

To tweak the early Chapters slogan, great looks are just the beginning. The Dusty Bookcase has always been more about content than appearance. I write this, despite the near certainty that the jackets for this year's list of the three books most deserving of reissue were illustrated by the author herself:

The Jameson Girls
Jan Hilliard
   [Hilda Kay Grant]
Toronto: Nelson, Foster &

   Scott, 1956

The first of Nova Scotian's books to be set in Ontario, this one concerns four women brought together by the imminent death of their father, once a successful rumrunner. It's about them, not him. 

Miranda
Jan Hilliard
   [Hilda Kay Grant]
New York: Abelard-Schulman,

   1960

This was the very best novel I read this year. The titular character is the focal point, though her story is told through her daughter Rose. An servant in London, in Canada Miranda tweaks her past and takes on airs, while Rose grows to see through it all.

Morgan's Castle
Jan Hilliard
   [Hilda Kay Grant]
New York: Abelard-Schulman,

   1964

Her fifth in ten years, this is the author's final novel. Though Hillard lived a further three decades, she wrote only three more books; all were non-fiction, all were published in the 'sixties.

Sadly, of all the books covered, only one is in print today:

Yellow-Wolf & Other Tales of the Saint Lawrence, Jane Brierley's Governor General's Award-winning 1990 translation of Philippe-Joseph Aubert de Gaspé's posthumous Divers (1893). Copies can be purchased directly from publisher Véhicule Press through this link.

I was tempted to include The Missing Chums (1928), the fourth Hardy Boys book penned by Ontario boy Leslie McFarlane, but that would've been cheating. The edition being flogged today was rewritten in 1962 by James Buechler. As I understand, all that's left of the original is the title. 

This year, I was involved in the publication of only one book, the Ricochet rerelease of Sugar-Puss on Dorchester Street with new cover and revised introduction by Will Straw.

Next year will see a Ricochet reissue of a 1952 Canadian pulp novel that was deemed to spicy for the American market.

I'll say no more.

As for New Year's resolutions, I have but one. I resolve to read more humour. Given the racket from south of the border, I have a feeling I'll be in need of a good laugh every now and then. 

As always, keep kicking against the pricks! Do Johnny Cash and John Metcalf proud.

Bonne année!

Related posts:

The Best Reads of 2023: Publisher's Take note
The Very Best Reads of 2022: Ladies First
The Very Best Reads of the Second Plague Year (2021)
The Very Best Reads of a Plague Year (2020)
The Very Best Reads of a Very Strange Year (2019)
Best Books of 2018 (none of which are from 2018)
The Year's Best Books in Review - A.D. 2017
The Year's Best Books in Review - A.D. 2016
The Year's Best Books in Review - A.D. 2015
The Christmas Offering of Books - 1914 and 2014
A Last Minute Gift Slogan, "Give Books" (2013)
Grumbles About Gumble & Praise for Stark House (2012)
The Highest Compliments of the Season (2011)
A 75-Year-Old Virgin and Others I Acquired (2010)
Books are Best (2009)

My Mistake in Reading Richardson

Of Known Knowns, Known Unknowns, Unknown Unknowns,
and David Richard Beasley

Too Soon?

Acadian Driftwood

As He Lay Dying

Growing up with Mother

A Nova Scotian Writes Ontario Gothic

Last Words of a Raconteur

Here's to Absent Chums

There's a New Sugar-Puss on Dorchester Street

Criminal Notes & Queries

The most recent number of Canadian Notes & Queries – The Crime Issue – arrived last week in our Upper Canada rural mailbox. I was honoured to serve as Guest Editor. It was a pleasure putting it together, though I must admit that the heavy lifting was done by regular editor Emily Donaldson.

As always, Seth's provides the front and back covers. Tell the truth, do you not see yourself in one of his mugshots?

In The Landscape, Seth shares an undated, uncredited insert from The Weekend Magazine – which, as he notes, was itself an insert.

"What’s Old," our regular salute to reissues, coupled with offerings from the country’s antiquarian booksellers features Austin Clarke's When He Was Free and Young and He Used to Wear Silks (Anansi, 2021),  Carmine Starnino's Dirty Words: Selected Poems, 1997-2016 (Gaspereau, 2021), a new translation of Markoosie Patsauq's Hunter with Harpoon (MQUP, 2021). Windsor's Juniper Books offers The Executioners (Harlequin, 1951) and French for Murder (Fawcett, 1954), two old Brian Moore pulps that the late author's estate has kept out of print.

