The Dustiest Bookcase: Z is for Zink (Again)

The Dustiest Bookcase:

Short pieces on books I've always meant to review (but haven't).

The Uprooted
Lubor Zink
Toronto: Longmans Canada, 1962
343 pages

The Bombardier Guide to Canadian Authors places satirist Lubor Zink in the same league as Rabelais, Swift, and Ayn Rand, yet few outside the Canadians at National Lampoon truly understood his talent. He worked for decades as a columnist in Toronto, with the Telegram and the Sun, but his humour went over the heads of most readers. Zink will be forever linked to Pierre Elliott Trudeau, toward whom he feigned obsession and hatred, but I think his best columns date from the Pearson era. In July 26, 1965 edition of the Toronto Telegram he criticizes medicare, suggesting "legalcare, morticare, carcare, housecare, leisurecare, and endless other possibilities" are to follow.

Hilarious.

Trudeauacracy
Lubor J Zink
[Toronto]: [Toronto Sun], 1972

Zink coined "Trudeaumania," which Larry Zolf credits with boosting PET in the 1968 Liberal leadership race. "Trudeaucracy," the title of his 1972 book, didn't catch on in the same way. Lubor Zink's greatest influence was on Stephen Colbert, who clearly used the "Lubor J Zink" character as the inspiration for his own on The Colbert Report.

Zink wrote three novels, The Uprooted, a Cold War thriller, being the only one that was written and published in English. Does it not have the look of a late-seventies indie album?

If his mastery of satire is anything to go by, Zink's thriller will be even better than Richard Rohmer's Starmaggedon.

Related posts:

B is for the Bombardier Guide to Canadian Authors

Z is for Zink, Lubor J.

Richard Rohmer Recycles (Again)

No Weddings and Three Funerals

Quebec in Revolt
Herman Buller
Toronto: Swan, 1966
352 pages

The cover has all the look of a 1960s polemic, but Quebec in Revolt is in fact a historical novel. Its key characters are depicted on the title pages:

At far left is Joseph Guibord, he of the Guibord Affair.

The Guibord Affair?

Like Gordon Sinclair, one of twelve columnists and critics quoted on the back cover, the Guibord Affair meant nothing to me.

It most certainly didn't feature in the textbooks I was assigned in school. This is a shame because the Guibord Affair would've challenged classmates who complained that Canadian history was boring.

Here's what happened:

In 1844, Montreal typographer Joseph Guibord helped found the Institut canadien. An association dedicated to the principles of liberalism, its library included titles prohibited by the Roman Catholic Index – the Index Librorum Prohibitoru. These volumes, combined with the Institut's cultural and political activities, drew the condemnation of Ignace Bourget, the Roman Catholic Bishop of Montreal. In July 1869, Bourget issued a decree depriving members of the sacraments. Guibord died four months later.

Here's what happened next: 

Guibord's body was transported to a plot he'd purchased at Montreal's Catholic Notre-Dame-des-Neiges Cemetery, only to be refused burial by the Church. The remains found a temporary resting place at the Protestant Mount Royal Cemetery, while friend and lawyer Joseph Doutre brought a lawsuit on behalf of the widow Guibord. In 1874, after the initial court case and a series of appeals, the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council ordered the burial. In response, Bourget deconsecrated Guibord's plot.

The second attempt at interment, on 2 September 1875, began at Mount Royal Cemetery:

At Notre-Dame-des-Neiges, a violent mob attacked, forcing a retreat to Mount Royal.

The third attempt, on 16 November, was accompanied by a military escort of over 1200 men. Guibord's coffin was encased in concrete so as to protect his body from vandals.

The sorry "Guibord Affair" spans the second half of the novel. The focus of the first half is the man himself. Young Guibord woos and weds Henriette Brown, the smallpox-scared orphaned daughter of a poor shoemaker. He moves up the ranks within Louis Perrault & Co, the printing firm in which he'd worked since a boy, eventually becoming manager of the entire operation.

