Robert Switzer, Esquire

A follow-up to last week's review of I Was Going Anyway by Robert Switzer.

Robert Switzer's I Was Going Anyway as published as a Cock Robin Mystery, a series Macmillan published from 1955 to 1970. Poul Anderson, Lawrence Block, John Creasey, Michael Moorcock, Josephine Tey, and Donald Westlake were amongst the other Cock Robin authors.

But I Was Going Anyway is not a mystery, something remarked upon in contemporary reviews.The only real mystery is Robert Switzer. Not since ne'er do well novelist Kenneth Orvis have I encountered so elusive and intriguing a figure.

There are contradictions, beginning with the 1931 Canadian census. Robert Switzer appears on line number 15 of page number 14 in sub-district number 43 of sub-district Saskatoon (City) in district number 205 of district Saskatoon. That's a lot to take in, so I'm providing this link. If you prefer, this screenshot captures the most pertinent information (click to enlarge):

The 1931 census would have been the first since his birth. But when was that birth? The census taker records Robert's age as eight, but his year of birth as 1925. 

Elsewhere on the same page, Robert and older siblings Helen and Franklin are recorded as students. The family owned a radio, and lived in a rented stucco house that still stands at 1026 Aird Street, Saskatoon.

Robert Switzer's first known published short story, 'No End to Anything,' appeared in the July 1946 issue of Esquire. You'll find his name on the cover under the FICTION heading.

The same issue provides a brief contributor profile of the author:

'No End to Anything' was the first of nineteen Robert Switzer stories published by Esquire between July 1946 and April 1957. During that span, the magazine published two further profiles, the one from the August 1947 issue being my favourite:

'The Big Bout' was the first of two Switzer boxing stories published in Esquire. The second, 'Death of a Prize Fighter' is the one to read. The June 1949 issue in which it appears also features Switzer's third and final contributor profile:

Though Switzer continued to publish in Esquire – eleven stories in the eight years that followed – there were no further profiles. That said, we do have a brief biography published on the back cover of The Tent of the Wicked (New York: Signet, 1956), the author's first novel: 

All this leads back to the dust jacket for his last known work,  the novel I Was Going Anyway (New York: Macmillan, 1961), which is where my hunt for biographical information began: 

It is also where it ends.

Before I close the file – for now, at least – a couple of conclusions and an observation:

Given that Switzer is described as being eight in in 1931, twenty-three in 1946, and twenty-six in 1949, I think it safe to say that the 1931 census taker was incorrect in recording Switzer's year of birth as 1925. As if further evidence was required, we have this from "A Check-list of Contributions of Literary Import to Esquire 1933- 1958" included in The Armchair Esquire (New York: Putnam, 1958):

The matter of Switzer's place of birth is less clear, but my money is on Portland, Oregon, if only because the 1931 Canadian census records an American birth and Esquire reports the same. How explain "born in Canada" and "Canadian-born"? My guess is that those who worked with the author knew him to be Canadian and so made an assumption. If alive today, he would be in his eleventh decade.

Robert Switzer's career as a writer was both short and productive; nineteen Esquire short stories and three novels in fifteen years. Its abrupt end at age thirty-eight leads one to suspect the worst, but I like to think he gave into wanderlust and lived to a grand old age touring Latin America.

Really, I like to think he's traveling still.

Trivia: The Cock Robin name will be familiar to Ian Fleming collectors. The first American edition of Live and Let Die (New York: Macmillan, 1955) was published as a "Cock Robin Thriller." As far as I know, it is the only book that bears this device.

My thanks to Phil Stephensen-Payne, editor of the The FictionMags Index, who joined me in the hunt for Robert Switzer. I've long relied on the Index for information and recommend it highly. 

Related post:

Bringing It All Back Home

Bringing It All Back Home

 

I Was Going Anyway
Robert Switzer
New York: Macmillan, 1961
121 pages

Robert Switzer flew under my radar for decades, it was only last month that I first read his name. I shelled out a bit extra for a copy of I Was Going Anyway with a dust jacket and am glad I did. The rear flap features some very interesting information about the man:

I expect there is some exaggeration in the description of the author's vagabond upbringing. The 1931 Canadian census finds Robert, age eight, living in Saskatoon with his two older siblings and their parents Franklin K. Switzer ("Dentist") and Edna Irene Switzer ("Home Maker"). While it is true that his 1949 Esquire story 'Death of a Prize Fighter' had been widely anthologized, most notably in Prize Stories of 1950: The O. Henry Awards (New York: Doubleday, 1950), it was not his Esquire debut. 

