The Dusty Bookcase

23 July 2026

Silly Idol

The Living Idol
Robert Switzer
New York: Signet, 1957
128 pages

Robert Switzer's second book, The Living Idol is a novelization of a Hollywood film. I read a lot of these in my youth; Escape from the Planet of the Apes (1971), Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972), Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973), Earthquake (1974), The Omen (1976), It's Alive (1977), Star Wars (1977), and Damien: Omen II (1978) come to mind, but the one I hold most dear is an adaptation of the 1978 Goldie Hawn/Chevy Chase romcom adventure Foul Play. This is because I gave a copy to an older crush on the occasion of her sixteenth birthday.

Before you judge, my next crush received David Bowie's Stage for her sixteenth (and it was a double album).

I didn't realize then that novelizations where very much part of the hype. James Cass Rogers' Foul Play would've hit grocery store checkouts weeks before the film's release. The timing meant that it couldn't be based on the movie itself, rather the Colin Higgins screenplay. It's possible that Rogers included scenes that never made it to the screen, which might make it an interesting read.

The Living Idol was written by Albert Lewin, best known for The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945). If you count Madame Currie (1943), from which he was fired, it was his seventh and last film as a director.

The plot is quite simple:

American journalist Terry Matthews is visiting an archaeological dig led by Doctor Alfred Stoner, PhD and Manuel (no title, no surname, no degree) at the site of a Mayan pyramid. The professor leads Terry and Juanita, Manuel's pretty teenage daughter, into a newly discovered chamber housing an ancient jaguar idol. Juanita is so disturbed by the sight that she flees. Two days later, her father is killed while attempting to raise an ancient monolith. Juanita suffers a collapse. Stoner is certain that the girl's distress has nothing to do with having witnessed her father being crushed to death, rather that she is spiritually linked to an Mayan princess once sacrificed to the Jaguar God. Believing he can save Juanita, Stone frees a jaguar from the local zoo and is mortally wounded in the process. The cat makes its way to the professor's home where it is killed by the journalist, thus releasing Juanita from her torment.

Not much of a story, is it.

James Robertson Justice as the professor – I remember him as Lord Scrumptious in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang – is the most energetic of a lackadaisical lot. Handsome Texan Steve Forrest, who plays Terry Matthews, is wooden, but nowhere near so much as Eduardo Noriega (Manuel) whose performance is so dry as to be akin to kindling. Parisian Liliane Montevecchi (Juantita), shown here with Sara García (Elana, Stone's wife), has three facial expressions.

The true star of the film is cinematographer Jack Hildyard, who went on earn an Academy Award for his very next film, The Bridge on the River Kwai.

Switzer's novel follows the plot very closely and uses much of the same dialogue. Where it departs is in description. In an early scene, Manuel encourages Terry to accompany his daughter to a fiesta in the nearby village. Juanita dresses for the occasion:

She was wearing a yellow peasant blouse. The blouse hung from the very tips of her shoulders and it dipped maybe a little unnecessarily low in front. But that would depend on how you look at things, and Terry looked at her and smiled, thinking. She is wearing what they call a full skirt and her blouse is full, too – full of Juanita.

In the film, she wears a modest pale pink dress that leaves pretty much everything to the imagination.

Later that same night, Juanita wakes Terry, sneaking into his room and declaring her love. Switzer describes the nightgown she wears as revealing. This is the nightgown depicted in the film:

You can see The Living Idol in its entirety here as a muddy print in glorious CinemaScope at the Internet Archive. I encourage cinephiles to skip to 49:48 for one of the most awkward dance sequences in motion picture history. Kudos to whoever put together this trailer, which reimagines the movie as a sexy Yma Sumac album brought to life:

As I say, the book is quite faithful to the film. The greatest departure comes in the final scene. Here Elena cradles the body of her dead husband. The last paragraph reads:

Terry and Juanita went out into the garden. The sun was not up but there was light in the sky now and they could see the mountains that ring Mexico City outlining very faintly against the gathering light.

The film depicts the professor's final minutes, then cuts abruptly to a very different final scene: Terry and Juanita's wedding. The groom provides a voiceover:

"Juanita was so happy, so wonderfully happy. I'd never seen anything so happy as Juanita's face. I made a mighty oath to keep it that way."

