Cruising Toward Cannibals with Grant Allen

The Cruise of the Albatross;
   or, When was Wednesday the Tenth?
Grant Allen
Boston: Lothrop, 1898

I've never bothered with the stories in The Boy's Own Annual – the pictures are more than enough fun – but I imagine they read something like this very slight Grant Allen novella. Cannibals, slave traders and a powerful thirty-pound brass gun are just a few of its many attractions.

The Cruise of the Albatross begins aboard same with the sighting of a small boat bobbing in the Pacific Ocean.  Ship's captain Julian Braithwaite sets out for the lesser vessel and finds "two white-faced lads, apparently twelve or thirteen years old, dressed in loose blue cotton shirts and European trousers". The pair cling to life, but manage to convey that their missionary parents and siblings are captives of cannibals on the far off island of Tanaki. Barring an act of divine providence or earthly daring-do, all will feature in a feast to take place on "Wednesday the tenth".

Julian is a good man – he once risked his life to free forty or so kanakas from slavery – so it comes as no surprise when he sets course to save the boys' parents. The captain's brother figures they'll arrive just in time:

Jim took out a piece of paper and totted up a few figures carelessly on the back. "We've plenty of coal," he said, "and I reckon we can make nine knots an hour, if comes to a push, even against this head wind. To-day's the sixth; that gives us four clear days still to the good. At nine knots, we can do a run of two hundred and thirty-six knots a day. Four two-hundred-and-thirty-sixes is nine hundred and forty-four, isn't it? Let me see; four sixes is twenty-four, put down four and carry two; four three's is twelve, and two's fourteen; four three's is twelve, and four two's - year that's all right: nine hundred and forty-four, you see, exactly. Well, then look here Julian: unless Tanaki's further off than nine hundred and forty-four nautical miles, - which isn't likely – we ought to be there by twelve o'clock Wednesday, at latest.

Anyone familiar with adventure stories will recognize Jim's calculations as more than mere filler. Time is not only of the essence, it is central to both plot and plot twist. When Was Wednesday the Tenth? – the alternate title – gives away something of the latter. I'll go a bit further and spoil things for the well-read by revealing that the story's twist owes everything to Around the World in Eighty Days.

This is a late Victorian story, complete with heavy, politically incorrect steamer trunks and other musty baggage. Thus, Allen writes about the sensitive European nostril and sharp Polynesian eyes. When ship's boy Nassaline, speculates that the two boys had run away because they feared being eaten by their own kind, Julian responds:

It's my belief, Nassaline, we'll never make a civilized Christian creature of you, in a tall hat, and with a glass in your eye. You ain't cut out for it, somehow. How many times have I explained to you, boy, that Christians never cook and eat their enemies ? They only love them, and blow them up with Gatlinojs or Armstronos – a purely fraternal method of expressing slight differences of international opinion....  

I omitted to have remarked to him (as I might have done) that I hadn't seen such a painful sight before, since I saw the inhabitants of a French village in Lorraine – old men, young girls, and mothers with babies pressed against their breasts – flying, pell-mell, before the sudden onslaught of a hundred and fifty Christian Prussian Uhlans. These little peculiarities of our advanced civilization are best not mentioned to the heathen Polynesian.

Now, I find myself wondering. Would a passage such as this have made it into The Boys' Own Annual, a publication of the Religious Tract Society?

Object: An attractive, slim hardcover in olive green cloth, my copy was purchased for $20 last month from a London, Ontario bookseller. The front free endpaper is signed and dated by a Marion Allen. I've not been able to determine whether this lady was in any related to the author.

Access: Held by most universities, the public libraries serving Toronto and Kingston, the National Gallery of Canada Library, Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, but not Library and Archives Canada.

"An uncommon Allen title", claims one bookseller. Well... not really. More than three dozen can be bought online with Very Good copies going for under ten dollars. The print on demand folks have really moved in on this title, offering all sorts of ugliness at much higher prices.

'Death of D'Arcy McGee'

McGee Mausoleum

Cimetière Notre-Dame-des-Neiges, Montreal

A poem on the death of Thomas D'Arcy McGee, assassinated 144 years ago this morning.

from Verses and Rhymes by the Way

Nora Pembroke [pseud. Margaret Moran Dixon McDougall]

Pembroke, Ont.: S.E. Mitchell, 1880

Related posts:

'O Martyr'd McGee!'

D'Arcy McGee's Query (with a response)

D'Arcy McGee, All Compliment to Thee

'IN MEMORIAM! The Hon. T.D. McGee'

A Poet's Angry Word With the Fenian Brotherhood

Now that April's Here...

Spring has sprung and the thoughts of a middle aged man turn to work. Much of these past few months have been spent going through John Glassco's letters in preparation for a volume to be published this coming autumn.

More on that another day.

This morning, rereading correspondence between the poet and his old McGill friend Leon Edel, I was stuck – for the nth time – by their final exchanges. Glassco, not long for this world, continues to be haunted by a short story published a half-century earlier: Morley Callaghan's "Now that April's Here".