 The first appeared in the magazine three years earlier when Switzer was twenty-three:

'No End to Anything' was followed by eighteen more stories, 'Death of a Prize Fighter' included, all published in Esquire. I've yet to find a single Robert Switzer story to appear in another magazine. The run ends in April 1957 with 'A Terrible Tomorrow,' a story about the desperate search for a young missing girl and the unstable teenager accused with her abduction.

I mention these things of a reason. 

I Was Going Anyway centres on Will, a syndicated sports columnist based in Toronto, and his relationship with a woman named Dorothy, the daughter of a celebrated surgeon, They meet at a party in early winter, enjoy a bit of light flirtation, and then part. Nothing more to see here until Will sends her a Christmas gift. Dorothy responds. Next thing you know, the two have a date for New Year's Eve. When the clock strikes twelve, they have their first kiss.

Will and Dorothy take things slow at the beginning, then speed up the pace considerably, consummating their relationship during a ski weekend in the Laurentians. They return to Toronto engaged. Dorothy's widower father disapproves, but says nothing. And so, arrangements for the happy day commence. Dorothy flies off to Ottawa to consult a college girlfriend, leaving Will behind. What the bride-to-be doesn't know is that there is a woman staying in her fiancé's house.

Erie Clark had arrived a day earlier. It sort of makes sense that Will said nothing about her to Dorothy. Erie and he had never been girlfriend and boyfriend, but they used to sleep with each other. This was fifteen years ago in Montreal, when both were in their late teens. Will was struggling to find his footing in one of the dailies and Erie performed onstage at one of the city's legendary burlesque clubs. They had aspirations, but only Will's was realized. Erie, who'd planned on becoming a Hollywood star married to a wealthy man, instead ended up homeless on Will's doorstep.

He let her in.

What exactly does Erie want from Will? I don't think she herself knows. If pressed, I'd say the answer is shelter from the storm. A second guess, related to the first, would be that she just wanted the company of someone whom she'd known to be kind. Those fifteen years had been rough. Like me, critic Ron Gobin was struck by this passage, quoting it in his review for the Honolulu Star-Bulletin (23 April 1961):

This is how Erie is introduced:

These passages are gems. To my knowledge, I Was Going Anyway is the first and only time they ever appeared in print. The same can be said for most every other – but not every other. I Was Going Anyway includes dozens of sentences lifted from the author's Esquire stories. It also includes the better part of 'Death of a Prize Fighter,' reworked to include sportswriter Will as witness.

I had no reason to suspect this when reading the novel. I Was Going Anyway is seamless, so smooth, so polished that it reads as if it was written in one feverish go, beginning with the first word and ending with the last. I didn't catch on until I began reading Switzer's short stories.

A case self-plagiarism? I suppose, but I'll give him a pass. 

The June 1949 edition of Esquire reports that the short story writer had turned down repeated offers from publishers wanting a novel. Switzer would eventually write two for Signet before I Was Going Anyway. The first, The Tent of the Wicked (1956), was a paperback original. The following year he was hired to provide a novelization of Albert Lewin's screenplay for The Living Idol. 

I wonder whether any publisher approached Switzer about a short story collection? I'm guessing not. I'm also guessing that he saw I Was Going Anyway as an opportunity to rescue the best bits of his Esquire stories from the landfill.

This is pure speculation on my part, of course.

With few exceptions, reviews of I Was Going Anyway were very positive – "dulled by lapses into offensive language," sniffed the Buffalo Courier Express (30 April 1961) – but there was no second printing. There has never been a paperback edition. The worst part of Robert Switzer's story as a writer is that it ends here, a mere fifteen years after 'No End to Everything.' With its publication, perhaps before, he went silent and vanished.

I Was Going Anyway is both his last book and his best work. It stands with The Long November, Hot Freeze, The Crime on Cote des Neiges, and The Damned and the Destroyed as the very best of post-war Canadian noir.

