A Millar Mystery and the Art of Deception

Following last Wednesday's post on Margaret Millar's An Air that Kills:

One man dies in this novel; here's how the discovery of his body is described:

Two barges, sent down from Meaford with winches and dredging equipment, located the car in twenty feet of water just below the cliff where Lehman had found the tire tracks. The car was barely damaged. the windows and windshield were unbroken and Ron Galloway was still inside, fastened snugly to the driver's seat by his safety belt.

So, who's that above on the cover of the 1985 International Polygonics edition?

The 2000 British edition from Allison & Busby (again, no relation), does the reader a similar disservice by falling back on that tired cliché of the clutching hand.

Who exactly is drowning here? It can't be poor Ron Galloway, who enters the drink in a comatose state, courtesy of best friend and pill pushing pharmaceutical salesman Harry Bream.

Though Ron's staged suicide by car crash is a key event, it's never described by Millar. We learn of the tragedy many days after the fact when tire tracks leading off the edge of a cliff are discovered. The author makes much of the fact that Ron was behind the wheel of a submerged Cadillac convertible when he died, yet all German editions feature an image of a sedan that has hit a wall.

It's understandable that readers of Die Süßholzraspler might expect someone at some point to drive into a wall, just as folks with the International Polygonics edition would've been keeping an eye out for a floating body. I expect those who read the Allison & Busby edition braced themselves for Mrs Millar's description of a struggling, drowning man.

Readers of the 1976 Penguin edition may have found some satisfaction; the cross-scarred wrists depicted on the cover feature in the novel, appearing fleetingly on page 243 of the 247-page book.

They're of no importance to the plot.

Forget those covers – they're bland and boring. The best, the steamiest, the sexiest is the 1960 Bantam edition:

It too has problems. The flying Caddie is great, but that can't be fair-haired, chunky Thelma Bream. And while its true that An Air that Kills is a "novel of subtle evil", it's not until the final chapter that the hidden "savage lust for revenge" is revealed. Consider that a spoiler.

Four years later, unmourned publisher Lancer got Thelma's hair right, but little else. While acknowledging that this ugly edition was published when Twiggy was at her height, I must ask: Can the femme fatale in blue bra be considered plump?

Or am I being just too damn picky?

The least colourful cover I've yet to find comes from Tokyo publisher Sogensha. It's also the most accurate. The small lake on its cover could very well be located outside Meaford, Ontario; I see nothing to indicate otherwise, except for the fact that the area is blessed with some of the most beautiful scenery on the planet. This doesn't do it justice:

The most beautiful feature on the cover belong's to A.E. Housman, who provided the novel's epigraph:

Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those? 

That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.

Published in 1995, Sogensha's is the fourth – yes, fourth – Japanese edition. We Canadians are still awaiting our first.

Margaret Millar and the Air Up North

An Air that Kills

Margaret Millar

New York: Random House, 1957

249 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.

Suggestive Harlequins: A Romantic Threesome

To Please the Doctor

Marjorie Moore

1959

Doctor in Bondage

Jean S. MacLeod

1961

Strange Request

Marjorie Bassett

1960

Related post:

SF, not S/M

'Burns' by James McIntyre, the Cheese Poet

The Robert Burns Memorial

Square Dorchester (né Dominion), Montreal

Photograph by Wally Gobetz

BURNS 

The following ode was read by the author at the Centennial Anniversary of Burns in the year 1859.

This night shall never be forgot
   For humble life none now despise,
Since Burns was born in lowly cot
   Whose muses wing soars to the skies. 

'Round Scotia's brow he wove a wreath
   And raised her name in classic story
A deathless fame he did bequeath,
   His country's pride, his country's glory. 

He sang her hills, he sang her dales,
   Of Bonnie Doon and Banks of Ayr,
Of death and Hornbook and such tales
   As Tam O'Shanter and his mare. 

He bravely taught that manly worth
   More precious is than finest gold,
He reckoned not on noble birth,
   But noble deeds alone extolled. 

Where will we find behind the plow
   Or in the harvest field at toil
Another youth, sweet bard, like thou,
   Could draw the tear or raise the smile. 

We do not think 'twas Burns' fault,
   For there were no teetotalers then,
That Willie brewed a peck of malt
   And Robin preed like other men. 

'Tis true he loved the lasses dear,
   But who for this would loudly blame,
For Scotia's maids his heart did cheer
   And love is a true heavenly flame. 

So here we've met in distant land
   Poor honest Robin to extol,
Though oft we differ let us stand
   United now in Ingersoll.

From Poems of James McIntyre (Ingersoll, ON: Chronicle, 1889) 

No Lady Before Judith Hearne

A Bullet for My Lady
Bernard Mara [pseud. Brian Moore]
New York: Gold Medal, 1955

As titles go, A Bullet for My Lady ain't so bad. The problem is that that narrator Josh Camp has no lady, and the only person who takes a slug is a small time crook named Domingo Jiménez.

Barcelona sets the stage. Camp, a trader in airplanes, arrives in "the biggest, roughest city in Spain" to search for AWOL business partner Harry Spoke. He's barely set foot on Spanish soil when met by a beautiful woman who reports that the missing man got drunk and fell from the balcony of a fourth class hotel. Camp doesn't believe a word. Harry, always one for routine and discipline, never strayed from a two drink maximum.

Camp takes a room in the selfsame flophouse, where he's visited by the beautiful bearer of bad news, a moustachioed marquesa, a lovely lush named Lucille and, of course, Domingo Jiménez. As it turns out, all are searching for the coffin of a cardinal who, centuries earlier, was buried wearing vestments inlaid with pearls, rubies and diamonds. What we have is a dark, violent, not so funny It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World.

