Grant Allen Dons a Woman's Blouse

The Type-Writer Girl
Grant Allen (writing as Olive Pratt Raynor)
Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2003

Juliet Appleton is a Girton girl; she knows the meaning of "mandragora" and can spell it with confidence. Though Juliet suffered tragedy in her mother's early death, hers was an otherwise happy childhood. Papa was both loving and kind, but now he too is gone. At twenty-two, Juliet finds herself not only alone but facing a life of poverty. The reasons don't matter – Allen barely mentions them – the important thing is that poor Juliet Appleton has hardly a two-bob bit to her name.

What's a Girton girl to do?

This one answers an advert placed by the legal office of Flor & Fingelman, where she secures a position as "Shorthand and Type-writer (female)". That she could supply her own machine – a Bar-lock

– may have played to her advantage, but they would have hired her just the same. Truth is, Juliet is a significant asset to any firm; she's intelligent, creative, and has a wonderful personality. This is not to say that her character is without flaws; criticism may be made that Juliet is prone to throw caution to the wind. "I was born to take no heed for the morrow," she tells us. "I belong to the tribe of the grasshopper, not that of the ant."

Juliet resigns her post within the week, producing one of the greatest letters of resignation ever written:

You see, Juliet had been unhappy in the unseemly offices of Flor & Fingelman. During lunch break on her third day, she happened to sit within earshot of a Cambridge man who was telling his companion of a colony of agrarian anarchists just outside Horsham. Juliet pawns her typewriter and sets off by bicycle to join their number. The colony is not the quite the utopia of her dreams, nor is it the disaster I was expecting. The anarchists know not what they do and toil inefficiently, yet manage to harvest enough to get by. No, the real problem with the Horsham anarchists is found in their leader Rothenburg, who pressures Juliet to "fraternise".

Our heroine is not long with these people – no longer than she was with Flor & Fingelman – but then The Type-Writer Girl is not a long book. At sixty-six of 119 pages, the third and final act takes up the most

space. However, it is in these same pages that the novella falters and eventually falls flat. Juliet returns to London, where she finds employment in a publishing house run by a romantic figure not much older than herself. She refers to him as "Romeo". Juliet falls in love with her new employer (as she knew she would), while Allen falls back on coincidence (as he invariably does).

The Type-Writer Girl is one of two Allens available from Peterborough's Broadview Press. My pleasure in this is tempered somewhat by the absence of supplementary material of the sort included with other novels Broadview has reissued.

I must add that it is odd Broadview chose to reissue the novella. By far one of Allen's lesser works, its true value lies only as a further sign of

evolution in the author's thought ("evolution" being a word Allen would have appreciated). The Type-Writer Girl may be weak, but its heroine, Juliet Appleton, is strong. As with the title character of his final work, Hilda Wade: A Woman with Tenacity of Purpose, our Juliet is more intelligent, industrious and capable than any who surround her. Both are a far cry from the fragile Blackbird of Under Sealed Orders, whose high education strains to the point at which she takes her own life.

Ultimately, The Type-Writer Girl is as slight as its page count. I find myself agreeing with Allen scholar Peter Morton in judging that The Type-Writer Girl could have been so much more. In his study The Busiest Man in 
England, Prof Morton writes of Allen:

If he (and his readers) had been willing to confront the darker side of sexual harassment, it could have been an effective piece of social realism like Wells' Ann Veronica of a few years later. As it is, it ends as little more than a romantic romp.

Damn, now I've got to track down a copy of Ann Veronica.

Dedication:

Favourite line:

"I am anarchic by nature. Wherever there is a government, I am always against it. Let me join your band – and I promise disobedience."

A critic raves:

Athenaeum, 11 September 1897

Object: A slim trade-sized paperback, feauring an Introduction by Clarissa J. Suranyi. Copies can be ordered for $18.95 through the publisher's website. I purchased mine three years ago at Cheap Thrills in Montreal. Price: $6.00.