Louis Perrault & Co, c.1869

Henriette and husband come to be joined by Della, the daughter of one of her distant Irish cousins. Poor girl, Della was part of the exodus brought on by the Potato Famine. Her father and lone sibling having died whilst crossing the Atlantic – mother soon to follow – she clings to life in one of the "pestilential sheds" built for accommodate diseased immigrants. The most dramatic scene in the novel has Joseph defying authority by lifting he girl from her sickbed and carrying her home. 

"Skin and bone had given way to flesh and curves," Della recovers and grows to become a headstrong young woman. Buller makes much of her breasts. Ever one to buck convention and authority, Della spurns marriage, has a lengthy sexual and intellectual relationship with journalist Arthur Buies, and ends up living openly with Joseph Doutre ("Josef" in the novel). Truly, a liberated woman; remarkable for her time.

I've yet to find evidence that Della existed.

Joseph Guibord's entry in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography informs that he and Henriette, a couple Buller twice describes as childless, had at least ten children. The entry for Joseph Doutre, whom the author portrays as a lifelong bachelor, records two marriages.

Were it not for the novel's Author's Note, pointing out that Guibord began his career working for John Lovell (not Louis Perrault), or that he was born on 31 March 1809 (not 1 April 1809), or that women didn't wear bustles in 1820s Montreal, might seem nit-picky.

The Swan paperback quotes Al Palmer, author of Montreal Confidential and Sugar Puss on Dorchester Street):

In fact, what Palmer wrote is this:

The Gazette, 19 November 1965

I expect there many more fabrications and errors in this novel and its packaging, but can't say for sure. Again, we didn't learn about the Guibord Affair in school.

About the author: Herman Buller joins Kenneth Orvis and Ernie Hollands as Dusty Bookcase jailbird authors. A lawyer, he rose to fame in the 'fifties as part of a baby-selling ring.

The Gazette, 13 February 1954

Buller was arrested at Dorval Airport on 12 February 1954 whilst attempting to board a flight to Israel with his wife and in-laws. The worst of it all – according to the French-language press – was that the lawyer had placed babies born to unwed Catholic women with Jewish couples.

La Patrie, 11 February 1954

Remarkably, Buller served just one day in prison. He paid a $20,000 fine, was disbarred, and was good to go.

Though Quebec in Revolt was published just eleven years after all this, not a single review mentioned of Buller's criminal past.

I hadn't heard of the Buller Affair (as I call it) until researching this novel, despite it having been  dramatized in Le berceau des anges (2015) a five-part Series+ series. Buller (played by Lorne Bass) is mentioned twenty-two seconds into the trailer. 

Fun fact: I read Quebec in Revolt during a recent stay at the Monastère des Augustines in Quebec City. 

Object and Access: A bulky, well-read mass-market paperback, my copy was purchased for one dollar this past summer at an antiques/book store in Spencerville, Ontario.

Quebec in Revolt was first published in 1965 by Centennial Press. If the back cover is to be believed, McKenzie Porter of the Toronto Telegram describes that edition as a "Canadian best seller." I've yet to come across a copy.

As of this morning, seven copies of Quebec in Revolt are listed for sale online. At US$6.00, the least expensive is offered by Thiftbooks: "Unknown Binding. Condition: Fair. No Jacket. Readable copy. Pages may have considerable notes/highlighting," Take a chance! Who knows what will arrive!

There are two Swan copies at US$8.00 and US$12.45. Prices for the Centennial edition range from US$10.00 (sans jacket) to US$24.00. 

Surprisingly, Quebec in Revolt enjoyed an Estonian translation: Ja mullaks ei pea sa saama... Google translates this as And you don't have to become soil... 

There hasn't been a French translation.

Is it any wonder?

A Russian is Coming! A Russian is Coming!

Russian Roulette [Kosygin is Coming]
Tom Ardies
Toronto: PaperJacks, 1975
207 pages

Tom Ardies' thrillers fall into two neat categories: those published under his own name, and those written under the nom de plume "Jack Trolley." The latter books had a far better time with the critics. Balboa Firefly, his first Trolley thriller, received a star review in Publishers Weekly (31 October 1994), with the uncredited reviewer lamenting that it had been sixteen years since Ardies' last novel. Kosygin is Coming, filmed and reissued as Russian Roulette, received a lesser welcome in the pages of Kirkus (11 January 1973):

Some rather indeterminate idiocy about Timothy Shaver, temporarily suspended from the Mounties, who is assigned to keep Kosygin safe when he comes to Vancouver on an official visit by maintaining the surveillance of a professional protester (also possibly CIA). He disappears. So will this – essentially a cheerfully nonstop non sequitur.

