A Martin Brett Mystery

Exit in Green
Martin Brett [pseud. Douglas Sanderson]
New York: Dodd, Mead, 1953

Douglas Sanderson once said that he turned to mysteries after Dark Passions Subdue, his "serious" debut novel, had proven a commercial failure. I don't question the claim, but wonder whether Exit in Green was such a great success.

Consider this: Dark Passions Subdue was published in paperback, but not Exit in Green; in fact, the latter is the only Sanderson novel – there are twenty-three – to have appeared only in hardcover. Dodd, Mead never returned to press, allowing the novel to go out of print. Six years passed before Exit in Green appeared in the United Kingdom – and this was only after it had been rewritten for London publisher Hammond & Hammond.

I think Exit in Green owes something to the author's early professional struggles. Sanderson's protagonist is William Marshall, a New York-based writer whose career hits the skids after he sells a play to a big-time Broadway director. Marshall is strung along for a bit, banking his future on rewrites until all goes bust. He then takes to drink, blacks out, and finds himself five days later in Boston having suffered a nervous breakdown.

The novel opens with the writer trying to right himself. He manages to get back in his agent's good books by proposing an article on reclusive English actress Leonora Kristen, who has taken up residence just outside the small Laurentian town of St Genebald. General consensus is that the country air will do him good.

Marshall may be in a fragile state, but he's a real pro. The afternoon following his arrival, he's got Leonora agreeing to a full-fledged biography. It's the writer's bad luck that the next morning the actress is found dead suspended from a pine tree:

Then slowly, painfully slowly, the clutched boughs parted and like some hideously overripe fruit, Leonora Kirsten disengaged from the tree and came plummeting to earth.

The grisly scene, hinted at in the Dodd Mead edition, is better captured by the Hammond & Hammond jacket:

Everyone but Marshall sees poor Leonora as the latest to take a tumble from La Chauvre, a/k/a Bald Rock, a particularly treacherous part of a local hiking trail, The local landmark had claimed the lives of two other women in the previous two years. There was nothing suspicious about those deaths, nor is there anything odd in Leonora's, yet Marshall is convinced that the actress was murdered. He has no idea why or whodunit, but this doesn't stop him from making some pretty serious accusations about his innkeeper, Leonora's cook, the parish priest, a Montreal lawyer, Sergeant Rivard of the Sûreté du Québec and a good many others. Indeed, a fair percentage of sleepy little St Genebald (pop. 532) finds itself target of Marshall's unfounded aspersions, expressed loudly (often drunkenly) in the local hotel bar.

One suspects that the author – and here I mean Douglas Sanderson – is casting about, vainly attempting to find a murderer and motivation for Leonora's death. Eventually, well into the second half of the novel, he adds a Vancouver society woman to his cast of characters. This provides Douglas an out, though it does not help any reader who fancies him or herself a detective; the murderer and his true identity, upon which lies the solution, is revealed only in the final pages when he tries to kill again.

This reader had long lost interest in solving the murder of Leonora Kirsten. Truth be told, I was hoping that her death would be shown an accident, thus proving boorish lout William Marshall wrong.

No, I was more consumed by the mystery surrounding Marshall's unfounded allegations, and why it was that none of the townsfolk popped him in the puss. More than this, I wanted to know how such a sloppy, directionless novel – written, it needs be said, by a man who did not read mysteries – was published. Most of all, I must know how the hand that produced Exit in Green gave us Hot Freeze, the Great Canadian Noir Novel, not five months later.

Q: Might an explanation for St Genebald's small population lie in the number of women who lose their lives on La Chauvre?

They really should consider a fence or something.

Trivia: As production problems with Marshall's play mount, the role of the leading lady shifts from Cordelia Otis Skinner to Gale Sondergaard to Judith Anderson. Sanderson botches the name of the first actress.

Object: Orange boards stamped with green foil. My copy was purchased a couple of months ago from an American bookseller. Price: US$9.99.

Access: Only the University of Toronto, the University of Alberta, Library and Archives Canada and the Toronto Public Library have copies. Not one Canadian library has Murder Came Tumbling.

Two copies of Exit in Green are listed for sale online. Recognition goes to the Missouri bookseller who offers a Very Good copy at US$14.50. Ridicule is placed upon the Illinois bookseller who claims his ex-library copy to be "Very Good-", then provides this description: "Moderate shelf cock, IDs on backstrip, mottled lower edge as from damp stains, paperwork at front, minor to moderate toning throughout". Clearly, a reading copy sold by a ne'er-do-well.

The lone copy of Murder Came Tumbling is being offered at £47 by a bookseller in Lincolnshire. More than worth it.

U is for Unproduced

Canadian artistic directors!

A half-century ago, your predecessors received the above. I've taken the liberty of transcribing the text:

BYRON'S GOOSE
(Synopsis)

       Comedy in 3 Acts. 2 sets. Cast of 12 (4 principals). Standard playing time. Scene: Vienna and Ravenna in 1822.

       Byron's final tragicomic relationship with his last mistress 19-year-old Teresa Guiccioli, her eccentric 70-year-old husband, her father and brother (amateur revolutionaries), and his friend Trelawny. His ambitions as lover of Teresa, as would-be liberator of Italy; his involvement in revolutionary, family and social intrigue, climaxed by his cutting himself free of the entanglements of his background and leaving for Greece.

