One Non Blonde

Incendiary Blonde
Keith Edgar
Toronto: National Publishing, 1945
126 pages

When is a blonde not a blonde? When is a novel not a novel? Is a novel that is not a novel a series of novelettes? These questions weighed as I made my way through Keith Edgar's Incendiary Blonde, sure to be this year's most baffling read. Consider the title page:

'The Case of the Incendiary Blonde' has as its hero, lanky Star-Advertizer photographer George MacGregor. He's first seen leaning against a pillar in Grand Central Station, having fallen asleep whilst waiting to snap Hollywood heartthrob Yvonne La Flame. "We got to get some glammer shots of dis skoit," says a competing shutterbug. "She's got classy gams."

Indeed! Yvonne has legs and she knows how to use them, "perched on a baggage truck to coyly display the 'classy gams.'"

MacGregor wakes up in time to get the pics, but as he makes to return to the Star-Advertizer darkroom he's canoodled and smooched by a "red-haired girl" with "auburn curls." She whisks our hero into a cab, tells him she is a German spy on the run from G-men, and makes him take her to his uptown apartment. Once there, our hero gives her a good sound spanking.

Classic Edgar, it continues apace, adding a Nazi cabbie, an ineffective butler, a sinister trading company, and a Lone Ranger Cap Pistol into the mix. My only complaint is that it's all over too fast. At under seventeen thousand words, 'The Case of the Incendiary Blonde' is not a novel – not even a 20th-century novel. The publisher's note fails to clarify: 

MacGregor's adventure is the first and longest of what the cover sells as "STORIES OF MYSTERY & CRIME." Most of the remaining seven are bland retellings of true crime cases.

How bland? Here's a paragraph from 'Murder on the Steamer "Okanagan",' which begins with the 1912 manhunt for Walter Boyd James, a North Dakotan who'd held up a Kelowna general store:

At Penticton, 40 miles away, Provincial Const. Geoffrey H. Aston was stationed. Aston, a soldierly figure who had served in the 17th Lancers and the North West Mounted Police, had received a description of the bandit from Tooth, and immediately acquainted Penticton's Chief of Police, Michael Roche, with details of the Kelowna crime.

'Who Murdered Laura Kruse?' focusses on the still unsolved 1937 killing of a Minneapolis beauty school student. It features this passage:

Witnesses were called to review the case from all angles. They included Claussen, the milkman, Hanson, the motorman, F,W. Perlich, who found the body, M.T. Silvertsen, who found the personal effects, Mrs. Christ Larson [sic], near whose home the murder was believed to have been committed, Mrs. Carl Lind, who saw the flash of light as a car was leaving the alley, Arthur Kruse, brother of the girl, Sheriff Hannes Rykema of Pine County, Irene Chimelski, a friend of Miss Kruse, Ray Harrington, police identification officer, Dr. McCartney, Dr. Seashore, Detective Adam Smith, Arthur Olyson, Walter Hansford, John Anderson, morgue keeper, and Capt. Arnold Neitzel of the 6th precinct police station. 

Still awake?

When it comes to non-fiction, Edgar isn't much of a storyteller. To his credit, he does stick to facts, and makes only the occasional error. For example, in 'Drink, the Devil, and the Third Degree,' concerning the 1882 murder of Louis Hanier, the victim is a "French wine merchant" when in reality he was a Hell's Kitchen saloonkeeper. The case is broken by Thomas Byrnes, whom Edgar describes, unimaginatively, as "a real-life Sherlock Holmes."

Incendiary Blonde follows I Hate You to Death (1944) and Arctic Rendez-vous (1949) as my third Edgar. Both are quirky, fanciful, strange, perverse, titillating, and never dull.

"Do you expect me to believe this absurd story?" the main baddy asks MacGregor at the climax of 'The Case of the Incendiary Blonde.' Absurdity is at the heart of Edgar's writing (see: 'The Wonderful World of Mortimer Tombs'). Sadly, it comes and goes with the first "novelette."

At 126 pages, Incendiary Blonde should've been a quick read, but wasn't. It took a long time to tackle; much more than it was worth. 

It's all a damn shame. I was really looking forward to it. The cover art promised the craziest Edgar book yet! The blonde! The devil! The four floating heads! Sadly, none of these feature in the book. I guess I'll never know the significance of the aqua blotch on the lower right-hand corner.

You can't judge a book by its cover, but you sure can sell it. That said, I think Incendiary Redhead is a much more exciting title.

Trivia: Incendiary Blonde was published the same year as a Hollywood film with the same title. It stars Betty Hutton as Texas Guinan, "Queen of the Night Clubs." I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest this is coincidence.

Object and Access: A cheap digest-sized paperback with thin glossy covers, it bears the swan logo of F.E. Howard, the publisher of Edgar's previous books. My copy appears to have been distributed in the U.K. by the now-defunct Rolls House Publishing Company.

Of interest is this notice on the interior cover:

I don't buy it. Is this the look of a layout resulting from space constraints?

Pages 86 and 87.

My copy of Incendiary Blonde was purchased earlier this year from a Lincolnshire bookseller. Price: £20.00. The very same bookseller is right now offering another copy, in similar condition to mine, at the very same price! 

There is only one other copy listed online. Also in similar condition, it's offered by another UK bookseller at £15.00. Seems a bargain until one reads the shipping cost: C$60.25.

You know which copy to purchase.

Incendiary Blonde can be found at the British Library.

That's it.

Not even Library and Archives Canada has a copy.

Related posts:

A Publisher's Worst Book?

