A Fair Thriller

A Fair Affair
Paul Champagne
Winnipeg: Greywood, 1967
190 pages

The Canadian Government has reason to believe there is a vast conspiracy working to sabotage Expo 67. This being the summer '66 and James Bond being all the rage, stylish Serville Gart is brought in expose and defeat the villains. After all, why send in a team when, as Hollywood has shown, the right man can readily handle the job himself. As newly-minted Secret Service Agent 18 dash 67 (irritatingly, never simply "18-67"), Gart receives his assignment in a Privy Council Chamber meeting attended by various government ministers, Quebec government officials, the Mayor of Montreal, and Expo's Commissioner General.

Why Serville Gart?

Well, to begin with the man served in the Canadian Army Special Services and earned a Victoria Cross during the Korean War in rescuing fallen comrades and "single-handedly grenading a North Korean pillbox." A university swimming and wrestling champ, he was scouted by both CFL and NHL teams and once declined a hockey scholarship offered by an American college. Lest you dismiss Gart as all braun and no brain, he is also a chess master and accomplished pianist with two scholarly books to his name. 

From the start, it's clear that Gart has the goods. During the Privy Council Chamber meeting he notes something suspicious about an attache case carried by a man named Conrad, aide to the Minster of Finance. Minutes later, Conrad, who has proven himself a baddie, is lying dead with a broken neck in his Centre Block office. Conrad's innocent teenage secretary suffered a bullet to the shoulder, and is whisked off the Ottawa Civic Hospital. Our hero follows:

Gart's TR4 sped off Parliament Hill to Wellington Street. He was not sure which route would be quickest to the Civic Hospital. Some roads had been torn up by construction while others had been patched so often that they resembled backwoods hunting trails. He wondered if the Nation's Capital would ever do anything about them.
   He decided to take Wellington, then south on Bronson. He would turn left on to six-lane Carling Avenue and continue straight out to the hospital.
   At the hospital he parked his car on the emergency parking area in front of the old red building. While approaching the main entrance, he admired the colourful 12x35 feet mosaic tile mural beside it. Gart recalled that the abstract work is meant to depict the various systems of the human body and was donated by the Ottawa Civic Hospital Architectural Association. It was created by an Italian craftsman who placed the two million cut stones by hand.
   He pushed open the glass doors and strode to the reception desk. After he identified himself, the nurse buzzed a young intern, who led Gart to the elevator. They both got on.
Gart could not help noticing the pretty but efficient-looking nurse who shared the elevator with them. He mused that patients – men anyway – would probably heal much more quickly if nurses like her would wear uniforms which were not quite so, well, starchingly official.

   The elevator doors hummed open at the third floor and they all got off. The nurse turned to the right. Gart and the intern to the left; the intern kept looking right.
   They reached the appropriate room and the intern said, "Well, here we are Mr. Gart, Room 365-F," and walked briskly away.
   Gart walked into the room. The doctor was sitting alongside the girl's table. When he saw Gart, he got up and greeted him.

A first time novelist, Champagne has real problems with pacing and needless digression, the former being particularly lethal in the thriller genre.

About those digressions – here I myself digress – one gets the sense that the author is keen on including his own observations. This too features driving:

Gart drove on Carling Avenue until he spotted a "Queensway East" exit, then sped around the turn exceeding the 30 m.p.h. ramp speed by 15 m.p.h. He slowed down to let a car pass on the outside lane. He held the little sports car at seventy-five. He could see a black and white Ottawa Police car approaching on the other side of the boulevard. He recalled that for a while the City officials had thought of painting them a bright orange – an experiment. Gart thought they probably did not adopt the suggestion because a policeman from Ontario would not let a French-Canadian ride in an orange squad-car.

Given Champagne's political background (see below), the most interesting of these are five-pages of memorable campaign quips made by John Diefenbaker the "Opposition Leader" in a past election as recalled by Gart.

To be clear, that's five pages devoted to entirely irrelevant statements made by a politician during an irrelevant election campaign that occurred years previous. The Opposition Leader never appears in the novel.

Returning to the plot, microfilm of the Canadian Pavilion's blueprints are found in the Conrad's trouser cuff. Gart's investigation leads to international steel corporation Uni-Dom, which is supplying much of the material used at Expo. Uni-Dom is headed by a man known only as "Center," who is also the mastermind behind the conspiracy. Remembering the dead man's pants, my first thought was that the plan had something to do with the supports of the pavilion. Imagine one failing! This old postcard will give some idea of the disaster that might befall:

But no, the sabotage in play is far more complex and expansive. Uni-Dom is just one component of something called the Association of Insular Degaussity. The name of this highly secretive organization –unknown to all secret service agencies – comes courtesy of Endico Novak, an operative who has worked her way into the Expo offices. A Hungarian whose family fled after the 1956 revolution, she has mixed feelings about AID and mixed emotions about Gart. The two take to bed, but what he really wants is for Endico to reveal less of her body and more about the conspiracy.

And so, two days into their relationship, he slaps her around.

Endico tells him what he wants to know, sharing information about a hidden submarine base off the Gulf of St Lawrence and a secret three-acre compound beneath the Expo site housing hundreds of trained martial artists and millions of lethal shadflies.

With the aid of scuba gear, Gart infiltrates the hidden base, commandeers a sub, and enters the secret three-acre compound, only to be caught and brought to Center.     

In true Bond villain fashion, Center provides a lengthy, detailed explantation of the conspiracy and its purpose.

Here we get the first of two elements that render this otherwise botched thriller noteworthy. 