       The play is tightly knit, with rapid action and with dialogue sparkling with Byron's own special brand of wit, overall tone is one of sophisticated comedy relieved by sentiment and action. Gives a new and sympathetic view of Byron as an aging but far from superannuated figure of romance; of Terasa as a blend of charm, devotion and duplicity; of Count Guiccioli as a fantastic and disreputable old man selling his polite consent to adultery; of Trelawny as an ultra-Byronic hero, adventurous, gloomy, dauntless, a little absurd.

       Has great possibilities for eventual adaptation as a musical in the same style as 'Camelot'.

       Complete script will be mailed on request.

John Glassco,
FOSTER,
Que., CANADA

John Glassco considered Byron's Goose his "one great play". Daytime soaps and radio drama aside, I've had no experience writing scripts, so won't presume to judge. That said, I am confident in deeming it superior to The Augean Stable, a loose adaptation of Harriet Marwood, Governess, the only other work Glassco composed for the stage.

Mr Glassco having passed from this sphere in 1981, requests to Foster will be met with frustration. Interested parties are advised to contact Library and Archives Canada, which holds the script in its John Glassco fonds.

Antoni Cimolino, do not repeat Michael Langham's error!

Cross-posted at A Gentleman of Pleasure 

Critic Spoils Christmas (but not Christmas sales)

Snow arrived this past weekend, bringing visions of sugar plums and reminding me of a stern, schoolmarmish rebuke uncovered in researching Marika Robert's A Stranger and Afraid (subject of Thursday's post). Published in the 25 December 1964 edition of the Globe & Mail, it came as part of an "end-of-year summary" of books. The author was Joan Walker – that's her above – winner of the 1954 Stephen Leacock Medal for Pardon My Parka.

Mrs Walker covers eight books, lauding all but one:

I was disappointed in Marika Robert's first novel, A Stranger and Afraid, because here is a talented writer who has wasted a clean, perceptive narrative on a grubby little plot obviously contrived to attract the prurient. The book could have been a disconcertingly vivid examination of the integration of a certain type of sophisticated and irresponsible European immigrant into the democratic way of life of a country chosen, not for any specific reason, but simply because of expediency. Instead it read like a half-heard lewd joke whispered by a schoolgirl.

As a war bride, European immigrant Joan Walker had a specific reason.

The reviewer fairly races through the other three Canadian books in her round-up, beginning with Sheila Burnford's The Fields of Noon – praised for its "bubbling sense of vitality" – before declaring 1964 "a vintage year in Canadian humour [sic]".

I had no idea.

Mrs Walker singles out two humour titles, neither of which I've read: Norman Ward's The Fully Processed Cheese and The Great Canadian Lover by "newcomer to the world of wit" Mervyn J. Huston.

"Both books were a collection of brisk essays on a number of subjects," writes the critic, "all humorous, some in the rolling-in-the-aisles category."

Each to his own, I suppose. Had I read Mrs Walker's column that Christmas Day, I'd have been much more interested in the whispered lewd joke.

Related post:

A 49-Year-Old Fifty Shades? S&M from M&S?

A 49-Year-Old Fifty Shades? S&M from M&S?

A Stranger and Afraid

Marika Robert

Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1964

320 pages

This 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 post:

Critic Spoils Christmas (but not Christmas sales)

T is for Thievery

Pettes Memorial Library, Knowlton, Quebec

Hugely flattered to hear you stole my book. This is fame. I used to steal a lot of books myself, mostly from libraries: my method was to look at the little card in the back envelope and if it hadn’t been taken out more than twice in the past year I would figure I needed it more than the public. 

— John Glassco, letter to Al Purdy, 18 September 1964

John Glassco, that self-proclaimed "great practitioner of deceit," made a very fine book thief. His personal library, most of which was purchased by Queen's University, included volumes lifted from McGill University, Macdonald College, the Westmount Public Library and the Royal Edward Laurentian Hospital.

Queen's is not alone in having profited from Glassco's ill-gotten gains. Twenty-three years ago, I purchased what I thought to be his copy of Irving Layton's Balls for a One-Armed Juggler (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1963).

A couple of decades passed before I happened to notice this on the top edge:

Glassco dated the copy April 1963, the month of publication. It is presented here as evidence that he was not above breaking the rule described in his letter to Purdy:

Two summer's ago, I purchased another of Glassco's books, Henry de Montherlant's Perish in Their Pride [Les Célibataires] (New York: Knopf, 1936), only to notice this after the sale:

(cliquez pour agrandir)

The Laurentian Sanitarium became the Royal Edward Laurentian Hospital, at which Glassco spent a nearly all of 1961 undergoing treatment for tuberculosis. On 3 November of that year he wrote his wife:

Now that I’m getting ready to leave I’m casting a selective eye on the books in the library. There’s just so much stuff here I’d like to opt (organizieren) that no one has ever read or will ever read. But I’d better not: that’s bad medicine. Only two: Robert Elie’s La fin des songes (there are three copies, all untouched) and Madame Ellis’ book on Garneau. They’ll none of them be missed, as Gilbert says. Anyway, I’d like to give them a good home.

How's that for gratitude?

Trivia: The book Purdy pilfered was The Deficit Made Flesh (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1958). The victim was a Montreal bookseller.

Plug: Both Glassco letters quoted feature in The Heart Accepts It All: Selected Letters of John Glassco, edited by yours truly.

Cross-posted at A Gentleman of Pleasure.