I share this because Russian Roulette reads much like the work of two different hands. The first 155 pages promise the great Canadian Cold War Thriller, while the final fifty-two read like an uninspired parody.

Alexai Kosygin
1904 - 1980
RIP

Corporal Timothy Shaver, RCMP, is our hero. Suspended without pay for slugging a superior, he's called to a dank Vancouver bar run by war amputees. There he meets a Special Branch man named Petapiece, who offers the corporal a means of keeping his job. Soviet premier Alexai Kosygin will soon be making an eight-day visit to Canada, and the KGB is concerned about the Vancouver stop. Shaver's assignment, should he choose to accept it, is to make scarce a small-time agitator named Rudolphe Henke, whom the Soviets consider a security risk. It's hard to understand their concern. An ageing drunk, Henke's days are consumed by reading newspapers, attending demonstrations, and masturbation.

Petapiece could have been more forthcoming about Henke. Unbeknownst to the Soviets, there's a reason why the Special Branch doesn't take the threat seriously – it is for this reason that they've thrown it to a disgraced low-level like Shaver.

And yet, the assignment proves too much. Shaver's initial plan is to befriend his target by passing himself off as a sympathetic ex-Toronto Telegram reporter. but Henke sees through the ruse and spits in his face. Plan B is to simply show up at Henke's rooming house, flash his badge, take the man into custody, and hope that the Civil Liberties Union (read: Civil Liberties Association) isn't made aware. He breaks in, only to find evidence of a kidnapping. Shaver lies in his next visit to the war amps bar, telling Petapiece that he's got Henke hidden away somewhere.

Shaver's subsequent desperate search for the shit-disturber is interrupted by an attempt on his own life by an assassin imported from Detroit... because, you see, things aren't quite as Petapiece portrayed.

There are no spoilers in my criticism of the final chapters. Vancouverites know that theirs are not the streets of San Francisco. The long, slow crawl over the Lion's Gate Bridge is nothing like the chase scene in Bullit. Would gunshots and a car set alight by incendiary devices divert a foreign leader's motorcade? I suggest they would. The final two pages, in which a wedding is announced, are particularly painful.

I haven't given this novel its due. The premise is strong, the plot is clever, and the intrigue high. It's easy to understand the interest in bringing it to the screen, just as it's easy to see why PaperJacks brought out a movie tie-in. Sadly, the novel has been out-of-print ever since. The Kirkus reviewer was right –the novel has disappeared. Despite the flaws, it deserved a much longer life. It deserves to be read today.

Trivia: Kosygin did indeed come to Canada. A reformist, his 1971 eight-day visit was seen as an effort to thaw the Cold War. Ardies may have taken some inspiration from an assault on the Soviet Premier, which took place while walking with Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau on Parliament Hill.

Object: A poorly produced mass market paperback, the best that might be said is that it held together in the reading.

But then our new puppy got a hold of it.

Access: The 1974 first edition, Kosygin is Coming, was published in Toronto and New York by Doubleday. The following year, Angus & Robertson published the novel in the UK. Under the title Russian Roulette, movie tie-in editions were published by PaperJacks (Canada) and Panther (UK). I can find no evidence of any American edition after the Doubleday.

Library and Archives Canada and eight of our academic libraries have copies of Kosygin is Coming. The Vancouver Public Library does not. For shame.

Copies of Kosygin is Coming are plentiful and cheap. Ignore the New Hampshire bookseller asking US$80. Russian Roulette is cheaper still. Pay no more than three dollars.

Interestingly, the only translation has been to the Chinese: 最危險的一日 (1977). It would appear the Russians weren't interested.

Related post:

George Segal Gets His Man

This Necessary Read

This Necessary Murder
Frances Shelley Wees
London: Jenkins, 1957
191 pages

When buying this book I chose to ignore several significant clues: This Necessary Murder is the only Frances Shelley Wees novel that did not attract a North American publisher. The Jenkins edition was limited to a single printing. There has never been a paperback.