Trivia: The Buffalo Courier Express is extremely sensitive regarding language. Granted, I was born after I Was Going Anyway was published, but my twentieth-century eyes see only one word that might offend. In a late chapter, a Montreal Morality Squad cop named Maisonneuve fills a Toronto police detective in on the burlesque club run by Erie's old boss Piggy Latourelle:

This is the earliest use of the word I've encountered in a Canadian novel.

About the author: I've uncovered more about Robert Switzer, but this is already running long. I'll post more next Monday. Stay tuned, the jacket's author bio contains one whopping error of fact!

Object and Access: Such an odd-looking book. I bought it not knowing the page count, so was surprised when it arrived. I Was Going Anyway is a very slim hardcover, slimmer than many mass market paperbacks I have from the time, despite it's olive green boards. What's more, the yellowing pages aren't much better than newsprint.

As I write, five copies are listed for sale online, all from American booksellers. The cheapest is a library discard with "musty odor Due [sic] to age and/or environmental conditions, the pages of this book have darkened." Best to take a pass.

After that we have four copies. At US$3.99, the least expensive lacks a dust jacket. And don't you want that jacket? After that we have three, and only three, that do have the dust jacket, ranging in price from US$20.00 to US$34.00. As might be expected, the most dear is in the best condition.

Do not expect to find I Was Going Anyway in your local library. A WorldCat search suggests that the only copies held by Canadian libraries are found at Queen's University, Library and Archives Canada, and the University of Toronto's Thomas Fischer Rare Book Library.

Saskatoon Public Library take note.  

I Was Going Anyway was read for the 1961 Club hosted by Simon and  Karen. In doing so, I broke my New Year's resolution to read and review only women authors in 2026. Before you shame, it was also read for work. It was just too good not to share.

Other 1961 books I've reviewed over the years:

Bottoms Up - Jock Carroll

A Dum-Dum for the President - Martin Brett [Douglas Sanderson]

Return to Today - Margerie Scott

And for fun, here's one from 1861:

Edith Percival - May Agnes Fleming

Related post:

Robert Switzer, Esquire

The Great Lost Canadian Mystery Novel?

'Four To Go'
Kay Grant [Hilda Kay Grant]
The Star Weekly (24 - 31 March 1973)

I once thought that Hilda Kay Grant's bibliography could be divided neatly into two unequal parts. The first spanned thirteen years, beginning in 1951 with The Salt-Box, a fictionalized memoir of her youth published under the name "Jan Hilliard." Five novels followed, all using the very same nom de plume, the last being 1964's Morgan's Castle. The second part, which lasted from 1967 to 1969, consisted of three works of non-fiction written or co-written under the name "Kay Grant."

And then silence... Again, this is what I once thought.

Last autumn, while working on the Ricochet Books reissue of Morgan's Castle I stumbled upon a reference to a novel by "Kay Grant" titled Four To Go published over two 1973 issues of Toronto's Star Weekly.  

Surely this couldn't be same Kay Grant. It had been nine years since her last novel. Besides, all her fiction had been published as being by "Jan Hilliard." Could this be the other Kay Grant, the one who wrote wartime verse like It's 'ard to Keep Straight in the City (1941) and It's 'ard to Be Good in the Blackout (1944)?*

Rural life can be 'ard. I was spoiled during my Montreal, Vancouver, and Toronto years in having ready access to resources. It took some effort to access those old issues of the Star Weekly, but the heart leapt when I did. Here's why:

The Niagara Peninsula! Why, Morgan's Castle is set in the Niagara Peninsula! So is her 1956 novel The Jameson Girls! I next came across this:

The Star Weekly, 17 March 1973

Written by Gwen Beattie, it's an author profile published in anticipation of the next week's publication of Four To Go. In it, Kay Grant is identified as Jan Hilliard, the author of "earlier Niagara-based novels – The Jameson Girls and Morgan's Castle."

I would've felt confident in declaring Four To Go as the work of Hilda Kay Boyle just the same. Location aside, it contains two elements found in each and every Jan Hilliard novel: dysfunctional family and an unusual house.

