Harlequin's Change of Heart

I've taken more than a few shots – here and elsewhere – at that great Canadian success story known as Harlequin Enterprises and its reluctance to acknowledge its varied past. As evidence, I point to that peculiar corporate exhibit of last May, which included only passing recognition the publisher's first fifteen years. And then there's this bullying of a BC bookseller. Never mind, today I come to praise Harlequin for what it refers to as its 'Vintage Collection'. The publisher hasn't exactly been trumpeting this new 'miniseries' – there doesn't appear to have been any attempt at publicity and no mention is made on its main page (so, I provide this link). Again, never mind. Whoever is overseeing this thing has done a very nice job; and the books, which should appear in bookstores this month, are very reasonably priced.

Looking at the first six titles, it's pretty clear that Harlequin has focused on novels in which women feature prominently. Fine, I understand the concept of branding. Disappointment rears its head only with the realization that there are no Canadian books amongst this first batch. While I'm not expecting Wreath for a Redhead or The Executioners, both disowned by author Brian Moore, I hold out hope that November's offerings will feature something of this vast, fair Dominion.

And so, I present this modest three title wish list.

The Body on Mount Royal

David Montrose

Winnipeg: Harlequin, 1953

A mystery featuring Russell Teed, the hard-working, hard-drinking, Montreal private dick at the centre of The Crime on Cote des Neiges (Collins White Circle, 1951) and Murder Over Dorval (Collins White Circle, 1952). Not only is The Body on Mount Royal the darkest of the three, it has a cover that Harlequin has yet to surpass.

The Mayor of Côte St. Paul

Ronald J. Cooke

Winnipeg: Harlequin, 1950

Admire the cover, but don't focus too much on the clothing, hairstyles or that typewriter; this novel isn't set in the post-War era, but in 1920s Montreal. Organized crime, bootleggers, smugglers and slot machines... much like today, but with different cars.

Die with Me Lady [sic]

Ronald Cocking

Winnipeg: Harlequin, 1953

And finally, a book that appears to combine the dual dangers of drugs and overhead power lines. I've never felt the urge to read this this oddly titled novel, perhaps because the plot is spoiled by an overly descriptive back cover:

Throughout North America, despite the vigilance of law-enforcement agencies, the deadly traffic in narcatics grows by leaps and bounds.

One of the centres of this vicious traffic is Toronto, Canada - a fast growing city of a million people, facing New York State across the waters of Lake Ontario, and providing a ready link with the United States.

Al Morley, a Toronto newspaper reporter, in covering the apparently insignificant death of a humble newspaper seller, crosses the path of the celebrated and erudite Sir Wilfred Cremorne and his lovely daughter, Valerie.

From then on he finds himself drawn into a tangle web of intrigue with a dope ring at its centre. He watches while respectable people are bought to protect the operations of the million-dollar traffickers.

The story moves towards a terrifying climax where a group of horrified people, doomed by their own avarice, helplessly await death on a luxury yacht cruising on the sunny waters of Lake Ontario.

Update: Caveat emptor.

Related posts:

Covering Up the Past

Hard Lessons in Publishing

That's Entertainment, Part III

A bit of a change of pace this month as I work toward a deadline. Expect fewer words and more pictures – a bit like the revamped Maclean's or Canwest's treatment of the old Southam papers.

Let's begin the visual feast with six books by man of the week Arthur Stringer. The most interesting, I think, is Without Warning (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1924), a novel he co-wrote with Russell Holman. The project began as a publicity gimmick put together by Paramount, which released a film without a title – actually, it was called The Story Without a Name – and encouraged moviegoers to submit suggestions. The plot centres on an idealistic young scientist who invents a death ray, is kidnapped by pirates, but escapes when he is able to create a second death ray out of old junk. An attractive cover, I suppose, but where's that death ray?

The Prairie Child. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1922.

The standard line on Stringer is that he's remembered for his Prairie Trilogy: Prairie Mother (1915), Prairie Wife (1920) and Prairie Child. This isn't at all true; Stringer is a forgotten writer. The last any of these titles saw print was in 1950, when two appeared in a bind-up called The Prairie Omnibus. To find all three, you have to go back even farther, to 1939, and another bind-up, The Prairie Stories.

Power. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1925.

The story of John Jusk, a determined man who makes his fortune in the railroads. Though it would make for an interesting book, I'm assuming that's not our hero on the cover.

Power was hated by Frederick Philip Grove, Stringer's rival in the area of prairie fiction. Grove's review for Canadian Bookman misidentifies the novel as an 'autobiography', and concludes: 'Whenever John Jusk says a thing, he does so "with his jaws clamped". That is sufficient advertisement for one class of readers; a sufficient warning for another.'

Wolf Woman. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1927.

The daughter of a bush ranger, Dynamite Mary is 'three-quarters timber wolf and one-quarter angel'. Hers is a simple, uncomplicated until one day she is 'transported suddenly out of the forests of Canada to the fever and tumult of life on the banks of the Hudson and the castled shores of Long Island.'

Fun.

Marriage by Capture. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1933.

Stranded in the Canadian wilderness, a beautiful young heiress believes she's found rescue in a mysterious man, only to find that he refuses to help her return to civilization.

Creepy.

The Wife Traders: A Tale of the North. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1936.

In this fantasy set four decades in the future, citizens of 'Suburbia' gather to play a strange game in which car keys are placed in a bowl and... Well, not really, though the novel does deal with adultery, a topic that prevented magazine serial sales.