'Publisher Dies in Orgy of Hate'

The Wonderful World of Mortimer Tombs
Of Whips, Veins, and a Bottomless Pool of Warmth
A Femme Fatale in the Frozen North
Harlequin Blondes: Terror Struck Them Dumb

Average Leacock for the Average Man

Winnowed Wisdom
Stephen Leacock
New York: Dodd, Mead, 1926
300 pages

The author's sixteenth book of humour in as many years, one wonders how he managed; it's not as if Professor Leacock had no day job.

Winnowed Wisdom came in mid-career with the best of his writing in the past. Look no further than the six-page italicized preface for evidence:

It is the especial aim of this book to make an appeal to the average man. To do this the better, I have made a study of the census of the United States and of the census of Canada, in order to find who and what the average man is.
     In point of residence, it seems only logical to suppose that the average man lives at the centre of population, in other words, in the United States he lives at Honkville, Indiana, and in Canada at Red Hat, Saskatchewan. 
     In the matter of height the average man is five feet eight inches, decimal four one seven, and in avoirdupois weight he represents 139 pounds, two ounces, and three pennyweights. Eight-tenths of his head is covered with hair, and his whiskers, if spread over his face...  

You get the idea. Still, this made me laugh:

The percentage of women in the population being much greater in the eastern part of the country, the average woman lives one hundred and five miles east of the average man. But she is getting nearer to him every day. Oh yes, she is after him, all right!

The thing with Leacock is that even his most middling work has something that catches the light and shines. The same might be said of the collections themselves; Winnowed Wisdom may be weak, but three of its essays – 'How We Kept Mother's Day,' 'The Laundry Problem,' and 'How My Wife and I Built Our Home for $4.90' – were included in Laugh With Leacock: An Anthology of the Best Work of Stephen Leacock (1930).

Deservedly so.

This early passage from 'The Laundry Problem' had me sold:

In the old days any woman deserted and abandoned in the world took in washing. When all else failed there was at least that. Any woman who wanted to show her independent spirit and force of character threatened to take in washing. It was the last resort of a noble mind. In many of the great works of fiction the heroine's mother almost took in washing.

This comes later:

In the old days if you had a complaint to make to the washerwoman you said it to her straight out. She was there. And she heard the complaint and sneaked away with tears in her eyes to her humble home where she read the Bible and drank gin.

J.B. Priestley looked at Winnowed Wisdom and selected 'Our Summer Convention' and 'At the Ladies Culture Club' for 1957's The Bodley Head Leacock (aka The Best of Leacock).

I wouldn't have chosen either. 

My Winnowed Wisdom favourites have never featured in a Leacock anthology, so I thought I'd share. Each is as relevant today as a century ago.

The first, 'The Outline of Evolution,' is the second of Prof Leacock's 'The Outlines of Everything' essays.

It begins:

It seems that recently there has been a lot of new trouble about the theory of evolution in the schools. Either the theory is being taught all wrong or else there is something the matter with it. For years it had seemed as if the doctrine of Evolution was so universally accepted as to lose all its charm. It was running as a close second to Spherical Trigonometry and Comparative Religion and there was no more excitement about it than there is over Anthropology.

     Then suddenly something seems to have happened. A boy in a Kansas public school threw down his book and said that the next time he was called a protozoon he’d quit the class. A parent in Ostaboola, Oklahoma, wrote to the local school board to say that for anyone to teach his children that they were descended from monkeys cast a doubt upon himself which he found intolerable.

I never experienced such a fuss, but then I attended school in Montreal.

Sounds smug, I know. Given what's going on in the republic to the south, I can't help it.

My second favourite essay is titled 'Are We Fascinated with Crime?'

I've never been much fascinated myself, though I once made a good living writing true crime books published under a nom de plume. This was a decade ago. The books were sold around the English-speaking world – French and Polish translations appeared in other spheres – and I got a fair cut.

There's been talk about the rising interest in true crime, but I don't buy it. The fascination pre-dates London's Police Gazette. Montreal had Police Journal, and, in my day, Photo Police and Allo Police. 

Allo Police, 16 September 1984

As a younger man, I watched 48 Hours, Unsolved Mysteries, America's Most Wanted, and...

Mea culpa.

I was fascinated with crime. We are all fascinated with crime. In 1926, Leacock recognized as much, all the while questioning our interest: 

If a rich man is killed by his chauffeur in Tampa, Florida, and his body hidden in the gasoline tank, why should you and I worry? We don’t live in Tampa and we have no chauffeur and gasoline is too expensive for us to waste like that.

     Yet a whole continent will have to sit up and read a column of news about such a simple little event as that.

I read the professor's article as BBC and New York Times reports on the arrest of the Long Island Killer vied for my attention. 

The Montreal Gazette, 7 December 1957

Busby? Preistley? You tell me who chose better. Winnowed Wisdom can be read online here courtesy of the fine folks at the Faded Page.

Whatever you decide, I guarantee the average man will something that amuses, as will the average woman.

Object: One of the many Leacocks purchased up over the years at the McGill Book Fair. I'm fairly certain this one, a first American edition, was picked up in the early 'nineties. Price: $2.  

Access: First published by Macmillan (Canada), Dodd, Mead (United States) and John Lane (United Kingdom). The Macmillan and Lane editions feature the same dust jacket illustration by John Hassall.

The cover of the Dodd, Mead edition is by Jazz Age illustrator John Held, Jr.

In 1971, Winnowed Wisdom was added as #74 to the New Canadian Library. It holds the distinction of being the first NCL title without an introduction. It survived long enough to benefit from the third series design.

