Ten Best Book Buys of 2020 (& Three Great Gifts)

In years to come – presuming they come – I expect I'll look upon this beat-up copy of Arthur Beverley Baxter's The Blower of Bubbles with great affection. I do now. Published in 1920 by McClelland & Stewart, the book is neither rare nor valuable, yet it is this year's most memorable find. It was purchased at the Bookworm in Perth, Ontario, not long after lockdown restrictions had been lifted. Three months had passed since I'd last visited a bookstore. After all that time, I'd have gladly paid for admission.

As might be expected, most of the books added to the bookcase this strange year were bought online. You'll see I was particularly drawn to signed copies – something to do with the daily reminders of mortality, I suppose.

What follows are the nine other titles in this year's top ten. 

An African Millionaire

Grant Allen
New York: Edward Arnold,

   1897

The first American edition, this isn't the best of copies – I am not a wealthy man – but at US$27.00 it was a great find. Responding to my review of Allen's The Woman Who Did, a friend suggested that An African Millionaire is the author's better-known book. Perhaps, but is it as good?

Mon cadavre au Canada

   [Hot Freeze]

Martin Brett [Douglas

   Sanderson; trans Bruno

   Martin]

Paris: Gallimard, 1955

The French translation of our greatest post-war noir novel. The story is abridged and Bruno Martin is clumsy, but that didn't stop me from also buying Estocade au Canada, his translation of Sanderson's A Dum-Dum for the President.

Pascal Berthiaume
Francis DesRoches

Quebec: Elite, 1932

A novel brought to my attention by Jean-Louis Lessard of Laurentiana. His review of this short novel of romance and small town politics intrigued. I was not disappointed!

Signed by the author.

Married, Yet No Wife;

   Or, Told in the Twilight
Mary Agnes Fleming

New York: Street &

   Smith, [c. 1916]

A fragile paperback published during the Wilson administration, it crumbles to the touch. The nineteenth-century Carleton editions hold up better, but I do like that cover. The title, which predates same-sex marriage in Canada by more than a century, intrigues.

PeeVee
Fred Jacob
Toronto: Macmillan, 1928

Bland boards, lacking dust jacket – please tell me one has survived – and still this ranks as one of my favourite finds. I've been meaning to read poor Fred Jacob for ages. The first sentence grabbed me: "In the Hortop family, innovation was looked upon as something to be combated."

The Twenty-first Burr
Victor Lauriston

Toronto: McClelland &

   Stewart, 1922

An early Canadian mystery, this is Lauriston's only novel. Amongst his other books are A Century of Milling, 1848-1948: the story of the T.H. Taylor Company Limited, Chatham, Ontario and Blue Flame of Service: A History of Union Gas Company and the Natural Gas Industry in Southwestern Ontario. Inscribed by the author.

Mine Inheritance
Frederick Niven
Toronto: Dent, 1945

Niven never had much of a profile, so how is it that Mine Inheritance, of which I'd never heard, was once abridged and edited as a school text? This copy, found in an Ottawa bookstore, came from the library of Henry C. Miller, founder of the legendary Graphic Publishers.

The Devastator
Arthur Stringer

Indianapolis: Bobbs-

   Merrill, 1944

The last of Stringer's forty-four novels, I purchased this on a whim, sight unseen, from an online bookseller located in author's birthplace (Chatham, Ontario). Hollywood figures, as it did in the life of the author. Will you look at that cover! Signed by Stringer!

Psyche
Phyllis Brett Young

Toronto: Longmans, 1959

The first edition of the author's first novel –  signed by the author, with a gift inscription from her mother – how this ended up in a Wallingford, Oxfordshire bookshop is anyone's guess. It has now been repatriated. I made the purchase while working on the Ricochet reissue of The Ravine, Phyllis Brett Young's only thriller.

Three generous souls sent books which, had they not been gifts, would have been considered amongst the year's best buys:

Dale of the Mounted:

   Atomic Plot
Joe Holliday

Toronto: Allen,

   [1959]

Of the fourteen Dale of the Mounted books, this is the one I'd most wanted to read. I mentioned as much when reviewing Dale of the Mounted: Atlantic Assignment. Chris Otto of Papergreat heard my wish.

