My selection, Margaret Millar's An Air That Kills, won't come as much of a surprise to regular readers. You know how I'm always going on about her writing. If not An Air That Kills it would've been Vanish in an Instant or Wall of Eyes or The Iron Gates or Beast in View or… But no, with action alternating between Toronto and cottage country, An Air That Kills makes most sense. Summer approaches. Besides, I think it's her best novel.
The Partisan list, numbering thirteen, has some old favourites; I see others deserving reconsideration. I'll be reading them all over the next few months – including the four I don't know at all.
How come no one told me about Jonathan Goldstein's novel?
Anyway, here's the list. I'm presenting it in order of publication for no other reason than it places my selection first, but you'd do better to read the actual Partisan piece.
An Air That Kills – Margaret Millar
Recommended by Brian Busby
From a Seaside Town – Norman Levine
Recommended by Nathan Whitlock Pandora – Sylvia Fraser
Recommended by Mark Sampson Dancing Nightly in the Tavern – Mark Anthony Jarman
Recommended by Elisabeth de Mariaffi Onyx John – Trevor Ferguson
Recommended by Andrew Hood The Republic of Love – Carol Shields
Recommended by Joel Yanofsky Wigger – Lawrence Braithwaite
Recommended by Derek McCormack Paradise, Piece by Piece – Molly Peacock
Recommended by Guillaume Morissette Lenny Bruce is Dead – Jonathan Goldstein
Recommended by Ian McGillis
A Tourist’s Guide to Glengarry – Ian McGillis
Recommended by Andrew Steinmetz HA! – Gordon Sheppard
Recommended by Dimitri Nasrallah
The Darren Effect – Libby Creelman
Recommended by Saleema Nawaz Lighthouse Island – Paulette Jiles
Recommended by Michael Winter
Verse for May Day by "Gay Page", Florence Nightingale Horner Sherk. Like last year's, this is drawn from The Workshops and Other Poems, her lone volume, published in 1919 by the Fort William Times-Journal.
A complex woman was Mrs Sherk. In Victoria's time, when women rarely advanced beyond the position of teacher, she became principal of Fort William's Ogden School. In 1907, she reinvented herself as a journalist, became one of the earliest members of Canadian Women's Press Club, and yet was a fervent anti-suffragist.
I'd not heard of Florence Nightingale Horner Sherk until two years ago when I rescued her book, a library discard, just as it was about to be tossed, stripped and pulped. It has since provided hours of enjoyment.
Well, an hour, anyway. It's a very slim book.
The poetess pairs her May Day poem, "May Day", with a photograph titled "The Promise of May".
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
Straight to video, but without enough momentum to make it to DVD. I'm guessing I've missed my opportunity to see Deadly Companion. True, there are used VHS copies for sale out there, but who can be bothered? Besides, I can't figure out how to connect our old VCR to the Samsung.
Deadly Companion was a tax shelter film. "Based on the novel 'The 3 Roads' [sic] by Ross MacDonald [sic]", it was offered up by the same Toronto production company that gave us Nothing Personal, a romcom starring Donald Sutherland/Suzanne Somers.
Screenwriter Thomas Hedley (Flashdance) appears to have taken a good number of liberties with his source material. Here's John Candy as John, a character not found in the novel.
And here's John doing lines of coke.
Fellow SCTV cast members Joe Flaherty, Eugene Levy, Catherine O'Hara and Dave Thomas also feature, but it's Candy who shares top billing in the 1994 VHS release.
He gets less than two minutes screen time.
I feel particularly bad for the late Michael Sarrazin – cast as Michael Taylor (Bret Taylor in the novel), he's owed top billing. This earlier video package, issued under the original title, seems a tad more fair:
The adaptation brings things into the 'eighties by having Taylor shed his Second World War naval uniform for a journalist's trench coat. Here he's traumatized not by a Japanese kamikazes, but by Middle Eastern terrorists in aviator sunglasses.
Like the Taylor of The Three Roads, Michael must also deal with the murder of his young wife Lorraine. She's given life here – fleetingly – by Pita Oliver, an actress best remembered for having survived Prom Night.
Of course, she's not so lucky here.
Pita Oliver is billed twenty-fifth in the film's IMDb listing. This too seems unfair; after all, the solution to her character's murder is key to Macdonald's plot. The Three Roads positions Larry Hopkins (Anthony Perkins) as prime suspect, but I'm not sure about Deadly Companion. Here we see an encounter between Taylor and Hopkins.
In what I take to be a later scene, the two are involved in a dust-up.
Taylor also takes on Dellassandro (Al Waxman). Same camera angle.
Waxman's character doesn't feature in the book, nor do any of the five played by the SCTV cast. Fourth-billed Howard Duff portrays some guy named Lester Harlen. He's not in the book either.
The film has Hopkins shooting Harlen though a doorway…
…allowing Perkins to do his thing.
Leonard Maltin's review runs two sentences: "Confusing, annoying thriller with mentally tortured photojournalist Sarrazin attempting to track down his wife's murderer. Sarrizan is his usual bland self; Clark is wasted." The few souls bothering to weigh in at IMDb appear to agree:
This murder/mystery makes little sense.
– sgt619-1
The film simply does not make sense even after seeing it twice
– cfc_can
In "Double Negative Developing" (The Globe & Mail, 10 February 1979), critic Jay Scott suggests chaos on the set. He quotes actress Susan Clark on the script:
"This is one of the things that's in progress, so it's a big question mark. The three writers [Hedley, Janis Allen, Charles Dennis] seem to be coming from three different places. We have improvised; the locations have stayed the same and so has the intent of the individual scenes but…"
The ellipses are Clark's… Or are they Scott's?