The story is one the writer's most anthologized, but I've never quite understood its weight; Callaghan had better than this. Its real value lies in it being a nouvelle à clef, with Glassco cast as Johnny Hill, a young, chinless expatriate who is writing his memoirs. Glassco's friend Graeme Taylor appears as Charles Milford, whom Johnny supports through a small monthly income. As portrayed by Callaghan, they're two gay boys who delight in snickering at others. Robert McAlmon makes an appearance as Stan Mason, a boozy writer who is hurt to discover that he is their chief target.

Graeme Taylor, John Glassco and Robert McAlmon, Nice, 1929

The story was first published in the Autumn 1929 number of This Quarter, by which time Callaghan had completed his "summer in Paris" and was safely back in Toronto. He never got to witness the effects the time bomb left behind in Montparnasse had on Glassco's friendship with McAlmon. Leon Edel came to Glassco's aid by dismissing the story in his "Paris Notes" column for the Montreal Daily Star. Late in life, after Glassco's death, he allowed that Callaghan's depiction of the "two boys" was accurate.

For Glassco, it was a story that just wouldn't go away. In 1936, he saw it given a place of prominence in Now that April's Here and Other Stories. It would return in Morley Callaghan's Stories (1959) and lives on in the man's misleadingly-titled Complete Stories (2003).

Then we have Now that April's Here, an odd 1958 feature comprised of four Callaghan short stories": “Silk Stockings”, “Rocking Chair”, “The Rejected One” and “A Sick Call”, but not the one that gives the film its title.

Now that April's Here enjoyed a gala opening in Toronto, closing after two weeks. After a few more runs through a projector in Hamilton, it was never screened again. Glassco was spared the distress of reading the title on Montreal movie marquees.

This seven minute clip, courtesy of YouTube, reveals why the film is forgotten:

Criterion will not be interested.

Cross-posted at A Gentleman of Pleasure.

A Dick's Deadly Dames

The Deadly Dames

Malcolm Douglas [pseud. Douglas Sanderson]

Greenwich, CT: Gold Medal, 1956

Douglas Sanderson's fifth novel, The Deadly Dames was the first to be published as a paperback original. Not quite the same as "straight to DVD", of course, but I don't think it's such a coincidence that this book is by far the weakest of the lot.

With The Deadly Dames we have a new publisher, a new nom de plume and a new hero. Sort of. That hero, Bill Yates, shares something with Mike Garfin, the protagonist of Sanderson's two preceding books: both are Montreal private investigators, both are the sons of French Canadian mothers and both have Scotch landladies.

As with Garfin's outings – Hot Freeze and The Darker Traffic – things start rolling when the private investigator is hired by someone of considerable wealth. In this case, the client is Philip Corday, a spoiled lush who hopes to get the goods that will allow him to divorce his cheating wife Grace. Yates has only just accepted the job when an expensively dressed woman tries to hire him away. Minutes later, she's crushed under the wheels of a streetcar rounding the corner of St Catherine and Peel. And so, what began as a bland divorce case takes a deadly turn. Pun intended.

St Catherine and Peel, Montreal, 1956

Mike doesn't stick around. No pun intended. Hoping of catch Grace and her lover, he heads north to the Corday country home. Things become complicated when he confuses the unfaithful wife with her beautiful older sister. Some PI.

Bodies pile up quickly in The Deadly Dames – nine corpses in 160 pages – but our man Yates is not one of them. Dozens of shots are fired in his direction, but none find their mark. He's beaten senseless repeatedly, but bounces back with superhuman speed. Not even a broken nose slows him down. Good thing too, because the action in this novel clocks in at well under 72 hours.

A lazy novel, the fast pace is provided by characters that exist for no other reason than to propel the plot. There's Corday's chatty Russian housekeeper, a talkative cop with an encyclopedic knowledge of Montreal's underworld and a rural hashslinger who likes nothing more than to listen to the police waveband. As for Yates, he's not so much Mike Garfin under a different name as a pale imitation. There's not much to him, and yet every woman, bar none, throws herself at him.

I lie.

There was that lady who was run over by the streetcar, but she never had a chance.

Worst sentence: "In that dress, in those surroundings, she looked like a poem that got printed by accident in an anthology of prose."

Object: A slim mass market paperback with vibrant cover image by Bob Peake, whose work graced this pretty pink book belonging to my mother:

Warner Brothers Presents My Fair Lady
New York: Warner Brothers Pictures, 1964

Access: The first edition enjoyed one lone printing. A handful are listed online, with decent copies gong for under ten dollars. I could find no library copies outside Ohio State University's William Charvet Collection of American Fiction. Yep, "American Fiction". The first British edition, published in 1961 by Consul, is both less attractive and less common. Two crummy copies are listed for sale online at £2 and £5.

Translated by Laurette Brunius, in 1956 Galimard published a French language edition titled Du Rebecca chez les femmes. The original features no character named Rebecca.

In 2006, a half century after the Gold Medal edition, The Deadly Dames was paired with Sanderson's next novel, A Dum-Dum for the President, and returned to print by the dedicated people at Stark House. The twofer is blessed with a very fine essay by expat Montreal critic Kevin Burton Smith, and an all too brief interview with the author. My copy, a second printing, was bought south of the border. The book is unavailable in Canada.