The Guest Editor’s Note, in which I recall childhood trauma brought on by a speeding ticket, is followed by the issue's Dusty Bookcase. This one is unusual in that the volume covered, Grant Allen's fin de siècle novel An African Millionaire, is not only in print, but is a certified Penguin Classic. We all remember studying it in high school, right?

Adam Sol and Manahil Bandukwala provide verse.

The issue's features begin with "Sin City," Will Straw's look at Police Journal, the post-war Montreal crime tabloid that anticipated Allô Police.

In "A Requiem for Skid Row," Amy Lavender Harris writes about a Toronto that has fallen to condos, but lives on in the works of Juan Butler, Austin Clarke, and Hugh Garner.

Novelist Trevor Ferguson (aka John Farrow) writes of his encounters with the criminal element in  "Fringe Elements."

Dedicated readers will remember my interest in the mysterious Kenneth Orvis (aka Kenneth Lemieux), author of Hickory House, The Damned and Destroyed,  Cry, Hallelujah!, and four other novels. You may even remember my 2016 plea for information about the man. Imagine my surprise in discovering that former 39 Steps frontman Chris Barry – whom I've seen onstage in Montreal and onscreen in Hannah and Her Sisters – is the mystery man's nephew.  Chris' "Uncle Ken, We Hardly Knew Ye: Kenneth Orvis’ Nephew Surveys the Writer’s Life, Hustles, and Mysterious Disappearance" helps fill in the gaps.

In "Vale of Fears," Monika Bartyzel looks at the influence of a 1935 murder on the fiction of Phyllis Brett Young, our most unjustly neglected novelist.

Jennifer Hambleton disturbs with "Shut Out: How University Libraries are Increasingly Limiting Public Access.

David Frank writes on the relationship between Jack London and all but forgotten Canadian socialist Wilfrid Gribble.

Chris Kelly looks at Blue City, the 1986 adaptation of the 1947 Ross Macdonald novel of the same name. You remember it, right? Judd Nelson and Ally Sheedy starred.

No?

This GIF may refresh you memory.

I intrude again with an interview with Danny McAuley of Brome Lake Books in Knowlton, Quebec.

David Mason's Used and Rare column concerns book thieves and a revelation about a certain famous author.

In the North Wing - selections from the Lost Library of CanLit Graphic Novels -  Nathan Campagnaro adapts Thomas King’s DreadfulWater.

We've also got a new short story from Caroline Adderson, “All Our Auld Acquaintances Are Gone.”

At a time when newspapers and magazines are slashing space devoted to book reviews, we buck the trend with:

Bruce Whiteman on Erin McLaren’s Little Resilience

Rohan Maitzen on Anna Porter’s The Appraisal and Deceptions

Laura Cameron on Amanda LeDuc’s The Centaur’s Wife 

Brett Josef Grubisic on Michael Melgaard’s Pallbearing 

Alex Good on Pasha Malla’s Kill the Mall 

Paige Cooper on Carrie Jenkins’ Victoria Sees It 

Dancy Mason on Patricia Robertson’s Hour of the Crab 

James Grainger on Andrée A Michaud’s Mirror Lake

Emily Donaldson on Sarah Berman’s Don’t Call it a Cult

The Shelf Talker belongs to The Bookshelf in Guelph. Catherine Bush's Blaze Island is one of their four titles.

As always, we finish off with Stephen Fowler's Exhumations. His pick this issue is Writing Thrillers for Profit: A Practical Guide by Basil Hogarth (London, Black, 1936), a volume that once belonged to "a recently deceased author of detective novels." Stephen suggests that it may have been a "joke gift." I'm betting he's right.

The CNQ Crime Issue can be purchased through this link.

It's a steal.

Sugar-Puss Returns!

Sixty-three years after it disappeared from drugstore spinner racks, Sugar-Puss on Dorchester Street is finally making its way to bookstore shelves. This is not your grandparents' Sugar-Puss, but a brand new edition with Introduction by Will Straw. Reset and printed on FSC certified paper, unlike the News Stand Library original this baby is built to last!