Related posts:

Lunar Attractions; or, The Leacock I Like
Professor Leacock Sets the Stage
Am I the Only One Laughing with Leacock?

The True Crime Book That Spawned an Industry

The Black Donnellys
Thomas P. Kelley
Toronto: Harlequin, 1962
158 pages

Oh you who hail from Ontario
Know the tale of the Donnellys Oh
Died at the hands of a mob that night
Every child and man by the oil torch light
                         — Steve Earle, 'Justice in Ontario' (2002)

Because I hail from Quebec that I didn't know much about the Donnellys until well into adulthood. My introduction came through a work colleague when I was living in Toronto. Together, we made up a very small department in a very large book retailer – so large that it had its own publishing arm.

We were it.

After a few months working together, he suggested we reprint Orlo Miller's The Donnellys Must Die. I nodded in agreement, though Miller meant nothing to me, and I'd never heard of the book. The new edition of The Donnellys Must Die we ushered back into print sold twelve thousand copies in twelve weeks. Its success led us to consider reviving Miller's next book, Death to the Donnellys. We joked about commissioning a third book to be titled Die, Donnellys, Die!

What Steve Earle refers to as "the tale of the Donnellys" is infused with bloodshed of a sort that we Canadians like to think of as foreign. It begins with the 1842 arrival of Irish farming couple James and Johannah Donnelly in what is today Lucan, Ontario. They had with them a son, who had been named after his father. Six more boys and a daughter would follow, all born on Canadian soil their parents had cleared. The respective births were punctuated by violence and murder. First to be killed was neighbour Patrick Farrell – "John Farrell," according to Kelley – whom patriarch James hit on the head with a handspike. The murderer then hid in the woods, and dared work his fields disguised in his wife's frocks:

Johannah was almost as tall and heavy as her husband; appareled in her clothes, Donnelly was taken for her by those traveling the road and seeing him in the fields, and he was able to get in the seeding. Later, still dressed in women's clothing, he brought in the crops, working with his sons, and did the fall plowing.

Murder by handspike aside, this episode is the lightest part of the Donnelly story. Kelley doesn't do as much with it as I thought he might, though he does go for laughs here and there throughout the book. Poor Johanna receives the brunt:

She looked like and should've been a man; her sex undoubtably robbing the bare-knuckle prize ring of a prospective champion. In later years she sprouted a miniature Vandyke, wore red flannels, and told of never having been "much of a beauty." Her picture proves the words to be an understatement.

In Kelley's account, the matriarch directed many of the misdeeds attributed to her offspring. Beginning in 1855, various members of the Donnelly family were charged with larceny, robbery, assault, and attempted murder, amongst other crimes. The events that most troubled this reader concerned animal mutilation. It all came to an end on February 4, 1880, when a mob descended on the Donnelly farmhouse, beat its residents to death, and set the building alight. They then moved on to the home of second son William Donnelly, where they killed third son, John Donnelly. 

Steve Earle is wrong. Not every child and man died that night. There was a survivor in John O'Connor, a hired farm boy, who hid under a bed when the mob broke in. No doubt that mob would've murdered him, too, just as they did Bridget Donnelly, James' twenty-two year-old niece, who was newly arrived from Ireland. No one was ever convicted of the slaughter.

That Kelley records John O'Connor's surname as "Connor" is typical. He made his living as a speedy magazine and paperback writer. He had a reputation as a man who could be relied upon to fill pages in a pinch. The Kelley technique is on full display in this passage:

The writer first heard of the Donnelly feud – bits of it, at least – more than twenty years ago when travelling around the Lucan area. Twenty at the time – ah, my lost youth – the history of Lucan and its violences of bygone years did not interest him. A pair of blue eyes in the nearby village of Exeter, did. Eventually marrying the owner of the eyes, and as time went on, learning more of the feud, it became apparent at last, however, that mere hearsay, a thorough knowledge of the Lucan district or even the tales of oldtimers, would not be enough to write the true story of the Donnellys.  Seemingly endless hours of research were and did become necessary – the reading of old files, old newspapers, police and court records, etc.

It's unlikely that the seemingly endless hours Kelley spent researching the Donnellys were many, but they were lucrative. They resulted in "The Donnelly Feud," a 1947 article written for New Liberty Magazine. It was reprinted in his book Famous Canadian Crimes (Toronto: Collins White Circle, 1949) and then reworked as "The Terrible Donnelly Feud" for his next book, Bad Men of Canada (Toronto: Arrow, 1950). The Black Donnellys, which followed four years later, is said to have sold more than a million copies.

The Black Donnellys is not the best place to begin reading about the family and its fate; I recommend The Donnellys Must Die or, better still, The Donnelly Album by Ray Fazakas. Kelley's book is a fun read, but is wholly unreliable – which is not to say that it is without value. What I find most remarkable about the book has less to do with its contents than it does its impact. Sure, those who hail from Ontario know the tale of the Donnellys, but this wasn't always so. I don't doubt that Kelley (1905-1982), an Ontario boy who toured the province with his medicine man father, claims he hadn't heard of the family until "travelling around the Lucan area" at the age of twenty. After they faded from the headlines, very little was written about the Donnellys. Published a full seventy-four years after the bloody events of February 4, 1880, The Black Donnellys was the first book about the family and its fate. It's inaccuracies and – here I'm betting – commercial success encouraged Miller to write The Donnellys Must Die. More than a dozen Donnelly books have followed.

In this way, it is Kelley's greatest achievement as a writer. Would that we could all have such influence. He's owed a debt of gratitude.