Center tells Gart that AID is funded by Europeans who are concerned that Canada is flexing its muscle as a soft power. Blame Lester B. Pearson, I suppose. Their concern is that Canada has broken from the Old Country and is setting off on an independent course that will leave it vulnerable to American influence and annexation, thus creating political imbalance. The thinking goes that the humiliation of so grand a project as Expo would put an end to Canada's aspirations.*

The second, which is far more interesting, concerns Endico Novak. She clearly has feelings for Gart, and seemed on the verge of sharing everything she knew about AID when he hit her. In the end, she betrays him for that very reason. He hit her. 

Center sends Gart off to a death that involves those lethal shadflies. He's taken to a sealed room where every two minutes increasing numbers are released. To give him a sporting chance, Gart is provided a newspaper to swat them. I like to think it's the Montreal Star; it usually had more pages than the Gazette. 

Agent 18 dash 67 manages to escape, of course.

The final pages are the best because they feature the most action. The last sees Gart leaving bickering politicos in Privy Council Chambers "with a warm understanding and smile which said that while there are many frailties in this system of government, it is still the best." 

Mine was the smile of a man who was happy to be done with this thing, yet also happy that he'd read it.

* Two comments: 

1) Canada's stance during the Vietnam War and Pearson's 2 April 1965 address at Temple University don't lend credence to AID's concerns, but then Champagne was a Tory who supported maintaining the Union Jack on our flag.  

2) That Center is not "Centre" suggests a further layer to the conspiracy, one I don't believe the author intended.

Worst passage: Longtime readers know how much I enjoy good dialogue. In this A Fair Affair fails – not so much as He Shall Return, but it is very bad. The worst comes from Expo's Commissioner General, a man who comes off like Lorenzo St. DuBois in The Producers. Here he responds to a comment made by the Minister of Finance before before assembled federal ministers and provincial office holders:

"Minny, Minny. Like, honey-baby, we're all hip to your cool efficiency. We love your pads, we love your pencils; we love your pitcher and glasses; as a matter of fact, we even love that vase of Saskatchewan lillies [sic] over there – that was expansive man expansive..."

It goes on, but I feel I've tortured enough with those detailed descriptions of Gart driving through the streets of Ottawa.

For the record, the Commissioner General of Expo was career diplomat Paul Dupuy (1896-1969). Here he is at the fair with Grace Kelly and her daughter Caroline. 

Trivia: Born and raised on the Island of Montreal, I never once heard mention of shadflies and am not sure that I've ever seen one. That said, research informs that they were a concern of Expo organizers. The shadfly, which in truth is harmless, looks nothing like the cover depiction provided by Jack Jenson and Mark Shop. 

More trivia: Thus far, the only novel I've found that references the Brothers-In-Law (mentioned here previously). This comes in the form of a complaint made by a RCMP colonel about this song:

After the Mountain City Four, the Brothers-In-Law are my very favourite Canadian folk quartet.

Even more trivia: Throughout the novel, Expo is referred to as "EXPO." I can't begin to tell you how irritating this becomes.

The critics rave?: The closest thing I've found to a review of A Fair Affair was published in the 23 September 1967 edition of the Globe & Mail, in which William French remarks on the launch of Greywood Publishing:

The first two titles are A Fair Affair by Paul Champagne, and Canada in Caricature by George Shane. Champagne's book is an Ottawa-based secret-agent send-up about a sinister organization that wants to sabotage Expo. It's really quite bad.

The back cover features what appear to be excerpts of reviews by gentlemen then writing for Time, the Globe & Mail, and the New York Times, but I have yet to find evidence that the words quoted ever appeared in those publications.

About the author: Born in 1936, Champagne was was raised in Melville, Saskatchewan. He attended the Syracuse University. Up to the time of the novel's publication, his working life involved the federal Progressive Conservative Party, much of it as a member of John Diefenbaker's staff. He served as the leader's press secretary during the ill-fated 1965 federal campaign. Here he is with Dief in the pages of the Edmonton Journal (11 September 1964).

Or maybe not. The man identified doesn't resemble one on the back cover of A Fair Affair,  nor does he look twenty-eight (as Champagne was at the time).

In September 1967, the month after the novel was published, Champagne worked against his old boss in an effort to elect Davie Fulton as Progressive Conservative Leader. Following Fulton's defeat, he soon found himself working for successful candidate Robert Stanfield. For how long, I wonder? After 1968, when he would've been in his early thirties, the trail grows very cold.

I'm sure there is more to discover.

Object and Access: A mass market paperback, typical of its time, my copy was purchased last summer from a Manitoba bookseller. At $5.00, it was a real steal. Printed only once, in August 1967, as I write no copies are listed for sale online.

The last page features two ads for "Other Greywood Paperback Originals," Winnipeg editorial cartoonist George Shane's Canada in Caricature being the first. 

The second is My Most Unforgettable Convicts by Dr Leo L. Stanley, who despite having no surgical experience served forty-eight years as Chief Surgeon at California's San Quentin State Prison. How it ended up with a start-up paperback publisher in Winnipeg is anyone's guess. Mine is that no other publisher would touch it.

A dangerous kook, Stanley believed that crime caused disease. He transplanted testicles from executed prisoners and other mammals to living inmates in the belief that they would not only reverse the aging process but cure acne, asthma, and pedophilia. Stanley performed over 10,000 testicular implants on prisoners and injected ground-up testicles into the abdomens of others. He forcibly sterilized homosexual inmates. Stanley was a staunch believer in racial segregation and eugenics, writing: "The right to bear children will in time be reserved to the fit,"

Leo L. Stanley died in 1976 at the age of ninety. He was, of course, childless.

