Betting the House

Hickory House

Kenneth Orvis [pseud. Kenneth Lemieux]

Toronto: Harlequin, 1956

Bookie Alfredo Rossi can see the writing on the wall. The Feds are cracking down, and it's only a matter of time before they move in on him and sidekick Benny Kramer. Fortunately, Al has been good with his savings; he dresses like a million dollars, but is otherwise quite frugal. Al's also a guy who keeps an ear to the ground. He's heard rumblings about a corrupt mayor in some city on Lake Michigan. He's also heard that this same mayor, Carson Peters, keeps paperwork pertaining to his various illegalities in his office safe.

Al knows just the guy, a safecracker named Lou Kovaks, who can get him those papers. The poor sap was once a steady client – "Lou doesn't pick stretch runners as well as he does the locks on safes" – before he took one too many chances on the job. He's been serving time in the prison at Dannemora, but is just about to be sprung. Al is there when it happens: "'What's the matter, Al... afraid I'd be late for the first race?'"

Instead of the track, Al drives Lou to that city on Lake Michigan. Along the way, he fills the safecracker in on the job, complete with photograph:

"It's an old Continental," he stated soberly, "I've blown a dozen them in my time. A good jamb shot and the door pops open like a cuckoo clock when the hands point up."

Piece of cake. After Lou is paid, he leaves town and the novel. Al sticks around and blackmails the mayor into allowing him to set up Hickory House, a swanky nightclub and illegal gambling den on the edge of town. All goes swimmingly until the joint attracts the attention of big-time mobster Budsey Everest.

Hickory House is a first novel. In his 1985 memoir, Over and Under the Table, author Kenneth Orvis tells us it was written over an intense seven-month period: "Total absorption in plotting writing, and editing erased every other want and need except eating, sleeping, bathing, and defacating [sic]." I found this surprising, not because Hickory House is a bad book (it's perfectly fine), but because it's so short and simple. There is no real depth to the characters: Benny is devoted, Peters is corrupt, his tramp of a daughter is a tramp, and Al really know how to dress. Everyone plays their part, and the plot unfolds pretty much as you might expect.

Seven months?

Who am I to say it wasn't worth it? Hickory House went in and out of print within a month, but Orvis maintains that it brought all sorts of attention:

My novel had opened many new doors. After several radio and TV interviews and short pieces in local newspapers, more copywriting accounts than there was time for were easily available.

One can't help but envy.

So, yes, a worthwhile debut... for Orvis, if not the reader.

Shame that Harlequin forgot to put his name on the cover.

Object and Access: A 157-page mass market paperback. This past summer I snatched up the lone copy being sold online from a bookseller in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia. Price: US$12.95.

Not on Worldcat.

Good luck.

Related post:

'A Relentless Story of the Hell of Drug Addiction'

The Paratrooper, the Professor and the Publisher: The Nasty Public Battle Over The Quebec Plot

The first review of my first book was negative. The reviewer's disappointment had to do with my having written the book I wanted to write rather than the book he had wanted to read.

The second review of my first book was written by a man who was identified in same as the model for a throughly dislikeable character in George Galt's novel Scribes and Scoundrels. The reviewer made no mention of this, though he did question my existence.

"Do not respond," a senior writer friend advised.

I didn't.

The reviews that followed were very positive. I remember nothing of them other than that – very positive – but I do remember the two negative reviews in detail. For example, I can tell you that the first reviewer got the price and page count wrong. I can also tell you that I was taken to task for not including an index. The book has one, but he'd read an advance copy. His was an amateur's mistake, published in the closest thing Canada has to "the organ of the trade".

Bad reviews stay with you in a way good reviews don't. I know not to read them. I don't read good reviews either. Every now and then I feel bad for not acknowledging a reviewer's kind words... and here I'm certain that they are all kind words.

"Do not respond."

Good advice I pass on to others. And yet all these years later I still fantasize about taking on the critics in question, which is why I so enjoyed Leo Heaps' thrust and parry with Patrick O'Flaherty found in 38-year-old editions of the Globe & Mail.

A professor at Memorial University, Patrick O'Flaherty was tasked with reviewing The Quebec Plot for the paper (22 July 1978). I have no idea why; I don't see that O'Flaherty had reviewed thrillers in the past. His opening sentence betrays a certain ignorance of the genre: "Leo Heaps, who has been reading James Bond stories and learning a little Canadian geography and history, has decided to write a thriller, some would say a roman a clef about the Quebec situation."

Ignoring the obvious (The Quebec Plot owes nothing to Ian Fleming), what irks is the insinuation that Heaps, then living in London, needed something of a refresher in things Canadian. This is very same thinking the most stupid of our cultural nationalists once employed against the great Mavis Gallant. Winnipeg-born Leo Heaps was the second son of A.A. Heaps. He was educated at Queen's and McGill, and lived most of his life in Toronto. At the risk of being accused of racism – more on that later – I find this quip about Heaps "learning a little Canadian geography and history" a bit rich coming from a man whose early education pre-dated his province joining Confederation. It's not O'Flaherty at his worst, but it's pretty bad. His lowest and laziest comes when he quotes two lines of dialogue out of context:

• "I hope to God there's no armed revolution in Quebec."
• "Let's get down to business."

This is a cheap trick that we've all seen before; indeed, Heaps himself recognizes it as such in his response. But before I get to that, O'Flaherty's conclusion is worth presenting in full:

Now, I'm the first to recognize that it is not always easy to come up with a decent conclusion to a review – look no further than mine of The Quebec Plot for evidence – but this one is a real head-scratcher. On the other hand, I'm no academic, which is why I so appreciated the University of Toronto's June V. Engel, who in a letter the Globe & Mail (1 Aug 1978) refers to Prof O'Flaherty's conclusion as "incomprehensible."