Postscript: I left the very large book retailer in 2001, and began writing books that were published under noms de plume. Eight years later, when living in the Ontario town of St Marys, roughly twenty-five kilometres east of Lucan, I was commissioned to write a YA book on unsolved Canadian mysteries. A chapter on the Donnellys – "Who Killed the Donnellys?" – seemed a given. The St Marys Public Library then held seven books on the family, each of which was represented on the shelves by a block of wood bearing its title. Patrons interested in checking out a volume brought the appropriate block to the front desk. This system had been put in place to prevent theft.

Object: A paperback original, The Black Donnellys was first published in 1954 by Harlequin. My well-read copy, a seventh printing, was won for $7.50 in a 2009 auction at a St Marys, Ontario, thrift store.

Access: A 2002 Globe & Mail story reported that The Black Donnellys had to that point sold over one million copies in Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom. I point out that that same article refers to The Black Donnellys as a novel. The only American edition (right) is a 1955 paperback published by Signet. I've found no trace of a UK edition.

The Black Donnellys helped build Harlequin. The original 1954 printing was followed by fourteen others. The last was in April, 1968, long after Harlequin had (otherwise) come to focus exclusively on romances. Subsequent editions have been published by Greywood, Pagurian, Firefly, and Darling Terrace (it's current publisher).

Unsurprisingly, dozens of used copies are listed for sale online. Prices begin at US$2.99.

Easily found in academic libraries, but uncommon in the public. I suggest instituting the St Marys Public Library block system.

Related posts:

The King of the Canadian Pulps Bowdlerized

Kelley Pulls a Fast One

True Crime Stories from David Cronenberg's Dad

Montreal's Murderous Murder Mystery Writer

(and the transvestite brother he passed off as his wife)

A Man Forgets His Identity (but not his manners)

The Thread of Flame
Basil King
New York: Harper, 1920
351 pages

I raced through this novel, caught up in its plot and hungry for the solution to the mystery surrounding its main character. He's first introduced as Jasper Soames, though he and the reader are well-aware that this is not his true identity:

It was a name that to me meant nothing. Referring it to my inner self, nothing vibrated, nothing rang. It was like trying to clink a piece of money on wool or cork or some other unresponsive material.

Soames, as he's known through most of the novel, remembers nothing of his life before awakening to find himself aboard a ship bound for New York. His cabin-mate, a blind boy named Drinkwater, is of no help as the two are strangers. Soames's search through his modest belongings yields nearly four hundred dollars, but no clues as to his true identity.

For the remainder of the crossing, Soames does his best to hide his amnesia, speaking in vague terms about his past and deflecting questions about himself. In doing so, he becomes a man of mystery and a subject of significant interest amongst the shipboard well-to-do: Boyd Averill, his wife Lulu, and his sister Mildred. Those of the working class accept Soames as is. They do not pry, do not judge, and readily accept him as one of their own. But Soames is not one of their own. Aware that he belongs to a different class, he is offended by their friendliness and gross familiarity, and looks forward to shedding the acquaintance of each just as soon as the ship docks. This doesn't happen as quickly as planned – Soames feels obliged to escort Drinkwater to the boy's new lodging – but soon enough he sets off on a new course.

Soames recognizes New York, and is certain that someone in the city will recognize him. To this end, he passes his days in the lobbies of the finest hotels, hoping that he will encounter an old, forgotten friend:

At any minute I might feel a clap on the shoulder, while some one shouted, "Hello, old Brown!" or, "Why, here's Billy Robinson! What'll we have to drink?"

These daily expeditions are undertaken with some trepidation, because he fears that he may have adopted the Soames name in fleeing some horrible crime.

When finally it comes, the clap on the shoulder is more of a tap:

In the interval too brief to reckon before turning round two possibilities were clear in my mind. The unknown crime from which I was running away might have found me out – or some friend had come to my deliverance. Either event would be welcome, for even if it were arrest I should learn my name and history.

Soames is disappointed in that the man who tapped his shoulder is Boyd Averill, a man who knows our hero – is he a hero? – only as Jasper Soames. Boyd is pleasant enough, but has growing suspicions about his mysterious acquaintance. Meanwhile, Boyd's sister Mildred grows close. She's attracted to Soames, recognizing him a man raised in privilege who is now on some sort of quest. In this way, he is a kindred spirit. The daughter and inheritor of great wealth, Mildred is searching desperately for a purpose in life.

Though the attraction is mutual, Soames begins to distance himself from Mildred:

Falling in love with anybody was no part of my program. It was out of the question for obvious reasons. In addition to these I was in love with some one else. That is to say, I knew I had been in love; I knew that in the portion of my life that had become obscured there had been an emotional drama of which the consciousness remained. It remained as a dream remains when we remember the vividness and forget the facts – but it remained. I could view my personality somewhat as you view a countryside after a storm has passed over it. Without having witnessed the storm you can tell what it was from the havoc left behind. There was some such havoc in myself.

Soames's decision is made all the easier because his "program" is failing. The days sitting in hotel lobbies are proving fruitless, and funds are running thin. With winter setting in, and no money to replace his summer suits, he cuts himself off from the Averill family, and moves into squalid lodgings alongside the very class of people he'd sought to reject.

There's more, much more, of course. I spoil nothing in revealing that Soames never quite regains his identity. Sure, he eventually learns his real name, and the nature of the "emotional drama," but he is forever altered by the event that caused his amnesia and his experiences living amongst the working class.

A wild ride, I very nearly finished The Thread of Flame in one sitting. What slowed my progress were a dozen or so pages near the end in which Soames tries to make sense of the Great War and the new world it created.

