10 September 2018

The Dustiest Bookcase: I is for Irwin


Short pieces on books I've always meant to review (but haven't).
They're in storage as we build our new home.
Patience, please.

Kak, The Copper Eskimo
Vilhjalmur Stefanson and Violet Irwin
New York: Macmillan, 1924
253 pages

Yes, I is for Irwin... and not for Stefansson. My reason for buying this book has everything to do with her and nothing to do with him. To be honest, I'm not much interested in Kak, the Copper Eskimo – I bought it because I saw it. The Violet Irwin book I really want to read is her first novel, The Human Desire (Boston: Small, Maynard, 1913). I've never come across a copy and have never read a review. All I know about The Human Desire comes from advertisements for the 1919 Hollywood adaptation.


Silent films took great liberties with source material. I don't know how faithful Hollywood's 1919 Human Desire was to Irwin's novel, but I'm interested in finding out.

The McGill Daily
10 October 1919
I've seen dozens of films at The Imperial – my favourites being The King of Comedy and After Hours – sadly, I was seven decades too late for Human Desire.

Fun fact: Kak, the Copper Eskimo was never adopted by Hollywood, but it was translated into Yiddish: Ḳeḳ - der ḳleyner esḳimos (Ṿilne : Naye yidishe shul, 1939). The only copy of which I know is held in New York at the Yivo Institute for Jewish Research.

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04 September 2018

Familiar to Hundreds (including Mike Myers?)



Doors of the Night
Frank L. Packard
Toronto: Copp Clark, 1922
297 pages

The hero of this novel is a young man named Billy Kane. Raised a son of wealth – or so he thought – on the death of his father Billy learns that the family fortune has been long since spent. Happily, he secures a position as personal secretary to David Ellsworth, a known collector of rubies and one of Manhattan's richest men. Billy enjoys his work, but is concerned about his employer's generosity toward the less fortunate. It isn't that Billy doesn't believe in charity, rather that he's suspicious about those to whom Ellsworth gives money. Antonio Lavarto is a case in point:
The man was a pitiful looking object enough – one of those mendicants commonly designated in the vernacular as a "flopper." His legs were twisted under him in contorted angles at the knees, and his means of locomotion consisted in lifting himself up on the palms of his hands and swaying himself painfully along a foot or so at a time.
Despite his best efforts, Billy hasn't been able to get anything on Laverto... that is, until the night Ellsworth asks him to deliver a gift of $2000 to the flopper's flat. Billy finds evidence that Laverto is indeed a fraud, but doesn't feel all that good about it; Ellsworth likes to think the best of people, and there's no pleasure to be found in proving the old man wrong.

Billy never has an opportunity to tell his employer about Lavarto. He returns from his errand to find Ellsworth has been murdered, the
ruby collection gone, and that he, Billy Kane, has been framed. Billy manages to elude the awaiting lawmen, but is shot in his escape. On the run, losing blood, he's mistaken for Bundy Morgan, alias the Rat, a kingpin of the criminal underworld. He regains his strength, then sets the Rat's gang off in search of the missing rubies. Billy's thinking is that in solving the Ellsworth murder and the mystery of the missing gems he will be able to clear his name. However, his plan is complicated by the appearance of a mysterious "Woman in Black," who seems to have something over the Rat. This means Billy must bend to her will.

What does she want?

She wants him to fight crime, of course.

Readers of Packard will find much of this familiar. Let's begin with Billy Kane, a name that bears some similarity to Jimmie Dale, alias the Gray Seal, the author's greatest hero. Like Billy, Jimmie was raised in comfort. Both take on the personas of disreputable men. Billy becomes a crimefighter because he's blackmailed by a mysterious woman, as is Jimmie.  Even the flopper, a minor character, is familiar.


The first flopper I've ever encountered was in Packard's 1911 novel The Miracle Man. Like Lavarto, he's a fraud who only pretends to be "crippled." Played by Lon Cheney in the film adaptation, this earlier flopper is so great a character that he's mentioned on the cover of the Hodder & Stoughton paper edition:


H&S used the "Good it's a PACKARD [sic]" tag on several of its reissues. And why not? Packard was remarkably consistent. The bulk of his literary output has New York as a setting. It's a city with an underworld the Montrealer knew well, thanks in part to the NYPD, who allowed him to accompany them on raids. Manhattan is invariably divided into luxurious mansions of men like poor David Ellsworth and the squalor of rag shops, opium dens, dive bars, and cramped tenements in which members of the criminal class reign. In Doors of the Night they have names like Gypsy Joe, Red Vallon, Shaky Liz, the Cadger, and Whitey Jack.