Engel wasn't alone in her criticism of the critic. An earlier letter found in the 28 July edition describes the professor's review as " jumbled, incoherent." The writer was someone named Caruso, who may or may not have been an academic him or herself.

By that time, Heaps had responded to the critic. In the 26 July 1978 edition of the Globe & Mail, he shrugs off everything to do with his knowledge of Canada, associations with Ian Fleming, Marian Engel, Charles Templeton and Little Orphan Annie creator Harold Gray, then presents a parting shot:

I have been away from Canada for some time and have grown accustomed to having my books read by literate people who are concerned both with their prose and the philosophical content of their reviews. If Mr. O'Flaherty is a professor of English in Newfoundland who is there to protect us from the academics who teach in our schools?

Fair question. I've been asking variations since my graduation from Beaconsfield High School.

Leo Heaps' letter drew no response from Patrick O'Flaherty, though Jack McClelland weighed in with a letter (4 Aug 1978), which reads in part:

At first I thought it was a bad Newfie joke. Then my reaction turned from disbelief to anger. Mr. O'Flaherty's judgement, in my opinion, ranks slightly below that of a Rhesus monkey and I have nothing against monkeys. 

Was the publisher being disingenuous? "It happens that although I am not the publisher, I have read The Quebec Plot," McClelland writes of a novel he would publish within a year. Might as well add that he also published the novel about the cardinal who doesn't want the world to know about the discovery of Jesus' bones and the one in which a woman tries to copulate with a bear.

Curiously, it was McClelland's letter that brought a response from professor. Notably tardy, here he is from the 24 August 1978 edition:

The letter from Jack McClelland (Aug. 4) comes out with abusive, racist talk – "Newfie," "monkey," etc. This letter, contemptible though it is, merits a few words of reply.
     In recent years I have reviewed a number of silly books published by McClelland and Stewart Ltd. rather harshly. Looking back over my reviews, my only regret is that they were not harsher.
     What does a reviewer do when he is sent a trashy book to review? Normally, I, for one, return the item to the editor with a note saying that it is not worth reviewing. But there is so much writing in Canada – especially at the "creative" level – and so much of it is published with the assistance of the Canadian taxpayer, that it is hard to resist occasionally damning bad books. And so I stand by my review of Leo Heaps' book.

I imagine the professor does to this day, ignoring the simple facts that The Quebec Plot received no taxpayer support and was never sold as anything other than a thriller.

The last word is owed Leo Heaps himself, as published in this letter in the 4 September 1978 edition:

I cannot resist taking a parting shot at my friend Patrick O'Flaherty who reviewed my book The Quebec Plot in your columns. I will miss the professor from Memorial College, Newfoundland, at his departure.
    Professor O'Flaherty has in his letter to your newspaper on Aug. 24 presented such a perfect and inviting target that I felt it was irresistable. His remarks either hide a character of infinite subtlety and wit or one of enormous pomposity and self-righteousness. Personally, I am inclined to favor the latter view. Mr. O'Flaherty has sounded like the budding parliamemtary candidate he is when he protests against the waste of taxpayers' money on behalf of Canadian authors struggling to make ends meet. (Unfortunately, I have never had any grants. All my books have been published abroad, except one, which won a Governor-General's Award.) Perhaps the professor might tell us where the subsidy came from to publish his somewhat obscure anthology of Newfoundland and Labrador writing, which he co-edited some years back.
     If Patrick O'Flaherty remains as severe as he is, "untroubled," as Browning said, "by the spark," and if he is allowed to indecently expose himself in book review columns, then one can begin to understand his concern about Canadian prose. One only has to read what the professor writes.

Yes, Heaps is owed the last word... but I can't quite bring myself to let him have it.

In January 2009, at a dinner celebrating the sixtieth birthday of the aforementioned senior writer, I was introduced to the second critic of my first book. On learning my name he paused – here it comes, I thought – and then said: "You wouldn't be any relation to Reverend David Busby? I was one of his altar boys."

"Yes," I replied, "he was my uncle."

"Nice man," said the critic.

"Yes, very nice," I said.

And then we parted.

Related post:

Thriller Most Foreign

Thriller Most Foreign

The Quebec Plot

Leo Heaps

Toronto: Seal, 1979

This is a thriller written by a man whose own story reads like a thriller. A Jewish Canadian paratrooper in the Second World War, Leo Heaps fought in the Battle of Arnhem, was captured by the Nazis, escaped, joined the Dutch Resistance and returned to fight another day. He served as an advisor to the Israelis in the War of Independence and worked on the International Rescue Committee during the Hungarian Revolution. Heaps was also the son of A.A. Heaps, a leader in the Winnipeg General Strike and one of the founders of the CCF. Anyone collecting OAS today should raise a glass.

With a background like that it should come as no surprise that The Quebec Plot isn't just a thriller but a political thriller. It begins with Marcel Legros, chief of the secret French intelligence agency CEDECE, catching a plane at Charles de Gaulle Airport. Cut to Martinique, scene of a clandestine meeting between Legros and Gilles Marcoux, newly installed Parti Québécois Minister of the Interior. Our hero, Mark Hauser, makes his debut in Stowe, Vermont, where he's looking to get in some end-of-season skiing.

Hauser is a Pulitzer Prize-winning senior journalist at a New York-based news syndicate. Far below, in age and experience, is a colleague named Freeman. When the younger man breaks his leg while on assignment in Quebec City, Hauser is tapped to take his place. Good choice. The American-born son of a French Canadian and a German Jew, Hauser is bilingual and knows a good deal about Canada. It would've been his assignment from the start had the agency thought there was much of a story.

What is the story? Harry Consadine, head of the syndicate, explains: "This new Quebec party wants the province to separate from the rest of Canada. You know how insular we are down here, Mark. We've always taken Canada for granted."