Evil, but nowhere near so evil as Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

Related posts:

An Expo 67 Murder Mystery

Summer of a Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name

A McGill Student's Mild Summer of Love

The Little People of Expo 67
Worst. Dialogue. Ever.
P is for Plus ça change...

A Feminine Jimmie Dale?

The White Moll
Frank L. Packard
New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1931
306 pages

Walt Disney failed to interest NBC in Jimmie Dale, Alias the Gray Seal. His biographers haven't made much of this, but evidence suggests it irked. He'd first read Jimmie Dale's adventures in adolescence, and would act them out with childhood chum Walt Pieffer. What roles they'd played are unknown. I like to think one of the Walts played Marie Lasalle, the Tocsin, but that's just me.

In 1952, fifty-one-year-old Disney purchased the rights to Jimmie Dale – “motion picture, photoplay, television, radio and/or any other adaptations of every kind and character” – and held onto them, even after NBC declined.

In an alternate universe, Disney managed to convince the network and Jimmie Dale, Alias the Gray Seal became a cathode-ray tube hit. The adventures of a millionaire masked crimefighter, it would've pre-dated and perhaps even inspired ABC's Batman and The Green Hornet. A Gold Key comic was pretty much guaranteed. In this alternate universe, it might've spawned spin-offs, some featuring the White Moll, which publisher George H. Doran positioned as "a Feminine Jimmie Dale."     

The White Moll
Frank L. Packard
New York: Doran, 1920

The White Moll is not Jimmy Dale en femme, though the two share the talent of impersonation. Both move though a grotty New York beset by poverty, drug addiction, alcoholism, and crime. The Gray Seal, Jimmy Dale is heir to a great fortune, while the White Moll, Rhoda Gray – note the surname – is of the lowly upper middle class. Her mining engineer father had worked for an English concern in South America until ill-health forced him to New York for medical consultation. Papa required an operation, but before it could take place petty thief  Pete "the Bussard" McGee broke into the Grays' flat. He was caught by father and daughter, spilled some sob story starring a sickly wife and hungry, unclothed kiddies, and was let go. The following morning, a curious Rhonda investigates to find Pete was telling the truth about his godawful life.

Sadly, Rhoda's father does not survive his operation. Left an orphan of modest means, she dedicates her young self to saving people like Pete from a life of poverty and crime. Rhoda comes to be known amongst the down and out as "The White Moll," the name coming from the Bussard, who'd introduced her to his invalid wife with these words:

“Meet de moll I was tellin’ youse about, Mag. She’s white – all de way up. She’s white, Mag; she’s a white moll – take it from me!”

Rhonda is about three years into her do-gooding when she visits a dying old hag known as Gypsy Nan. She soon learns that Nan is not the woman's true name, nor is she an old hag... but she is dying. In her final hours, the unnamed woman removes her disguise. As life slips away, the woman known as Gypsy Nan seeks salvation by telling the White Moll of a heist that will go down that very night. Rhonda tries to thwart the crooks, but is nabbed by Rough Rorke of the NYPD. She's saved by a seemingly drunken passerby who wrenches Rhonda from Rorke. Fleeing, she ends up in Gypsy Nan's hovel and adopts the role of the old hag.

The set-up, the only thing to add is that the seemingly drunken passerby was more than likely sober. The man who rescued Rhonda, referred to as "the Adventurer," weaves in and out of the novel, much like the Tocsin does in the adventures of Jimmie Dale.

I expect you know where that relationship will lead. Packard was a commercial writer and knew how to please his audience. 

Disney take note.

Trivia (or not): In 1920, the Fox Film Corporation released a film adaptation that that owed very little to the novel. The subject of next week's post.

Access: First published in the pages of The Blue Book Magazine (August 1919 - January 1920), the novel's first  edition is either the Copp, Clark (Canada) and Doran (United States). Both can be read online through the Internet Archive. My copy is one volume in the 1931 Gray Seal Edition set of Packard's works.

Two copies of Copp, Clark's Canadian first edition are currently listed for sale online, but no copies of the Doran.

Related post:

Whatever Happened to Jimmie Dale?

James Moffatt Wins the Race

The Marathon Murder
James Moffatt
London: New English Library, 1972
124 pages

On January 12, 1972, Canadian writer James Moffatt appeared on BBC 2's Late Night Line-Up.  The public broadcaster had a habit of wiping tape back then – most famously David Bowie's January 3, 1973 Top of the Pops performance of 'The Jean Genie' – but footage survives. At the time, Moffatt was the biggest paperback writer living in Britain. Skinhead was his greatest success.

The Encyclopedia of Pulp Fiction Writers describes Skinhead as a "million-copy seller." I don't doubt it. Every Brit I know around my age has read Skinhead.

Skinhead was published in 1970. By the time of his Late Night Line-Up appearance, Moffatt had followed it with Suedehead (1971) and Boot Boys (1972); Skinhead Escapades (1972), Skinhead Girls (1972), Top Gear Skin (1973), Trouble for Skinhead (1973), and many more followed, all published under "Richard Allen."

Moffatt once claimed that as a child he'd earned third prize in a Toronto Star short story competition. In one interview he spoke of studying law at Queen's, but in another he said it was chemistry. Moffatt talked about writing for pulps in New York, living in Hollywood, and being the publisher and editor of a bowling magazine.

