Montreal Noir at Blue Metropolis

Just announced by the good folks at the Blue Metropolis festival, a month tomorrow I'll have the honour of hosting 'Montreal Noir', a panel discussion focusing on the city's forgotten pulp past:

Cheap, disposable and sensationalistic, Montreal’s pulp fiction took its place on Canadian and American newsstands sixty years ago. It has since been ignored, neglected and, in some cases, hidden by its authors. What was so shameful about these books and why are we reviving them now?

Joining me on stage will be Trevor Ferguson, Jim Napier and Will Straw. Actor Marcel Jeannin will be reading excerpts from the work of Montreal's three best noir novelists. Who they? Buy a ticket and find out.

Montreal Noir: The City's Forgotten Pulp Past

OPUS Montreal Hotel, Salon St-Laurent

10 Sherbrooke Street West

Saturday, 21 April, 8:30 pm 

Dr. Drummond's Curious St. Patrick's Day Poem

The Quebec Saturday Budget, 2 April 1892

"He only Wore a Shamrock" 

He only wore a shamrock
On his faithful Irish breast,
Maybe a gift from his colleen one,
The maiden whom he loved best;
But the emblem of dear old Ireland,
Tho' worn on a jacket of red,
Was the emblem of rank disloyalty,
And treason most foul, they said. 

Had he but borne the heather,
That grows on the Scottish hills,
A rose from an English garden,
Or a leek from the Cambrian rills,
Then he might summon his comrades,
With trumpet, and fife, and drum.
And march through the breadth of England,
Till trumpet and fife were dumb.
But he only wore a shamrock,
And tho' Britain's most gracious Queen
Had pinned her cross on his bosom,
Yet the little trefoil of green
Might not nestle down beside it,
For the color, alas! was banned,
And the Celtic soldier was made to feel
That he trod an alien land.

Oh! poor little modest symbol,
Of the glorious Trinity,
Rather bloom on your native hill-side,
Than cross the dark Irish sea;
Rather rest on the loving bosom,
Of the Mother that gave you birth,
For even your virtues can't chasten
The ungrateful English earth.

Atypical verse from William Henry Drummond, the poet we prefer to forget, "He only Wore a Shamrock" was inspired by an incident in which an Irish soldier in the British Army was punished for refusing to remove a shamrock from his non-dress uniform. We know this because the poet tells us much in an appended note that credits an anonymous headline writer for giving his poem its title:

Here's the thing: On 18 March 1894, a Sunday, there was no edition of the Gazette. While it's tempting to think that Drummond merely misremembered the year – the incident in question having taken place on  St Patrick's Day 1892 – there's no such heading in the 18 March 1892 edition. In fact, it wasn't until the next day that the story was broken by the Daily News. Despite dogged detective work, the Gazette heading has eluded me.

I'm not sure what to make of the  awkwardly composed quote. A sub-heading? Drummond's own words? In either case, it's all wrong. According to Hansard, Private O'Grady's bit 'o green was stuck not in a buttonhole, but his glengarry cap. More importantly, O'Grady was not court marshalled, but was received a punishment of 48 hours of hard labour.

William Henry Drummond, physician, poet and poor historian? Or is this just a case of poetic licence spilling over onto an explanatory note?

Irving Layton Rides a Rooster

Frank Newfeld doesn't figure in Irving Layton's memoir Waiting for the Messiah, he makes no appearance in Elspeth Cameron's 517-page Layton biography, and yet I'd argue that the designer's work played a key role in the poet's public persona.

I don't think I'm stepping out on too frail a limb in writing that The Laughing Rooster (working titles: Poems in Bad Taste and The Indelicate Touch) is the most illustrious Layton cover. It displays a bit of the whimsy that we might have seen in Newfeld's rejected "tits" cover for Leonard Cohen. Published by McClelland & Stewart in 1964, it opens in cinematic style with sixteen pages of images, credits, contents, dedication and more. At one point, rooster and poet face off.

The former seems to win – the rooster's image appears four more times before Layton begins his Preface.

Of course, it all really begins with Newfeld's first Layton cover, A Red Carpet for the Sun (1959). The poet's big press debut, it sold more than 8000 copies, elevating Layton to the level of national celebrity.

A Red Carpet for the Sun

Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1959

Those eyes. Were they too intense for our cousins to the south? A different Newfeld design was used in the American edition. A shame. 

