Dope, Danger and Dolls

The lure of the lurid. I was hooked when, as a teenager, I came across Lush Lady and The Lady is a Lush next to each other in a used bookstore. Pulps, they were the first titles in a collection that would one day help pay for a move from Montreal to Vancouver.

I was reminded of these titles, lucrative for the collector, by Dope Menace: The Sensational World of Drug Paperbacks 1900-1975, a new book by my pal Stephen J. Gertz. What a pleasure to see these tawdry covers again, with their enticing captions ('A WILD WEEKEND OF JAZZ AND JUNK IN A HOTBED OF SEX'). It's hard to resist these images; they promise so very much. However, as Steve reminds us, these books tease, but seldom deliver. Case in point, Vice Rackets of Soho, which provides the cover image for Dope Menace:

The illustration by Reginald Heade for Vice Rackets of Soho by Ronald Vane (Ernest L. McKeag) with its glorious scene of drug eroticism - a half-naked woman lying supine on a bed in a sheer gown that appears to have been spray-painted on, her head thrown back in ecstasy as she's shot up with junk by a leering miscreant - is a prime example. Though the image suggests artist Heade as a sort of twisted Bernini - the Ecstasy of St. Theresa of Avila as sultry babe meets criminal Christ who plunges His flaming scepter of drug-love deep within her - there is virtually no mention of drugs within the text, nor much sex, for that matter.

Little in the way of sex and drugs... I'm betting the same is true of Frances Shelley Wees' Lost House.

I very much doubt that Mrs Wees, author of the Scholastic paperback Mystery of the Secret Tunnel, wife to the president of omnipresent textbook publisher Gage, wrote much, if anything, about heroin and loose women.

Lost House is one of only two Canadian titles found in Dope Menace, begging the question: Where are our drug paperbacks? This is no oversight on Steve's part. Canada's early mass market publishers all but ignored the money to be had in the lucrative drug paperback trade. Lost House is very nearly unique, and has the further distinction of being Harlequin's second book. The only other Canadian drug pulp - Ronald Cocking's poetic Die With Me Lady - was also brought out by the romance publisher.

Of course, Harlequin wasn't always all hearts, flowers, bosoms and bodices; their history is much more rich and varied. They were the first Canadian paperback publishers of Agatha Christie, W. Somerset Maugham and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Their titles included thrillers, mysteries, westerns, works of science fiction and weird things like Vengeance of the Black Donnellys ('Canada's Most Feared Family Strikes Back from Beyond the Grave') by Thomas P. Kelley. And, as with the pulp houses to the south, the early Harlequin wasn't above using the same deceptive bait - Thomas H. Raddall's historical adventure Roger Sudden was pitched as a 'lusty tale'.

The publisher is currently making a big deal about its 60th anniversary, but you won't find any recognition of the early years. Something to do with branding, I suppose - and yet, Harlequin is so very protective of the very same material they choose to disown.

The Poet Mayor of Toronto

The Mackenzie Poems

William Lyon Mackenzie & John Robert Colombo

Toronto: Swan, 1966

A great deal is being made today over Toronto's 175th anniversary. This all goes back to the city's incorporation, of course, ignoring the founding of York by the heroic John Graves Simcoe some four decades earlier. Never mind, the day gives cause to look more closely at this interesting collaboration between Toronto's first mayor and John Robert Colombo. 'Is this prose or poetry?' asks the cover copy. The answer is clearly the latter - found poetry, to be precise. To quote further: 'Here are the actual words of William Lyon Mackenzie, the man who led armed citizens through the streets of Toronto in 1837.'

FRANCE AND FREEDOM

Let the readers

of the Colonial Advocate

keep a watchful eye

upon the march of events

in Europe;

the tide rises.

Predating F.R. Scott's Trouvailles: poems from prose by one year, this is poetry of the Centennial, written - or, to be more accurate, cut - at a time of healthy, heightened interest in the past. Fun stuff, it's easy to see why names like Scott, Earle Birney, Raymond Souster and James Reaney wrote blurbs for the book.

Object: A slim title, just 94 pages in length, The Mackenzie Poems appears to have been issued in simultaneous hardcover and paperback editions. Both are published on cheap newsprint and state 'First Edition, 1966'. My paperback copy was purchased nine years ago for 69¢, a full 6¢ off the original price, at a Toronto Value Village. A pretty good find, it's inscribed by Colombo to Philip Givens, who was then the city's mayor. 'Your cultural crusade is as needed today as Mayor Mackenzie's political crusade was in his', wrote the poet - a reference, perhaps, to Givens' lengthy campaign to bring Henry Moore's Three-Way Piece No. 2 to Nathan Phillips Square.

Access: A fairly fragile item, I imagine most library copies have long since fallen apart and been discarded - the Toronto Public Library holds only three. That said, it is readily available and inexpensive. Very Good copies of the paperback can be had for as little as C$3. Expect to pay roughly C$10 for the hardcover.

Freedom to Read Redux

A few days after the end of Freedom to Read Week and my little rant, I note that Jean-Charles Harvey's account of the suppression of Les Demi-Civilisés has been added to Jean-Louis Lessard's excellent Laurentiana blog. A reminder of a dark time not long past.

The Canadian Preview Book Society

Jacques Godbout's recent words of wisdom had me going back to my slight collection of his works, including this curiosity, a translation of the great man's Le couteau sur la table. It isn't an 'uncorrected proof', as claimed, but an advance copy issued to subscribers of McClelland & Stewart's ill-fated Canadian Preview Book Society. James King's biography of the late Jack McClelland, Jack: A Life With Writers, provides an entertaining account of what the publisher proclaimed 'the greatest single idea in the history of book publishing'. For ten dollars a year, society members would receive fake proofs in advance of publication. A good idea? I don't know. Certainly, it would have appealed to bibliophiles. But the execution was rotten. M & S, then a company with a reputation for missing pub dates, had trouble producing the advances; frequently society members received their copies after the finished book had arrived in bookstores.

By my count, the publisher issued eight Canadian Preview Book Society titles, including René Lévesque's Option-Québec (translated as An Option for Quebec), Pierre Berton's The Smug Minority and Mirror on the Floor, George Bowering's first novel. Each can be bought today for under C$20. To the collector of Canadian literature the most attractive is probably something called This Year in Jerusalem by Mordecai Richler. The only society offering in which the title is indicated as 'tentative', it was later published as Hunting Tigers Under Glass. Richler obviously liked the earlier title; he used it for his 1994 autobiography-cum-history-cum-commentary. That said, I think the most interesting of all the society's titles is The Bad News: Notes on the Mass Media and Their Masters by journalist Ken Lefollii, a book McClelland & Stewart cancelled under pressure from the conservative Toronto Telegram. Four years later, aged 95, the paper died. The Bad News lives on, but only in this faux proof form.

Jacques Godbout on the NFB

The articulate M Godbout on what shouldn't need saying.