A Bullet for My Lady ain't so bad. While the plot isn't much and the characters cardboard, Moore's sketches of Spain are at times quite striking. (He banged out the early chapters in Barcelona and Majorca.)

The fourth of his disowned novels, it appeared two months before Judith Hearne. Back in 1955, the Gold Medal thriller was Moore's moneymaker, bringing an advance that was well over ten times that proffered by André Deutsch for the more literary undertaking.

Three more Moore pulps followed.

Can you blame him?

Object: A cheap mass market paperback with spicy cover illustration by James Meese. The back cover features a curious black and white photograph that looks for all the world like a still from a movie that was never made.

Access: The first and only printing arrived at news stands in March 1955. Very Good copies begin at US$45 and, for no good reason, go up to US$150. Non-circulating copies can be found at the Toronto Public Library, Library and Archives Canada, McMaster University, the University of Saskatchewan, the University of Calgary and Simon Fraser University.

Related posts:

Brian Moore's True First

Murderers Move in on Montreal

Parisian French, not Québécois French
No Gun for Gloria

The Dominatrix of Time (and other fantasies)

There are no whip-wielding women in Masters of Time, green-skinned or otherwise. In fact, the only female so much as mentioned in the entire novel is aging spinster Nora Matheson. The 1974 Manor Books edition above is a cheat designed to appeal to adolescent boys. I was eleven when it arrived in stores.

With van Vogt, covers rarely reflect content. Publishers puff, peddling images that – four times out of five – are entirely unappealing.

Yes, four times out of five.

I present the following as evidence:

Super-Cérebro [Supermind]

Lisbon: Livros do Brasil, 1978

The Book of Ptath

London: Panther, 1975

Out of the Unknown
London: New English Library, 1970

宇宙嵐のかなた [Mission to the Stars]

Tokyo: Hayakawa, 1970

The Weapon Makers

New York: Greenberg, 1952

Related post: The Homoerotic van Vogt

Wasting Time on A. E. van Vogt

Masters of Time
A. E. van Vogt
New York: Macfadden-Bartell, 1967

Masters of Time opens with poor Norma Matheson scrambling up a slippery riverbank after a failed suicide attempt. Eleven years earlier she'd rejected college boyfriend Jack's marriage proposal to pursue a career in social service. How'd that go? The author won't say, though the publisher provides plenty in this pitch to prospective purchasers:

Front cover, back cover, front page – Macfadden-Bartell describes this novel three different ways, though not one is true to the plot.

The finest scene is the first. Norma rests on a park bench gathering herself for another run at the river when she's approached by Dr Lell, a gaunt man who offers a job recruiting mercenaries for "the Calonian cause". That she accepts might be an indication that things didn't go so well in the social service game. Norma soon discovers that her employer is not the country of Calonia, but aliens amassing soldiers for a war in the distant future. She runs to the local police station only to be temporarily transformed into a mute old woman by Dr Lell.

Norma next turns to the US Mail, penning a plea to former beau Jack, now a world-renowned physicist. The lengthy letter she receives in response is full of mixed messages. Jack questions her sanity, repeats each and every detail Norma has gleaned of the alien plot, provides scientific analyses of same, and encloses $200 so that she might pay for psychiatric help.

What began as a mildly interesting episode of Twilight Zone suddenly becomes awkward and disjointed. The novel stumbles forward, picking up and discarding characters, concepts and concerns while torturing the reader with pedestrian prose. Here are Jack's thoughts upon learning that he's aboard a spaceship bound for Venus:

Venus! He let the word roll around in his mind and it was exciting, intellectual food, immensely stimulating to a mind shaped and trained as was his. Venus? For ages, the dreams of men had reached into the skies, immeasurably fascinated by the mind-staggering fact of other worlds, as vast as their own continents, seas, rivers, treasure beyond estimate. And now for him there was to be reality.

This plain passage is atypical in that it is at least comprehensible. As in Bond parodies, van Vogt's villains reveal too much. Explanations are plentiful, advanced knowledge is imparted and secrets are spilled, but nothing the aliens say makes much sense:

"–the seventeenth x space and time manipulations... taking place sometime in the future... several years from now. Your spaceship either by accident or design caught up in the eddying current in the resulting time storm– Still no clue to the origin of the mighty powers being exercised."

While readers may feel that they have missed something, fault lies wholly with the author who in his Reflections of A. E. van Vogt reveals that the novel was but one cobbled together from unrelated stories. The effort was, as he put it, "fix-up work". I suggest that "hack work" is more appropriate. I'll add that that grafting lifeless things to other lifeless things brings animation only in science fiction... and not with science fiction.

Oh, one more thing: Nora and Jack get married in the end.

Trivia: The novel first appeared as "The Recruiting Station" in a 1942 issue of Astounding Science Ficton. It first appeared in book form coupled with a shorter pulp story, "The Changeling". It has also been published as Earth's Last Fortress.

Translations include L'ultima fortezza della terra (1976), La dernière fortresse (1978) and Beherrscher der Zeit (1978).

Object and Access: A mass market paperback, typical of its time, copies of the Macfadden-Bartell edition are plentiful and cheap. Good copies can be had for one dollar (double that for Very Good). The first edition, published in 1950 by Fantasy Press of Reading, Pennsylvania, is not nearly as rare as one might expect. Near Fine copies begin at the forty dollar range. In Canada, only the Toronto Public Library and a handful of universities have the novel in their collections.