A Red Carpet for the Sun

Highlands, NC: Jonathan Williams, 1959

The Swinging Flesh

Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1961

Balls for a One-Armed Juggler

Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1963

Periods of the Moon

Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1967

Related posts:

McClelland's Expriment, Newfeld's Art

Frank Newfeld's Masterpiece (and Leonard Cohen's Unseen Face for Tits)

The Brilliance of Frank Newfeld

A Song for the Irving Layton Centenary

 
Irving Peter Layton
(né Israel Pincu Lazarovitch)
12 March 1912 – 4 January 2006

He is the light of our generation and after his 130 or 140 years are over and the man's removed from his work so that nothing lies between the reader and the work, the universe Irving created will shine forever.

– Leonard Cohen, 1997

Margaret Millar Saturday Matinée Spoilers

Having complained about spoilers dropped by a forgotten reviewer, I'll warn that I'm about to commit the same crime. Anyone who has not read Margaret Millar's Beast in View might want to stop at this point.

This is not about the novel, but the two television adaptations: 1964 and 1986 episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. The first is worth watching, if only for Joan Hackett's portrayal of Helen Clarvoe.

On the surface, Hackett's casting is curious. She's meant to portray a Plain Jane, but little attempt is made to hide her good looks. Let's remember that this accomplished actress first garnered public attention as teenage model. Like her paper counterpart, television Helen lives in a hotel suite. While there's a slightly glamourous air about her – in the first scene, she looking over fashion drawings – she's otherwise very true to the character Millar created. Knowing what little I do about Ms Hackett, I'm not surprised. Supremely talented, but difficult to work with, she had a reputation as a perfectionist. I'm betting she read Millar's novel – and more than once.

James Bridges, who went on to write and direct The Paper Chase and The China Syndrome, had the task of adapting the novel for cathode ray tubes. The fifty minutes he was allotted cuts most characters, the foremost being Douglas, Evelyn's homosexual ex-husband. No real surprise there. Bridges adds motion in having Helen sabotage the wedding before it ever takes place, thus giving Evelyn – here named Dorothy – motivation for revenge. Clever. 

While it claims to be based upon the novel, the 1986 adaptation isn't an adaptation at all. Clocking in at a mere 23 minutes, credits and posthumous Hitchcock intro included, it's mercifully short and can be quickly described:

Privileged pop psychologist Marion McGregor, author of the bestseller Masculine Wants, Male Needs, marries former patient Cliff Potts. Her paradise is rocked by threatening messages left on her answering machine by first husband Gordon. But it can't be! Gordon died four years ago! The next thing you know Marion's dog is killed. We, but not she, see that a Peeping Tom is watching through the leaded glass windows of her luxurious home. The same man shows up at one of Marion's book signings and she flees for home

Cliff arrives to hear his wife struggling with Gordon. Cliff descends the cellar stairs, stumbles around a bit, and discovers Marion with the mummified corpse of her first husband. But is it really his wife? In her own twisted mind, she's become Gordon. As Marion chases Cliff, trying to kill him with a shovel, it becomes clear that she left those answering machine messages. The police arrive in the nick of time. The Peeping Tom turns out to be psychiatrist Dr Kaufman, who we learn has been treating Marion. Phew.

The climax of this Beast in View owes much to Psycho, and as with Psycho, everything is explained in the denouement:

Dr Kaufman: I should have institutionalized her four years ago when she first told me.
Cliff: Why didn't you?
Dr Kaufman: Why? Oh, professional ethics [emphasis mine], one shrink to another. I thought I could help her. She was making such great progress. Then when I found out she was marrying you, I knew it was happening all over again.
Cliff: What was happening?
Dr Kaufman: Marion was losing control.
Cliff: What about Gordon's body? I mean, why would she...
Dr Kaufman: Keep it? Because she loved him. And that's what you do when you love somebody, and he's a beast. The cellar is the only place to hide.

So, you see, a beast in view... or out of view. He's hidden because, um...

Oh, forget it.

Related post:

The Telephone Always Rings

The Telephone Always Rings

Beast in View
Margaret Millar
New York: Bantam, 1956

Margaret Millar's big book, this was put aside for years after I read a review that gave away far too much of the plot. The same mistake will not be made here.

As with most Millars, things begin quietly. The protagonist, Helen Clarvoe, is not at all foreign to her fiction. Lonely and insecure she resides – but does not truly live – in a downtown hotel suite. Though just thirty, Helen meets the very definition of spinster. She has no friends or interests, dresses dowdy and is a bit of a prude. The suite might seem like an extravagance, but it only enables her to live as a shut-in; Helen is otherwise remarkably frugal.