There's no fault in this.

I dare say we're trying to make sense of it still.

Favourite passage:

Ernestine, to do her justice, was as tolerant of me as she was of any one who wasn't a flag. The Flag having become her idol and she its high- priestess, she could talk of nothing else. The nation had apparently gone to war in order that the cult of the Flag should be the more firmly established; and all other matters passed outside the circle of her consideration. She knew I had been dead and had somehow become alive again; but as the detail didn't call for the raising of a flag she couldn't give her mind to it. As she could give her mind in no greater measure to Minna's canteen-work or Vio's clothes, I profited by the generous nature of her exclusions.

A mystery quickly solved: The Thread of Flame first appeared as a serial in Maclean's (December 1919 through 15 May 1920), accompanied by twenty illustrations by Charles L. Wrenn.

Maclean's, 1 February 1920

Ten months after publication of the concluding chapters, the magazine included this very strange piece:

Maclean's, 15 March 1921

I admit to having been mystified. The words the con quotes do not appear in the novel, nor do they appear in its serialization. A bit of sleuthing reveals that they come from an introduction that King wrote for Charles E. Chapin's Story: Written in Sing Sing Prison (New York: Putnam, 1920). I haven't read the book, but do remember it being described in The News Game (Toronto: Clarke, Irwin, 1966) by Toronto Star reporter Roy Greenaway as "one of the best descriptions of nerve-shattering newspaper toil ever written." The tragic results of this toil are described in the opening sentences of the publisher's note appended to Chapin's Story:

Object: A bulky hardcover in red boards with white type, the book is made bulkier still by four John Alonso Williams illustrations. My copy, a first edition lacking dust jacket, was purchased just last month for US$9.00 from an Illinois bookseller. As is so often the case, I paid much more in shipping than I did for the book itself.

Access: Library and Archives Canada and fifteen of our academic libraries hold copies of the novel, but not one is found in any library in Prince Edward Island, the province of the author's birth.

Other than the Harper first, the only edition of which I am aware is a cheap Grosset & Dunlop.

The Harper edition can be read online here thanks to the University of Toronto and the Internet Archive.

Related post:

The Great Canadian Post-Great War Novel

A Gangster Finds God

Hooked
Ernie Hollands with Doug Brendel
Toronto: Mainroads Productions, 1987

A stolen car took me there. Hollywood was a grotesque paradise for me, with wide streets lit up  in neon, hundreds of peep shows where a guy could see a pornographic movie for a quarter, fifty cents if it was really raunchy. Teenage boys and senior citizens seemed to keep the place in business. Roaming the sidewalks were real-life versions of the girls in the porno flicks, painted-up prostitutes, some barely into their teens, others obviously pushing fifty. And liquor flowed freely everywhere.

Ernie Hollands is a smalltime crook looking to make it big in Hollywood. He thinks that pulling off heists in Tinseltown – as opposed to, say, Moose Jaw – will make him "someone with class, with clout, with a great reputation." Things don't go quite as planned. His first few days are wasted whoring, drinking, and selling stolen wristwatches. Eventually, he sets his sites on a Hollywood Boulevard grocery store: "They were doing big business, with customers swarming the aisles, and cash registers ringing like church bells, as the cashiers took in fives and tens, the twenties, the mounds of ones."

Ernie plans to rob the place after hours, then use the money to plan a big bank heist – "something to get real headlines." Because he'll be needing food as he works out the details, Ernie decides to shoplift from the very same supermarket. What he doesn't bank on – sorry – is a cop watching behind a plate of one-way glass. The cop stops the crook, patts him down, and finds a loaded .38. They struggle. The gun goes off:

My eyes fell on the policeman's leg. The wound, just below the knee, was pumping blood furiously. I was mortified.
     "Take the gun!" I shouted, holding the weapon out to him. "Take the gun!"

The cop grabs the gun with one hand, "grasping his bloody leg" with the other:

"I should put a bullet tight through you," he growled, and I knew he was serious. In the pit of my stomach, I was sick to see what I had done. And, in the moment, my whole life – all forty-two years of it – made me sick. I had accomplished nothing, I was little more than a wart on society's skin. I was slime. And this seemed to prove it to me, finally.
     "Go ahead," I replied as I stared down the barrel of the gun. "You'd be doing me a favor."

An autobiography that reads like a pulp novel, Hooked begins with the author's final crime – then flashes back to his childhood. There's nothing to envy. The son of a sixteen-year-old mother and forty-seven-year-old father, Ernie grows up surrounded by siblings in a two-room

Ernie Hollands at 17

Halifax slum house. There was only one pot to piss in. At age eight, Ernie learns that his parent's affection can be bought by shoplifting food and booze. A bit of an entrepreneur, he steals bundles of newspapers left on the curb for carriers and sells them at a discount in all-night restaurants. Ernie was a hellion at school, which gave mean Mrs Toblin an excuse to pull down his pants and give him the cane.

He ends up at the Halifax Industrial School – more of a prison, really – from which he makes his first great escape. What happens next is a bit of a blur. Ernie moves between Canada and the United States, picking pockets, shoplifting, and breaking into homes of the affluent. Every once in a while he gets caught, is sentenced, and then manages to escape. You'd almost think someone was looking out for him.

If there is a problem with Hooked, it is that its author has too much to confess; his crimes are so numerous, and the book so short, that not many are gone into in any detail. The one I remember most involves jewelry. Somewhere in the States, he teams up with a drunk to rob the home of a couple who own a grocery store. Their eighteen-year-old daughter stumbles upon the scene and is locked in a closet. The sound of her pounding on the door has Ernie realize that she's wearing a ring – which turns out to be an engagement ring – and so he opens the door and takes it.

