Reverend Kerby Warns Against the Dime Novel

This second part of my review of George W. Kerby's The Broken Trail now appears, revised and rewritten, in my new book:

The Dusty Bookcase:

A Journey Through Canada's

Forgotten, Neglected, and Suppressed Writing

Available at the very best bookstores and through

Biblioasis, Amazon, Chapters/Indigo, and McNally-Robinson.

Ernest Cashel
c. 1882 - 1904
RIP

Related posts:

Reverend Kerby Treads Carefully
Reverend Kerby Stumbles Upon a Blazing Bosom

Reverend Kerby Treads Carefully

The Broken Tail

George W. Kerby

Toronto: Briggs, 1909

189 pages

This first part of my review now appears, revised and rewritten, in my new book:

The Dusty Bookcase:

A Journey Through Canada's

Forgotten, Neglected, and Suppressed Writing

Available at the very best bookstores and through

Biblioasis, Amazon, Chapters/Indigo, and McNally-Robinson.

Related posts:

Reverend Kerby Warns Against the Dime Novel
Reverend Kerby Stumbles Upon a Blazing Bosom

The Year L.M. Montgomery Became Lucy Maud

The Canadian Bookman, January 1909

I have Erica Brown of the wonderful Reading 1900-1950 to blame for time wasted this past weekend. It was she who demonstrated just how much fun can be had with the Google Ngram Viewer, a tool used in charting words, names and phrases found in the 5.2-million books that the corporation has digitized.

Prof Brown, whose work focusses on the history of popular fiction, used the GNV to trace the rise of the term "middlebrow". I began with "Ontario Gothic" (as with all, click the graph to enlarge):

An interesting result, though one that should be viewed with a cautious eye. As Prof Brown points out, "5.2 million books digitized sounds great – and it is – but it isn’t everything, and it is skewed towards US publications." I'll add that the tool doesn't capture anything published after 2008, and that any ngram that occurs in fewer than 40 books will deliver a rather deceptive 0% flatline. Still, while not entirely accurate, I think it goes far in reflecting trends.

Here, for example, is a search that charts the shift away from "L.M. Montgomery" to "Lucy Maud Montgomery". Interesting to note that the two lines converge in the mid-nineties, when most of her work entered the public domain.

The real fun comes in drawing comparisons between writers. Here, for example, are Canada's Booker Prize winners:

How about this graph featuring mentor Irving Layton and pupil Leonard Cohen:

Better yet, Irving Layton versus Louis Dudek:

Here we see the careers of rivals Ernest Thompson Seton and Charles G.D. Roberts:

The declining interest in Seton and Sir Charles made me curious about Sir Gilbert Parker, our biggest fin de siecle author.

Sobering. Wonder how I'm doing. 

Oh.

Pamela Wallin Issues a Challenge

Read over my morning coffee:

Despite all the motives attributed to us, journalists seldom set out to uncover human flaws or scandal just for the sake of creating pain, or embarrassment, or defeat. But we do quite deliberately look for contradictions and incompetence, which sometimes leads us to uncover the aforementioned. And I'll challenge those who would question our pursuits and our legitimate curiosity about those who seek to lead us to explain why, as citizens, the less we know the better we are able to make choices.

— Pamela Wallin, Since You Asked, p. 58

Related post:

Speaking of Pamela Wallin

Frank L. Packard's Wire Thriller (and others)

My review of Frank L. Packard's The Wire Devils, newly reissued by the University of Minnesota Press, is now up on the Montreal Review of Books website. You can read it here.

How good it is to see Packard return to print. Yes, some of the man's work has been available from POD publishers, but just how much confidence can one have in things like this "Frank L. 1877-1942 Packard" edition from Nabu Press.

Wait, isn't that Montreal's Spiš Castle? You know, the one built by 12-century Hungarians?

Amazon.ca sells Nabu's The Wire Devils for $31.54, and the new University of Minnesota Press edition at $12.96. I recommend the latter – and not because I'm cheap. The UMP's is not only free of the "missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc." that plague Nabu, but includes a very fine Introduction by Robert MacDougall of the University of Western Ontario.

Prof MacDougall describes the novel as a wire thriller, late 19th and early 20th-century works that use the railroad, telegraph and telephone "as a backdrop for adventure." Dime novelist Frederick Van Rensselaer Dey penned Fighting Electric Fiends (1898) and his Street & Smith stablemate Franklin Pitt served up Brothers of the Thin Wire (1915), but I think it was Canadians, in Packard and Arthur Stringer, who dominated the genre.

The Wire Devils first appeared as a serial that ran over six issues in The Popular Magazine (20 March - 7 June 1917), was published in Canada by Copp Clark, the US by George H. Doran and A.L. Burt, and in the United Kingdom enjoyed two Hodder & Stoughton editions.

Messrs Dey and Pitt would've envied Frank L. Packard's success, but I'd argue that the true King of the Wire Thrillers was the handsome, savvy Arthur Stringer.

As far as I can tell his first foray into the genre was a short story, "The Wire Tappers", published in the August 1903 issue of Smart Set. I've not seen it, but am willing to bet that it was the basis of Stringer's 1906 novel of the same name.

The next year brought Phantom Wires. By far the most commercially successful wire thriller, it saw editions from Little, Brown, Musson, McClelland & Stewart and Bobbs-Merrill, It's likely that the last, a cheapo from A.L. Burt, appeared in 1924.

Even in 1906 and 1907, when first editions of The Wire Tappers and Phantom Wires sat on bookstore shelves, the wire thriller must have seemed a touch old-fashioned. "Look!" exclaims the heroine of the latter "they're talking with their wireless!" Stringer anticipated the future by following the two with The Gun Runner, a novel in which a wireless operator from Nova Scotia plays hero.

Whither the fax thriller?

The Wire Tappers
Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1922