Still do, apparently, which is why they sent Freeman with his schoolboy French, and it is why Consadine reassures his star reporter that he'll be back on the slopes in a day or two. With great reluctance, Hauser leaves Stowe and his newfound love interest, an intellectual ski bunny named Hilda Beane, for an appointment that his boss has set up with Saul Klein at the Montreal offices of the Canadian Jewish Congress. Why? "The Jews are a seismograph. If they're leaving it's a sure sign something is wrong," Consadine tells him.

Klein is staying put.

The thriller only kicks into gear when Hauser leaves Montreal for Quebec City. Along the way he picks up a hitchhiker named Paul Lejeune who is heading for a hunting and fishing lodge north of Lac St-Jean... or so he says. Hauser notices an automatic weapon with folding stock sticking out of the Lejeune's rucksack.

What Hauser doesn't know is that his passenger is really en route to one of the training camps of something called the Quebec Army of Liberation. The Canadian government knows about the army, and is fairly certain that the bases exist, but can't seem to find any. Ottawa's doing much better with L'Inflexible, a French nuclear submarine it's tracking as it makes its way from Martinique to the Gaspé peninsula. Unbeknownst to the French, the Americans are following in their own submarine, Wolverine, which has been newly equipped with a secret weapon.

Ignore the bit about the secret weapon. Ignore the cover copy about H-bomb missiles (we're never told exactly what L'Inflexible is delivering). The most interesting parts centre on Hauser in Quebec City, beginning with his discovery that Freeman has disappeared from his bed at the Hôtel-Dieu hospital.

The Quebec Plot is taut, which is just the thing one wants in a thriller. I imagine it would've been tighter still had it not found a home with London publisher Peter Davies. I blame the intrusive hand of an editor for its worst page:

I won't criticize Seal – McClelland & Stewart, really – for letting these lines stand, but will take it to task for ignoring typos, "tyre" and glaring mistakes like "Party Québecois".

Don't let that dissuade you. The separatist movement of the 'seventies inspired several Quebec-based thrillers. Heaps' followed others by old pros like Philip Atlee, Lionel Derrick and Richard Rohmer. I expected little, yet found that The Quebec Plot rose high above the rest. Quite an accomplishment for a first-time novelist. The author's bio should've given me a clue.

Addendum:

Don't you believe it. That urbane Prime Minister is modelled on Pierre Trudeau. The chain-smoking Premier of Quebec is René Lévesque. The American President with the perpetual smile owes everything to Jimmy Carter.

Object: A 248-page massmarket paperback, featuring ads for The Snow Walker by Farley Mowat and Margaret Laurence's Manawaka series. The cover art is uncredited. I purchased my copy for three dollars in 2013 at the Merrickville Book Emporium. The following year, I came across a pristine copy of the Peter Davies true first (right) in London at Attic Books. Fresh as the day it was published, it set me back one Canadian dollar. 

Access: Held by seventeen of our university libraries, the Kingston Frontenac Public Library, Library and Archives Canada and the Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec.

After the Peter Davies first, The Quebec Plot reappeared in the UK as a Corgi paperback. Seal's first Canadian edition appears to have enjoyed one lone printing. Leo Heaps was no Richard Rohmer.

Used copies are plentiful. Very good copies of the Peter Davies edition begin at US$2.95. Pay no more than US$6.00.

Related post:

The Paratrooper, the Professor and the Publisher:
The Nasty Public Battle Over The Quebec Plot
Americans to the Rescue!

The Brexit Fix-it

Today in The Walrus, my take on the biggest story going:

The Brexit Fix-it:

How an obscure forty-year-old Canadian thriller might help alleviate a global crisis

That obscure thriller? Exodus/UK, the 1975 Canadian bestseller.

Its author? Richard Rohmer, the mind behind Ultimatum and Balls!

Rohmer's solution? Ah, you'll have to read the piece to find out.

It's here – gratis!

Related posts:

Resolved to Reading Richard Rohmer
Still Reading Richard Rohmer. Is Alice Munro?
Recycling Richard Rohmer

Richard Rohmer Recycles (Again)

Of Thucydides, Themistocles and Richard Rohmer

Chasing Down a Thriller Writer's Hidden Verse
Pornography Dressed Up as a Cautionary Tale
Learn to Write the Richard Rohmer Way

Cocking in Bed

The House in Brook Street
Ronald Cocking
London: Hurst & Blackett [1949]

Wives who wish their husbands to fall asleep at a reasonable hour should not allow them to take this title to bed; it is one of the 'to be read at a sitting' variety, and liable to bring about marital crisis.

– Bruce Graeme, jacket copy for The House in Brook Street

Started in bed, moved to an armchair and ended up on the living room couch. I fell asleep several times. All in all it was very disappointing. I'm ashamed to say I paid for it.

My third Cocking, The House in Brook Street opens at Washington's Hotel Statler on the evening of V-J Day. Our hero and narrator, Inspector George Crawley of Scotland Yard, emerges from an elevator; that it isn't referred to as a "lift" is the novel's first and greatest surprise. George has been in the United States for three years, on loan to the FBI in its battle against wartime counterfeiting and the illegal transfer of bonds. Over a celebratory drink, G-Man pal Barney asks about future plans.

          "What'll you do now? Go back to England, I suppose?"
          "I suppose."

George isn't what you'd call a man of action, which may explain why he's never responded to G-Gal Norma Jean Travers' flirtations. A week after V-J Day she tries one last time, sitting on the corner of his desk, "one nylon leg crossed over the other," before giving up and seeing George off on the train that will take him to New York, the Queen Mary and, eventually, dear old London.

Aboard train, a beautiful blonde named Brenda Walsh asks to share his private compartment. He watches as she fiddles with her purse, and then their coffee cups. "I began to feel nervous," reports George. The coffee tastes bitter. His final thought before losing consciousness: "I had fallen for the oldest trick in the world."