It begins:

Jane Merrill (our young Jyne, as Patch the gardener called her), ran joyfully down the broad polished stairs her brother Jonathan's ancient Toronto house and flung open the door. The birds were out of their minds with excitement over the fat worms hastily digging themselves underground on the dewy lawn, and the great variety of perfectly wonderful spots for new one-room homes. The air was heavy with flowers, budding leaves, new grass...

My heart sank.

Before reading those words, I'd hoped This Necessary Murder might make it as a Ricochet Book, the Véhicule Press imprint for which I serve as series editor.

And why not?

I'd liked the author's previous mystery, The Keys of My Prison, going to far as to liken it to the domestic suspense and psychological dramas of the great Margaret Millar. Ten months after reading the novel, The Keys of My Prison was back in print as a Ricochet Book.

This Necessary Murder isn't nearly so strong a work, but it's also not quite as awful as its publishing history and opening scene suggest.

Our young Jyne or Jane (we never do encounter Patch the gardener) is twenty-four years old. A single woman of indeterminate means, she lives with and dotes on her much older bachelor brother, renowned specialist in criminal psychology Doctor Jonathan Merrill. Dutiful Police Constable Henry Lake, “Jonathan’s extra right arm,” also lives in the ancient Toronto house, though this is a temporary arrangement.

Read nothing into Jonathan’s bachelorhood.

Backstory informs that the doctor has recently put his skills to use in taking down the notorious Barnes Gang, and was shot through the shoulder for his efforts. Now, with leader Jed Barnes and the rest of his gang locked away in the Don Jail, the threat posed to the small Merrill household appears over. Henry Lake stays on only to care for Jonathan as he recovers from his shoulder wound.

You know, instead of a nurse or Jane or Patch the gardener.

The morning of the fat worms brings a letter from Allie March, wife of Jonathan’s old college friend Danny:

We need Jon in Tressady just now. We have an odd little problem… an emotional business, nothing more. I wish Jon could come but I don’t dare write him. It’s only a small storm in a Wedgwood teacup, but there are possibilities of the sort of unpleasant gossip and long-term suspicions that are bad for a small town.

Justice being swift in This Necessary Murder, Jon isn’t able to help because he has to stay in Toronto to testify at the Barnes Gang trial. He suggests Jane go in his place:

“Me? In your place? Are you out of your mind?”
     “Quite sane. You have often acted as an observer for me before now. You could see what is troubling Allie… send me reports… get out of the city as you wish to do, and as soon as I am free I will come.”
     “How long will that be?”
     “Not long, I think,” Jonathan said quietly.

Again, justice is swift in This Necessary Murder; investigation, on the other hand, moves at the pace of a particularly fat worm.

But is there really anything to investigate?

The small storm in a Wedgwood teacup is being caused by Bill Edwards, the fiancé of Ann Elliott, small town dress-designer and heiress to a family fortune built on the lumber industry. It is assumed that the two would’ve wed by now had it not been for the recent deaths of Ann’s mother and sister. The old lady – well, she was in her fifties – died of heart failure. The sister, Myra, followed a few months later during a Toronto shopping spree. A vain asthmatic with an allergy to just about everything, she was discovered dead in her car smelling of a perfume she'd been advised to avoid. At the time, no one thought anything suspicious about either death, but Bill has begun to suggest that both women were murdered.

Before Jane has the chance to do much investigating, the body of a real estate agent named Marina Thorpe is found just outside the gates of the Elliott estate. Jonathan and Henry Lake fly in from Toronto and things get strange.

Jonathan holds sway over the investigation... but why? Sure, he's worked with law enforcement in the past (see: Barnes, Jeb), but the doctor isn't in the employ of any law enforcement agency. As a Toronto Police constable, Henry Lake is well outside his jurisdiction. And yet, the Ontario Provincial Police allow both free rein. Meanwhile, Jane steals what she believes to be evidence from an innocent woman, and then accompanies Jonathan as he removes articles from murder victim Marina Thorpe's hotel room. In doing so, the doctor learns that the OPP sergeant standing guard has a pass key, and so asks him to keep watch as he goes through a room belonging to a man is known to have spoken to the murdered woman:

The sergeant looked at him sharply. “I got no orders, Dr. Merrill.”
     “Nor have I. We are definitely out of bounds. But I think that under the circumstances we could be allowed the latitude.
     “Well you wouldn’t do no harm,” the sergeant agreed.