"Good it's a PACKARD."

Doors of the Night is as good a place as any other to start reading Packard. This alone speaks to his talent.

Trivia: The most clever of all criminal schemes involves a character known as the Cherub, who spends two weeks pretending to be the grandson of a Shaky Liz. On the evening when the crime is to be committed, he has this to say:


I'd thought that diss originated with Wayne's World. Apparently not.

Trivia II: The quote on the cover of the the H&S paper edition of The Miracle Man doesn't appear in the novel, though something very similar is said by Helena to "gentleman crook and high- class, polished con-man" Doc Madison:
"Doc," she said, "it – it isn’t fair. It’s a shame – he can’t fight back."

Object and Access: A 297-page hardcover, mine is a copy of the first (and only) Canadian edition. It was purchased six years ago at London's Attic Books. Price: $10. Like Copp Clark's, the first American edition (Doran) and first British edition (Hodder & Stoughton) were also published in 1922. A cheap A.L. Burt edition followed. The last Doors of the Night saw print in the US was in 1931 as one of the Gray Seal editions (above) published by Doubleday Doran. The Hodder & Stoughton paper edition appears to date from about the same time.

Doors of the Night first appeared as a serial in The Popular Magazine (20 September - 7 December 1918).


The novel is held in one edition or another by Library and Archives Canada and twenty-two of our academic libraries.

Fifteen copies are listed for sale online, ranging from US$5.23 (a Fair A.L. Burt copy w/o jacket) to US$110.00 (a Very Good Doran 1st).

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01 September 2018

Words on Writing for a Labour Day Weekend


Bookseller & Stationer, February 1910
A brief passage from H.A. Cody's 1933 novel The Girl at Bullet Lake. Here Augustus Rockbridge, editor of the Pretensia Daily Echo tells his wife about contributor Robert Rutledge:
"He is a clever writer, and we have used several of his articles. They have been most favorably received and copied by other papers. But confound him, he had the impudence to ask me to pay for his stuff."
     "He did! Isn't that unusual?"
     "Quite. To have his articles published in the Echo should be pay enough. It gives a young writer a publicity he could not otherwise obtain."
Plus ça change...



27 August 2018

The Dustiest Bookcase: H pour Harvey


Short pieces on books I've always meant to review (but haven't).
They're in storage as we build our new home.
Patience, please.

Pourquoi je suis antiséparatiste
Jean-Charles Harvey
Montreal: Éditions de l'Homme, 1962
123 pages

Last year's Dusty Bookcase Best Books in Review ended with a series of resolutions, one of which was to read more books by French language authors. The bar was set very low. I read only one in 2017 – Roger Lemelin's Pierre le magnifique – and that was in translation.

I admit I sometimes find reading books in the original French a struggle, but this is not to say the effort doesn't pay off. Similia Similibus, Le Nom dans le bronze, Erres boréales, and Fermez la porte, on gèle are four favourite books covered in this blog.

I've had the luxury of reading Jean-Charles Harvey in translation. His second novel, Les Demi-civilisés, has twice appeared in English-language editions: Sackcloth for Banner by Lukin Barette and Fear's Folly by John Glassco.

That's it.

Harvey published eighteen other books during his lifetime, but not one has been translated. I find this odd in that he wasn't unknown amongst English-speaking Canadians. Harvey spoke to audiences across the country. His opinion pieces appeared – translated, I'm guessing – in the Maclean's and the Globe & Mail.

The Globe & Mail
10 January 1944
A light in the darkness of Maurice Duplessis' Quebec, Jean Paré dubbed him "bootlegger d'intelligence en période de prohibition." To Pierre Chalout, he was "grand-père de la révolution tranquille." I was born in the midst of that revolution... a revolution for which he had fought and risked everything.

I've read all Harvey's novels: Marcel Faure, Les Demi-civilisés, Les Paradis de sable, and La Fille du silence, in French, but not his non-fiction. Pourquoi je suis antiséparatiste appeared near the end of his seventy-five years. Even at the time, it must have seemed an inadvisable career move. But then Harvey was never one to stand down; Les Demi-civilisés, is proof enough of that.

He was a great man to whom I owe a great deal.

All Quebecers do.

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