Reprinted by Harlequin in 1955, to this day The Wife Traders remains the very last Stringer title to have appeared in print.

Related posts:

That's Entertainment!

That's Entertainment, Part II

That's Entertainment, Part II

The Woman Who Couldn't Die was the nineteenth of Arthur Stringer's forty novels. He wrote mysteries, wilderness adventures and, it may be argued, was one of the earliest purveyors of prairie realism. Add to these two hundred or so short stories, fifteen collections of poetry and a few non-fiction works like A Study of King Lear (1897) and you have the most prolific and versatile Canadian writer of his generation. A good amount of Stringer's work found its way to the screen. Not only was Stringer the man behind The Perils of Pauline, his stories and novels served as the basis of roughly two dozen movies and serials. The most enduring, The Purchase Price, is based his 1932 novel The Mud Lark. It stars Barbara Stanwyck as Joan Gordon, 'a little gal who sings torch songs in a naughty nightclub', who flees Manhattan and her bootlegger boyfriend for Montreal. There, as Francine La Rue, she performs at the Maple Leaf Club until discovered by her boyfriend's cronies. In order to escape, Joan adopts the identity of her chambermaid, and leaves town as the mail-order bride to a struggling farmer. The rest of the film takes place in North Dakota, a change from the Canadian prairie setting of the novel.

A pre-Code Hollywood film, The Purchase Price isn't nearly as spicy as the title or movie poster suggest; though it does have a few examples of ribald dialogue:

Mail-order Bride #1: You know what they say about men with bushy eyebrows and a long nose?

Mail-order Bride #2: Oh, Queenie, I can tell you've been married before!

I'm quick to point out that this exchange does not feature in the novel.

Not a bad film, it's available in its entirety on YouTube.

Stringer had another connection to Hollywood in his first wife, actress Jobyna Howland. A woman of Amazonian proportions, standing over six-feet tall, she's generally recognized as the original Gibson Girl.

Here she is in later life as Fannie Furst – not Fannie Hurst – with Bert Wheeler and Robert Woolsey in The Cuckoos. A musical comedy featuring three sequences in early Technicolor, it was shot six years before her death from a heart attack at age fifty-six.

Related posts:

That's Entertainment!

That's Entertainment, Part III

That's Entertainment!

The Woman Who Couldn't Die

Arthur Stringer

Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1929

That's her standing near the bow of the longboat. She is Thera, the daughter of the Jarl of Hordoland, a woman of beauty amongst 'herring-slitted wenches with little more charm than a she-cod on a smoking rack.' Not that you can tell from the cover; she's barely perceptible, despite her great height. No, the dust jacket does not do Thera justice, though it does credit her creator, Arthur Stringer, with the most remarkable ability:

A modern Scheherazade could insure the safety of her life by reading to her cruel spouse this amazing story of the Farther North. It would not only hold him spellbound by its bold and unparalleled adventures but also make him cherish forever the woman who had the wisdom to select such excellent entertainment.

Bold-faced silliness befitting a book that is nothing but an entertainment. We begin with twenty pages of italics relating the story of this Viking princess, how she crossed the Atlantic, became lost in the Canadian Arctic and ended up entombed in a giant block of ice. Regular type signals a shift from omniscient narrator to David Law, a jaded journalist on the hunt for stories in late 19th-century Montreal. Mysterious documents are uncovered, a parchment map is produced and the novel shifts once again. Together with a mad scientist and a dimwitted muscleman, Law sets out for the Arctic to find a hidden land of riches and thaw out the lovely Thera, known in 'Eskimo mythology' as 'the Eternal Maiden of Gold' and 'the Golden Woman who Never Died'.

As a young pup, I once counted the number of times Richard Butler spits out the word 'stupid' on the first Psychedelic Furs album. I was tempted to do the same with Stringer's use of 'gold', but growing awareness of mortality prevents further examination. Let's just say it's a lot. Thera's hair, for example, is 'living and liquid gold, gold luminous as a cat's eye by night, gold indiscernibly vivid yet soft, with radiance all its own, like that of a rose-leaf behind which a candle burns.'

This is fiction crafted for readers of Edgar Rice Burroughs, a writer I left behind long ago with other elementary school interests. I will say, however, that The Woman Who Couldn't Die is just as good as the Burroughs I remember. And while my eyes began to glaze over with all this talk of lost worlds, hidden peoples, strange religions and gold, gold, gold, I found the forty or so pages that take place in fin de siècle Montreal to be fascinating. Here Stringer draws upon his past as a journalist for the Herald, not only criticizing the paper, but taking swipes at the Royal Victoria Hospital and the city's establishment.

Write what you know.

Access: Library and Archives Canada doesn't have a copy, but the Toronto Public Library does. It can also be found in a dozen of our university libraries. Those wishing to purchase will find that The Woman Who Couldn't Die isn't terribly scarce, but difficult to find in anything approaching a Good dust jacket. Expect to pay a little over two grams in gold.

Though the book received only one printing, The Woman Who Couldn't Die was reprinted in Famous Fantastic Mysteries. The issue appeared on newsstands in October 1950, the month following Stringer's death.

For your entertainment:

Oh, my misspent youth.

Related posts:

That's Entertainment, Part II

That's Entertainment, Part III
Remembering the Woman Who Couldn't Die