05 December 2011

Sexy Stuff from Bizarro Superman's Creator



Touchable
Les Scott and Robert W. Tracy [pseud. Alvin Schwartz]
New York: Arco, 1951
184 pages

This review now appears, revised and rewritten, in my new book:
The Dusty Bookcase:
A Journey Through Canada's
Forgotten, Neglected, and Suppressed Writing
Available at the very best bookstores and through


02 December 2011

The Highest Compliments of the Season



Now in the final month of the year, tradition dictates that I offer holiday gift suggestions – this time accompanied by bits and pieces published one hundred years ago today in the Globe.

Of the twenty-eight neglected books reviewed here this year, the three most deserving of a return to print are:
Hot Freeze by Martin Brett (né Douglas Sanderson)
The Pyx by John Buell
Four Days by John Buell
By coincidence, not design, each deals with the Montreal criminal underworld of decades past. Used copies of are available through online booksellers for as little as a dollar ($5 in the case of Hot Freeze).

Praise this year goes to the British Columbia publishers that returned worthy titles to print through the Vancouver 125 Legacy Books Project. Ten books in total, I recommend Class Warfare by D.M. Fraser, Crossings by Betty Lambert, The Inverted Pyramid by Bertrand W. Sinclair and, above all others, Edward Starkins' Who Killed Janet Smith?

Macmillan of Canada, 1984/Anvil Press, 2011

I'll be so bold so to make this final gift suggestion: my own A Gentleman of Pleasure: One Life of John Glassco, Poet, Memoirist, Translator and Pornographer, published this past April by McGill-Queen's University Press. Seven years in the making, at long last a biography of this country's most unusual writer.

Right now, the least expensive copies – C$25.17 – come through Amazon.ca. Would that I could compete. The best I can do is offer signed copies, gift wrapped in Anaglypta (heavy embossed paper) and postage paid to any destination, at the retail price of C$39.95. Kind souls can make contact through email at my blogger profile.

Once a bookseller, always a bookseller.

01 December 2011

A Post-Victorian Christmas (w/ Frank L. Packard)



Purchased just last week, a century or so after it arrived at the news agent, the December 1911 edition of The Canadian Magazine was hard to resist. Just look at what's on offer: "A Study of Iago" by Arthur Stringer, some thoughts on winter by L.M. Montgomery, a new Homer Watson and no less than ninety lines of verse from the delightfully quirky Isabel Ecclestone Mackay.

But what really sold me was "The Mad Player", an uncollected work by Frank L. Packard. Something just less than 4000 words in length, this simple story is reflected in the accompanying illustrations by J.W. Beatty, R.C.A., O.S.A.

The unnamed narrator is a landscape artist travelling somewhere in France. One evening he comes upon a wild looking violinist busking on a village street.

The painter returns to lodgings, where he is confronted by the violinist – as a fellow artiste, he is offended that our narrator put a coin in his cap. Things are becoming quite unpleasant until the eyes of the unkempt musician fall upon the painter's most recent landscape:
"Monsieur will tell me where it was done – where?"
When told, he rushes out. The innkeeper, who is highly amused, fills in our narrator. It seems that the wild violinist is an aristocrat who as a young man lost his mind at the drowning death of his fiancée.



The following morning, the violinist's body is discovered near the spot captured in the landscape. Wracked with guilt, the painter watches the cortege. He returns to the landscape, trying to make sense of the insane aristocrat's reaction. Though it takes some time, he realizes that the violinist viewed the work upside down.
I reversed it quickly – and then I, as he had done, with startled cry, carried it closer to my eyes. At last I understood. The foliage, by some grim freak as my brush had traced it, bore a crude, but unmistakable resemblance to a woman's face, with her hair streaming down touching the river's brink – and to the poor, crazed brain it had been the end of a long search!
FIN
"The Mad Player" is the work of a man honing his craft as a storyteller; it's well-written, intriguing and, ultimately, most unsatisfying.

When the story appeared in The Canadian Magazine, Packard was labouring as a civil engineer; fortune and fame were still in the future. That said, 1911 did see the publication of On the Iron at Big Cloud, his very first book.



Though Thomas Y. Crowell, Packard's publisher, didn't advertise in this magazine, a whole lot of houses did. Macmillan, Cassell & Co., William Briggs, Oxford University Press, the Upper Canada Tract Society and Copp, Clark all took out full page adverts, only to be overwhelmed by a pink, four-page spread for the brand new Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica.

I ask, who wouldn't want to be met like this on Christmas morn?


28 November 2011

The Fugitive Bertrand W. Sinclair



Following Friday's post...

A couple of months ago, Vancouver's Ronsdale Press reissued The Inverted Pyramid, thus becoming the first Canadian house to in over eight decades to publish Bertrand W. Sinclair. Their choice was apt, I think. Sinclair didn't think of the novel as his best work – that would be Poor Man's Rock (1920) – but, as dedicated biographer Betty Keller tells us in Pender Harbour Cowboy, he'd hoped to be remembered for this "literary" novel.

First published in January of 1924 by Little, Brown, like The Hidden Places, The Inverted Pyramid is touched by the Great War. It tells the story of brothers Rod and Grove Norquay, and their divergent dreams for a family fortune that had been built on BC timber. Ronsdale describes the book as having been "a best-seller". An imprecise term to be sure, but still I can't agree. Back in 1923, Little, Brown had become so certain that the book would not be a best-seller that it sought to avoid the competitive Christmas market by postponing publication until the new year. There was no second printing, though A.L. Burt did produce one of its cheap editions. One could dismiss the relatively low sales as self-fulfilling prophecy – Little, Brown chose not to advertise the book – but evidence points to an overall lack of interest in this new, higher-brow Sinclair. Despite strong reviews, The Inverted Pyramid became the one novel that his agent failed place as a serialization.

"The Inverted Pyramid's poor showing in the bookstores had made him cautious about returning to literary novels in a hurry", writes Keller. "He opted to play it safe..." This meant falling back on pulp magazines – wells from which he drew until the 'forties, when they began to run dry.

It's interesting to consider that Sinclair's books, all novels, represent nothing more than a small percentage of his work. The pulps published over two hundred of his short stories; one encounters them from time to time in anthologies like Best Mounted Police Stories and Vancouver Short Stories, but they otherwise remain in the forgotten past.


Reading Betty Keller's very fine biography, one can't help but wish for a collection of Sinclair's stories. Let's not let another eight decades pass.