Ah, yes, there's the happy couple.

Mercifully, none of this appears in the book. Was it not in the draft he was handed or is it that Switzer chose to ignore it?

If the latter, he's an even better writer than I'd previously thought.

Trivia I: I've described Juanita as a teenager. Her age is not mentioned in the film, but she's a seventeen-year-old in the novelization. Terry is thirty. She has known him since the age of seven.

Let's pretend that Juanita turns eighteen before they marry.

Trivia II: I've come across several ads for the film in which the book is described as the source.

The Sarasota Herald-Tribune, 3 January 1958

It is not.

Kingswood Times-News, 12 January 1957

Object and Access: A slim mass market paperback, The Living Idol appears to have enjoyed no more than one printing. As I write only two copies are listed for sale online, both at US$15.50. Mine was purchased early this year for US$15.00.

Signet hired the very best illustrators back then. This time credit goes to American artist Robert Macguire, who clearly based his cover painting on this production still.

Macguire is the same man who proved the cover of Mark It for Murder by that old Dusty Bookcase favourite Douglas Sanderson.

18 July 2026

Margaret Laurence: 100 Years

Margaret Laurence was born one hundred years ago today. Is recognition appropriate in a blog devoted to Canada's forgotten, neglected, and suppressed writing? I'd say so. Laurence was popular and celebrated in her day and remains so today, yet she was also a lightning rod for censors.

Leading the charge was Reverend Sam Buick of Peterborough's Dublin Street Pentecostal Church, who considered The Diviners blasphemous, adulterous, and profane. Did the preacher's ire have something to do with his similarity to the novel's Reverend Jake Flood? He never addressed the issue.

My first Margaret Laurence book, A Jest of God, was a gift from my uncle, David Busby, a canon in the Anglican Church. It was also my first signed book. Published in 1978, it's part of a series of Seal reissues which I would argue are the most attractive mass market paperbacks ever published in this country.

Missing is The Stone Angel, her masterpiece, but that's only because I couldn't find a decent image online.

Ah, what the hell. Here's a copy being offered on Ebay.

Starting out in the book trade, I was surprised to find that Laurence, whose novels were so ubiquitous as to be found in drug stores, were out of print in the United States. When they did return, it was with an academic press. My English cousins had easier access through Virago.

American and British reissues of A Jest of God:
University of Chicago Press (1993) and Virago (1987)

For years I worried that Margaret Laurence would fade from Canadian consciousness, but her name is still strong. True, we don't see her books sold in drug stores, but then books are no longer sold in drug stores. I see Laurence lauded by English bloggers, most notably Simon at (Stuck in a Book) and Ali (Heavenali), and sense that her profile has actually risen in UK.

Wishful thinking, perhaps, but it warms the heart of this stranger.

Jean Margaret Laurence (née Wemysse)
18 July 1926, Neepawa, Manitoba -
5 January 1987, Lakeside, Ontario

RIP

Related post:

Margaret Laurences's Cauliflower Soup

02 July 2026

Living Through Another Cuba

The Tent of the Wicked
Robert Switzer
New York: Signet, 1956
128 pages

We begin in a despot's bedroom. Six soldiers enter, one throws the light switch, and the country's president is ordered out of bed. His mistress is a sound sleeper.

This is the end of the Small Man's rule. He'd been expecting it.

Where readers expecting it?

In June 1949, on the occasion of the author's eighth short story for Esquire, the magazine reported that publishers had been urging Robert Switzer to write a novel. Did The Tent of the Wicked meet their expectations? Was it shopped around? Whatever happened, it didn't arrive for another seven years – and then only as a mass market paperback.

That opening scene is also the first in his story 'The Small Man,' which had appeared in Esquire's March 1955 issue. Not identical, but pretty damn close, it runs from the beginning to the first line break:

cliquez pour agrandir

'The Small Man' is not a long story. This is the rest:

The violent final scene is much the same as another in the novel. Though the paragraphs between don't feature in any way, they do follow the Small Man's changing fortunes.