Idiots!

"What right have you big-shot snooping outsiders got to come here and show up the regular officers?"   says the murderer, when caught. "A smart-alecky girl... an armchair thinker with his arm in a fancy black sling, a tin-horned cop with a notebook... and how do you think our Provincial men are going to look, going into court with all the credit going to you?"

Good questions. Of course, Jane, Jonathan, and Henry have no right at all. The Provincial men won't look at all good. What's more I'm betting that the evidence Jane and Jonathan collected will be thrown out of court.

And so, This Necessary Murder joins Wees's Where is Jenny Now? in being considered and rejected as a Ricochet Book.

Next up: M'Lord, I Am Not Guilty.

Here's hoping it's better than its title.

Most boring sentence:

The day moved on.

Most boring passage:

Bill Edwards, Allie and Danny had gone to Ann Elliott's. Jonathan had called Henry Lake to give him the news of Jed Barnes, and Henry had said at once that he would like to come in and see Jonathan, if suitable replacements could be found for him. There had been two more reporters, he said, and in any case Miss Elliott had been shut up in her room most of the day, alone, and it might be that she would soon waken and wish for company. There had been a special note in his voice that Jonathan recognized. So Allie and Danny had been encouraged to go out there, and Bill had insisted on going too.  

Trivia: Though Jane is the main character in This Necessary Murder, her name isn't so much as mentioned in jacket copy.

More trivia: Ottawa is spelled "Ottowa." I blame the British editor.

Still more trivia: The Herbert Clarence Burleigh fonds at Queen's University features a good amount of writing on Wees, including "MURDER IN MUSKOKA," a piece on This Necessary Murder clipped from the Toronto Telegram. Sadly, the fonds do not record the date, nor the writer, nor the artist who contributed this illustration:

The anonymous hand behind "MURDER IN MUSKOKA" writes that "This Necessary Murder starts out in Toronto and moves to Muskoka" (the novel places Tressady as being north of Toronto, but gives no specific location). Jonathan Merrill is described as a psychologist who lectures at the University of Toronto (something not mentioned in the novel). According to this same anonymous hand, Wees has confirmed that the Boyd Gang inspired the Barnes Gang (which plays a role only in the backstory). She reveals that Jonathan Merrill is modelled on a "Toronto public relations man (who is in on the secret)."

Object and Access: A compact hardcover in pristine dust jacket. The rear flap features an advert for The Keys of My Prison. I purchased my copy of This Necessary Murder from bookseller Stephen Temple this past summer. He was kind enough to knock off a few dollars from the asking price.

As of this writing one – one – copy is listed for sale online. Jacket-less and ex-library, it's being offered at $17.50 by a Chatham bookseller. It may well be worth the price.

Library and Archives Canada, the University of Calgary, and the University of Victoria have copies. C'est tout.

Despite disinterest from the Americans and paperback houses on both sides of the pond, the novel was published in German translation: Der Duft von Permaveilchen (Munich: Goldmann, 1962).

Related posts:

A Rival for Margaret Millar?

The Return of Frances Shelley Wees

Where is Jenny Now?

Romance and the Psychopath's Daughter

True Crime Stories from David Cronenberg's Dad

There's much to admire in Milton Cronenberg, a man who worked very hard to put food on his family's table. A writer and editor, through much of the Depression he owned and ran a bookstore on Toronto's College Street. Greg Gatenby's Toronto: A Literary Guide features a very nice photo of Cronenberg, père, in front of his shop. "COME IN AND BROWSE AROUND" invites one of the many signs in the window. Would that I could. The store sold new and old books, new and old magazines, and offered bookbinding and book repair services. "MANUSCRIPTS EXPERTLY TYPED" reads another sign.