Still, hotel suites don't come cheap. Miss Clarvoe is able to afford hers through an inheritance she's received from her late father. Estranged from her mother and sole sibling Douglas, Helen's only steady contact with the outside world comes in the form of Paul Blackshear, who handles her investments. It's to this man that Helen turns when things begin to go awry.

Much is made of Millar as someone who could pen psychological mysteries with a good twist, but I admire more her abilities to draw characters. In Beast in View the reader meets a good number of fascinating figures: Helen, her mother, Douglas, Blackshear, Jane the switchboard operator, school chum Eveleyn, charm school headmistress Lydia Hudson, photographer Jack Terola and painter Harley Moore, are just half of the cast. It says much that all are real, so fully fleshed, living in a novel that ends before hitting the bottom of page 120.

True, the type in this Bantam edition is small, but it's not at all dense. I've written before of my admiration for Millar's dialogue; here it is real and revealing to the point in which one feels that it would only be polite to close the book and leave the room. I can think of no better example than the six pages of dialogue in which Douglas reveals to his mother that he is gay.

This is the closest I'm going to come in spoiling the book.

It's tempting to slam Bantam for its author bio, which gives equal space to husband Ross Macdonald. However, after reading Millar on Beast in View, I'm willing to cut the publisher some slack.

In the Afterword to the 1993 International Polygionics edition, she writes that she abandoned the novel – "half-written" –  after happening upon a 1954 "television play" with a plot that was, in her words, "the same as the one I was writing."

The television play in question, Gore Vidal's Dark Possession, starring Geraldine Fitzgerald, is about... ah, but that would be spoiling things.

Millar tells us that her husband "stepped in as he often had in the past", presenting an idea that "altered the whole book". She reveals the idea, but I won't repeat it – again, that would be spoiling things.

Object: My copy, the first paperback edition, is as common as the first edition is scarce. What it has going for it is that cover. Equal parts sexy and scary, it beats all others. Anyone considering this edition would be wise to ignore the publisher's pitch page, which not only misleads, but tells far too much of what is to come. I present it here with spoilers blacked out:

Access: Reissued last autumn under the Orion imprint, British readers should have little trouble tracking down a copy. Canadians, meanwhile, are forced to look to used bookstores.

I've never encountered the 1955 Random House first edition, nor could I find an image. It's interesting to note that right now one – just one – copy is listed for sale online. It is signed not by Mrs Millar, but by Dorothy B. Hughes. The first British edition, published by Gollancz in 1955, seems to be just about as uncommon; two jacketless ex-library copies are listed, but nothing else. Those who don't care about such things will be pleased to learn that dozens of decent copies published by Bantam, Penguin, Avon, Orion, Corgi, Mystery Guild, International Polygonics, John Curley, Carroll & Graf and Hodder & Stoughton going for under five dollars.

Like most Margaret Millar novels, Beast in View has been translated numerous times. The first French edition, Mortellement vôtre (Paris: Presses de la Cité, 1957), is the most attractive, even if the cover was recycled from Jay Barbette's Death's Long Shadow. German, Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish, Danish, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Polish, Japanese and Chinese also figure in the mix.

Most foreign-language titles have something to do with the idea of a beast –  狙った獣 (Aimed at the Beast), La bestia se acerca (The Beast is Coming). The best, 眼中的獵物 (The Eyes of the Prey), turns everything on its head. The worst, but most successful in terms of sales, is the German: Liebe Mutter, es geht mir gut... (Dear Mother, I Am Fine…).

Related post:

Margaret Millar Saturday Mantinée Spoilers

POD Cover of the Month: The Sky Pilot

Tutis Classics' edition of Ralph Connor's nineteenth-century novel about nineteenth-century settlers and ranchers in the foothills of nineteenth-century Alberta. At the centre of it all is Arthur Wellington Moore, a modest missionary come to convert cowboys. In the 1921 film adaptation he was played by tragic Hollywood figure John Bowers.

Some good soul has uploaded the entire thing to YouTube:

First edition:

The Sky Pilot: A Tale of the Foothills

Chicago: Revell, 1899

Runner up:

Tutis' take on The Man from Glengarry, the story of Ranald Macdonald, a nineteenth-century logger  who grows into manhood with the aid of a pious woman and the mighty Ottawa River.

Related Posts:

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

POD Cover of the Month: Romany of the Snows

POD Cover of the Month: The Backwoods of Canada