Alpha, Beta and Other Crap Sold by Amazon

Corporate greed knows no bounds beyond those imposed by prostate government ministers. Anyone seeking evidence should look no further than the feculence being spewed upon us all by VDM Publishing. Located in the publishing hotbed of Saarbrücken, Germany (pop. 176,000), VDM publishes no original material; for the most part, its writers (unwitting) are the selfless souls who contribute to Wikipedia. The free encyclopedia's entry on Malaysia's South Klang Valley Expressway can be yours through VDM and Amazon for US$146.39. 

If this all seems somehow familiar, its because I've written about VDM, Alphascript, Betascript and its 76 other imprints before... back in 2011 and 2012. I thought then that I was taking shots at a sinking ship. Amazon, through which the company sells nearly all its stuff, seemed ready to "retire" their titles. At least that's what they'd told a disgruntled customer back in 2010 – but you know how slowly things move on the internet.

Consider this my 2013 post. The proliferation of titles aside – the Betascript imprint alone now offers more than 319,000 – there's really nothing new to report. That said, I must acknowledge the debate raging over something in Moscow called "Bookvika". Are they part of VDM or are they an imitator? Because, really, who wouldn't want to follow VDM's business model. 

Recognizing that Bookvika is a 2500-kilometre drive from Saarbrücken, I feel pretty confident in my belief that it falls under the proud VDM corporate umbrella. I cite as evidence the tag found on the cover of Mordecai Richler – "High Quality  Content by [sic] WIKIPEDIA articles" – which is identical to that found on VDM titles. And should we not recognize Jesse Russell and Ronald Cohn, whose names grace tens of thousands of titles?

That Isaac Asimov, what a piker.

Russell and Cohn's Mordecai Richler is worthy of special attention, if only for its odd cover. I must admit, I've never associated the man's name or his writing with China or the Chinese. On the other hand, VDM uses the very same image in hoovering up, bagging and selling entries relating to Pierre Elliott Trudeau... and in 1970 the late Prime Minister did open relations with China. So there you go.

Forget politics, never mind history, being a bookish fellow I'm most interested in VDM's CanLit titles.    

"Scratch an actor and you'll find an actress," opined Dorothy Parker. Here we have former thespian Robertson Davies, the man who gave us the Deptford Trilogy, as attractive sorority girl:

There's more gender-bending with Marie-Claire Blais... 

but, oddly, not with Michel Tremblay, whose work is populated by transvestites and drag queens. Instead, VDM's Bookvika imprint presents the celebrated separatist as a staunch federalist.

More weirdness comes with their book on Gabrielle Roy – thirty years dead – which features the laptop she used when writing Bonheur d'occassion and La Petite Poule d'Eau.

Having devoted six or so years of my life – my wife insists the number is ten – to writing a biography of poet John Glassco, it was this title that interested me more than any other:

Amazon sells Alphascript's 18-page John Glassco for $53.00. Buy it and you'll find not only the man's Wikipedia entry, but others on McGill University (which he attended), James Joyce (whom he likely never met), Ernest Hemingway (ditto), Gertrude Stein (ditto) and Alice B. Toklas (ditto). You'll  also find my name because some kind Wikipedian saw fit to cite A Gentleman of Pleasure, my 398-page biography. A McGill-Queen's University Press publication, Amazon is selling the hardcover first edition for $25.17.

Order four and I'll have earned enough in royalties to buy you a beer.

Related posts:

Alpha, Beta, Dada

POD Cover of the Month: Special Montreal Edition

A Not So Nice Place to Visit

The Sin Sniper

Hugh Garner

Richmond Hill, ON: Pocket Books, 1970

From the back cover:

So what's he doing writing a cheap paperback original?

The answer is going full circle and then some – past Storm Below, his 1949 hardcover debut, to Waste No Tears(1950), Cabbagetown (1950) and Present Reckoning (1951). Paperback originals all, the latter three brought more money than would've been garnered – sorry – through higher literary endeavours. It's true that Storm Below did the author well, but not in an immediate sense. A man needs to eat... and drink.