Was any of this repeated on Late Night Line-Up? Segments of the 12 January1972 broadcast were used in the 1996 BBC2 documentary 'Skinhead Farewell,' but not enough to get a real handle on all that went down that night.

Because the episode itself hasn't been posted online, I rely on the publisher's note:

Added to this is Moffat's four-page author's note, in which he claims that The Marathon Murder began as a sort of spur of the moment thing with host Will Wyatt throwing out an an idea. "I had precisely five seconds in which to think of a title and write the first few sentences ON CAMERA!" writes Moffatt. 

Here are those first few sentences:

Munich was but two weeks away. This left Harry Nolan with two weeks solid training to get himself in shape. He had not been too keen of late to keep himself in shape because he had problems.

It's not much of a start. This gruff Canadian, a self-described veteran of hard-boiled American pulps, writes: "Munich was but two weeks away" and "He had not been too keen of late to keep himself in shape." Reading these words, I'm almost surprised that Moffatt used "two weeks" and not "a fortnight."

Anyway, here's my fix:

Munich was two weeks away. This left Harry Nolan fourteen days to get in shape, but he had problems.

It may be that Moffatt was going after word count; his thirty-seven to my nineteen. New English Library describes The Marathon Murder as a novel, but at 38,000 words it is more accurately a novella. The low number surprises in that, when divided by seven, it amounts to fewer than 5400 words per day. Two months earlier, in a Daily Telegraph Magazine profile, Moffatt claimed ten thousand words as his daily output. He repeated that very same figure on the Late Night Line-Up appearance.

The writer at his desk.
Late Night Line-Up, 12 January 1972

The Marathon Murder was written when the Olympic ideal of amateurism still held. Hero Harry Nolan, who ranks amongst the very best long distance runners on the planet, is an English office worker. His wife, Emily, has left him for another man. He worries that this will... um, affect his performance. 

Terry Grayson is the other hero. A BBC journalist with no background in sport, for whatever reason he's been assigned to cover the marathon. Where Harry pines for Emily, Terry is stuck on some bird named Gloria. He just can't get over her, yet happily accepts leggy Sandra into his bed: "He had no illusions regarding their relationship. It was fleeting like fame. A fast, furious, fornicating union that had no basis in fact." Terry is surprised when Sandra follows him to Munich.

The Marathon Murder was written seven months before the start of the 1972 Olympic Games. It imagines violence, but in no way anticipates the actual horrors. At time of publication, Moffatt's likening the Olympic Village to a hastily constructed kibbutz would not have been chilling.

At some point in his Late Night Round-Up appearance Moffatt stands next to a New English Library spinner-rack."These are some of the 250 books I've written these past twenty years," he says. "During the last year I've written eight, nine books, due to the fact I haven't been too well." The words hint at his future. A drinker, Moffatt's addiction got the better of him. His final book, Mod Rule, appeared in 1980, after which he went silent. He died thirteen years later at the age of seventy-one.

James Moffatt (right) in the Daily Telegraph Magazine, 19 November 197

The Marathon Murder is no speedy read. A tough slog, it took me two weeks to reach the end.

I was outpaced by the author.

Trivia: Harry Nolan is a fan of James Bond and Silas Manners, the latter being a British spy who features in Moffatt's The Sleeping Bomb (1970) and Justice for a Dead Spy (1971).

Object and Access: A cheap mass market paperback, typical of its time, the last four pages are given over to other New English Library titles, including Skinhead, Suedehead, and Boot Boys. 

I purchased my copy last October for £5.00 from a Lincolnshire bookseller. As of this writing, all of two copies are listed for sale online. 

WorldCat suggests that no library, Canadian or otherwise, holds a copy.

Related posts:

Walking in on Virginia Box and Baird Rodd

The Queer Queen Kong

Nazis Threaten from Beyond the Grave!

The Great Canadian Author Photo and Bio?

Purchased last week to treat myself. Lord knows I deserve it. Above is the cover of the first and only British edition of Hot Freeze by Martin Brett. Published in 1954 by Max Reinhardt, it follows Dodd, Mead's first American edition by a matter of weeks. I prefer the latter, but only for the dame.

I first read Hot Freeze in 2011, roughly nine years after the author died. It's the very best work of post-war Canadian noir, those by Brian Moore and David Montrose included. Four years later, I helped return it to print as part of the Véhicule Press Ricochet Books series. It is the only edition to be published under Douglas Sanderson, the author's true name. 

A few months later, Ricochet brought back Blondes Are My Trouble (original title: The Darker Traffic), the sequel to Hot Freeze.

Blondes Are My Trouble is the second-best work of post-war Canadian noir.

Sanderson is an unlikely top dog. A transplanted Brit, he began writing thrillers after the commercial failure of his literary debut, Dark Passions Subdue (1952). He claimed the turn toward genre was done on a dare. If true, it sure paid off; throughout the decades, he produced nearly two dozen, most of which enjoyed French translation.

Mon cadavre au Canada [Hot Freeze]

Martin Brett [Douglas Sanderson; trans Bruno Martin]

Paris: Gallimard, 1955

I wrote the intro to the Ricochet Hot Freeze and invited John Norris to contribute another for Blondes Are My Trouble. Greg Shepard of Stark House Press has done more than anyone in reviving interest in Sanderson, republishing nine Sanderson novels, featuring additional material by himself, Kevin Burton Smith, Paul Charoff, Jonas Westover, and the author's son John D. Sanderson. This, I believe, forms the bulk of Sanderson scholarship. What else have we got? Never mind The Canadian Encyclopedia, The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature, and W.H. New's Companion to Canadian Literature, not even Wikipedia recognizes Sanderson.