Twenty-five-year-old widow Katie Gaylord is narrator and protagonist. Maiden name Whitney, she'd thrown off her family-pressured engagement to stable second cousin Charles Davis, a lawyer, and had eloped with freewheeling Harry. During their two-year marriage, Katie's husband promised much, delivered little, and brought it all to an end by drowning off the coast of California. Left with next to nothing, Katie packs her clothes in cardboard boxes. gets in a pale green convertible – "purchased during a brief period of affluence" – and drives the more than four thousand kilometers home to Cragsmore, the grand Whitney family home on the Niagara Escarpment.

Katie knows that her 87-year-old grandmother Beatrice will accept her back. The prodigal granddaughter  reappears as Beatrice is entertaining two other elderly ladies:

"Well, Katie," she said, as matter-of factly as if I'd left home that morning. But she clutched my hand tightly as she lifted her face to be kissed. "Sit down and have some tea. You know everybody. Mrs. Kemp, Mrs. Taylor. They're collecting for the unmarried mothers."

Grandmother Beatrice will never say a word about Harry or his tragic death. He will be forever forgotten, expunged from the Whitney family history.

* * *

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

— Leo Tolstoy

Katie's family isn't particularly happy or unhappy, though its history is tinged with tragedy. Only one of Gran's children lived beyond infancy, that being Shane O'Neill, described by daughter Katie as a "philanderer and amateur sadist":

Three years later, forty-something Shane married eighteen-year-old Rose, then three months pregnant with Katie. Gran liked this second wife and was heartbroken when Rose's car plunged over a cliff not a half-mile from the family home.

Shane was the next to go (boating accident), but not before fathering a son, Conn, who was left on the doorstep by the teenage daughter of an itinerant fruit-picker.

The Whitney fortune came from jam.

* * *

If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don't put it there.

—Anton Chekhov

Though it has been just two years since she left, Cragsmore is much changed from the house Katie knew. Thirty-three-year-old Martha, a woman who had never once garnered a second look from a man, is now married to local lothario Joe Bennett. Mrs Baines, the long-time cook is gone. Joe replaced her with a man named Horace. He lives with his "cousin" Dickie in an apartment above the old coach house. Dickie is employed as Gran's chauffeur.

Martha has taken to wearing makeup and now cares more about her dress. Katie doesn't even recognize seventeen-year-old Conn. He's grown his hair and bought a motorcycle, but really only as an act of rebellion against Martha. Conn's also taken up with a runaway named Sue, who he has hidden away in a room above the old barn. It also contains his rock collection. At night, he uses the old dumb waiter to sneak out of the house. It works on a pulley system that involves ropes and lead weights running from the cellar to the second of Cragsmore's three storeys. Originally used to carry coal, now used to carry laundry, Martha has the dumb waiter inspected every March and September by old Mr Bennett. He died in April. 

You'd be right in thinking that something's going to happen with that dumb waiter.

I'll leave it at that.

Four To Go is a conventional mystery. An argument can be made that it is the author's only mystery. I'm happy to have found it, all the while being disappointed. Four To Go just doesn't reach the level of the Jan Hilliard novels. Black humour is absent, the pacing is off, and the denouement seems so very long.

In that old Gwen Beattie Star Weekly article she describes Four To Go as a condensed version of the author's "latest Niagara novel."

The uncondensed version has yet to be published. The manuscript has yet to be found.

Is Four To Go the Great Lost Canadian Mystery? 

I don't suppose we'll ever know. Are there other lost Canadian mystery novels? 

Is Four To Go worth republishing as is?

Of course, it is.

* What little I know of Australia's Kay Grant comes from the brief author bio found on the rear jacket of the American edition of the intriguingly titled It's 'ard to Keep Straight in the Navy.

cliquez pour agrandir

Related posts:

The Jan Hilliard Ricochet
A Nova Scotian Writes Ontario Gothic
As He Lay Dying

Handled by the Saturday Evening Post

'Woman-handled'
Arthur Stringer
The Saturday Evening Post, volume  197, issue 44

May 2, 1925

A critic writes: "In your New Year's Day post you urged readers to start off 2024 with Arthur Stringer. It's now fall and you haven't reviewed any book by Stringer. Have you even read one?"

I haven't, but smarting from the comment I've since tackled this short story. I'd always meant to read "Woman-handled" because of "Manhandled," a longer Stringer story that appeared in the Post the previous year (11 March - 29 March, 1924). It was brought to the screen by Paramount. Gloria Swanson played the lead.