CAW-CAW Ballads
Wilson MacDonald
Toronto: The Author, 1930

Number 449 in this "AUTHOR'S EDITION, WHICH IS LIMITED, NUMBERED AND AUTOGRAPHED." The poet inscribed this copy to Healey Willan. A gift from Fiona Smith, does this go in my MacDonald collection or my Willan collection? I can't decide!

 

The Private War of

   Jacket Coates
Herbert Fairly Wood
Toronto: Longmans,

   1966

A gift from old pal James Calhoun, who worked with me in returning Peregrine Acland's All Else is Folly to print. The Private War of Jacket Coates is Canada's only novel of the Korean War. How is it that there was only one? And why is he title so bad? I aim to find out.

There's more to my purchase of Arthur Beverley Baxter's The Blower of Bubbles. On that day I was in Perth for the celebration of the 101st birthday of André Hissink, my grandfather.

A man born in 1919, in the midst of the Spanish Flu pandemic, two months after his 101st birthday he came down with COVID-19... and he beat it.

Here's hoping I share those genes.

Here's hoping you all are safe and well.

Related posts:

The Twenty Best Book Buys of 2019
Best Book Buys of 2018 (four of which were gifts)
Ten Best Book Buys of 2017 (one of which was a gift)

The Ten Best Book Buys of a Very Bad Year (2016)

Ten of the Best; Spanking Good Book Buys of 2015

Done With Buying Books (2014)

Nazis Threaten from Beyond the Grave!

The Sleeping Bomb
James Moffatt
London: New English Library, 1970

125 pages

Jim used to say, "It's a business, it's the way I make my money, and I can live this way. I mean, people who write hardbacks can take a very, very long time to write them, which is very nice if you've got a good income behind you. Jim didn't have. I mean, he simply wrote to live, and he enjoyed doing it.

— Derry Moffatt, 1996 

The Sleeping Bomb appeared at news agents a few months after the author's pseudonymously published Skinhead. I wonder whether Moffatt knew by that time that he'd scored a smash hit. Skinhead was easily his biggest seller, spawning Suedehead (1971), Boot Boys (1972) Skinhead Escapes (1972) Skinhead Girls (1972), Top Gear Skin (1973) Trouble for Skinhead (1973) Skinhead Farewell (1974), and Dragon Skins (1975).

Even today, a half-century later, skinheads hold Skinhead and its sequels in high regard.

The Sleeping Bomb is a lesser work. Bereft of braces and Doc Martins, it begins on the other side of the pond – beneath the Hudson River, to be exact – with the discovery of a thirty-year-old one-man Nazi submarine during the construction of a new tunnel linking New York and New Jersey.

CIA agent Paul Henderson is assigned the case.

Why the CIA?

I have a theory – which is mine – that Moffatt knew he was out of his element when it came to responsibilities, jurisdictions, command structures, and the like. For this reason, he sets the novel in not-so-distant 1975, a year in which the armed forces of Canada, the United States, Mexican, and the United Kingdom fall under the centralized authority of the North Atlantic Defence Alliance. Intelligence agencies are being unified in a similar manner, which explains how Henderson ends up working under a Brit named Silas Manners

Not Silas Marner.

Not Miss Manners.

Because the sub is armed and booby-trapped, its hull cannot be breached. Dials, some broken, indicate that it contains a time bomb that is set to explode at some point in 1975. Whether government, intelligence or military, no one knows just  just what will happen, but everyone is sure it'll be really, really bad. 

The situation is so dire that I wondered why Henderson and Manner were left on their own to figure it all out. Restructuring, perhaps. As in any Richard Rohmer novel, the pair spend a good amount of time flying from place to place in an effort to get to the bottom of things. In their travels, they learn that the sub carries a "parasitic bomb" which will kill everyone within an area amounting to 250,000 square kilometres. 