Access: The Type-Writer Girl was first published in 1897 by C. Arthur Pearson. The first American edition appeared three years later, courtesy of cheapo publisher Munro (above). Street & Smith put out an even cheaper edition later that same year. The Pearson edition can be read online here courtesy of the University of Alberta and the Internet Archive.

The Broadview edition is held by sixteen of our universities, Library and Archives Canada, and Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec. I don't see any other anywhere. Surprisingly, no copies of any edition is to be found in the Kingston-Frontenac Public Library.

Related posts:

Romance Turns Russian Nihilist Reluctant

Blackbird Dying in the Dead of Night

The Busiest Man in England Lays Down His Pen

The Last of James Benson Nablo?

The life of James Benson Nablo has always intrigued. A Niagara Falls native who had never before appeared in print, he came out of nowhere in 1945 with The Long November, a solid novel from a major New York publisher. It was then off to Hollywood, where three motion pictures featuring big names like Mickey Rooney, George Raft and Edward G. Robinson were made from his stories. A fourth, China Doll starring Victor Mature, was in production when Nablo died at age forty-five.

There's more to the writer's story, of course. For one, there was a second novel, And Yet Another Four, he had under contract with Scribners. Nablo wasn't satisfied and set it aside. The manuscript is now lost.

Two years ago, I helped bring The Long November back into print as part of the Véhicule Press Ricochet Books series. It's now joined by Stories, a collection of Nablo's previously unpublished short fiction. This attractive hardcover, handset and printed using a Vandercook SP-15 press in an edition of fifty, is the latest title from J.C. Byers' Three Bats Press.

Five stories in all, they're preceeded by my Introduction. Also included is an Afterword and memorial verse by Nancy Nablo Vichert, Nablo's daughter. The latter dates from her years as a student at McMaster University.

With Stories, all known surviving writing by James Benson Nablo is now in print. Until today, they existed only as a series of manuscripts the author had entrusted to Nancy.

But what are they? As I write in the Introduction, Nablo couldn't have intended these stories for the movies, and yet Nablo never published any short stories. What's more, there's no evidence that he so much as tried. Were they written for his own amusement? Are they false starts? Fragments of larger works?

All these years later, he remains the Mysterious Mister Nablo.

Copies of Stories by James Benson Nablo can be purchased by contacting Three Bats Press: 

3bats@wollamshram.ca

Related posts:

The Mysterious Mister Nablo
Nablo in Hollywood

Nablo in Paperback

Edward G. Robinson Gets His Man

The Long November in Late August

A Poem for Labour Day by A.C. Stewart

"On the Drowning of a French-Canadian Laborer" by A.C. Stewart from his self-published tome Dust and Ashes (n.p., 1910).

Sadly, I have not been able to identify the victim... nor the year... nor the location. "Jacques Cartier Rapids" does not exist. There are rapids in Jacques Cartier National Park. Was it there that the tragedy took place? Doubt it. Still, knowing Stewart, it's a safe bet that the drowning of the French-Canadian labourer happened somewhere, and just as he described.

Dust and Ashes was a gift from Vanessa Brown and Jason Dickson of Brown & Dickson in London, Ontario. This past weekend, saw the couple celebrating their move to a new, larger location on Richmond Row.

Congratulations!

Now, get to work you two.

Related posts:

Happy Labour Day, Young Fella!

Drowning by the Dock of the Bay

Cheese! What a Story!

The Mystery of the Folded Paper
Hulbert Footner
New York: Collier, n.d.

The British title is The Folded Paper Mystery.

Any better?

I would have dropped "Mystery," which isn't much in evidence. The first page introduces Finlay Corveth, a young go-getter who mines the criminal underworld for material he uses in his short stories. Today he's on the hunt for of a brass ball that went missing during a break-in

at Nick Peters' flat. Tony Casino grabbed it from the bed frame, used it to knock out Nick, and then took off with the thing in his hand. What Tony and Fin don't know is that the ball contains an antique locket, which in turn contains a folded paper upon which is a message that leads to the basement of a large house in on the outskirts of New York. Sealed in the brick wall behind the furnace is a box that holds information relating to the line of succession in a fictional monarchy on the Black Sea.