The James H. Crank illustration the Saturday Evening Post chose to introduce "Woman-handled" is an odd in that it depicts the climax. 

The opening scene is urban. It's set in New York's Waldorf Astoria, where novelist Baran Bowerman, author of The Passionate Year, has just concluded the third of three talks to various ladies social groups. Amongst the rapt-eyed, fawning female readers he encounters sporty young horsewoman Glenna van Gelder, who ribs him for accepting these sorts of engagements with their pink carnations, hothouse violets, and macaroons.

"Why you're eating it up!" she says. "You love it! And if I don’t get out of the way of this adoring army they're going to trample me down.”

Baran Bowerman is drawn to Glenna van Gelder. The attraction has nothing to do with alliteration, rather that she is so different than the delicate women who typically attend his talks. Later, whilst walking down Fifth Avenue, Glenna's ribbing turns to mockery:

"You’re smothered in women... You're drowned in them. You’re like that Duke of Clarence who tumbled right into his vat of wine. You're so tangled up with petticoats you can’t breathe.”
   The handsome young author laughed, but his laugh was a defensive one. “Oh, I can still breathe,’’ he protested, with barricading lightness. ‘‘And there’s always safety, remember, in numbers.”
   “Is there?” asked the solemn-eyed girl at his side. “Isn’t there danger of getting your soul clogged up with talcum powder?”
   “I can’t see that it’s left any knock in the engine,” averred the pink-cheeked author. "I still have my two- hour work-out with my trainer every day.”
   “I know stout ladies who do the same.”

She later warns Baran that he's being "effeminized without knowing it."

From this point on Stringer's story becomes rather silly. The next morning they meet in Central Park, where Baran seeks to demonstrate his non-existent equestrian skills. This in turn leads to fisticuffs – not with Glenna van Gelder, you understand, rather with her riding partner. The novelist next makes for the west in order to toughen himself up. Interestingly, it is the Canadian west, not the American. More interesting still, is the arrival of a "movin' picture outfit," making a western.

My critic, a friend, will be pleased to learn that I've invested a further fifty-five minutes of life viewing Womanhandled, the Hollywood adaptation of "Woman-handled."

It was worth it.

More in next week's post.

Related post:

Gloria Gets Groped 

Shorter Moore

Dear Departed: Selected Short Stories
Brian Moore
[Belfast]: Turnpike, 2020
102 pages

Brian Moore was first and foremost a novelist. He received Governor General's Awards for The Luck of Ginger Coffey and The Great Victorian Collection, and was thrice nominated for the Booker. Dear Departed is the first collection of his short stories. Its appearance last year was so late in coming as to be unexpected. The publisher added to the surprise; there was a time in this country when a collection of Moore stories would have been published by McClelland & Stewart or Knopf Canada.

"Grieve for the Dear Departed," lends the collection its name. It was first published alongside Hemingway, Wilder, Frost, Thurber, and Dinesen in the November 1957 centenary edition of The Atlantic. In the story, a recently widowed woman grieves, but the dear departed of the title isn't so much the husband as the son who had left Ireland for a new life in the New World.

The longest and best of these short stories, "Uncle T," is one Moore salvaged and reworked from the aborted novel that was to have followed Judith Hearne. Vincent Bishop, newly married to Barbara, gazes out of their hotel room overlooking Times Square. The two met in Canada, to which he had fled from a future teaching secondary school in an Ulster town, "forty lumps of boys waiting at forty desks, rain on the windowpanes, two local cinemas, a dance on Saturday nights."

As a refuge, Canada was as good as anywhere. Vincent had applied for work as a clerk in the Shan State, a shipping aide in Takoradi, a plantation overseer in British Guiana, ending up teaching secondary school in Toronto. There's unstated irony in this.

Vincent is convinced Toronto is but a stop on the way to much greater things, and has convinced his bride as much. Uncle Turlough, whom he has yet to meet, has offered him a senior position with his New York publishing house.

There are elements of autobiography in these stories, particularly in the troubled relationships between fathers and sons. Moore described "A Vocation," the first story in the collection, as "about the only thing I can consciously remember writing about my early childhood.

Its first two sentences.