The Americans published The Sleeping Bomb as The Cambri Plot. I mention this because because Cambri  – "Project Cambri" – is referenced a couple of times early in the novel.

Sure seems important. The ABC Movie of the Week President of the United States has a conniption when Paul Henderson let's slip that he's heard about it:

"WHAT!! Where did you hear that name, Henderson?"

   Paul wished to hell he'd kept his big mouth shut. "In General Herschfeld's office, sir. I overheard it when I paid a visit to him..."

   "Have you mentioned this to your colleagues?"

   "No, sir!"

   "Thank God!" The president's heavy breathing could be heard clearly.

Project Cambri involves rockets that can land on a pinprick. Their purpose is to carry documents and diplomats that might otherwise be intercepted by the Soviets.

That Project Cambri – note: not "The Cambri Plot" – is barely mentioned must have seemed strange to American readers. It vanishes in the early pages, only to reappear as the climax approaches. With three pages to go, I was interrupted by Kiefer, our nine-month-old Schnauzer. We played, and then went for a long walk.

As we made our way along our lonely rural road, I thought of everything that was wrong with the novel. I wondered whether visitors to East Germany were never searched. I tried to imagine Henderson piloting a locomotive across several hundred meters of railway ties, and then managing to get it back in the tracks.

Yeah, that happens.

More incredible was the Nazi plan, which involves planting a time bomb during the dying days of the Second World War and then waiting, waiting, waiting... The detonation, thirty years later, is intended to both bring about the reunification of a country that hadn't yet been divided and bring the world to its knees. Why not just set the bomb off in 1945? Why not kill millions and threaten millions more? Wouldn't that have brought the war to a sudden end? Wouldn't that have given Hitler the upper hand?

I'll never understand Nazis; James Moffatt's Nazis included.

Favourite passage: "CRAAAAASH! Wood splintered, flew in every direction. CRUUUUMP!"

Trivia I: New English Library's cover copy (below) was clearly written by someone who had not read the novel. The bomb would cover 250,000 square miles, not one thousand.

No neo-Nazis figure.             

Trivia II: Silas Manners reappears in Moffatt's Justice for a Dead Spy (London: New English Library, 1971).

Object: A slim, cheap mass market paperback. The novel itself is followed by three pages of adverts for other New English Library books.

Isn't this tempting!

Access: The Sleeping Bomb enjoyed one lone printing. Five copies are listed for sale online at prices ranging from £3.95 to £6.19. Condition isn't much of a factor.

The Cambri Plot was published in 1973 by Belmont Tower. Copies of that edition range from US$4.10 to US$55.42.

The novel last appeared as a Spanish translation, La Vengganza de Hitler, "una novela escalofriante," published in Mexico City in 1974 by Novaro.

Whether academic or public, not one copy of any is held by a Canadian library.

Related post:

The Queer Queen Kong

Just like a paperback novel...

Released fifty years ago this month. Always chokes me up.

If I could read your mind, love

What a tale your thoughts could tell

Just like a paperback novel

The kind the drugstore sells

When you reach the part where the heartaches come

The hero would be me

But heroes often fail

And you won't read that book again

Because the ending's just too hard to take

What to Do? What to Do?

The New Front Line

Hubert Evans

Toronto: Macmillan, 1927

291 pages

Hugh Henderson has returned from the Great War, but not to his Ontario home. During the conflict, his parents relocated to Vancouver, a city that seems nearly as foreign as those he encountered overseas. Now twenty-five, with four years of military service behind him, Hugh is expected to start in on a career. His parents have renewed their offer to "see him through" college, but Hugh doesn't think it's for him.

So, business it is! Or so thinks his father.

A higher up in a thriving plate glass company, Hugh's dad is in a good place to find his son a position. Over a lunch at a department store restaurant, he introduces Hugh to a builder named Canby, who happens to belong to a committee dedicated to finding employment for returning soldiers:

"I'm only too glad to do it, Mr. Henderson. I know what you boys went through—," the statement seemed to lose by over-emphasis— "but just the same it's a handful for a man that's got to hustle."He raised his glass of milk and drank deeply, his little finger sticking out like a frozen sausage.