Shows what a right bastard he was.

Ernie remained a bastard for many of the years that followed, and he kept getting lucky breaks. He has to serve only one year for shooting that Hollywood cop. After that, Ernie is extradited, and ends up in Millhaven, where his reputation as a cop-shooter brings considerable respect. Life is pretty good: "I had a radio, earphones, cigarettes, plenty of food, numerous books". The inmates are encouraged to take up hobbies – painting, needlepoint, sculpting – but none of these appeal. Eventually, he settles on fly-tying, and quickly develops a reputation as a master. Sports shops take notice, as does the press – "Time Flies Tying Flies" is the headline in the Toronto Star – and it isn't long before Ernie is raking it in:

I was making two or three thousand dollars a month, all tax-free. The taxpayers of Canada were paying my way, providing my housing, my utilities, my meals, my entertainment. I sat in my cell, smoking cigars by the case, watching television, reading filthy magazines, tying flies, and counting the money.

Those words appear on page 113 of this 146-page autobiography. The thirty or so pages that follow would have come as a surprise had the book's cover not promised a dramatic "before and after" saga I have ever read. What follows lives up to that grand claim.

Hoping to flog his wares, Ernie writes to Grant Bailey, the owner of a Pembroke, Ontario sporting goods store. He gets no order in response, but two religious tracts, along with a lengthy letter in which the storeowner recounts his journey to accept Jesus Christ as his Saviour. Ernie strings Bailey along, which unleashes a steady stream of tracts and books. Ultimately, they have the greatest effect:

On March 12, 1975, at two a.m., I got out of bed and I knelt in my cell in Milhaven Prison. I held my Bible and I raised my hands in the air. With tears streaming down my face, I let Jesus set me free.

The beginning of a remarkable scene, it's very well described in the book, but I much prefer Ernie's account from a later appearance on 100 Huntley Street:

I admit to being cynical about such things – can we agree that the percentage of crooks amongst evangelical preachers is very high? – but I've seen nothing to suggest that Ernie didn't leave crime behind. He married a widow, adopted her children, and at age fifty fathered his first child. He also founded Hebron Farm, an institution dedicated to helping ex-cons reenter society.

Hooked has an interesting structure in that the pages dealing with Ernie's redemption and Born Again life are so few. It's much more about crime than Christ, though the latter wins out in the end.

Ernie Hollands died in 1996, at the age of sixty-six. A smalltime crook who looked to make it big, he died a bigger man.

The critics rave: The only reviews I've seen for Hooked are the three on the back of the book itself. Two are provided by men associated with Full Gospel Business Men's Fellowship International, an organization that was new to me. The  third comes courtesy of John Wesley White:

I've written about Dr White's own books many times over the years – Arming for Armageddon, Thinking the Unthinkable, and Re-Entry – and can attest that his literary criticism is superior to his music criticism. Yes, once you pick Hooked up you will not get stopped.

Object: A cheap 145-page mass market paperback. I found my copy, a third printing, five years ago at the Stratford Salvation Army Thrift Store. Price: $1.00. Signed.

It came with a colour postcard of the Hollands family. Suitable for mailing.

Access: If information in my copy is to be believed – and I see no reason to doubt – 270,000 copies of Hooked were published in the first four years of its release. I've seen a later video in which Ernie pegs the number at a held-million. Not surprisingly, it is being sold online for as little as one American dollar. A crooked New Hampshire bookseller hopes to get US$96.71. At US$6.98, the lone signed copy is the one to buy.

Hooked is still in print, and can be bought directly from Hebron Ministries for eight Canadian dollars.

Library and Archives Canada has a copy, as do Portage College and something called Theolog in Vancouver.

I've seen two translations, French and Spanish, though Hebron Ministries informs that there are also Russian and Chinese translations in circulation.

I have no reason to doubt.

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Immoral Music for a Monday Morning

Boum!

The Crime of Ovide Plouffe [Le crime d'Ovide Plouffe]
Roger Lemelin [trans. Alan Brown]
Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1984

On 9 September 1949 a Canadian Pacific DC-3 exploded over Quebec's Cap Touremonte killing twenty-three passengers and crew. Amongst the former was Rita Guay, the twenty-eight-year-old wife of Quebec City jeweller and watchmaker Albert Guay. The plane was to have flown between Montreal and Baie Comeau. Mrs Guay boarded during a stopover in Sainte-Foy, just as a special delivery package was being placed in the cargo hull.

Two weeks later, on what just happened to be his thirty-first birthday, Mr Guay was arrested. The tip-off might have been that an acquaintance, Marguerite Pitre, had had that special delivery package put on the plane. Or it could've been that on the morning of the crash he'd taken out a $10,000 accidental death policy on his wife. Maybe it was the sorry fact that he'd been having an affair with a teenaged waitress named Marie-Ange Robataille. Other names came out in court, including that of Guay's business associate Généreux Ruest, a tubercular watchmaker who possessed the very skills necessary to make the bomb. Such a sordid tale. It even turned out that Albert Guay had been lying about being a jeweller and watchmaker. He was a salesman.

This novel grew from the tragedy, but also from Lemelin's work in adapting Les Plouffe, his most successful work, to the screen. That the resulting film was such a great critical and commercial success surely inspired.

