A Blockhead Tries Writing for Money

The Mayor of Côte St. Paul

Ronald J. Cooke

Toronto: Harlequin, 1950

"No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money", wrote Samuel Johnson. But is not one who persists in writing for money, without achieving a single sale, also a blockhead? The question – unintended, I assure you – lies at the heart of this, Ronald J. Cooke's second novel. Like his first, The House on Craig Street (1949), this is a tale of a struggling writer living in Depression-era Montreal. Our new hero is Winnipeg boy Dave Manley, who arrived in the city thinking that its rich atmosphere would inspire his short stories. Sadly, the seventy or so produced in the eight month since have brought nothing but a steady stream rejection notices.

Fortune both smiles and frowns when he spots a tall and leggy blonde walking at a furious pace along St Catherine Street. Dave follows her for a block or two before realizing that he's not alone:

"Time for you to check out, old boy," he said.

Dave's not talking tough to his fellow stalker, but to himself.

"You've got no business being interested in the dame. You're a struggling free-lance writer, remember. You haven't got time for dames – besides you're broke. And dames, particularly ones like that one ahead cost dough. And dough and you have no affinity. Turn your steps around bud – head back to Peel Street – buy a Star and go home.

"Nuts," thought Dave. "Editors tell me that I'm not selling my stuff because there's no life in it. Maybe this is a real life plot that'll shape into something profitable."

It doesn't matter so much that Dave is broke; turns out the leggy dame – Cherie is her name – made fistfuls of cash working for an underworld kingpin called the Mayor. "But I kept my skirts clean – no street-walking for me", she's quick to add. Now Cherie wants out. Her dream is to open a lingerie shop in little Lunenburg, Nova Scotia. Cherie's escape, made with Dave's help, is remarkably easy. A lucky break. The Mayor is a sadistic psychopath – he murders by throwing darts, for goodness sake – but this doesn't stop Dave from working for him. You see, the writer is always on the hunt for new material. The way Dave figures it, "any character with as many ramifications as he has, is worth a story – maybe a dozen stories." It all turns out very badly, of course.

There's very little plot, "real life" or otherwise, in The Mayor of Côte St. Paul. Most of the book consists of Dave's persistent yapping, to himself and others, about the writing game, the writing life and ideas for the novels he's going to write. When the man does shut up, it's only so that he can listen to someone's life story, which he'll later mine for material. It's not that Dave has a passion for literature – he doesn't read – he sees it only as an easy way to make money. How frustrating then that what he calls his "stuff" doesn't sell.

As is usually the case with early Harlequins, the cover copy deceives. Sure, Cherie, "the girl from Lunenberg who had been learning about life since she was 16", intends to teach Dave what she knows, but does Dave want to know?

The first time she visits his flat, Dave welcomes her with a peck, before proudly showing off his stacks of unsold stories:

"Why don't you finish one job before you start another?" Cherie pouted.

"Meaning?" asked Dave.

"Meaning that you didn't finish that kiss."

"One is enough for me kitten," said Dave. "Your kisses are like dynamite – sort of rock me to my heels. After all, I'm just an ordinary guy – I'm no hero. And when a girl like you comes around it doesn't make it any easier."

"When I like a guy I like him," answered Cherie. "But you're the boss – if you don't want to kiss me it's okay."

"It's not that I don't want to kiss you," answered Dave, taking Cherie in his arms. "But you're so doggone feminine my head spins when you're in my arms."

"Just like a top, eh? said Cherie, running her fingers through his hair. "Okay, let's talk about your work."

And, as always, Dave does.

Blockhead.

Object: A typical early Harlequin. The cover image is sort of interesting. Cherie's hair doesn't seem quite right for 1931; I'm not sure about that typewriter either. The depiction of the Mayor – a slim man with sharp-chin, high forehead, "well-made" nose and eyes possessing "the type of glow one might expect to find belonging to someone who dealt in the occult" – is completely off.