Gatenby tells us that David Cronenberg has held onto his business diary: "though it is a fascinating document, the income statements (some days he grossed less than two dollars) make for sad reading." In 1942, as bookseller he closed up shop for the last time. Cronenberg seems to have thrown himself into writing for magazines – everything from Magazine Digest to American Gas Association Monthly – and would later have a stamp column in the Toronto Telegram. I'm most interested in the writing he did for Canada's true crime pulps, like the piece he penned for Greatest Detective Cases (August 1943) on Ontario's most infamous swindlers. Pipsqueaks all when compared to the charlatans working Bay Street today.

As a contributor, Cronenberg was better than most, but what really sets him apart is that he often – perhaps always – wrote under his own name. Sadly, I've never seen a copy of the Famous Crime Cases (May 1943) pictured above, so can't speak to "Toronto's Double Cross Death", but I do know the story behind "Death for $100", which Cronenberg contributed to the April 1942 issue of the same magazine.

It all begins with the 5 May 1941 disappearance of 52-year-old Ottawa businessman Charles Walton and the discovery of his wrecked car in Rockland, Ontario. Fourteen days later, two boys in a row boat found his body floating in the Ottawa River within the sight of the Parliament Buildings. It was thought that Walton had drowned, possibly after having been thrown from the Champlain Bridge. On 25 June, Edward Paquette and Germaine Doucet two RCAF servicemen, were arrested for the murder; seven months later each received 20-year-sentences for manslaughter.

Milton Cronenberg tells it much better than I do.

The Greater Canada of 1962

Canada 1962: The Official Handbook of Present Conditions
   and Recent Progress
Ottawa: Queen's Printer, 1962

I missed the better part of 1962; by the time I showed up at Montreal's Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Marilyn Monroe and William Faulkner were gone and E.E. Cummings looked in rough shape. I wasn't a reader then, of course, but had I been this handbook would've provided a good introduction to the land of my birth. This is Canada as it was just before I came to know it, a country in which bookmobiles rode the rails,

a personable young woman might find employment as a bus hostess,

and mothers and daughters bought groceries from vending machines.

The Grocerette never caught on, but I don't imagine that it's failure was recorded in subsequent handbooks – challenging enough just keeping up with the successes. In 1962, Canada was undergoing great change, as reflected in the caption accompanying this photograph of my hometown.  

Our cities were changing so quickly that it seemed pointless to include new buildings; better to feature models of those under construction. Here's Place des Arts, which would be built to a similar, yet superior design:

And here are the new offices of the Toronto Telegram and Sudbury Star:

While the Telegram is long gone, the Star hangs on. A year ago, the Star building "that once bustled with a library and an archiving service, a press and a pre-press operation, a distribution centre and warehouse, the largest newsroom in Northern Ontario and a full complement of sales agents, circulators and office support staff" was put up for sale. There have been no takers.

Stray tears drawn through nostalgia can blind. In the Canada of 1962, homosexual acts were criminal, employers could pay a woman less than a man for equal work, and Native Canadians had only just won the right to vote in federal elections. Yet that Canada was moving forward; building more than just skyscrapers, concert halls and newspaper offices, it was investing in institutions, education and services. All comes into focus with this photograph:

The uniformed man pictured is a food inspector. While the country's population has almost doubled since 1962, fewer people hold his position today. This year alone, our Minister of Agriculture, comedian Gerry Ritz, a man who finds humour in death from listeriosis, will be overseeing the dismissal of 308 people from the Canadian Food Inspection Agency.

Ours is a contracting Canada. The self-described "Harper Government" would have us believe that we can no longer afford the services and protections offered under the record surpluses of previous governments not ten years past. As these Conservatives run up record deficits, the advantages they themselves enjoyed, the programs from which they themselves benefitted, are being stripped from my generation and denied the next.

We are a smaller country now.

Object: A very well-constructed, remarkably heavy trade-size paperback printed on glossy paper with tipped in fold-out map of the dominion. The cover was a commissioned piece by Kiakshuk.

Access: It  should come as no surprise that Canada 1962, a five-decade-old reference book, has disappeared from our public libraries. Those looking to add it to their own collection should be happy to learn that Very Good copies of the paperback begin at seven dollars. The uncommon, bland hardcover edition is yours for forty bucks.