One Last Time in Montreal

A Dum-Dum for the President
Martin Brett [pseud. Douglas Sanderson]
London: Hammond, 1961

Depending on how you want to look at it, A Dum-Dum for the President is the third or fourth Mike Garfin mystery. Either way, it's an unexpected return. The last we saw of the private investigator was in The Darker Traffic (1954), though a fairly strong case can be made that he reappears as "Bill Yates" in The Deadly Dames (1956). In the years since, it seemed that Sanderson had not only left  Garfin, but his beloved Montreal behind. The city that provides the setting for five of the novelist's first seven novels, receives not so much as a mention in the nine that followed.

Nine novels, five years, and no Montreal... then came A Dum-Dum for the President. It has all the elements of a typical Mike Garfin novel: a hot female, a high body count and more than a few digs at the city's wealthiest. As in the dick's previous adventures, there is a stench of homophobia, tempered somewhat by Garfin's man crush:

He was middle aged, medium eight, broad as an ox and had hands like a stevedore. One finger wore a conspicuous gold ring in the shape of a South American Indian head that must have weighed a quarter of a pound but on him did not look flashy. Patent slippers, good quality trousers, a white silk stock at his neck, a blue-silk dressing gown with the monogram M.B. on the breast pocket. His eyes were the color of chestnut peel. There was no trace of grey in his curly black hair. He was powerful in every sense of the word and damn near overwhelmed me.

This man, who Garfin tells us "radiated power like heat coming from an open furnace", is Manuel Bordera. A deposed Latin American dictator, he hides under an assumed name in a Mount Royal mansion, planning his next coup d'état. Such is the crush that Garfin all too readily sides with loyalists who counter that the stories of torture, murder and corruption are nothing but lies. Before you judge our dick, consider those chestnut peel-coloured irises:

His eyes glowed warm with buddy-buddy friendship. It was like undergoing invisible heat. I almost spread my arms and burst into blossom.

A Dum-Dum for the President is no love that dare not speak its name story. The relationship between dick and dictator is purely professional, with Bordera hiring our hero to hold a key that may or may not free $100 million. The first hint that things are beginning to go awry comes when Garfin arrives home to find the cops looking over a corpse in the nearby alleyway. My own detective work places the dead man a block or so from Chalet Bar-B-Q.

There's violence. Unpleasantness, such unpleasantness. Sentences are short. Talk is cheap. Longer passages bring things like this:

He was on his back. I knelt before him. Fat flakes of snow drifted down between the trees and melted on his face. His head was to one side. His mouth gaped in idiocy. The porcelain caps had been shattered by a smack in the face and the grinning tooth-stumps made him look like a circus clown playing a joke.

Une image forte, it's one of many in what becomes an increasingly fast-paced and messy investigation. The final scene brings clarity from chaos, and features some of Sanderson's very best writing. Any disappointment comes from the sad fact that Garfin's girlfriend Tessie, the best character in the series, is gone. The last we see of the private investigator he's alone, walking in the snow toward a cabin outside Mont Tremblant. It's a sad, yet appropriate end to not only Garfin but Montreal's post-war noir.

The Wisdom of Mike Garfin:

The man tired of a Canadian autumn is tired of life.

Object: The cover image above belongs to the 1961 Hammond first edition. As is so often the case, the scene depicted does not take place in the book.

Published 45 years later, my copy of the novel – a Stark House Mystery Classic – comes coupled with The Deadly Dames. It features an Introduction by Kevin Burton Smith, and an interview with the late author.

Access: It's been years since I've seen a copy of the Hammond edition offered online. While the Stark House edition is happily in print, there is no Canadian distributor. I bought my copy down south.

If WorldCat is anything to go by, only one Canadian library – the Robarts at the University of Toronto – has the first edition. All our libraries fail when it comes to the Stark House edition. Bibliothèques de Montréal take note.

A French translation, Estocade au Canada, was published in 1961 by Gallimard. There's not a copy to be found in any Canadian library.

Related posts:

Of Sex and Drugs and Montreal

Dark Blondes

A Dick's Deadly Dames

Gloria Swanson's Subway Scene

A follow-up to Friday's post on Manhandled:

Time was you could see the classic silent film online. No more. At some point last week it was pulled from YouTube. The short segment above has somehow escaped notice. Here is Gloria Swanson's comedic genius in full flight under the direction of Toronto boy Allan Dwan.

Dwan is neglected in this country, but not in the United States. Next month – for the second time – the director will be recognized with an exhibition at New York's Museum of Modern Art. This year's retrospective, Allan Dwan and the Rise and Decline of the Hollywood Studios, draws its title from a new biography by Frederic Lombardi.

Manhandled will screen on June 15 and 16. Buy a ticket and you'll see Swanson's take on Chaplin's Little Tramp – a full quarter-century before she reprised the role in Sunset Boulevard.

For now, take a peek at the clip above. One of the funniest moments in the history of silent film begins at 1:06. You'll not find it in Arthur Stringer's original story, or in the photoplay novel; credit belongs entirely to Dwan and Swanson.