Lemelin's first novel in three decades, The Crime of Ovide Plouffe  bolts out of the gate. The year is 1948. Théophile is dead, Ovide and Napoléon are married, and Guillaume works as a guide on Anticosti Island. Josephine and daughter Cécile now live alone in the same Quebec City flat that had once been such a hub of activity.

It will be hard grasp any of this without having read – or seen – Les Plouffe. Because I'd sat down with the novel not two months back, it held my interest.

As the title suggests, this is Ovide's story. Much of it has to do with the unlikely rise of a jewellery business he runs with a crippled watchmaker named Pacifique Berthet. Just as much has to do with his marriage to former boot factory worker Rita Toulouse.

Readers of Les Plouffe will remember Rita as being a bit loose. They'll also remember that Ovide has always been drawn to beauty. Rita is so beautiful that her former fiancé, impotent Stan Labrie, has managed to have her named the new Miss Sweet Caporal. He's also given her money to sleep with men, all clients of his low-key escort agency.

This last bit struck me as a stretch, but Lemelin – his omniscient narrator, anyway – assures that a fair number of housewives turned tricks in post-war Quebec.

Sweet and tender Rita tells herself she'll never, never do it again. And of course she won't – not until the next time. But when Stan orchestrates a drunken afternoon that turns into something resembling both a game show and a ménage a trios – I won't go into details – she realizes just how far she's fallen. Repentant, and possibly pregnant, Rita confesses her sins to her husband. Humilated, Ovide seizes upon the betrayal as justification to begin his pursuit of waitress Marie Jourdan, the only woman in all of Quebec City more beautiful than his wife.

If you're at all curious, Marie is described as looking something like French film siren Viviane Romance.

"It was like a bad melodrama," begins one chapter. For the most part The Crime of Ovide Plouffe is just that. Les Plouffe lose a dimension, becoming cardboard characters. Plot is predictable and disguises are donned. I've not encountered such a concentration of exclamation marks since Thomas P. Kelley:

There was no doubt about it, his rock in Berthet's pond had made waves! He must be biting his nails now! Just wait, just wait!

That was the narrator.

At 408 pages – an even 500 in the original French – The Crime of Ovide Plouffe is Lemelin's longest novel.

It needn't have been.

There's an awful lot of repetition. Plot points are raised time and again, as if Lemelin has no faith in the reader's memory, while stretches of nostalgia intrude:

They were there to hear Charles Trenet sing "Boum! When my little heart goes boum!" and "The sun has a rendezvous with the moon," and "When I was small," and "Ménilmontant." Charles Trenet's genius symbolized gaiety and youth, relegating pre-war songs to the mothballs and anticipating Presley and the Beatles.

Lemelin's debut, The Town Below, is one of the best novels I've read this year; The Plouffe Family, his second, was nearly as good. So, what happened?

Lemelin set those two novels in what was then the recent past. The Crime of Ovide Plouffe was written at a distance of more than three decades, a period divided by the Quiet Revolution. Markedly different times, Lemelin struggles in depicting the past, inserting observations that disturb the narrative.

Or was it simply a case of atrophy?

I like to think that Lemelin had more good novels in him, but we'll never know. Diagnosed with lung cancer, he managed just one more book, Autopsie d'un fumeur, a memoir inspired by that death sentence.

And Albert Guay? He was hanged. Généreux Ruest was transported to the scaffold by wheelchair. Marguerite Pitre holds the distinction of being the thirteenth and last woman to be executed in Canada.

Trivia: Lemelin knew Albert Guay before the disaster, attended Rita Guay's funeral, and covered the subsequent trial for Time. In the novel, Ovide's friend Denis Boucher covers the events for the very same magazine.

More trivia: The novel was adapted to the screen in a 1984 production directed by Denys Arcand. Not quite as well received as Les Plouffe, this clip from YouTube is all I've seen of the film. Neither scene features in the novel:

Object: The first and only English-language translation, this particular edition is the only in any language to have been published as a hardcover. It's also the most attractive. I bought my copy – signed – at the 1992 McGill University Book Sale for two dollars.

Access: Dozens of Canadian universities serve, but very few public libraries. Alan Brown's translation enjoyed just one printing in hardcover. In 1985, McClelland & Stewart reissued the novel as a mass market paperback. It too enjoyed one lone printing. Both feature Brian Boyd's excellent cover illustration.

Very Good copies of the first edition can be had for ten dollars. One Montreal bookseller is offering a signed copy at $44.95, but I find this a bit steep. Lemelin was very generous with his signature.

Not surprisingly, the French-language original has done much better, going through several editions including a movie tie-in. Stanké is its current publisher.

With sales in the six figures, used copies of the French-language original aren't terribly hard to find. Another Montreal bookseller has listed a signed first edition at $25.00.

Seems fair.

Go get it.

Related post:

What's Going On with The Plouffe Family?

The Murder of George Brown: He Died with Grit

I could not let National Poetry Month pass without presenting verse by James Gay, Poet Laureate of Canada (self-proclaimed) and Master of All Poets (self-proclaimed, I guess). One of his longer poems, this concerns the tragic death of George Brown.

Not much attention is paid Brown these days, but he once held great sway as unofficial leader of the federal  Liberal Party and editor of the Toronto Globe. Such was his stature that three of the Four Jameses wrote verse about the man. James MacRae, who lived and died in a house not a five minute walk from mine, believed Liberals to be in league with Satan.

It would be inappropriate to quote his verse here.

The Ingersoll James – James McIntyre – wasn't so partisan. His 1884 poem 'Departed Statesman" features these lines:

George Brown, thou man of renown,
Confederation you did crown;
You now are all free from the strife
The wrangle and jangle of political life.