The Globe & Mail, 10 February 1979
I was hundreds of kilometres away in high school when all this was going on, and yet I realize, all these decades later, that I'm just one degree of separation from several of the key players in this drama.
The Three Roads Kenneth Millar New York: Dell, [n.d.]
The Three Roads is a psychological thriller of the type in which Margaret Millar excelled. Here husband Kenneth, writing under his true name for the last time, falls a bit flat. But only in comparison.
This story from Millar, mari, concerns Second World War veteran Bret Taylor, a naval officer made amnesiac by the loss of his ship and his wife. Now hospitalized, he's visited by Hollywood screenwriter Paula West. It was only a couple of years ago that determined Paula, a divorcée, saw a second husband in Bret. They'd met at a vacation resort and had shared nineteen nice enough days together. No bed, true, but twenty-something navy man Bret was a virgin.
Months passed before they were able to meet again. When they did, Bret drank too much, felt pressured to perform and propose, and fled to Los Angeles. Forty-eight hours later – or was it seventy-two? – he found himself married to a nineteen-year-old barfly.
"Fast moving" pitches Dell.
Sure, but not 'til the second half.
The earliest chapters of The Three Roads have Bret lagging behind, struggling to recall what the reader already knows. I spoil little in disclosing that his young wife was victim in the "murder in sunny California" referred to on the back cover.
Bret saw her naked dead body beautiful and passed out.
See front cover.
Credit goes to psychoanalyst Theodor Klifter for kicking this novel into gear. He hands over newspaper accounts of the murder, Bret springs to his feet, "irises shining grayly like small spinning wheels", and we're off!
Nose to ground and grindstone Bret starts sniffing out the killer of the wife he can't remember. First stop is the Golden Sunset Café, a dive at which she spent her penultimate hours. But Bret's no detective. He ties one on, gets into a fight and ends up in the bed of some guy named Larry Miles. I made the made too much of this; Larry's interest in Bret isn't at all sexual:
The way things were going he and Taylor might end up as bosom pals. And that would be a belly laugh of the first water. He was a card, all right, a real wag out of the top drawer with bells on.
Or am I wrong?
Look, I'm no psychologist, nor am I a psychoanalyst. That said, I recognize The Three Roads as very much a post-war work – not because of the conflict, but for its focus on psychopathy. It's no accident that the Dalíesque cover of Knopf's 1948 first edition brings to mind Hitchcock's Spellbound. Herr Doktor Klifter is one of two – two – psychoanalysts who chew up page after page with theories as to the source of Bret's psychosis, Interesting stuff, I guess, but it was much more fun to read about Bret's bar fight.
It seemed more real, too.
Dedication:
To Margaret [Millar]
Epigraph:
For now am I discovered vile, and of the vile. O ye three roads, and thou concealed dell, and oaken copse, and narrow outlet of three ways, which drank my own blood…
– Sophocles, Oedipus Tyrannus
Trivia:In 1980, the novel was made into what looks to be a particularly bad Canadian film known variously as Deadly Companion, Double Negative, Killer aus den Dunkel, Kauhun pierre and Imagem Dupla.
The subject of a future post. Object: A 222-page Dell mapback with cover illustration by Bob Stanley. I purchased my copy for $7.50 this past January at London's Attic Books, a mere three kilometres down three roads from the University of Western Ontario, Millar's alma mater.
Access: Published in 1948 by Knopf, for a fourth novel from a major house the first edition isn't cheap. We're well over US$300 before we find a copy in decent dust jacket.
The Knopf and Dell editions are the only to have been published under Millar's real name; the others – Cassell, Bantam, Corgi, Warner, Virgin, Allison & Busby and Vintage/Black Lizard – employ his more famous nom de plume. That last, the Vintage/Black Lizard edition, is in print at US$15.95/C$17.95.
While Americans are well-served, we Canadians starve. The only library copies I see are held by the Kitchener Public Library, the Toronto Public Library, the University of Toronto and the University of Calgary.
The University of Western Ontario does not have a copy.
As with most Millar/Macdonalds, translations abound: French (La boite de Pandora), Dutch (Drie wegen), German (Der Mörder im Spiegel), Italian (L'assassino di mia moglie), Portuguese (Vitória amarga), Polish (Troista droga), Czech (Rozcestí), Finnish (Valheen pitkät jäljet), Russian (Tri dorogi) and Japanese (三つの道).
A writer, ghostwriter, écrivain public, literary historian and bibliophile, I'm the author of Character Parts: Who's Really Who in CanLit (Knopf, 2003), and A Gentleman of Pleasure: One Life of John Glassco, Poet, Translator, Memoirist and Pornographer (McGill-Queen's UP, 2011; shortlisted for the Gabrielle Roy Prize). I've edited over a dozen books, including The Heart Accepts It All: Selected Letters of John Glassco (Véhicule, 2013) and George Fetherling's The Writing Life: Journals 1975-2005 (McGill-Queen's UP, 2013). I currently serve as series editor for Ricochet Books and am a contributing editor for Canadian Notes & Queries. My most recent book is The Dusty Bookcase (Biblioasis, 2017), a collection of revised and expanded reviews first published here and elsewhere.