No, I'm wrong. The French Wikipedia has a Martin Brett entry – very informative it is, too.

I reference all this because after all my years researching Sanderson, the brief Max Reinhardt author bio brought some revelations.

That is one great author photo.

Were it not for the words in parentheses, it would rank amongst the best author bios ever. 

Related posts:

Of Sex and Drugs and Montreal
Ricochet! Rocochet!
Ricochet Prefers Blondes
The Jacket, the Dressing Gown, and the Closet
A List of Montreal Post-War Pulps: A Second Shot

Quebec City Noir

Whispering City
Horace Brown
Pickering, ON: Global Publishing, 1947
190 pages

Whispering City may be Canada's very first film noir. This 75-year-old paperback may be the very first novelization of a Canadian film. The heroine of both is Mary Roberts, a young crime reporter with Quebec City newspaper l'Information. Mary is preparing to leave work one day when she receives a call that a woman has been hit by a truck. The accident victim, faded vidette Renée Brancourt, was once a big deal in Quebec until her lover, Robert Marchand, plunged over Montmorency Falls. The struggle to accept his death led Renée to be institutionalized. In recent years, she'd been living in a squalid flat on rue Sous-le-Cap in Quebec's Lower Town.

La rue Sous-le-Cap. Quebec City, 1947

Renée has held firm to her belief that Robert's death was no accident. She tells Mary as much from her Hôtel-Dieu hospital bed, pointing an accusing finger at Albert Frédéric.

Surely not! The man is not only the most respected lawyer in Quebec, he's a patron of the arts!

Frédéric is currently supporting talented Michel Lacoste, whose Quebec Concerto will soon be making its debut at the Palais Montcalm. Unfortunately, the composer's work on final revisions s stymied by Blanche, his shrew of a wife. Just you try working on your concerto with big band music blaring in the background. Can't be done.

Michel breaks her 78. She slaps him. He storms out, ties one on, and shows up in the wee hours at Frédéric's palatial home. It isn't long before Michel passes out. When he does, Frédéric dons the composer's overcoat and sneaks off to the Lacoste flat. His intent is to murder Blanche, just as he had Robert Marchand all those years earlier, but he arrives to find she's committed suicide. A note is pinned to her pillow, which Frédéric quickly pockets.

The following morning, Frédéric convinces a hungover and confused Michel that he killed his wife in a fit of rage. The lawyer then offers the composer a deal: Frédéric will work to save Michel from the hangman if he kills Mary Roberts. The reporter's investigation of the old Marchand murder is getting too close to the truth.

The story and screenplay are straight out of Hollywood – Americans George Zuckerman and Michael Lennox wrote the former; Americans Rian James and Leonard Lee wrote the latter – but adapt well to Quebec City.

Brown sticks close to the script, though there are departures. He improves on the dialogue and wisely does away with the talkative sleigh driver who introduces the film. Brown gives Mary Roberts a backstory as an American who had begun her career writing for a New York tabloid. In one memorable scene not featured in the film, Mary and Frédéric discuss Canadian painters. If anything, Brown depicts the lawyer as a more sinister figure – clearly a psychopath – making the book all the more dark.

Whispering City is far from a great film – its current 6.2 rating on IMDb seems fair – though I must say it gets better with each viewing. See for yourself; the film is now in the public domain. Of the muddy prints available on YouTube, this appears to be the best:

Sadly, Brown's novelization is nowhere near so accessible. This is a shame because his Whispering City improves on the film. It's easily the best Horace Brown novel I've read.

I wouldn't be surprised that it gets better with each reading.

Dedication: 

Paul L'Anglais was the producer of Whispering City and its French-language version La Forteresse.

Fun fact: In 1952, the film Whispering City was rereleased under the title Crime City. Seems a bit unfair to Quebec, especially when one considers that there's only one criminal.

Object: A mass market paperback bound in thin glossy covers. Whispering City is one of a very few books published by Brown's Global Publishing Company. Curiously, the spine features the name of its distributor, Streamline Books. I purchased my copy a year ago from a Burlington, Ontario bookseller. Price: US$89.95.

The novel is preceded by an enthusiastic foreword by the author followed by a "CAMERA-QUIZZ" in which readers are challenged to place twelve stills from the film in the correct order.

Don't mean to brag, but I had no trouble.

Access: The University of Calgary has a copy.

Related posts:

Horace Brown: Saturday Matinee

Horace Brown: Fritzi in Flight or a Coincidence?

Horace Brown: From Penthouse to Pavement

No Whack on the Side of the Head

Walking in on Virginia Box and Baird Rodd

The Girl From H.A.R.D.: Virginia Box and the "Unsatisfied"
James Moffatt
London: New English Library, 1974
112 pages 

I first visited the UK in 1974, arriving on a British Airways jet still painted in BOAC colours. My mother had brought us – my sister and myself – to meet relatives and friends of our late father. She gave me fifteen pounds, by far the most money I'd ever held held, which I spent it on a hardcover copy of the most recent Guinness Book of Records, a SHADO Interceptor, and a SHADO 2 Mobile.

The SHADO Dinkys have proven good investments – I have them still – but if I could go back in time, I would buy every copy of Skinhead, Suedehead, Demo, Boot Boys, Skinhead Escapes, Skinhead Girls, Glam, Smoothies, Sorts, Teeny Bopper Idol, Top Gear Skin, Trouble for Skinhead, and Skinhead Farewell I could find. Written by Canadian James Moffatt, sold for 30p, few can be purchased for under one hundred quid today. 