     "Course most of the boys appreciate it," he went on. "But a few don't and that kinda makes me sore. You were over there, Mr. Henderson, and you know s'well's I do that some pretty useless tools got into the army. And some of them got shot up for us too. Mind I don't forget that, but it's these sort of men that's hard to place." 

As Canby rambles, Hugh gobbles up his meal, excuses himself, and makes for the crowded streets of Vancouver's downtown. Here he passes men, who like himself sport "FOR SERVICE AT THE FRONT" pins on their lapels, yet introspection lies closer to home: 

He thought of Canby trying to "place" the returned men. Canby was like a man with one of those puzzle boxes, getting impatient with the pellets that wouldn't let themselves be rolled into place. The rolling pellets annoyed him.

Fortunately – perhaps not – Hugh's father considers his son's prospects a personal project. Ignoring sausage-fingered Canby, he's set his sites on an imminent opening at hardware wholesalers Mogg & Binwell. What Henderson père doesn't know is that fate has already played its part in the form of a chance encounter between his son and happy-go-lucky Sandy Briggs, with whom Hugh served in France. A BC boy, Biggs' was taken out of the war by shrapnel that surgeons could not remove. He rejoined his wife at Cedar City, somewhere north of Vancouver, where the two run a small general store. Briggs' invitation to come up and see him sometime – the fishing is great – is soon followed by a letter sharing that Vancouver surgeons are looking to remove some of the resurfacing shrapnel. He wonders whether Hugh would do him a favour by filling in on a part-time delivery job he has with the local shingle mill.

Against his father's wishes – "You'll lose out with Mogg and Binwell if you go traipsing up there." –Hugh sets out to help his old brother in arms. He finds that Cedar City is no city, rather a small, haphazard collection of houses and cabins separated by a creek from a similarly-sized Indian reserve. Hugh takes to his new surroundings in a way he did not in Vancouver. Evans devotes pages describing the natural beauty of British Columbia:

The sweep of the side-hill was broken in places by outcrops of granite. The lichens on these rocks were grey and brown, and where the rocks overhung and protected their faces from the weather, there were patches of brilliant green. Around these the moss and the strewn needles of the conifers fitted snugly. The sun, low now over the upper valley, sent its rays through the plumbed evergreens at right angles to the hill. It laid yellow light in strokes and curves across the ground, changing some colours, intensifying others. Hugh thought of the side-hill as some colossal canvas propped against the great lump of the upper mountain, and of himself as a toiling insect too minute to see the picture as a whole.

Hugh's father admires the industriousness of previous Hendersons in making something of themselves, each generation building upon the accomplishments of the last, and so finds it hard to accept that his only child would be attracted to a hard, physical life like that of his great-grandfather.

The New Front Line is a first novel, and first novels are so often romans à clef. Certainly, it features something of the author's own story – Evans grew up in small town Ontario, served in the Canadian Expeditionary Force and settled in rural British Columbia – but it has much more to do with his outlook on life, appreciation of nature, and affection for the people of the First Nations. My attraction to this novel had everything to do with the Great War and the treatment of returning veterans. Though these things feature in The New Front Line, they rank amongst the lesser elements; both all but disappear when Hugh leaves Vancouver for Cedar City. Looking over what I've written thus far, I see that I've placed too much emphasis on my own interests. To be frank, I'm still digesting this novel. The New Front Line is an unusual book. It is a remarkable book. There is no good reason it has been out of print these last nine decades. 

Hubert Reginald Evans
9 May 1892, Vankleek Hill, ON -
16 June 1986, Roberts Creek, BC
RIP

Object: Bulky in blue boards, my copy was a gift from my friend military historian James Calhoun. It would appear to have once been presented to a man named Charles Cameron.

Might that Charles Cameron have been one of the forty Charles Camerons who served in the CEF? I don't suppose we'll ever know.

Access: As of this writing, no copies are listed for sale online. The novel can be found at Library and Archives Canada and four of our universities.

Related post:

Sex, Betrayal and the Scars of the Great War