Much has changed since the story of young, innocent, farmette Gisele Lapine last saw print. Dorchester is not a street but a boulevard. No longer a centre of the city's nightlife, it's now a bloodless artery lined by some of the city's blandest buildings. Even the name is gone. The honour conferred upon Guy Carleton, 1st Baron Dorchester, the man credited with saving Quebec from the Americans during their Revolutionary War, has been stripped and given to a former United States Army liaison officer.

Enough. This is not a time for speeches. In celebration of her return, I present a Sugar-Puss Top Ten – favourite passages from the novel, beginning with the very first sentence:

1 - Dorchester Street spews out almost within shadow of the Harbour Bridge in Montreal’s slummy, crummy East End. Her spawning ground is wedged solidly between vermin-ridden tenements where French and English meet – but do not blend – and the greasy waters of the St. Lawrence River.

2 - Her eyes were large and softly brown as was her skin thereby hinting of a strain of Basque blood. Her breasts were large and firm; a legacy of her Norman ancestry. Long legs tapered off from well-rounded thighs to shapely ankles. Her feet were small and beautifully formed as are those of most French Canadian women.

3 - Bewildered Gisele looked at her newly acquired, giant-sized and self-appointed protector. He smiled back at her through a cloud of smoke. "It's okay, Honey. I'm Jim Schultz. I own this flea trap and you're safe here as you are in yah mudda's arms. Safer unless yah mudda'sgot cauliflower ears."

4 - The girl slouched against the bar beside her. "My name's Trixie. Helluva name that. Pop said he named me after a mongrel that died but Ma said it was a burlesque broad he used to sleep with."

5 - He turned slightly and looked down at her. The lamp cast a bluish glow across her flat stomach. It was like television, he thought.

6 - He didn't trust himself to speak. Instead he drank slowly looking into the light until his eyes blurred.
     She whimpered like a spaniel. "Please, Jimmy."

7 - "Today, Gisele," she told herself, "you are a woman." She paused for some time reliving every one of the precious moments of the night. "You are," she said, "a young woman in love – and what's more you look it."

8 - "Gisele ma petite bebe you are the greatest thing to hit show business here since Fifi D'Orsay. You are superb, magnificent, you are – shall we say – tres, tres? A combination of Pavlowa and Mam'selle St. Cyr. You were great."

9 - Madame Lapointe had given the nearest possible example of a human being sparked with atomic power.

10 - "So she's still in the city," he thought grimly, "and so are a million and a half other souls – plus a few heels."

The Gazette, 2 November 1949

Related post:

'THE NEONS GO UP ON MONTREAL'

Here Comes Sugar-Puss!

The Spring issue of Maisonneuve hits the stands today. Flip it over and you'll find this on the back cover:

(cliquez pour agrandir)

There they are, all three Ricochet Books from Véhicule Press, now joined by Al Palmer's Sugar-Puss on Dorchester Street. It's been 64 years since the story of Gisele Lepine – a/k/a Sugar-Puss – was sold at train station and drug store spinner racks. No sexigenerian copies are listed for sale online, but you can place an advance order for the brand spanking new edition (with Intro by Will Straw!) with Amazon, Chapters/Indigo or Véhicule Press itself.

Go get it, ya big lug.

Related post:

'THE NEONS GO UP ON MONTREAL'

Montreal Noir at Blue Metropolis

Just announced by the good folks at the Blue Metropolis festival, a month tomorrow I'll have the honour of hosting 'Montreal Noir', a panel discussion focusing on the city's forgotten pulp past:

Cheap, disposable and sensationalistic, Montreal’s pulp fiction took its place on Canadian and American newsstands sixty years ago. It has since been ignored, neglected and, in some cases, hidden by its authors. What was so shameful about these books and why are we reviving them now?

Joining me on stage will be Trevor Ferguson, Jim Napier and Will Straw. Actor Marcel Jeannin will be reading excerpts from the work of Montreal's three best noir novelists. Who they? Buy a ticket and find out.

Montreal Noir: The City's Forgotten Pulp Past

OPUS Montreal Hotel, Salon St-Laurent

10 Sherbrooke Street West

Saturday, 21 April, 8:30 pm