I haven't spoiled a thing. The Mystery of the Folded Paper tells a familiar tale; the reader will recognize it with the entrance of pretty Mariula, a sixteen-year-old private schoolgirl with a mysterious past.

There will be a murder and a suicide, and yet this is one of the happiest novels I've ever read: boy meets girl, boy never loses girl, and girl turns out to be a princess. Pay no mind that the boy is twenty-five and the girl is sixteen.

So, yes, a happy story... and not at all taxing! Anyone not paying attention will be set right by frequent explanations and summaries.

Small wonder that few people have bothered writing about The Mystery of the Folded Paper; those who have invariably mention the appearance of the author's friend Christopher Morley as a character.

Is he, really?

The Mystery of the Folded Paper features someone named Christopher Morley, but he's a theatre director, not a writer. I suppose it may be that the character shares something of Morley's... um, character, but I'm not interested enough to investigate further.

It's also noted that The Mystery of the Folded Paper is the first of Hulbert Footner's Amos Lee Mappin mysteries.

I was sorry to hear it.

Mappin is a bland figure. A bloated bachelor, spoiled by privilege, he lives a life of luxury and leisure in an expansive Manhattan apartment run by manservant Jermyn. Fin bows to the older writer's judgment, as younger writers so often do, for no other reason than he has published a few books. Though Mappin's deal with the criminal mind, he doesn't bring much insight. His greatest contribution comes in the way of funds.

Things are left to Fin, the boy who meets the girl, to carry the story to its predictable conclusion. Energetic, chatty and crazily optimistic, he's  always ready with a word and smile, as in this scene which finds him running for his life beside a woman whom he's endangered:

"You're doing fine!" Fin said to Daisy, grinning. "It's no cinch to run uphill!"

Though I can't recommend The Mystery of the Folded Paper, Fin's boyish over-the-top enthusiasm and cheery, positive attitude make it worth a fleeting look. This snippet of dialogue should suffice:

"Cheese! Tony, you sure are some nervy kid! It's a treat to hear you! You must tell me some more stories!"

Reaching the end of the novel, I couldn't help but wonder whether the whole thing wasn't a parody of something I'd never read. Again, I'm not interested enough to investigate further.

No, the only truly intriguing thing about The Mystery of the Folded Paper is this: With all Fin's snooping around the criminal class, never mind the stories he publishes about its crimes, wouldn't he have been offed long ago?

I suppose it's worth nothing that Fin doesn't feature in any of the other Amos Lee Mappin mysteries.

Object: A well-constructed 350-page hardcover in crimson boards with gold stamping, my copy belongs to Collier's Front Page Mysteries series. It was purchased earlier this year at London's Attic Books. Price: $10.00.

Access: First published in 1930 by Harper in the United States and Collins in the United Kingdom. As one might expect, a cheap Burt edition followed. I haven't been able to determine just when the Collier edition appeared.

Used copies are not plentiful, but they are cheap. The least expensive, a jacketless, cocked copy of the Collins first, is listed online for US$7.61. The only copy of the Collier edition - not quite so nice as mine - can be had for US$20.00. One Pennsylvania bookseller is trying to get away with selling the Burt reprint as a first edition. Price: US$300. Steer clear.

Remarkably, The Mystery of the Folded Paper was reissued in 2014 by Coachwhip Publications.

Seven of our university libraries hold copies.

Wanting Justin Trudeau Dead

Posted this morning online at the Walrus, an expansion of last Friday's blog post.

Available at the Walrus – gratis – through this link.

Update: Chantal Hébert picks up on the article here.

Related posts:
Sex and the Trudeaus: The Bachelor Canada
Ezra Levant and the Crude Art of Bowdlerization
Wishing the Prime Minister Dead