The publisher's pitch has it that The Tent of the Wicked takes place in "a Latin American country." I can do one better in identifying that country as Cuba. Its hero is Paul Rezzado, a young man who works for a travel agency in "the Capital." Much like Jonathan Richman, he falls in love with a bank teller. Her name is Angela. Their relationship is so passionate, so intense, so maddeningly enduring that Paul feels in need of a break. After pushing his employer for a temporary transfer, he leaves for two months' work in San José and doesn't return for a full three years. When he does, Paul finds Angela married to a plump businessman who is also father to her unborn child. She'd given up waiting sometime around the thirtieth month.

Just as well, really. Angela had been faithful, but not Paul. Besides, there was that old promise he'd made to return in sixty days, not eleven hundred.

Paul goes back to San José, where he befriends a married teenaged prostitute. He calls her "Doll-face," a nickname neither she nor anyone else understands. She vanishes, then reappears with a face that looks nothing like a doll's. The new police official in town had abducted her, raped her, tortured her, and disfigured her before dumping her back onto the street. Paul kills the man taking care that no one knows... but word gets around. San José sees him as a hero and his fame begins to spread. Other men begin following his example, taking on the authorities like their hero Rezzado. Paul wants none of this, but more men join in and the government feels threatened. He becomes a hunted man until the military surrenders to public will and joins his side.

The novel's second scene takes place in the Presidential Palace where Paul, Provisionary President of the Republic, meets with General Avilia and captains of industry identified only as "the oilman," "the cattleman," "the communications man," and "the banker.":

These men could be designated by their specialities, their near-monopolies, but actually they were inter-involved, the banker owning parts of oil well and the cattleman sharing in silver mines. They did not own everything in the country but, between them, they owned a part of everything and repesented those who owned the rest.

What good can come from a meeting such as that?

The novel's climax owes nearly everything to Switzer's October 1955 Esquire story 'The Death Bringers.'

As the title suggests, there is no happy ending.

Robert Switzer's last known work is the 1961 novel I Was Going Anyway. It's the best Canadian noir novel I've read this year, if not entirely original. Switzer mined three of his old Esquire stories, the earliest being 'Death of a Prize Fighter,' which appeared all the way back in the June 1949 issue.

'The Small Man' and 'The Death Bringers' were both published in the fifteen months leading to The Tents of the Wicked. Were they segments of a work in progress or simply reused for his debut novel?

I don't expect we'll ever know nor does it matter. The Tents of the Wicked is one hell of a book.

Trivia: In 'The Small Man' the Paul Rezzado character is named Jesus Rezzado. This Anglican caught several echoes of the New Testament in the novel itself.

The Rezzado character in 'The Death Bringers' is named Perez, which is the surname of the man Angela marries in The Tent of the Wicked.

Object and Access: A paperback original, there have been no subsequent printings or editions. The cover illustration does not reflect a scene in the novel.

As I write eight copies are listed for sale online, ranging in price from US$4.00 to US$33.00. All booksellers are in the United States. A word of caution, the bookseller asking US$33.00, the most dear by far, charges a further US$99.50 to ship what is a slim mass market paperback that weighs less than a sparrow.

01 July 2026

W.M. MacKeracher's 'Canada, My Land'

Patriotic and personal verse for the day by William Mackay MacKeracher (1871-1913), the very same man who wrote that old favourite 'My Canadian Girl.' Both come from Canada, My Land and Other Compositions in Verse (Toronto: William Briggs, 1908), the third of five volumes of MacKeracher poetry.

CANADA, MY LAND

There may be more enchanting climes
Within a southern zone;
There may be eastern Edens deckt
With charms to thee unknown;
But thou art fairest unto me,
Because thou art mine own,
Canada, my land.

More spacious plains and loftier heights
In other realms may be.
And mightier streams than those which bear
Thy waters to the sea;
But thou, great handiwork of God,
Art grandest unto me,
Canada, my land.

More glorious records may adorn
The annals of the past
Than those which tell the rise and growth
Of thy dominion vast;
But I am proudest of the land
In which my lot is cast,
Canada, my land.

Beneath thy green or snow-clad sod
My fathers' ashes lie;
Thou hast my all, to thee I'm bound
By every dearest tie;
For thee I'll gladly live, for thee
I cheerfully would die,
Canada, my land.