 In the beginning was the Word. And the Word was "No."

Biographer Denis Sampson tells us that "Off the Track," easily the darkest of these stories, reflects a holiday Moore and his first wife took to Haiti. "Hearts and Flowers," easily the lightest, was surely inspired by Moore's time at the Montreal Gazette. A Christmas story set in the "Old Bowerie Mission" (read: Old Brewery Mission), it's a mystery that it hasn't appeared in any collection of Canadian Yuletide stories.

Moore published only fourteen short stories during his lifetime, eight of which are collected here. Added to the remaining six are unpublished stories found amongst his papers. 

One hopes Turnpike is considering a second volume. The press is doing God's work.

Object and Access: A slim trade-size paperback. This collector placed an overseas order, hoping for a first edition. Instead, I received his:

Still, I was pleased to see it had done so well in such a short time.

McGill University has a copy.

A Winter's Tale of a Dry Summer

'Nemesis Wins'
Grant Allen
Phil May's Illustrated Winter Annual
London: Haddon, 1894

I often start the New Year with something by Grant Allen. Something to do with the letter A, I suppose, or that his work dominates the top shelf of the bookcase. Whatever the reason, Allen's "Nemesis Wins," which arrived by post late December, seemed a good way to kick off 2018. A short story, it appeared in the advert-heavy 1894 edition of Phil May's Illustrated Winter Annual...  and then never again. This fleeting appearance in print had me expecting little, and I was neither surprised nor disappointed.

"Nemesis Wins" starts as a love story, but ends in murder and devastation on a massive scale. The two lovers at the centre emerge unscathed and, one concludes, oblivious as to what actually transpired.

To think it all might've been avoided had it not been for the Elementary Education Act of 1870.

Education, particularly that of women, often plays a role in Allen's fiction; here it serves to open young Miriam Stanley to all kinds of possibilities, not the least of which is a life with handsome Jim Sladen. The two come from very different backgrounds; Jim is a gamekeeper for Squire Ponsonby of Hurtwood, while Miriam is the daughter of Septerius Stanley, king of the West Surrey gypsies. The relationship between the two lovers is the stuff of local gossip – gamekeepers and gypsy families being typically at odds. The worst of it, from Septerius's point of view, is that Jim is honest, and is known to refuse bribes. The gypsy king, who has done a stints for poaching in the past, and is in the habit of cutting gorse on the common for his horses, believes he'll soon be forced to move the royal van.

He seeks temporary respite from his problems at the local inn, where the chief topic of conversation is the state of the heath. "Been powerful hot o' late," says Sam Walters, the broom-maker. "Heather's dry as tinder. Surprisin' if Squire Ponsonby's heath don't get lighted somehow." Talk next turns to gamekeeper Jim, and speculation as why he hasn't arrived to raise a pint or two. Sam Walters and "half-wit" Dick know the answer, having seen Jim on his way to meet Miriam. Septerius is enraged, but not so much that he can't formulate a plan that will see the common go up in flames, Dick framed, and result in Jim's dismissal.

"Nemesis Wins" is a slight story, but opening mention of the "school-board and its fixed stern eye even on gypsie lasses" had me curious. Minutes after finishing, I was deep into reading about the Romany and the history of education in the British Isles... which is how I came to know everything worth knowing about the Elementary Education Act.

Ultimately, like the Winter Annual's advertisements, "Nemesis Wins" is one of those things made more interesting by the passage of time.

There's hope for me yet.

Object and Access: A 114-page paperbound book, loaded with illustrations and adverts. Allen's story takes up roughly four two-columned pages. I first spotted this copy at an online auction this past summer, and then kicked myself for forgetting to bid. Fortunately, it reappeared a few months later as a sale item. I paid US$4.88.

The University of Toronto has a copy. It can be read online here through the Internet Archive.

Romance and the Psychopath's Daughter

No Pattern for Life
Frances Shelley Wees
The Star Weekly, 11 December 1955

Not so much novel as novella, No Pattern for Life came and went sixty years ago this month, never to see print again. It pains me to write that this is no great loss. Frances Shelley Wees'  mystery The Keys of My Prison, ranks amongst the year's best finds. This is the most disappointing.