George is revived by a porter – "My, my sah! You sho' do sleep heavy!" – to find that the compartment has been ransacked. Though he recognizes that someone at the Bureau has leaked his itinerary, George proceeds as planned, checking into the hotel at which he has a reservation.

Wouldn't want to lose that deposit.

George sees that he's being trailed by a cream-coloured 1942 Chrysler, but that doesn't prevent him from stopping in on his pal Lou Rogers, a captain in the NYPD. Lou reminds George that he promised to give him a glossy of Scotland Yard. After that, it's off to a penthouse overlooking Central Park, where Jacob B. Rand – "The Rand! Rand's First National Bank of New York!" – thanks him for catching a counterfeiter, then drones on about his enthusiasm for something called the Society of the Friends of Peace. Rand sends George back to the hotel in a cream-coloured 1942 Chrysler, something our hero dismisses as an "odd coincidence." His room has been ransacked.

The next day, aboard the Queen Mary, George picks up a newspaper and reads this:

"That's what you have to get used to in America", George tells us. "Anything can happen there – and usually does."

It was at this point that I lost what little faith I had left in George. Nothing that followed caused me to reconsider –  not even Scotland Yard's remarkable belief in their man.

Back in London, George is promoted to Chief Inspector and entrusted with security for the opening session of the United Nations General Assembly, scheduled to take place – as it did – on 10 January 1946 in London. Barney and Norma Jean arrive in town to ensure the safety of the American delegates. Good thing, too, because their English friend proves himself entirely inept. Twice he's lured to meet strangers who offer undisclosed information, twice he's warned that the meeting is suspicious, and twice he's ambushed. His worst beating comes after Brenda Walsh, the very same woman who slipped the Mickey Finn on the Washington-New York train, asks to meet him in Place Pigalle:

"The Place Piguelle!" I said."That's a hell of a place to meet anybody."
     "I know," she said, "but we've got go to a house near there. I'll explain when I meet you."
     "All right," I said. "I'll take your word for it. See you at eight."

After that particular ambush, George forgets to retrieve the gun that was knocked from his hand.

Cocking forgets, too.

The author's debut, The House in Brook Street is set in an odd world in which a policeman specializing in counterfeiting and financial fraud is tasked with ensuring the safety of hundreds of the world's most important politicians, ambassadors and bureaucrats. George has no staff and meets with no one other than Barney and Norma Jean. He never visits Central Hall Westminster, at which the General Assembly is to take place.

At some point, George is reassigned. We don't know when exactly – he keeps it from us for a while – but I'm willing to accept his story. It seems that banker Jacob B. Rand and his Society of the Friends of Peace friends are up to something, and because George has met Rand... well, who better to figure things out? No one knows just what Rand and the SFP have in mind except that it's being cooked up in the Society's house on... er, in Brook Street, and will take place on the very day the General Assembly is to convene. Sadly, George proves himself to be just as ineffective as ever. Frustrating as it is for the reader, it does include this pretty great passage:

I once read in a book that one of the chief requirements of a novel was that it should have Dramatic Unity. Well, I suppose that in a piece of fiction you can organize things so that the action is smooth-flowing and that the bits and pieces all fuse together in a nice, complete whole.
     My trouble is that I've got to set the facts down just as they happened (and anyway I'm a policeman, not a writer). So I've got to ruin the Dramatic Unity of the story by skipping three weeks or so. Why? Well, simply because the whole case came to a complete standstill.

A serious alcoholic, Barney is of no help. Norma Jean spends all her time cooking for the men, making pots of coffee and changing outfits. As the day of the General Assembly draws near, the trio are kidnapped by Rand. For no good reason, the banker tells them all about his plans for murdering foreign delegates. A forged document will convince the world that the orders came from Downing Street. World War Three will begin with a new Axis led by "fanatical Nazis in hiding in the Bavarian Alps."

That's Rand's plan, anyway.

Convinced that they have no hope of escape, George, Barney and Norma Jean while away the hours playing cards until, quite by chance, they're rescued. 

Really. That's what happens. I didn't dream it.

Favourite sentence:

It was so obvious that the only excuse which I can make for not seeing it before is that I had a lot of things on my mind.

Trivia: The House in Brook Street follows Jane Layhew's Rx for Murder as the second novel read in five months to feature "nigger in the woodpile", an expression I swear I'd never before encountered.

The novel's lone black character is the  railway porter mentioned above. A helpful soul, the last we see him is when Crawley's train arrives in New York:

"We is pullin' out ob dis bay in two minutes, sah." He was looking at me curiously.
     I looked around. Miraculously, my bags were packed and ready.
     "That's fine," I said, "thanks a lot." I gave him five dollars and his shining black face split in a huge grin.

Object and Access: A compact 224 pages in rose-coloured boards. The cover illustration is uncredited. Excited by the opening scenes of Cocking's Die With Me, Lady, in 2012 I purchased my copy for £35 from a bookseller in Winterton, Lincolnshire. The pages were uncut.

The rear flap announces Cocking's second novel, High Tide is at Midnight (1950), which I read and reviewed here two years ago. In turn, the High Tide is at Midnight dust jacket reports that The House in Brook Street has enjoyed three printings. Surprising. I see just one copy of The House in Brook Street being offered for sale online. The UK bookseller provides this description: "Book Condition: Acceptable. Foxing/tanning to edges and/or ends. No dust jacket. Pages tanned. Staining/marking to cover. Staining/marking to pages/page edges. Wear/marking to cover." Price: £74.57.

It's not worth considering.

Not a trace in Canadian libraries, I'm afraid. American cousins will find one lonely copy at Boston University. My English cousins are served by Oxford University and the British Library.

Related posts:

Cocking on the Beach

The Lonely Patience of Kevin Marlow

Dope Rings in Canada! Oh My!

