A Dick's Deadly Dames

The Deadly Dames

Malcolm Douglas [pseud. Douglas Sanderson]

Greenwich, CT: Gold Medal, 1956

Douglas Sanderson's fifth novel, The Deadly Dames was the first to be published as a paperback original. Not quite the same as "straight to DVD", of course, but I don't think it's such a coincidence that this book is by far the weakest of the lot.

With The Deadly Dames we have a new publisher, a new nom de plume and a new hero. Sort of. That hero, Bill Yates, shares something with Mike Garfin, the protagonist of Sanderson's two preceding books: both are Montreal private investigators, both are the sons of French Canadian mothers and both have Scotch landladies.

As with Garfin's outings – Hot Freeze and The Darker Traffic – things start rolling when the private investigator is hired by someone of considerable wealth. In this case, the client is Philip Corday, a spoiled lush who hopes to get the goods that will allow him to divorce his cheating wife Grace. Yates has only just accepted the job when an expensively dressed woman tries to hire him away. Minutes later, she's crushed under the wheels of a streetcar rounding the corner of St Catherine and Peel. And so, what began as a bland divorce case takes a deadly turn. Pun intended.

St Catherine and Peel, Montreal, 1956

Mike doesn't stick around. No pun intended. Hoping of catch Grace and her lover, he heads north to the Corday country home. Things become complicated when he confuses the unfaithful wife with her beautiful older sister. Some PI.

Bodies pile up quickly in The Deadly Dames – nine corpses in 160 pages – but our man Yates is not one of them. Dozens of shots are fired in his direction, but none find their mark. He's beaten senseless repeatedly, but bounces back with superhuman speed. Not even a broken nose slows him down. Good thing too, because the action in this novel clocks in at well under 72 hours.

A lazy novel, the fast pace is provided by characters that exist for no other reason than to propel the plot. There's Corday's chatty Russian housekeeper, a talkative cop with an encyclopedic knowledge of Montreal's underworld and a rural hashslinger who likes nothing more than to listen to the police waveband. As for Yates, he's not so much Mike Garfin under a different name as a pale imitation. There's not much to him, and yet every woman, bar none, throws herself at him.

I lie.

There was that lady who was run over by the streetcar, but she never had a chance.

Worst sentence: "In that dress, in those surroundings, she looked like a poem that got printed by accident in an anthology of prose."

Object: A slim mass market paperback with vibrant cover image by Bob Peake, whose work graced this pretty pink book belonging to my mother:

Warner Brothers Presents My Fair Lady
New York: Warner Brothers Pictures, 1964

Access: The first edition enjoyed one lone printing. A handful are listed online, with decent copies gong for under ten dollars. I could find no library copies outside Ohio State University's William Charvet Collection of American Fiction. Yep, "American Fiction". The first British edition, published in 1961 by Consul, is both less attractive and less common. Two crummy copies are listed for sale online at £2 and £5.

Translated by Laurette Brunius, in 1956 Galimard published a French language edition titled Du Rebecca chez les femmes. The original features no character named Rebecca.

In 2006, a half century after the Gold Medal edition, The Deadly Dames was paired with Sanderson's next novel, A Dum-Dum for the President, and returned to print by the dedicated people at Stark House. The twofer is blessed with a very fine essay by expat Montreal critic Kevin Burton Smith, and an all too brief interview with the author. My copy, a second printing, was bought south of the border. The book is unavailable in Canada. 

The Retired Reverend King on Abolishing Death

A new Canadian Notes and Queries arrives bringing another Dusty Bookcase sur papier. This one, a bit longer than usual, focuses on that old odd bird Basil King's spiritualism.  Eternally fascinating.

Seth's superhero cover compliments an appreciation of Alvin Schwartz by Devon Code, my old dining parter Shaena Lambert contributes a new short story and Michel Basilières reviews The Sister Brothers. Steven W. Beattie, Marc Bell, Alex Boyd, Michael Bryson, Mark Callanan, Kerry Clare, Emily Donaldson, Aaron Gilbreath, Alex Good, Philip Marchand, John Martz, David Mason, K.D. Miller, Tara Murphy, Shane Nelson, Tina Northrup, Patricia Robertson, Christian Schumann, Kenneth Sherman, Zachariah Wells and Nathan Whitlock add to the goodness. But let me draw attention to Mike Barnes' contributions: an essay and The Reasonable Ogre, a Biblioasis chapbook featuring a new short story with illustrations by Segbingway.

Produced in an edition of 450 copies as a collectible for subscribers of CNQ. My copy's #149.

Information on subscriptions to Canadian Notes & Queries can be found here.

a/k/a Frank Tarbeaux

Tarboe: The Story of a Life
Gilbert Parker
Toronto: Copp Clarke, 1927

Imagine how old fashioned a fellow Sir Gilbert must have seemed when Tarboe first hit the bookstores. In 1927, the bewhiskered baronet had been a member of His Majesty's Most Honourable Privy Council for nearly a decade. While he'd begun his career in fin de siecle London, the author had had nothing to do with Oscar Wilde, the Decadents and The Yellow Book. In the Jazz Age, Tarboe fought a losing battle against Men Without Women and To the Lighthouse for the reader's dollar.