Access: Only the University of Calgary, the University of Toronto and McGill University have copies. It's much more common online, where decent copies go for about twelve bucks.

Related posts:

The Messy World of Ronald J. Cooke

Write Short Stories the Dave Manley Way!

Ronald J. Cooke, No Blockhead

Of American Pirates and Canadian Counterfeiters

I received an email recently from a publisher who took exception to a post on pirated John Glassco titles at my other blog. "Hey there," he begins, "actually, we're not quite without permission on Glassco."

Not quite.

He then goes on to acknowledge that he "may be without permission" for one of the works in question. "Amazon won't carry it, and the thing was going for $500 used before I came along," he writes in defence.

You see, the man is performing a public service.

I stand by my words, which are supported by contracts and correspondence found in the Glassco fonds at Library and Archives Canada.

As I've not responded to this email, it seems unfair to identify this particular publisher.

Not responded?

Oh, I would have, but his concluding remarks rather rubbed me the wrong way:

Too bad you didn't contact me before. I have around 14k paying customers on the site, not to mention half a million visitors each month to —. Some of these readers might have been interested in your book.

He's referring here, of course, to A Gentleman of Pleasure, my new biography of Glassco. Well, I happily sacrifice any sales that I might have enjoyed in associating myself with this individual and his various ventures. One is, after all, known by the company one keeps.

No pun intended.

With the spread of POD technology and ebooks, it's hard to imagine that the problem of piracy won't grow, perhaps returning us to the turbulence and tumultuousness of earlier times. I'm reminded of poor Mark Twain, whose pocketbook took shots from Canada in a copyright war between the United States and the British Empire. In the end, of course, it was the writer who suffered the most.

Same as it ever was.

Twain wrote about his frustration with pirates – counterfeiters, he called them – in a 1 October 1880 letter to Congressman Rollin M. Daggett. The letter, with entertaining p.s., can be found online here at the Mark Twain Project.

Dear Daggett—
I want to go to Washington, but it ain’t any use, business-wise, for Congress won’t bother with anything but President-making. My publisher got me to send a letter of his to Blaine a month or two ago, in which our grievance was fully set forth. I didn’t believe Blaine would interest himself in the matter, & I was right. You just get that letter from Blaine, & cast your eye over it, & try to arrive at a realizing sense of what a silly & son-of-a-bitch of a law the present law against book-piracy is. I believe it was framed by an goddamd idiot, & passed by a Congress of goddamd muttonheads.
Now you come up here –that is the thing to do. I, also have Scotch whisky, certain lemons, & hot water, & struggle with the same every night.
Ys Ever
Mark

If you want to see how thoroughly foolish section 4964 is, just read it & substitute the words “U. S. treasury note” for the w “copy of such "counterfeit U. S. treasury note" for the words "copy of such book."
My books sell at $3.50 a copy, their Canadian counterfeit at 25 & 50 cents. If I could sieze [sic] all the Canadian counterfeits I could no more use them to my advantage than the Government could use bogus notes to its advantage. The only desirable & useful thing, in both cases, is the utter suppression of the counterfeits. The government treats its counterfeiters as criminals, but mine as erring gentlemen. What I want is that mime mine shall be treated as criminals too.

S L C

Thirteen decades later, it's still enough to make one reach for Scotch whiskey, certain lemons and hot water.

A Son's Lies My Father Told Me

Lies My Father Told Me

Norman Allan

Toronto: Signet, 1975

Back in May, I described novelizations of Canadian films as the rarest of things; I can think of only two, Whispering City and Lies My Father Told Me. This one is particularly interesting in that it was written by Norman Allan, son of novelist, playwright and screenwriter Ted Allan. We have here a son's version of his father's work.