The Girl from H.A.R.D.: Virginia Box and the "Unsatisfied" was published during that 1974 summer in England. The second novel in the series, Moffatt presumes that the reader has read the first (right). I had not, but found it took little time to get up to speed. H.A.R.D. is the Hemisphere Administration for Regional Defence. Virginia Box – "leggy, busty blonde" – is its most valued agent. Baird Rodd is her superior. He sits on a "phallic-backed chair" behind a buttock-shaped "erotic desk."

Juvenile stuff, right? But things turn very dark in the fourth and fifth pages with Virginia working to procure an abortion for Ima Kissoff. Here the uninitiated are given a sense of what transpired in the the first Virginia Box novel. A Soviet agent, Ima was defeated by H.A.R.D., and at some point was raped by a man named Willi Kumm.

The Girl from H.A.R.D.: Virginia Box and the "Unsatisfied" is a lighter read. Our heroine is assigned to infiltrate Connie and the "Unsatisfied" (always in quotation marks), a rock band suspected of having ties with T.R.U.S.S. (Terrorism, Revolution and Underground Specialists in Sabotage). Much is made about lead singer Connie Linguistam being a lesbian, as are T.R.U.S.S. higher-ups Dolores Glamm and Magda Hott:

It stank of Rodd manipulation. As if her boss had deliberately put the computers to work and punched Box against lesbian and waited for a tray of cards to provide him with some inner, perverted sense of achievement.

May as well add that Ima Kissoff is also a lesbian.

Virginia's value to the agency is a sexuality so great that it can destroy creepy H.A.R.D. scientist Dr Spill's "sex computer" Exita (EXItments Transmitted into Action). Everyone is attracted to Virgina Box and wants to bed her. Club owner Dick Long gets lucky, but only because the agent was feeling amorous. There are no sex scenes, nor is there anything particularly sexy. Nothing else is so hot or inept as this passage:

Quickly now, she dressed. When she finished she postured before the mirrors again. The small, uplift brassiere did nothing except emphasise how firm her breasts really were and hoe exciting their nipples could be when fully awakened. The transparent blouse let every man see this. And the mini-skirt only served too whet appetites which could not, after one glance, have failed to be already whetted. Curvaceous legs, more curvaceous thighs beckoned sensually.

     "You're a sight for sore, lecherous eyes," she told her glassy self.

Late in the novel, Moffatt Rodd decides Virginia must uncover the identity of the man funding T.R.U.S.S. This she does by determining that his true initials are the reverse of those in his false name.

"'That's all you had to work on?' the man asked incredulously."

Yep.

All in all a frustrating, disappointing read. And not because it didn't last long.

Trivia: The Girl from H.A.R.D. was retired after a third adventure, Perfect Assignment (1975), in which she crosses paths with Perfect Laye, queen of the London underworld. 

Object and Access: A slim softcover. If WorldCat is to believed  – why should it? – only the National Library of Scotland has a copy. Mine was bought four years ago. I see only one copy listed for sale online. At US$9.96 it might seem a bargain, but the bookseller lists the shipping from New Zealand to Canada at an even US$37.00. 

Related posts:

The Queer Queen Kong

Nazis Threaten from Beyond the Grave!

A Shadow Moves Through a Shadowy Underworld

The Shadow
Arthur Stringer
New York: Century, 1913
302 pages

Time was when Jim Blake could pass unnoticed through the seedier side of New York. He'd hobnob with dips, yeggs, till-tappers, and red-lighters. Blake befriended ticket snips, queer shovers, hotel beats, bank sneaks, keister-crackers, dummy chuckers, sun gazers and schlaum workers. He studied their routines, their tricks, their hang-outs, their histories, and got to know the Tammany heelers, "the men with 'pull,' the lads who were to be 'pounded' and the lads who were to be let alone, the men in touch with the 'Senator,' and the gangs with the fall money always at hand."

All this was when he was a Secret Service man with the Bureau of Printing and Engraving. That job ended – rather he ended it – when the press began reporting on his exploits. Blake pretended that he wasn't encouraging the coverage, but his higher-ups at the Bureau were no dummies.

Good thing he'd made those connections at Tammany Hall.

Blake left the Secret Service to become Third Deputy Commissioner in the New York Police Department. His fame increased. There were newspaper features, magazine pieces, and even a Broadway play based on his exploits. Blake never forgot standing, in private box, to acknowledge the applause of an admiring audience.

But this is all backstory. Years have passed, times have changed.

The early pages of the The Shadow find our protagonist in decline. Not long after joining the NYPD, Blake was elevated to Second Deputy Commissioner, but there his career stalled. He'd known to throw in his lot with the Tammany crowd, but that was the extent of his political savvy. Younger members of the force have come to see Blake and his crude methods as relics from an earlier time. He's even been put down by a cop on the beat:

"You call yourself a gun! A gun! why, you’re only a park gun! That’s all you are, a broken-down bluff, an ornamental has-been, a park gun for kids to play ’round!"

The Cavalier, 21 September 1912

Stringer encourages the reader to share this impression with an opening scene in which an exhausted Blake summons a former lover, Elsie Verriner (a/k/a Chaddy Cravath; a/k/a Charlotte Carruthers). Years earlier, Blake had picked her up as an accomplice of con man and bank thief Connie Binhart. Elsie had pleaded that she'd change her ways. Blake had been taken in by her pretty eyes, protected her from the law, had fallen in love, and had gone so far as to propose. Elsie was reluctant, Blake pressed, and then she returned to Connie Binhart.