Published late in the author's life, just five years before the end, Tarboe stands alone in a bibliography dominated by adventure romances and historic novels. What is meant to be "the story of a life" –  another man's life – is in reality nothing more than accounts of encounters Parker shared with a man named Frank Tarbeaux. Like the knighted Canadian novelist, the American Tarbeaux is pretty much forgotten today, but in his time he appeared with some regularity in English-language newspapers.

The New York Times, 21 April 1913

A colourful character, "The King of the Card Sharks", Tarbeaux's portrait is painted here by an unnamed journalist in the 10 August 1895 edition of the Auckland Star:

He is uneducated and quite illiterate, but he is as clever as a monkey at what is called, in thieves' slang, "faking the broads," bunko steering, slim gambling, the gyp game, three-card monte, and is a proficient horse-shark, and an expert in green goods.

Nearly every mention I can find of Tarboe describes the book as a novel. The title – Tarboe, not Tarbeaux – more than hints that liberties have been taken. Parker has changed names to protect the innocent, the not-so-innocent and, I expect, the litigious. Of those we see touched by the card-shark's hand, only three, Hawai'i's King Kalākaua, Prince Consort John Owen Dominis and author George W. Peck are accurately recorded.* I think it no coincidence that all were long dead at time of publication.

Tarboe is not a novel; the proof lies in its structure. Parker was far too fine a craftsman to have composed so a rambling story. Here he is constrained by fact, limited by both what he had witnessed and what he had been told by his subject.

The drama takes place far away from the restaurants, art galleries and Parisian streets in which Tarbeaux tells his tales. It's in a comfortable Melbourne hotel room that he claims to be the sole survivor of Custer's Last Stand. His adventures with bounty hunters in the Transvaal are related at the Bodega on the rue de Rivoli.

The years go by and, as Parker notes (with some boasting, I think), encounters become less frequent:

The interests of my life grew wider and I entered the British Parliament but I had travelled before that in Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Greece, Turkey, Austria, Italy, Germany, and nearly all the European States, and since then in America, South America and elsewhere. I met many distinguished and notorious people, but never one with such interest for me as Frank Tarboe.

The final encounter, at a New York restaurant, takes place only through Parker's persistent pursuit of his old acquaintance. "I was called Arizona Frank", says Tarboe, launching into a story of how he once performed with Buffalo Bill.

Parker makes it plain that he has great admiration for the card shark. I'll join in. As portrayed by Sir Gilbert, the Frank Tarbeaux of Tarboe, though a crook, seems a stand-up guy:

Here was a man capable of great things, now a gambler by lack of moral courage, a menace to society while he could have been its benefactor, criminal now though he might have become a saint.

These words, coming early in the book, are followed by this passage in the final pages:

I would sooner have gone to Frank Tarboe in trouble than any relative of mine, or any friend I ever had. I'm not ashamed to have known him, to have liked him much, and here I have put upon record some of his sins, and his folly; but if we would count sins and folly, how many would stand the test? 

Three years after the publication of Tarboe, Frank Tarbeaux told his story to Donald Henderson Clarke, a writer of risqué novels. The resulting "story of a life", published as The Autobiography of Frank Tarbeaux, is much more fanciful than Tarboe. Unlike Parker, Clarke transcribed, he did not question.

In the autobiography, Tarbeaux says this about a man whom he claims was his cousin: "I shot Bob Ford, got him through the right lung down in the Gunnison County, in Southern Carolina."

That's right, Frank Tarbeaux was the man who shot the man who shot Jesse James.

Don't you believe it.

Object: An attractive book in moss green cover with gilt lettering, the Copp Clarke edition features four woodcuts by American illustrator Harry Cimino.

My copy, bought a few months ago from a London bookseller for $3.00, once belonged to the Rodney Public Library. To be honest, I'm not at all sure that it's not their property still; there is no discard stamp. The library card indicates that it was last checked out in 1933.

Access: The Copp Clarke Canadian first is joined by editions published in England (Cassell) and the United States (Harper). I see no evidence that any but the English enjoyed a second printing (peut-être). Very Good copies of the Copp Clarke edition, sans dust jacket, begin at $12.00. While Tarboe is easily found in our universities, patrons of public libraries will have real problems.

* Well, kinda. Parker slips up in recording Peck's name as "James Peck".

Montreal Noir at Blue Metropolis

Just announced by the good folks at the Blue Metropolis festival, a month tomorrow I'll have the honour of hosting 'Montreal Noir', a panel discussion focusing on the city's forgotten pulp past:

Cheap, disposable and sensationalistic, Montreal’s pulp fiction took its place on Canadian and American newsstands sixty years ago. It has since been ignored, neglected and, in some cases, hidden by its authors. What was so shameful about these books and why are we reviving them now?

Joining me on stage will be Trevor Ferguson, Jim Napier and Will Straw. Actor Marcel Jeannin will be reading excerpts from the work of Montreal's three best noir novelists. Who they? Buy a ticket and find out.

Montreal Noir: The City's Forgotten Pulp Past

OPUS Montreal Hotel, Salon St-Laurent

10 Sherbrooke Street West

Saturday, 21 April, 8:30 pm