Ricochet Prefers Blondes

The postman brings the third Ricochet Book in as many months. As Series Editor, I couldn't be more proud. One of the greatest Canadian noir novels, Blondes Are My Trouble followed Hot Freeze as the second Mike Garfin thriller. Like the first, it's set in the private detective's hometown of Montreal. And, like the first, the focus is on vice. This time it's prostitution, a racket not even Mike's girl Tessie can escape.

I was introduced to the novel as The Darker Traffic, published in 1954 by Dodd, Mead under Sanderson's "Martin Brett" nom de plume. Blondes Are My Trouble is the title given by Popular Library for the 1955 paperback release.

Better, don't you think?

We think Popular Library's cover is better, too, so have adapted it for the Ricochet reissue. Sure, that dame depicted isn't a blonde, but aren't you intrigued?

This time out I tapped John Norris of Pretty Sinister Books to pen the Introduction.

I think of Hot Freeze as the very best of post-war Canadian noir. John tells me that Blondes is even better.

Could I be wrong?

Acknowledgement: The publication of Blondes Are My Trouble sees the return of all four – or is it three? – Mike Garfin thrillers to print:

Hot Freeze (1954)

The Darker Traffic (a/k/a Blondes Are My Trouble; 1955)

The Deadly Dames (1956)

A Dum-Dum for the President (1961)

The last two are available from Greg Shepard's Stark House Press. It is thanks to Greg that we were able to contact Douglas Sanderson's son and secure the rights to Hot Freeze and Blondes Are My Trouble. Long a champion, in the past nine years Stark House has reissued six Sanderson novels, most recently Night of Horns and Cry Wolfsham.

Related posts:

Of Sex and Drugs and Montreal
Dark Blondes
Ricochet! Ricochet!

Ricochet! Ricochet!

Arriving in bookstores as I write, books seven and eight in Véhicule's Ricochet Books series. Following visits to Niagara Falls (James Benson Nablo's The Long November) and Toronto (Hugh Garner's Waste No Tears), we're returning to Montreal with:

The Mayor of Côte St. Paul by Ronald J. Cooke, the strange story of Dave Manley, a struggling writer drawn into the world of slot-machines and rum-running by a good looking gal who wants nothing so much as to open a lingerie store in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia. Both work for the Mayor, a sadistic crime boss who takes pleasure in murdering people with darts.

Printed once by pre-romance Harlequin in June 1950, the Ricochet edition is the first in more than sixty-five years.

Hot Freeze by Douglas Sanderson, post-war Canada’s greatest noir novel, introduces "inquiry agent" Mike Garfin, ex-RCMP (he made the mistake of bedding a suspect's wife). In this first of three or four adventures, he's hired to figure out what exactly is going on with one of Westmount's spoiled bisexual teenaged sons.

Published in 1954, by Dodd, Mead (New York) and Reinhardt (London), then in 1955 by Popular Library (New York), this edition is the first in sixty years.

Both The Mayor of Côte St. Paul and Hot Freeze feature Introductions by yours truly – my first since David Montrose's The Crime on Cote des Neiges (or, if you prefer, Meurtre à Westmount).

Long-time readers will recognize both titles. I first wrote here about Hot Freeze in the earliest days of 2011. The Mayor of Côte St. Paul consumed not one, not two, but three posts later that same year.

The Mayor of Côte St. Paul and Hot Freeze are available from the usual online sources, better bookstores and, of course, Véhicule itself.

I would be remiss in not recognizing the role played by Greg Shepard of Stark House Press in the Hot Freeze reissue. In recent years, Stark House has reissued six Douglas Sanderson novels, including A Dum-Dum for the President, the third – or is it fourth? – Mike Garfin thriller. 

Related posts:

Of Sex and Drugs and Montreal

A Blockhead Tries Writing for Money

Write Short Stories the Dave Manley Way!
Ronald J. Cooke, No Blockhead

Not Any Old Author, a Canadian Author

Night Without Darkness
Kenneth Orvis [pseud Kenneth Lemieux]
New York: Pan, 1968

Related post:

'A Relentless Story of the Hell of Drug Addiction'

'A Relentless Story of the Hell of Drug Addiction'

The Damned and the Destroyed
Kenneth Orvis [pseud. Kenneth Lemieux]
London: Dobson, 1962

How many novels begin with the protagonist being summoned to a mansion on Mount Royal? This very thing happens in Murder without Regret, the last book I read. Off the top of my head, I can think of a couple of others: David Montrose's The Crime on Cote des Neiges and Hot Freeze by Douglas Sanderson. Not so The Damned and the Destroyed – here the reader has to wait for the third page. The first two set the stage: The year (unstated) is 1954. Thirty-eight-year-old Jean Drapeau (unnamed) has just been elected mayor of Montreal. His party, the Civic Action League (named), looks to close down the open city of Al Palmer's Montreal Confidential.

Private investigator Maxwell Dent is more than familiar with the city's unseemly underside, which is not to say he's of it. Straight-laced and upstanding, Dent studied law at McGill, then served in the Korean War where he took down "an enemy ring supplying narcotics to U.N. forces for the purpose of troop demoralization."

Huntley Ashton, the man whose mansion the PI visits, knows all this stuff: "I've had you checked, Dent. Screened thoroughly. I respect what I found." Ashton's due diligence is understandable. As one of the city's most respected businessmen, he has to make certain that Dent can be trusted. The case is a sensitive one. Ashton's daughter Helen has turned heroin addict, and he wants Dent to smash the drug ring:

"I know that is a big order. A huge undertaking. Nevertheless, I want the people that are selling blackmarket drugs to my daughter run out of business and jailed. I want them punished to the full."

