The Mystery Writer Mystery Unravels

'Keeping an Eye Out for Pamela Fry' pays off:

A writer friend informs that Pamela Fry, author of Harsh Evidence and The Watching Cat, is the very same Pamela Fry who once worked as an editor at McClelland & Stewart. Though Miss Fry's years with the publisher were not many – 1965 to 1971 – she did work with several canonical favourites, including Sinclair Ross, Ernest Buckler and Farley Mowat. I imagine she'll be best remembered not for her mysteries, but as the editor of The Edible Woman, Margaret Atwood's debut novel. A high point to be sure.

The low? Look no further than Eric Koch's ill-fated satire The French Kiss (1969), which I mention here only because the book just might lay claim to the worst launch in Canadian publishing history. In Jack, McClelland biographer James King tells us that The French Kiss was on bookstore shelves when legal advice came down that members of Quebec's Johnson family might have been slandered in its pages:

The three thousand books were recalled, small slips pasted over the offending passages and the copies then returned to retailers. Jack only learned of the potentially disastrous situation at the book's launch at the home of the book's editor Pamela Fry. He called her aside, told her the book would have to be recalled and acted quickly and decisively to prevent a lawsuit.

According to King, Pamela Fry left M&S in for a position on a federal government task force. In his autobiography, Drawing on Type, designer Frank Newfeld places her c.1980 at the National Gallery of Canada. From there the trail grows cold.

Thanks go out to my "writer friend" and to fellow sleuth Richard Blanchard.

Related post: Keeping an Eye Out for Pamela Fry

The Canadian Publishers

McClelland & Stewart swallowed up by Random House Canada

McClelland and Stewart

"The Canadian Publishers"

1906 - 2012

RIP

Artwork by Astrid K. Busby
with apologies to Frank Newfeld

POD Cover of the Month: Romany of the Snows

Romany of the Snows – what we sticklers refer to as A Romany of the Snows – another fine product from print on demand house Tutis. Take care, bears are not nearly as cute, cuddly, petite or domesticated as they'd have you believe. From the novel:

I got sick and numb. There on that anvil of snow and ice I saw a big white bear, one such as you shall see within the Arctic Circle. His long nose fetching out towards the bleeding sun in the sky, his white coat shining. But that was not the thing — there was another. At the feet of the bear was a body, and one clawed foot was on that body — of a man.

First edition:

New York: Stone & Kimball, 1896

Runner up:


The Tutis take on Michel and Angele – what we sticklers refer to as Michel and Angèle – Sir Gilbert's romantic tale of two young lovers in 16th-century England.

Related posts:

POD Cover of the Month: Montreal for Tourists..

POD Cover of the Month: Rila of Ingelside
POD Cover of the Month: The Simple Adventures of a Memsahib

Mister Gumble Meets David Golder

A brief follow-up, of sorts, to Monday's post on Mr. Gumble Sits Up.

One keen-eyed friend notes that Irène Némirovsky's David Golder features amongst the "Selection of Horace Liveright Fall Books" listed on the back flap. Indeed it does. The publisher seems to have really been behind this novel, pushing it also on Gumble's back jacket.

What cost two dollars back in 1930, cannot be had today... at least not through online booksellers; only two copies of this first English-language edition are listed. Both sans jacket, the more expensive is described thusly:

There [sic] pages are clean except for some slight damp stain at the outside edge of some pages. The half-cloth binding has some staining mostly to the orange front paper cover. The corners are bumped, the spine is cocked, and there is a small tear to the crown of the binding. Webbing is exposed in the back.

"Reading copy" is the bookseller's summary. Surely not! At US$500 – a price I expect he'll get – his is a copy for the collector. This is a reading copy:

Sold in the original French for a mere C$9.99. New.

Dead Man Sitting

Mr. Gumble Sits Up

Douglas Durkin

New York: Liveright, 1930

Back in 1930, when it received its first and only printing, Mr. Gumble Sits Up was described by the Chicago Tribune as “a fantastic tale”. That I can’t report anything more says much about my reaction to this novel. Mr. Gumble Sits Up is a fantastic tale, and an intriguing book, but not so much that I’d pay the paper the US$3.95 they’re asking for the rest of the review.

The novel begins with the demise of its title character. Gumble is a simple and simple-minded small town hardware store owner. Unhappily married, pursed by creditors, he’s overtaken by mortal illness “on one of those very days when life had, so to speak, given him another beating.” His wife pulls back, creditors pull back, and Gumble enjoys the silence:

When he was told the solemn truth at last – that is he was about to die, was dying, in fact – Gumble embraced the knowledge with what remaining strength he had and went to sleep as peacefully as any child. In the morning he was dead.

Gumble’s rest in peace ends abruptly when he returns to life at his own funeral. This resurrection raises all sorts of interesting questions: Is the widow Gumble still free to marry her true love, Mr Pound of the village of Wayne? What of all those creditors? Should they begin apportioning the man’s estate or would they be obliged to extend their loans?

Ill-feelings abound, and Gumble figures it would be best for all concerned if he simply vanished. He sneaks away from this Leacockian quagmire, entering a rural America that bears some similarity to that of Liveright stable-mate Sherwood Anderson. Dark laughter meets black humour, bleak situations and curious conversations that consist almost entirely of what the dust jacket describes as “homely philosophy”. Here Gumble exchanges views with a snake oil salesman:

“It’s a wise man that accepts the truth and acts before it is too late.”
“True enough,” replied Gumble, “true enough! But you have heard, perhaps, that it is a wise man who knows when to doubt.”
The vendor looked puzzled for a moment. “I have never heard that, my friend,” he retorted at last, “but I have heard that a fool can ask questions a wise man can’t answer. What is it you want to know?”
Gumble knew how to appreciate a witty turn even when he himself was the butt of it. “Very good, very good!” he laughed affably.

And so it goes. Things happen – often fantastic, usually amusing – but all is undercut by page after page of tiresome dialogue, more often than not instigated by Gumble himself:

”You have heard it said, I am sure, that every dog must have his day.”
“You mean, perhaps, that by the same token we should let sleeping dogs lie,” laughed the widow.
“Very good!” Gumble declared and joined heartily in her laughter. “Very good, indeed!”

The reader is relieved when, after 230 pages of this, Gumble succumbs to an accidental drug overdose. Dead for a second and final time, he takes in a sun that “had never shone so brightly”, and just keeps talking:

“And what do you make of it all my friend?” he asked the first wayfarer he met. “or are you good at riddles?”
“As for that –” quoth God, and was silent.

Thus endeth the novel.

God is merciful, is he not?

Object: A well-constructed hardcover in black boards with gold lettering. The dust-jacket, turquoise paper with black and red printing, is a bit fragile. The back flap price reductions reflect Liveright's ineffective reaction to the 1930 book war begun when Doubleday and others slashed prices of their new fiction lists to one dollar.

Access: A rare book, it's held by not one of our public libraries and just eight of our university libraries. No copies are listed for sale online. My copy, the only I've ever seen offered, was purchased last month from an American bookseller for US$9.95.

Related post: Mr. Gumble Meets David Golder

Immature Verse for a New Year

Twenty-two lines of celebration from Poems (Beauchemin, 1922), the first volume by young Ethel Ursula Foran (1900-1988). The daughter of True Witness editor Joseph Kearney Foran, himself a poet, she subtitled her collection of "immature verses" A Few Blossoms from the Garden of My Dreams.

Related posts:

A New Year

An Old Poem for the New Year by Arthur Stringer

Temperance Verse for New Year's Day

Just Say the Invitation Never Arrived

The Globe and Mail, 30 December 1936