Jalna's Dirty Little Secret Exposed! (Part I)

The Secret of Jalna

Ronald Hambleton

Toronto: PaperJacks, 1972

175 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

Biblioasis, Amazon, Chapters/Indigo, and McNally-Robinson.

Related posts:

Jalna's Dirty LIttle Secret Exposed! (Part II)

The Pan Jalna (and the Careering Jalnawagon)

Max Braithwaite's Bawdy Book

Humorist Max Braithwaite was born one hundred years ago today in Nokomis, Saskatchewan. His Why Shoot the Teacher was one of the very first Canadian novels I ever read... and the 1977 film adaptation, starring Bud Cort, is a favourite.

So why is it that I haven't so much as picked up another Braithwaite novel?

The titles have something to do with it. The Night We Stole the Mountie's Car and The Commodore's Barge is Alongside gave off a folksy ring that had me covering my ears.

McClelland and Stewart's cover treatments neutered titillating titles...

...or rendered them dull and humourless.

So I passed on his books, offered in plenty at garage sales, thrift shops, and church bazaars, until last week I happened upon this, the one Braithwaite novel McClelland and Stewart did not publish:

Not bought at a church bazaar.

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

Biblioasis, Amazon, Chapters/Indigo, and McNally-Robinson.

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.