Good Canadian that he is, Dent gives thought, then responds:

"I must ask you to bear in mind that in Canada offences against the Narcotic Act fall under the jurisdiction of the R.C.M.P. The R.C.M.P. wouldn't like your present attitude."

Despite his reservations, Dent takes the case. I'm not sure why exactly, but I think it has something to do with Ashton's love for his daughter.

"She was beautiful, young, blonde and a junkie…" reads the pitch on the Belmont paperback.  The key word is "was". Helen was beautiful, or so Dent assumes, but those looks are gone by the time he sets eyes on her. Heroin has taken its toll, as it always does, and there's more: scars and weals crisscross her sunken belly, the work of a drunken abortionist.

Orvis – Lemieux, if you prefer – spent five years researching this novel. He hung with addicts and pushers, interviewed counsellors and read a mess of reports and case studies. There's a real feel of authenticity in the descriptions of his damned and destroyed: Frankie Seven, Dream Street Fay and wasted talent Phil Chasen. A classically trained concert pianist, Phil coulda been somebody, instead of a junkie, which is what he is.

Orvis handles these characters well – they appear real, and probably were – but falls flat with others. Drug kingpin Jack Moss, the "Back Man", comes off like a Bond villain. Shadow, his errand boy, is a young rapscallion who is equal parts Dondi and Oliver Twist. Inspector Welch of the RCMP is an inspector with the RCMP, and the only memorable thing about Helen's sister Thorn is her name.

Things fall apart in the second act with the shift from the first group to the second. By this point, I'd long grown tired of Dent, his outrage, his moralizing and his unwavering faith in himself. The PI is never more annoying than when he gets it in his head that he can cure Helen through tough love. He has her witness a police line-up, takes her to the trial of someone charged with possession, and forces her to visit Fay in the Fullum Street Prison:

My fingers tightened determinedly over Helen's shoulder. "Take a good look at her," I said with every ounce of firmness I could command… "Look at her face, her body. Listen to her screams, her agony. Listen and look well, because what you're seeing and hearing now is the end of the road for every addict. For everyone that thinks there's a thrill or an escape in heroin. For you – Helen Ashton!" 

Lee Child is a great admirer of The Damned and the Destroyed. Should I be surprised? I don't know, I've never read Child. But a thriller should thrill, right? At the very least, it should move forward at a good pace. This one stalls. Repeatedly. When it picks up, the reader is treated to lengthy descriptions of hours spent trailing Moss and stakeouts that go on for days and days. The climax, which comes as a relief, involves a risky plan of Maxwell Dent's own design. He gets RCMP support, but keeps the details to himself. "Just issue those orders," he tells Welch. "Issue them and wait."

Three people die as a result.

I'm sure our hero would tell you that it was the best of all possible outcomes.

Pierre Desmarais, Jean Drapeau and Pacifique Plante
25 October 1954

Epigraph:

Dedication:

Coincidence: Amongst those thanked in the Acknowledgements is "Gordon W. Phillips S. Th., Consultant at the Allan Division, Royal Victoria hospital, and Chaplain Montreal prisons." A friend of the my parents, glimpses of Rev Phillips' good work is found in Adopted Derelicts, a pre-romance Harlequin written by his wife Bluebell. My father is named in the Acknowledgements of Mrs Phillips' book.

Object and Access: An unexciting 223-page hardcover in black boards with silver type. The 1962 Dobson is most likely the first, but those who follow the flag will want the McClelland & Stewart edition published that same year. An old Gazette column (29 June 1962) has McGraw-Hill publishing the novel in the States, but I've yet to see a copy. There have been two paperback editions: Digit (1964) and Belmont (1966).

Copies of The Damned and the Destroyed aren't plentiful, but they're not expensive. Those listed for sale online range in price from between £5 and US$30. I purchased mine this past June for £3.50 from a UK bookseller.

The Damned and the Destroyed was reissued three years ago – as an ebook only – by Prologue Books. Lee Child provides the Foreword.

A handful of our academic libraries have copies, as do Bibliothèque et Archives nationals du Québec and Library and Archives Canada.

Related posts:

Of Sex and Drugs and Montreal

This Just In…

Bewitched, Bothered, but Not Bewildered
Dope Rings in Canada! Oh, My!

A Man's Struggle with Humiliation

Night of the Horns/Cry Wolfram

Douglas Sanderson

Eureka, CA: Stark House, 2015

Shame he isn't around to see it.

The year Douglas Sanderson died – 2002 – his twenty-two novels were many decades out of print. Two years later, Stark House brought back Pure Sweet Hell and Catch a Fallen Starlet. The last of his Canadian thrillers, The Deadly Dames and A Dum-Dum for the President, followed. With this volume, Stark House revives a fifth and sixth title; a seventh, Hot Freeze, will return this fall as part of the Véhicule Press Ricochet Books series.*

I read and wrote about the second novel in this pairing, Cry Wolfram (a/k/a Mark It for Murder),  a few years back. Night of Horns was something new, though it had always stuck in my mind as Sanderson's only Penguin.

Green bars and everything.

"A man's struggle with humiliation", the publisher's pitch, also stuck. Sanderson's previous thrillers dealt with murderers, drug traffickers, human smugglers, white slavers and political assassins. Here it's humiliation?

The struggling man is California lawyer Robert Race. Better known as Bob, he's made a name for himself by defending the disadvantaged. His latest case involves an immigrant named Garcia who is accused of having interfered with several young girls.

A lost cause.

His greatest victory involved Tony Fontaine, a latino teenager who'd been accused of dealing weed. Not only did Race get him off, he's clothing the kid and paying his way through college. Now twenty. Tony sometimes drops by the flat for a home cooked meal. Who can blame him? That Mrs Race – first name: Eve – is quite a cook… or not. What I know for sure is that she's a looker and is extremely amorous. Two years into marriage, the Races are as randy as ever.

Skirts rise, pants drop.