Allan père did very well with this semi-autobiographical tale. What began as a short magazine piece, was adapted for radio, television, the cinema and, finally, the stage. Allan fis draws nothing from the original story – not so much as a sentence is similar – rather he follows his father's screenplay. Dedication is such that when the younger Allan does depart, as happens twice, one wonders whether he's not included a scene that was left on the cutting room floor. This is not to belittle his effort; the writing is tight and more than competent. The unabtrusive debut of a man who had never before published a work of fiction, it features some fairly strong imagery. Here David, the protagonist, races to feed his grandfather's horse:

I hurry along the balcony, three stories above the cobbled courtyard: three stories and a romance above Ferdeleh's stable there. A dozen dwellings, tenements of poverty, boxed and stacked: thirteen dwellings, counting Ferdeleh's, share the hemmed-in courtyard, their awkward wooden stairways sculpturing the skeletons of grotesque fairy castles. The gingerbread's all taken away, leaving only a matchstick grandeur...

I received Lies My Father Told Me as a gift back in 1976. In those dinosaur days – before Beta, VHS, DVDs and Netflix – novelizations such as these were pretty much the only way to revisit films. There were repatory theatres, of course, but I don't remember Lies My Father Told Me being offered. Television was as it is now: a crap shoot.

Jonathan Coe once described novelizations as "that bastard, misshapen offspring of the cinema and the written word". He's probably right – I agree with him on much else. But Lies My Father Told Me is the only novelization I've ever read... and I think it's pretty good.

Object: A very slim, mass market paperback with eight pages of stills from the film. Three pages of adverts provide much needed bulk. All movie-related, they range from an "exclusive movie edition" of The Three Musketeers to this biography of a hot star who had long ago gone cold:

The most interesting, I think, is the full-page push above for TV Movies.

"America's second largest indoor sport". How ribald.

Access: Six copies are currently listed online, five of which go for between one and six dollars. Only four of our university libraries hold the book – not one is located in Montreal. Patrons of public libraries are, predictably, limited to that serving the good citizens of Toronto. Library and Archives Canada fails yet again.

Related post: An Author Turns Thespian

Post-Apocalypse in Pink

The Lord's Pink Ocean

David Walker

New York: Daw, 1973

160 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.

A Final Word on Manners

The Ottawa Citizen

14 November 1953

Look familiar? What we have here is the Mind Your Manners publicity sheet from Monday's post reproduced word for word and passed off as a book review. The Ottawa Citizen seems to have been quite keen on promoting this guide; five months later, it devoted the better part of a two-page spread to 13 cartoons inspired by the book:

These cartoons show artist Peter Whalley's reaction to a new dictionary of etiquette written by Claire Wallace and Joy Brown and titled Mind Your Manners. Whalley's interpretations are fortunately not everyone's. The authors say they could only be Whalley's.

Mind Your Manners is the outgrowth of a column on etiquette which writer-commentator Wallace syndicated to 25 newspapers across Canada between 1945 and 1949. It was bought and published by Harlequin Books, of which Joy Brown is an editor. The first printing of 30,000 has been followed by a second and seems to justify the authors' belief that there was a need for a new simplified guide to Canadian manners.

The Ottawa Citizen

24 April 1954

It would not be considered proper behaviour, I suppose, to question the motives of the paper's editors. That said, I will point out that this latter piece also reads like a Harlequin press release. Let me leave you with that thought, along with a few sample cartoons and one final rule.

Related posts:
On Addressing a Duke's Eldest Son's Younger Son

More Manners Minding

More Manners Minding

A correspondent gently suggests that I may be seen to have made a faux pas with my previous post. Referencing the title, he asks: "How does one address a duke's eldest son's younger son?" The answer, as provided by Miss Wallace, is as follows:

DUKE'S ELDEST SON'S YOUNGER SON

Writing to:

Is, by courtesy, addressed as if the father were a peer; i.e. "Honourable (John) Doe"

Personally addressed as: Mr. John Doe

Referred to as: Mr. John Doe.

It should be noted that the rules here are quite different from those concerning a duke's eldest son's younger son's eldest brother:

DUKE'S ELDEST SON'S ELDEST SON

Writing to:

Assumes, by courtesy, the third title of his grandfather, and is addressed as a peer.