Garner's seventh novel, The Sin Sniper landed just months after his sixth, A Nice Place to Visit (1970). It enjoyed a higher print run, more editions, and as Stone Cold Dead, would eventually be adapted for the screen in a film starring Richard Crenna, Paul Williams and Linda Sorensen.



Robert Fulford, who had a certain respect for Garner, was none too impressed. Writing in the Ottawa Citizen (5 November 1971), he dismissed The Sin Sniper as "close to being dreadful", adding "one was left with a nothing but baffling sense of being told to go left on Sumach, or right on Dundas, or left on Parliament."

I see what he means. This is the novel's opening paragraph:

Detective Inspector Walter McDurmont of the Metropolitan Toronto Police homicide squad jockeyed his three-year-old Galaxie along Dundas Street East in the morning rush-hour traffic. He crossed the Don River over the Dundas Street bridge, swung left down River Street, made a right turn at Shuter, and stopped when confronted with the raised stop-sign of the school crossing guard at Sumach Street, near Park Public School.

Lest you get lost, the book features a map that looks to have been ripped from a city directory.

Garner's setting is Toronto's Moss Park neighbourhood. The premise is found in the title: a sniper is murdering prostitutes. First to die is Claudia Grissom, whose snow-covered body is found early one morning near the corner of Shuter and Jarvis. Bernice Carnival is shot the next day (Dundas Street, one block from the Dainty Dot, just the other side of Church).

Those looking for a good mystery will be disappointed. There's little detective work here; McDurmont banks pretty much everything on catching the sniper in the act. While he comes to focus the investigation on three suspects, one of whom proves to be the sniper, nothing is provided that might justify the decision.

What saves The Sin Sniper is that the characters driving and walking through the streets of Toronto, turning left and veering right, are real people moving between real places. I'm not suggesting that this is a roman à clef, but I'm certain that Garner, a self-confessed alcoholic, drew heavily on the folks he met in drinking establishments, just as I'm certain that the drinking establishments in the novel would be recognizable to Torontonians of a certain age.

A Torotontonian of a certain age himself, Robert Fulford would know much better than I just how true the novel is to the people and places of Moss Park. I enjoyed the tour as much as the encounters. Fulford concludes his dismissal of The Sin Sniper by writing that the only mystery about the book is that it was published. To me, the answer is obvious: Money. Pocket Books recognized this, as did Paperjacks with their reissue, as did the investors in Stone Cold Dead.

Meanwhile, we're still awaiting the screen adaptation of Storm Below.

Money.

Trivia: Set in 1965, the climax of the novel takes place the same day as the Mersey Mops (read: The Beatles) play Maple Leaf Gardens. Garner moves the concert from the summer to the winter.

Outside the Beatles' 19 August 1965 concert, Maple Leaf Gardens, Toronto.

More trivia: Stone Cold Dead was written and directed by George Mendeluk, who would the next year take on Charles Templeton's The Kidnapping of the President.

Object: I bought my copy for $3.95 this past February 23rd, the day after what would have been Garner's hundredth birthday. A first edition, it features this misleading notice:

Access: Well represented in our university libraries. Decent copies of the first edition are plentiful and begin at $6.00. The 1978 movie tie-in, as Stone Cold Dead, is less common but just as cheap.

From Femme Fatale to Dewy-eyed Dame

Pagan
Jack Romaine [pseud. Tedd Steele]
Toronto: News Stand Library, 1949

The Pagans
Jack Benedict [pseud. Tedd Steele]
Toronto: News Stand Library, 1949

Time has come to reveal my envy of our early paperback writers. Money was good, work was easy, and as all evidence indicates, some publishers were prepared to print pretty much anything.

Consider Pagan, which News Stand Library published twice, under two different titles and pseudonyms, in July and August of 1949. My twelfth NSL read, Pagan/The Pagans is by far the weakest. In a list that includes The Penthouse Killings and Artists, Models and Murder, it stands out as particularly inept.