Trouble is that in springing his young charity case Race bribed a witness, and big time crook Al Kresnik knows all about it. He promises to forget everything if the lawyer agrees to pick up a suitcase and hold onto it for a bit. After some hesitation, Race does just that, only to be rolled and very nearly killed. He soon discovers the suitcase gone, along with his wife. This is where humiliation enters the picture.

Turns out that despite the married couple's incessant coupling, Eve had been seeing other men. Top spot was once held by fellow lawyer Paul Taylor, a neighbour from the floor below, but he's since been supplanted by bad boy Tony. It's almost certain that the young drug dealer – let's acknowledge it and move on – was the guy who stole the suitcase and tried to rub out poor Bob Race.

Faced with these harsh truths, the aptly named Race sets off in pursuit of the suitcase, Tony and his wife. It's in this that I found Night of Horns most interesting. Just what is Bob Race after? Retrieving the suitcase might just save his skin, but is he really out to get Tony? Or is it all about Eve?

Night of Horns is typical Sanderson in that the pace is frantic; like pretty much everything else he wrote, it begins and ends in a matter of days. Not much time, but enough for Race and the reader to come to hate Eve.

Do I spoil things in relaying that he finds comfort with a girl named Ginny Ferrer?

Give the guy a break.

Best passage: 

I'd met Mrs Fontaine twice before, once at the court, once at my office when she'd heard that I'd pay Tony's college fees. She had struck me as elderly, ill and pathetic. I guess I wanted her to be like that.
     She opened the door.
     She had on a negligee and a slip. The negligee showed most of the slip and the slip showed most of her breasts. Her feet were bare, her hair hadn't been combed in a while, her eyes were bleary and the rye on her breath would have knocked down a dray horse. 

Trivia: Night of Horns was first published in 1958 London by Secker & Warburg. The first American edition was published by Fawcett under the title Murder Comes Calling. Its back cover features dialogue that does not appear in the novel.

Might this be the work of the same hand that wrote the misleading cover copy on the Fawcett edition of Sanderson's Pure Sweet Hell?

More trivia: Adapted by Terence Dudley for a 1964 episode of the BBC's Detective. Frank Lieberman starred as Bob Race. Eve was played by the beautiful Barbara Shelley.

A Bonus: Another review, followed by much discussion about identity, categorization, markets and other preoccupations at Sergio Angelini's blog. 

Object: A 261-page trade-size paperback, mine is labelled an advance copy but is otherwise identical to the new Stark House edition that is right now hitting American bookstore shelves. Included is a very fine and informative Introduction by Gregory Shepard.

Access: Though Stark House has no Canadian distribution, Night of Horns/Cry Wolfram and its two other Sanderson books are readily available through the publisher's website.

Collectors may feel frustrated in that Secker & Warburg's true first edition is nowhere in sight. Not online anyway. Copies of the Penguin edition are plentiful and cheap. Prices range from £1.75 to £10.00. Condition is not a factor.

Murder Comes Calling, Fawcett's first American edition, was published the same year using the author's Malcolm Douglas nom de plume. Copies of this edition are just as plentiful and nearly as cheap. Prices range from US$3.44 to US$25.00. Again, condition is not a factor.

Good old University of Toronto has a copy of Penguin's Night of Horns. No Canadian libraries hold Murder Comes Calling.

* Full disclosure: I am Ricochet Books' series editor.

The Trouble With Charlie

The Fiend

Margaret Millar

New York: Dell, 1966

224 pages

This review now appears, revised and rewritten, in my new book:

The Dusty Bookcase:

A Journey Through Canada's

Forgotten, Neglected, and Suppressed Writing

Available at the very best bookstores and through

Biblioasis, Amazon, Chapters/Indigo, and McNally-Robinson.

Pornography Dressed Up as a Cautionary Tale

Death by Deficit: A 2001 Novel
Richard Rohmer
Toronto: Stoddart, 1995

There are plenty of villains in this novel – Quebecers, bankers, the Japanese, a CBC reporter with beer on his breath – but only one appears more than fleetingly. This would be the unnamed former prime minister, a "burned-out politician" whose "lined round face was recognized by everyone in Canada."

I recognized him as Paul Martin, our twenty-first prime minister.

Rohmer's twenty-first prime minister is one of "the architects and the builders of the crisis." The emphasis, mine, is wholly justified. Death by Deficit is set in an imagined 2001, a future past, during the earliest days of the greatest crisis Canada has ever faced. Rohmer's twenty-second prime minister – known only, perhaps tellingly, as "Richard" – has just been sworn in when the economy collapses.

Not his fault. Blame Paul Martin, Jean Chrétien, Brian Mulroney, Pierre Elliott Trudeau and their years of reckless deficit spending. As the country's accumulated debt approaches one trillion dollars, the Japanese get jittery and start dumping their Canadian bonds and securities. Richard announces to the assembled media that he is certain the Americans and Europeans will do likewise.

Which they then do.

Which is meant to show how smart he is.

This reader thinks he's an idiot – and not just for that self-fulfilling prophecy. I'm sure the author wouldn't see it that way. Rohmer's Richard is a hero. The leader of a new party created by the merger of Reform and the Progressive Conservatives, he sees crisis as an opportunity to do whatever the hell he wants: slashing the civil service, privatizing Crown corporations, ending foreign aid, giving "Indians" the what for and, of course, slamming the door on immigration.

I once wrote about this type of story in reference to a fantasy Preston Manning published in the Globe & Mail. Masturbatory to those who favour the right, I called it porn. It is. The U of T's Sylvia Ostrey can hardly contain her excitement: "As usual, Richard Rohmer tells a gripping tale – but this time about fiscal policy!"

Former Progressive Conservative MP James Gillies joins in: "Death by Deficit uncannily captures the atmosphere which dominates the House, the caucus, and the Cabinet when there is a crisis."