The Star Weekly did its best to position No Pattern for Life as a Christmas story – 'twas the season, after all – but the action extends well into the following spring. That said, the story does open on a Christmasy scene: Melinda Elliott, she of the deftly moving hands, decorates mistletoe with bright red ribbon.

See above.

Widowed Sarah Chalmers sits looking on, "absently knitting a white nylon sweater" and passing judgement. Roommates, the two not only share a flat but work together at a Toronto radio station. Their boss, George Johnson, is basically Jack Kent Cooke. And because Johnson is Cooke, he has divorced Agnes, his wife of twenty years, to marry vivacious young Melinda. Sarah doesn't approve.

Good question. Johnson is a balding businessman suffering a mid-life crisis – there's nothing more to him than that. Melinda's fascination has everything to do with his wealth and the many gifts it provides. The first chapter brings a mink coat, but before Melinda can don her dead apparel she trips over Christmas presents and flies face first into the edge of an open door. The story's greatest action – decorating the mistletoe comes a close second – it leads to an operation for a detached retina. The months of convalescence that follow allow Melinda time to contemplate life and reconsider her betrothal.

Priggish busybody Sarah seeks to provide moral guidance while dodging dinner invitations from Jim Malone, Melinda's eye surgeon. Here's a coincidence: not only did Jim and his wife Kitty attend university with Sarah and her dead husband Dick, but he just happens to have grown up in the very same small town as Melinda. Courtesy of Jim, Sarah learns of her roommate's kinfolk:

"I can't imagine how she would get into your orbit. Sarah, With her father and mother, and what must have been her upbringing."
     "That sounds pretty serious."
     "Well… the father, Emmett… he got killed finally, we heard, in some disreputable way – in prison, I think – was a psychopath."

A strong believer in nature over nurture, Sarah determines that her roommate "hasn't got a chance". It's not Melinda's fault, of course, rather her "heritage", which Sarah judges to be "low, cheap, degraded, weak, degenerating." How comfortable she feels in the newfound knowledge that she shares a flat with a psychopath's daughter is left unexplored.

Sadly, No Pattern for Life is no "Murder-Mystery". Given the choices, I'd say it's more "Marriage Problem" than "Romance", though not one marriage features amongst its main characters. The Johnsons' union has ended in divorce. Doctor Jim's marriage to Kitty endured until her untimely passing. As mentioned, Sarah's Dick is dead.

And then we have a secret marriage. At nineteen, Melinda married Bill Blake, of the Toronto Graham-Blakes, but it ended badly because of the bride's frequent, unexplained disappearances from the family home.

As you're unlikely to read No Pattern for Life – copies are scarce and it is not recommended – I'll complete the tale:

Sarah has been declining Jim's invitations because she doesn't know that Kitty died in childbirth a decade earlier. Upon learning the sad news she lays her hand on his and declares her love.

See below.

Melinda visits her grandparents' graves, reads some very complimentary things written on the headstones, and determines that she doesn't really come from such bad stock. Sarah agrees. We learn that Melinda had disappeared from the Graham-Blake home to care for the alcoholic, drug-addicted mother of whom she dared not speak.

Conveniently, Bill Blake returns to the scene because he just can't get over Melinda.

Melinda breaks off her engagement with George, sending the jilted fiancé off in search of his ex-wife. He finds Agnes looking "as she had years and years ago, when they were young." The stress of the divorce had caused a loss of thirty or so pounds in excess weight, so he pleads with her to take him back.

She does.

Lord knows why.

I guess she finds him fascinating.

Favourite passage:

Most boring passage:

Object and Access: Sixteen-pages, fifteen of which feature the novel. The final page is given over to American cartoonist Harry Weinert's "Vignettes of Life". This week's theme: Babysitters.

Anyone looking to read No Pattern for Life is directed to our best reference libraries. That said, old Star Weeky novels do show up from time to time. I pulled mine from a stack being sold by a London bookstore. Price: $4.98.

Related post:

A Rival for Margaret Millar?

Leonard Cohen Erotica… and John Glassco Porn

Five glimpses of Leonard Cohen's short story "Barbers and Lovers", from the Spring 1971 issue of Ingluvin.

The artwork is by Susan Hales.

Five pages later, John Glassco offers "Saisons de l'avenir" and "The Marital Sex Education Film":

All three published once… and never again.