Personally addressed as: Lord Doe.

Referred to as: Lord Doe.

I offer sincere apologies for not having addressed this matter in Monday's post, and add this invaluable bit of information.

Autumn approaches.

Related posts:

On Addressing a Duke's Eldest Son's Younger Son

A Final Word on Manners

On Addressing a Duke's Eldest Son's Younger Son

Mind Your Manners

Claire Wallace

Toronto: Harlequin, 1953

A businesswoman, a journalist, a pioneering radio broadcaster and something of a daredevil, Claire Wallace was a remarkable woman with a remarkable story. How curious then that this, her only book, should have etiquette as its subject. The press release tucked into my copy provides something of an explanation:

In her continuous search for stories on Canadiana, Author [sic] Wallace came against a problem. There were no up-to-the-minute reference books on Canadian manners. Etiquette seemed out-dated and stuffy. That's how the idea for this new book was born.

I venture to say that etiquette, by its very nature, always seems out-dated and stuffy. And the claim – implication, really – that this or any reference book is up-to-the-minute borders on false advertising. That said, Mind Your Manners remains a useful little book in that it provides a clear picture of acceptable and exemplary behaviour in the Canada of the early 'fifties. I write here of the days of double weddings, visiting hairdressers and afternoon dress gloves; a time when a polite divorcee (as Miss Wallace was) would make no mention of her failed marriage "except legally and in conversation to personal friends."

Mind Your Manners was indeed "the first Dictionary [sic] of Canadian etiquette" – here the copy doesn't lie – though I think those in the know would have deferred to DeBrett's. Would Lady Eaton have consulted a 50¢ paperback sold only at newsstands?

Really, Mind Your Manners is as much about dreams as it is about place cards. In this more egalitarian post-war world, one might be invited to dine with a duke, mightn't one? Best to know the proper form of address – and let's not forget the Duke's daughter, his eldest son's daughter, his eldest son's eldest son, his eldest son's younger son, his eldest son's wife, his younger son and his younger son's wife. Miss Wallace covers all these possible encounters, along with eventualities like this one:

Mind Your Manners sold out its initial printing, returning to press just two months after release – a rare reprint in Harlequin's first decade. In 1960, the guide was reborn as the awkwardly titled Canadian Etiquette Dictionary. "COMPLETELY NEW" trumpets the cover, while the interior quietly informs that the guide was originally published as Mind Your Manners. Both statements mislead. No, the book is not "COMPLETELY NEW", but it is updated and does feature a previously unpublished section on travel etiquette. Miss Wallace revised the book a third time for a 1967 edition, titled simply Canadian Etiquette, issued by Winnipeg's Greywood Publishing. The guide appeared again in 1970, with an "up-to-date" travel section, even though its author was two years dead.

Back to 1953.

I admit to being thrown by the dedication in Mind Your Manners: "To Our Parents...".

Our?

Turn the page and we find the Foreword: "A book like this could never be written by two women alone..."

Two?

The other woman is Joy Brown*, who is credited as editor on the cover and title page. It's true that Brown was a writer – Night of Terror (1950), one of Harlequin's earliest titles, is hers – but did she actually pen any of these entries... or is it that Miss Wallace was just being overly polite?

Object and access: With cheap glue and cheap paper, typical of early Harlequin's, the book isn't exactly designed to reference use. This may explain why so few copies are listed for sale online. Uncommon, though not dear, it usually lists for $8 or so. Mind Your Manners is held by the Toronto Public Library, the Royal Ontario Museum and a handful of our academic libraries. I bought my copy – inscribed – last week in a London, Ontario thrift store for 33 cents.

* The wife of Jock Carroll, Joy Brown was better known as Joy Carroll, author of Soul's End (1974), Satan's Bell (1976) and a handful of other "popular priced paper backed books".

Related posts:

More Manners Minding

A Final Word on Manners