Lombardi provides a good amount of detail on how it came to be, but it would be spoiling things to share it here.

See the movie. Read the book.

Related post:

Gloria Gets Groped

Peregrine Acland: Fifty Years

Peregrine Palmer Acland

15 May 1891 - 11 May 1963

RIP

The Globe & Mail, 13 May 1963

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Alec Falcon, c'est moi

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Canada's Great War Novelists: Peregrine Acland

A Neglected Novelist's Neglected Grave

The Great Canadian Great War Novel

Gloria Gets Groped

Manhandled
Arthur Stringer and Russell Holman
London: Readers Library, [n.d]

Manhandled
Arthur Stringer and Russell Holman
New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1924 

Manhandled gives good example as to why it is that Arthur Stringer is so frowned upon by CanLit academics. It sprang not from the lush farmland that surrounds Chatham and London, Ontario, his duelling hometowns, but the offices of Famous Players-Lasky in downtown Manhattan. General Sales Manager Sidney R. Kent came up with the idea, Stringer was hired to add flesh, and then everything was passed on to screenwriter Frank Tuttle.

Our Ontarian was given $1000 for his efforts, along with the right to turn the tale into something of substance to sell to the glossies. The first the world saw of Manhandled appeared as a 26,000-word short story in the March 22 and 29 issues of The Saturday Evening Post. This novel is that short story, expanded by Russell Holman, a writer who had a talent for turning American silents into entertaining text.

Manhandled is a Gloria Swanson vehicle, written long before the word had ever been used in that sense. It tells the story of Tess McGuire, the orphaned daughter of a comedic vaudeville team, beginning with her childhood in Marysville, a picturesque, perfect New England town found only in popular fiction. Though raised by a cautious, conservative spinster aunt – think latter-day Marilla Cuthbert – Tess grows to become a beautiful, adventurous young woman who looks to live a life in the visual or dramatic arts. That pursuit takes her to New York, where she rents a room in the very same house as high school sweetheart Jim.

Now, don't you go spreading gossip; the most that happens between the two is a fleeting kiss. Jimmy aches to make Tess his wife, while she keeps putting him off :

"I wouldn't be satisfied with what you can give me – yet. I may be selfish, but it's better that I should tell you how I feel about it. It'll save us both a lot of pain."

Harsh.

Tess wants to make it on Broadway, but doesn't really try. After her one and only attempt at getting an agent, she accepts a job selling "soiled" lingerie in the bargain basement of Thorndyke's. Tess may be a subterranean shopgirl, but such is her beauty that she's soon drinking hootch with such well-known figures as artist Robert Brandt, Wall Street banker Luther Swett, bestselling author Carl Garretson and, of course, department store heir Chip Thorndyke.

As Jim, the rube boyfriend, works nights on a carburetor that might one day make him rich, Tess is wined, dined, danced and driven on innumerable automobile trips by men with wandering eyes and busy hands. Her only acting gig comes by accident, the result of imitating an exiled Russian aristocrat at a drunken party. A week later, passing herself off as countess "Madam Patovska", she's playing hostess, pouring tea at Manhattan's most exclusive dress shop.

Tess is forced to defend herself to Jim:

"Will you tell me what the successes in this town are founded on? As I begin to see it, they're founded on bluff. It's the best window-dresser that gets by. Ten chances to one your boss is getting by on the very same game. I know mine is. The mayor probably is. The lawyers and bankers and swells and business men certainly are. So, why shouldn't I do my little share of it?"

Garretson, "the jitney George Moore", is more understanding. "The forest is too thick for you to see the trees", he tells Tess. "But you're on your way through. And sellers in a brisk market don't stop to wash mud from their tulips."

Tess doesn't get it. She will... and we know she will. Sidney R. Kent's simple idea was to bring an oft-told story, that of a country girl at risk of being corrupted by the big city, to a new medium. His greatest contribution was a title that was sure to sell. CanLit academics will point out that it was a brisk market.

Trivia: Early in the novel, Tess goes to see a Gloria Swanson film and is manhandled:

Tess would've enjoyed the picture, a Gloria Swanson society-drama, and shared Claire's raputurous remarks about the star's elaborate wardrobe, had Walter Hovey kept his obtrusive knees and his wandering hands more to himself.

Object: A small hardcover in thin brown boards, the Readers Library edition is printed on newsprint. Though touted a "Film Edition", the only element having to do with the Swanson vehicle is the dust jacket. The Grosset and Dunlap edition, on the other hand, features a generous eight plates of promotional shots.

Access: The Grosset & Dunlap and Readers Library editions were joined by a Hutchinson hardcover in 1925. Copies of all three are available online from booksellers in the United Kingdom, the United States, Ireland and Belgium. At £3.20, the cheapest is a Good copy, sans jacket, of the Hutchinson edition. The most expensive - US$85 - is a Readers Library.

Nine of our university libraries have the Grosset & Dunlop edition, the University of Guelph has the Hutchinson, but no Canadian library has a copy of the Readers Library. Our public libraries, Library and Archives Canada included, have nothing at all.

Related post:

Gloria Swanson's Subway Scene