Though I've seen it described as such, Brown's death was not a political assassination. What happened was this: On 25 March 1880, George Bennett, a drunk and disgruntled former employee, walked into the Globe offices demanding a certificate recognizing past service. Brown, who did not know his visitor, suggested he see the foreman. Bennett pulled out a gun. One presumes he meant to shoot his former employer in the chest or head, but Brown pushed down his assailant's arm. The bullet entered the editor's right thigh.

Look up, way up, to the dramatic illustration at the top of this post. Between Bennet's feet you'll see that artist Henri Julien has titled his work "Attempted assassination of George Brown, Toronto". The engraving was published in the 10 April 1880 edition of the Canadian Illustrated News, a little over two weeks after the incident. At the time, Brown was reported to be recovering nicely.

He wasn't. Gangrene set in. One hundred and thirty-five years ago this week he was struggling for life.

Sadly, Brown ended up another victim of those long-drawn-out nineteenth-century assassinations. American readers will remember that President James Garfield hung on for nearly twelve weeks after he was shot.

Brown managed only eight.

I've made you wait enough.

Here it is, our Poet Laureate's tribute:

ON THE HONOURABLE G. BROWN

Poor George Brown is gone at last,
O'er his wound could not surpass;
His politics we don't mind a bit,
Knowing well he died with grit.
Politics with man are no disgrace,
When kept in their proper place;
The best politics ever man possessed
Are truth, honesty, and his mind at rest.
A party man may act civil;
He cannot please God and the devil.
In this poem you may well understand,
No happiness for a party man;
If he wants to enjoy a happy mind.
He must live in peace with all mankind.
I give it to all in my straightforward way—
As the motto of your poet, James Gay.
When on this earth George done his best,
I hope he now has found his rest.

No more wrangle and jangle of political life.

"The Late Hon. George Brown"
James L. Weston
Canadian Illustrated News, 15 May 1880

Misfortune Follows Reverend Knowles

Robert E. Knowles is the very sort of fellow one would expect to have been the subject of a biography. I'm thinking here of those dry, polite stories of a life, often penned by friends, that were published in the early half of the last century. Not only was Knowles "One of Canada's Best Known Novelists" – this according to the March 1909 Canadian Bookman – but he was once Canada's preeminent Presbyterian preacher, a man renowned throughout the Dominion for his sermons and oratorial skills.

That same March 1909 Canadian Bookman positions Knowles as "the Ian Maclaren of Canada", in large measure due to St. Cuthbert's, his wildly popular debut novel.

Unlike Maclaren, Knowles' sermons were never collected. Most were delivered at Knox's Galt Presbyterian Church, which I visited last Sunday.

Literary sleuths will find it on Queen's Square, just across from Central Presbyterian Church, in that awkward composite city we know as Cambridge, Ontario.

Reverend Knowles once preached at St Marys Presbyterian Church, the steeple of which you can see from our garden… in winter.

He stayed in a house that is now owned by friends…

…during which time he worked on his commercially successful second novel:

The Undertow was published by Revell in the autumn of 1906, just months before the reverend's blessed life became less so. On 26 February 1907, Knowles was a passenger on a train that left the track outside Guelph, then travelled a further 356 metres. Mr Charles R. Rankin of Stratford was killed in the accident. It would appear that Knowles' recovery did not proceed as anticipated:

The Globe & Mail, 13 March 1907

The City of Cambridge is cagey concerning the accident's impact on the author – and messes up the year of the accident. Jean O'Grady is more forthright, writing in The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature that Knowles, a prohibitionist, likely descended into alcoholism. In January 1915, at forty-six years of age, he formally retired from his ministry, but not before having suffered through two further tragedies.

The Globe & Mail, 8 September 1913

On 7 September 1913, Robert Knowles, Sr, in whose footsteps the popular pastor novelist had tread, was struck by a Toronto streetcar. Rendered semi-conscious, he was first brought to the surgery of Dr Robert T. Noble, and was then "taken to his home by a carriage… suffering greatly from shock."

A larger tragedy, perhaps the greatest in the Knowles family history, occurred one hundred years ago today – 19 June 1914 – when the novelist's brother was killed by a blow to the head with a milk bottle wielded by a drunk named Émile Lebrie.

The Globe & Mail, 20 June 1914

"The blow fell upon a portion of the skull, it is said, where a silver plate had been placed in treatment of a wound received in battle in South Africa", reported the Globe. The altercation between James Knowles and Émile Lebrie was supposedly over a trivial matter. When arrested at the Miners' Hall in Cobalt, Lebrie was unaware he'd killed Knowles.

"MANSLAUGHTER LIKELY CHARGE" reads a headline in the 22 June 1914 Globe. What little I know about our legal system leads me to agree. I've not been able to find out whether I'm right, nor do I know the fate of Émile Lebrie, the Milk Bottle Murderer™.

If only there was a biography of Robert E. Knowles.

Addendum: I don't mean to suggest that the reverend's life had been untouched by tragedy before the train derailment. On 18 June 1905, a few months before the publication of his first novel, Knowles had officiated at the marriage of Mr William Lash and Miss Jane Anderson.

The Globe, 19 June 1905

The Globe reported that eats were served, glasses were raised, and the groom replied to a toast to his bride. The happy couple had then retired to an upstairs bedroom "to prepare to take the 2.45 Grand Trunk train", at which point the newly-wed Mr Lash collapsed. The paper was nothing if not polite: "It is supposed that, unaccustomed to speaking, the strain of replying to the toast had unduly excited him".

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