That Steele was an editor at Export Publishing likely explains much about the quality of this and other books issued under the NSL imprint. How much is anyone's guess. I'm willing to bet good money that he had something to do with this highly misleading cover copy:

“They” don’t pick Carl Chantrey up in a bar, rather he’s brought home by Marcia Havilland. A wealthy femme fatale who delights in treating men to one night of passion – but nothing more. Such is her body or technique or something that past paramours follow like puppies hoping for more teat or treats or something. More than a few have ended up at Marcia’s Satyr Lake villa, where they live off largesse that comes courtesy of an inheritance left by her mother.

Here I mention that Marcia’s father owns a struggling pharmaceutical company. And now, in homage to the novel's structure, I'll say no more about this until the end of the review.

Back to Carl. The “fledgling alcoholic” concert pianist passes out before Marcia can have her way. She hunts him down the next day and, removing her bikini, seduces him by the "amber pool":

   "Good Lord your [sic] beautiful, Marcia."
   His sentence was prematurely punctuated by the pressure of her lips against his and her body against his and once more he knew nothing but a shaking urge of ecstatic excitement. She was in his arms, eager, insisting.
   The little golden chipmunk looked down from his perch on the tree above and scolded vigorously.

Cover copy has it that the encounter "shook Carl to his soul", but it's Marcia who was most affected by the good vibrations. Owing to his body or technique or something – it can't be his personality – she falls in love with Carl and becomes all clingy and smoochy and stuff.

Marcia may be a babe, but she's certainly not “a breath-taking [sic] beautiful pagan queen”. And she can't be a “condoner of all the unbridled paganism that was practiced at her villa", because there is none. Pagan has nothing to do with religion or ritual, unless one counts end of day tipple.

On his second evening at Satyr Lake, Carl sneaks away as Marcia sleeps, and dodging bullets fired by the local police, manages to hop a train. Feeling abandoned, the former femme fatale is comforted by horsewoman friend Evelyn, whose wandering hands and words follow the finest lesbian pulp tradition:

"Yes, Marcia. I love you... don't go away from me... please... you'll understand... it's not evil... men are brutes they don't know... please Marcia... honey... you'll never worry about a man again."

Not evil? Oh, c'mon, Evelyn, we know it's your breast that has "a strange and evil passion burning fiercely within", and that this is meant to be the "Shocking Climax" sold on the front cover.

But there is no climax.

Horrified and disgusted, Marcia kicks Evelyn out of her bed and Carl returns on the next train.

Remember that pharmaceutical company that belongs to Marcia's father? Seems it was about to go under, taking Marcia's investments with it. Carl wasn't running from Marcia at Satyr Lake, rather he was running to his uncle, Senator Thomas Chantrey, in Washington. After Carl explains the situation, adding that he plans to marry Marcia, Uncle Tom awards the troubled company a large government contract.

Information comes fast and furious and the pace fairly exhausts the reader. It's been just two days since Carl was picked up in that bar and even he has trouble catching his breath:

And he doesn't... at least not in the novel's three remaining sentences.

It's a shame that it all ends so soon. Who knows what Day Three would've brought. We might have learned the reason the police were shooting at Carl – or why they ignored his return. A corrupt senator's influence perhaps?

But, you see, we've reached page 160 – and as Tedd Steele could tell you, no NSL book lasts longer than 160 pages.

Object and Access: Poorly produced mass market paperbacks, Pagan and The Pagans achieved just one printing each. While WorldCat shows no copies of Pagan, the University of Toronto's Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library has a lone copy of The Pagans. That's it. The good news is that there are currently four copies of The Pagans listed for sale online, beginning at US$7.50.

Pauline Johnson: 100 Years

E. Pauline Johnson
10 March 1861 - 7 March 1913
RIP

from Flint and Feather: The Complete Poems of E. Pauline Johnson
(Toronto: Musson, 1912)