Bullshit.

There's never been a crisis in which a PM has called for the RCMP to be brought in to House of Commons to quell dissent.

Not yet, anyway.

Richard snubs his Cabinet and meets with his neophyte caucus only to deliver a false primer on "the parliamentary principle of party discipline."

Enter that beery-breathed CBC reporter, who dares make the very observation that Richard did behind closed doors:

"You have a new, inexperienced Cabinet filled with people who don't even know how to find a washroom in this place, let alone how to handle this crisis. Don't you think you should get some help, call in the best brains in the country?"

A fair question, it's followed by others until Richard changes the channel (pun intended):

"There is no longer any justification for the continuation of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and its enormous drain on the public purse."

So ends the CBC. Cut the mike.

The prime minister never calls in "the best minds in the country", rather he phones Allan Greenspan Al Weinstock, Chairman of the Federal Reserve of the United States.

Weinstock states the obvious:

"…you'd better open the IMF and World Bank doors. At least knock on them and let them know you're coming."

As if he hasn't already helped enough, the Chairman of the Fed gives Richard some phone numbers.

Accompanied by Abbi Black, his very hot "director of international studies," Weinstock flies to Ottawa, susses out the situation, and presents the "Weinstock Solution": Washington will take on Canadian debt in exchange for free access to the country's fresh water, abrogation of cultural protection and unobstructed negotiations that would see British Columbia absorbed by the United States.

Richard accepts the proposal with thanks. No negotiation necessary. No need to call the President.

God, what a mess. It's not like we didn't see it coming.

Remember that 1993 episode of W5 devoted to New Zealand's meltdown?

Sure you do. After all, the reporter was "one of Canada's best, probably the best, TV news magazine producer, Eric Malling." American Abbi Black thinks so much of the show that she presents the entire transcript to Richard, his Minister of Finance, the President of the Treasury Board and, ultimately, the reader. Thirty pages of disjointed prose follow.

"There's been some criticism of the program," hot Abbi acknowledges, "but it's okay for our purposes."

Criticism? Well, yes. In fact, Malling's report inspired Linda McQuaig's Shooting the Hippo: Death by Deficit and Other Myths, which laid bare Malling's… let's say "stretching of the truth."

Published six months before Rohmer's novel, McQuaig's Shooting the Hippo: Death by Deficit and Other Myths dominated the 1995 bestseller lists and was shortlisted for a Governor General's Award for English-language Non-Fiction.

Rohmer's Death by Deficit is, of course, pure fiction. You can tell because he inflates Canada's 1993-94 debt, has it that Employment Insurance is a drain on our taxes and repeats that old saw about Francophones controlling the civil service.

Think of it all as a novelist's prerogative.

Still, I can't help but think that Rohmer believes these things, just as I'm certain he believes the PM's warped version of parliamentary democracy is spot on. Death by Deficit is our world, but a little off, like cheese that's been left out too long smeared over the pages of The Plot Against America. In Richard Rohmer's Canada a female Governor General delivers the "Speech From [sic] the Throne" decked out like Eliza Doolittle at the Embassy Ball.

Death by Deficit predicts a Chrétien government that paid no attention whatsoever to the growing national debt, when in fact it began paying off same with record surpluses. Credit belongs to Paul Martin, who is referred to in the novel as a "lying bastard".

I'll hand the author this: Paul Martin did indeed become our twenty-first prime minister. What's more, our twenty-second, Stephen Harper, leads a party born of a merger of Reform and the Progressive Conservatives. What Rohmer gets wrong is that the Harper government has run the largest deficits in Canadian history, raising us to unprecedented heights of public debt.

What he gets right is that, like Richard's party, Stephen's votes as one.

Sheep.

Trivia: In Generally Speaking: The Memoirs of Major-General Richard Rohmer, the author describes Paul Martin as "a good friend of mine." Rohmer isn't mentioned in Hell or High Water, Martin's autobiography.

Best passage:

It was Abbi Black who was the sight to behold. The PM's male hormone computer told him she was one of the most strikingly beautiful women he had ever laid eyes on. His computer went up a further notch when she slipped off her heavy coat and white scarf. This tall, high-healed, long-limbed, slim beauty was wearing a tight-fitting black woollen sheath with a gleaming row of golden buttons running down from the discretely low-cut bodice that covered her firm breasts (just the right size, according to his computer).
     His eyes took in the cascade of wavy ebony hair and the smooth, unlined forehead, the black, well-shaped eyebrows arched over eyes that held deep-brown pupils in their centres. Her nose was perfectly shaped, her high cheekbones led to a wide, full-lipped mouth with exquisite teeth.
     The PM liked – very much – what he saw, but there was serious business at hand, and he switched off his internal computer as he shook Abbi Black's soft, well-manicured hand.

Highest concentration of hyphens in Canadian literature (but that's not why I point it out).

Bonus:

The doors of the Speaker's chambers opened. There the Right Honourable Pearl McConachie stood in radiant white, her long form-fitting gown reaching to the scarlet carpet. He sleeved arms were partly concealed by a purple cape that sat on her slender shoulders. The wavy blond hair was fetched upwards, seemingly encased in a delicate, glittering tiara.

Object and Access: A well-padded 234-page hardcover in Tory blue boards, my copy set me back 60¢ last summer. Online booksellers offer a dozen or so at prices ranging from $4.11 to $38.74. Condition is not a factor. Pay no more than 60¢.

Death by Deficit was printed only once and has never come out in paperback, meaning all copies out there are first editions. Pay no more than 60¢.

Thirteen of our academic libraries have copies, as does Library and Archives Canada. Public library users will find the book in the Calgary Public Library, the Red Deer Public Library, the Medicine Hat Public Library and the Toronto Public Library.

Death by Deficit was read for Reading Richard Rohmer. 

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