Never-Fail-Blake (New York: McKinlay, Stone & MacKenzie, [c. 1928])

Again, this was years ago, which is not to say that all is forgiven or forgotten. Blake comes down hard on Elsie, demanding that she tell him just where her old partner in crime has been hiding. The last seven months have seen Binhart chloroform a woman, shoot a bank detective, and make off with $180,000. The Commissioner is under pressure to capture the crook. When Copeland, the First Deputy, fails, Blake steps up, seeing the capture of Binhart as a means of reestablishing his old reputation. Under threat of arrest for an unrelated crime, Elsie hands over a letter Binhart has written from Montreal.

Blake makes for Montreal, only to learn that the crook has decamped for Winnipeg. At Winnipeg, he's told that Binhart is on his way to Calgary. No dummy, Blake realizes he's been set up for failure, most likely by Copeland. Because returning to New York would only add to his humiliation, Blake takes a train to Chicago, where he begins his own inquiries into Binhart's whereabouts. It's here that the chase really begins, taking the Second Deputy through the more seedier locales of the United States, Brazil, Central America, and the Far East. 

The Shadow follows The Wife Traders (1937) and The Devastator (1945) as the third Stringer read this year. I'm glad I gave it a go. While those disappointed, The Shadow proved entertaining, imaginative, exciting, and highly atmospheric. If nothing else, read Chapter XIII, set on a ship running guns to Ecuador. This is Stringer at the height of his talent.

Anyone with an interest in the criminal underworld and its slang will enjoy, though I do warn that racial epithets feature. I admired Stringer's disregard of convention. Blake's life will be saved by a sexy female assassin in Shanghai. Elsie will reappear – reformed – as an agent for the Treasury Department. Both disappear well before the happy ending.

No women feature.

Were you expecting a love story?

Trivia: The return address on Binhart's letter is 381 King Edward Avenue, Westmount. Part of the plant is that the letter was posted from Montreal's King Edward Hotel, not King Edward Avenue. Neither avenue nor hotel exist outside the pages of the novel.

Object: A bulky hardcover purchased earlier this year from the Princeton Antiques Bookshop. Price: US20.00 (w/ a further US$25.00 for shipping). Much as I'm happy to add it to my library, how is this right?

Access: There was a Bell & Cockburn edition, but I've never seen it. While I've yet to find evidence that the Century edition of The Shadow enjoyed a second printing, in terms of sales this novel looks to be one of Stringer's most successful. It first appeared in a shorter version in the pages of Cavalier (September 21 - October 12, 1912). Century's first American edition followed in January 1913. Nine years later, cheapo publisher A.L. Burt reissued the novel under the superior title Never-Fail Blake. It last appeared under that same title as part of a set of Stringer novels, "Supertales [sic] of Modern Mystery," published in the late 'twenties by McKinlay, Stone & MacKenzie.

As I write, two copies of the Century edition are being offered online. Neither is in wonderful condition, but they seem worth the $20 asking price. Copies of Never-Fail-Blake are best ignored. I don't imagine anyone is tempted by this:

The Shadow is held by Library and Archives Canada and is fairly common in our university libraries. Curiously, the Canadian War Museum, the Institut National de la recherche scientifique and École nationale d'administration publique also have copies. What's that about?

Public library users will find that only the Toronto Public Library serves.

The Shadow can be read online – gratis – through the Internet Archive and Project Gutenberg. 

Related posts:

Arthur Stringer Unshackled (then bowdlerized)
Stringer's Swan Song

Fumbling Towards Legacy

Legacy of Fear
Garnett Weston

New York: W S Mill/William Morrow, 1950

245 pages

The jacket illustration suggests a gothic romance, but Legacy of Fear is a thriller. Its protagonist is no-nonsense American war vet Duff Catleigh. With the fighting over, he's returned to the States vowing to never again leave its borders. And yet, the novel's opening scene finds Duff on the cabin deck of the Princess Marguerite, a passenger ship of undetermined size, as it makes the short voyage from Seattle to Vancouver Island. Duff was talked into making the trip by Callender, his business partner: "You've got a knack of finding things, I haven't."

Their business is antique furniture.

"We haven't had a shipment of English or European antiques for years," says Callender. "We're stocked up with Colonial and New England and Mexican and a lot of hybrid junk I'm ashamed to have around." Because he's the tougher negotiator – so insists Callender – Duff makes from their New York office to the American West Coast, thence to Canada.

Aboard the Princess Marguerite, he spots a woman, "tall and slender with a curious rhythm, faintly undulant, in her walk, as if she moved to the sound of music audible to her ears alone." Duff pretends not to notice – and pretends not to notice again when the woman ejects a man from her cabin. That man as Temple Moxx, an inquisitive lawyer whom Duff had met earlier.

The Princess Marguerite reaches its destination early that evening. Duff decides to walk to the hotel at which he's made a reservation. Along the way, he interrupts a kidnapping attempt. The intended victim, Temple Moxx, flees the scene, leaving the newly arrived antique dealer to deal with Bob Brown, the constable walking the beat.

Later that same evening, Duff accompanies Brown to Moxx's flat in the Thunderbird Arms. The constable is looking to investigate the thwarted abduction, but finds the lawyer something less than forthcoming.

Duff  is disgusted by it all. He makes for his hotel, and dodges a knife thrown by a "Chinaman" he recognizes as one of Moxx's attackers. Duff retrieves the knife, returns to the Thunderbird Arms, tosses it it on Moxx's dining room table, and again leaves in disgust. Back at his hotel, Duff sees the woman from the Princess Marguerite getting into a limo. As the car drives away, he notices she's being followed. Turning around, Duff again sees the Chinaman – this time stealing out of the hotel with the woman's luggage. The thief disappears into a fish-and-chips restaurant. Duff follows, orders a meal which turns out to be drugged, and loses consciousness.

Our hero awakens bound in a storeroom. He's rescued by Constable Brown – now off-duty – and together they uncover a brothel/opium den. Brown returns to the station to alert his superiors. Duff returns to his hotel room to find his luggage gone.

That's an awful lot for one evening.

Thrillers with this much action have little room for character. As a tough guy with a passion for antiques, Duff is atypical, right? Brown is an honest cop, who likes to do detective work in his leisure time. That's different, right? What of the woman from the Princess Marguerite? Well, her name is Maureen O'Donnell. Curious gait aside, she's a conventional young Irish lass of a type that will be familiar to the reader. Maureen has made the journey to Vancouver Island after learning that her long-lost great-uncle, Philem O'Donnell, is alive.

Well, barely alive.

Philem lies in his death bed, believing that there is no kin to whom he can leave his vast estate. Moxx, who happens to be Philem O'Donnell's lawyer, has his eyes on his client's land, and so tries to prevent Maureen from seeing her great-uncle.

He's not alone.

Amongst other characters are John Hambly, Moxx's law partner (he's bad), sea captain Victor Mycroft (also bad), crime boss Sin Gun Pow (bad, obviously), Eurasian courtesan Vera (bad), calligrapher Mr Wu (bad), and Philem O'Donald's servants Donald and Morgan (both bad). Moxx too has a servant, Ling Chi, a seventy-year-old "houseboy." I can't say whether he's good or bad, though I certainly recognized him from old American movies and comic books:

"Missie Hambly, he call. Come after you have chow. You eatie quick now for he come. He catch you at chow, he say. 'No thank you; no have chow. Not hungry at all,' he say. Then he sit down an' eat allee sammee pig."

Ling Chi surprised me greatly because Garnett Weston wrote both the story and screenplay for Daughter of Shanghai (1937). Praised for its portrayal of Chinese-Americans, in 2006 it was added to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress.

I really like this film. If you have the time:

To be fair to Weston, Sin Gun Pow is no stereotype, nor is Vera, nor the girls working in the brothel. This is not to say that they have much flesh. How could they? As I've suggested, action crowds character. Things happen in Legacy of Fear, but too much for the four days in which the novel takes place. Both Maureen and Duff are drugged twice and kidnapped twice. Moxx too is drugged. He's rescued by Duff. May as well add that Duff suffers two blows to the head, and loses consciousness both times. Duff falls for Maureen, a woman he'd not so much as spoken twenty-four hours earlier. He proposes. She accepts. They're in love.

Like everything in this novel, the climax comes fast. It spoils nothing to reveal that Brown again comes to the rescue.

The final chapter isn't so much a denouement as a postscript. Callender shows up at Duff's hotel. He was worried by about Duff. The last paragraph – just two sentences – occur after Duff introduces Maureen to his business partner:

Smiling, he lifted the Irish girl's hand and kissed it gracefully. Only a man with a Vandyke beard could do it so well.

I have no idea what this means.

Is Callender bad?

   

Dedication: 

Edward T. Lowe is best remembered as a producer and screenwriter. In the latter role, his greatest accomplishments are House of Frankenstein (1944) and House of Dracula (1945); both penned in late career. Lowe and Weston's overlap in writing Bulldog Drummond films. Though they never wrote together, Lowe did produce the Weston-penned Bulldog Drummond in Africa (1938) and Bulldog Drummond's Secret Police (1939).

Lowe also produced Daughter of Shanghai.

Trivia: The Princess Marguerite docks in "Port Albert," which is clearly Victoria. Duff stays at an unnamed hotel, which is clearly The Empress. I think the obfuscation is explained by Weston's portrayal of Victoria as a city in which tourists and their belongings disappear with regularity (often from the  unnamed hotel).  

Humour: The increasingly unreliable WorldCat provides this information on Legacy of Fear:

Summary: A third baseman is sick with anxiety about whether or not to help his team by using his knack for knowing where the batter is going to hit the ball.

Rating: (not yet rated) 0 with reviews - Be the first.

Subjects: Baseball — Fiction

Object: Bound in red boards, typical of its time. To these eyes, the uncredited dust jacket anticipates Psycho. The rear flap has an advert for Poisonous Relations by Joanna Cannan. The back cover provides a second sales pitch for Poisonous Relations, then tries to sell three more Morrow Mysteries:

My copy was purchased in May from Scene of the Crime Books in St Catharine, Ontario. Price: US$40.00. 

Access: Legacy of Fear first appeared as an eight-part serial in The Saturday Evening Post (6 May - 24 June 1950). James R Bingham did the illustrations. Here's the first:

The rest are just as good (see the illustration above in which Catleigh strikes a similar pose when dodging a knife).

As far as I can determine, the Mill/Morrow edition enjoyed just one printing. There have been no other editions, though the novel did join Christianna Brand's Cat And Mouse, and Erle Stanley Gardner's The Case of the One-Eyed Witness in the Detective Book Club's January 1951 3-in-1 omnibus. 

Library and Archives Canada has a copy of the Mill/Morrow, as do the Toronto Public Library, the Vancouver Public Library, the University of New Brunswick, McMaster University, the University of Alberta, the University of British Columbia, and the University of Victoria.

As of this writing, no used copies were being offered for sale online.