Montreal's Murderous Murder Mystery Writer (and the transvestite brother he passed off as his wife)

Montreal has produced some pretty awful writers, but the worst must surely be Nicholas A. Rossi. We don't talk about Rossi. Never did. Seventy years ago today he bludgeoned an old woman to death with an iron pipe. None of the Montreal papers covered the trial. The only mention of the crime came in this edited wire service story that The Gazette slipped between ads for the National Trust and Rols-Rim desks on the day after Rossi's execution:

The Gazette, 20 June 1945, p. 7

A murder committed by a "writer of pulp fiction murder mysteries" should've attracted much more attention. I blame it on the war. Only the Hartford Courant covered the unpleasantness in any detail. Several years later, a rival paper's wag described the Wegner murder as "one of the most bizarre cases in Connecticut criminal history." Can there really have been any other so odd?

Let's begin with the victim, a wealthy, widowed German immigrant whose only son was off fighting the Nazis. Mrs Wegner was the proprietress of what was cautiously described as "a high class boarding house." Early on the morning of 23 September 1943, police found her bloodied body wrapped in a comforter on the floor of the backyard garage. Suspicion fell first on a gentleman friend, bounced, then landed on Nick and Lana Williams, a married couple who lived in the basement quarters. They'd gone missing, as had Mrs Wegner's 1942 Chevrolet coupe.

Nick and Lana Williams at the time of their capture.

The pair made it as far as Missouri before being picked up trying to buy black market gasoline. It took little time for the police to identify the pair as the couple wanted in the Wegner murder. Further truths were revealed when stubble began to appear on Lana Williams' face. With this discovery, the pair not only admitted to being brothers Nicholas and Robert Rossi, but confessed to the killing.

They'd arrived in Plainville the previous month. Nicholas worked as fire warden of the Hotel Burritt in nearby New Britain, while younger brother Robert, as "Lana", served as Mrs Wegner's maid. According to one report, "Robert, in his skirts and wig, had the Wegner family fooled to the extent that he acted as personal maid and on several occasions aided Mrs. Wegner and her daughter-in-law in dressing."

The only account of the actual murder came from the brothers themselves. They told police that on the evening of the murder they'd ransacked the house while their landlady had been at the movies. Finding little, they'd waited for Mrs Wegner to return home with the intent of taking her car, purse, and whatever jewels she might've been wearing. Things got out of hand.

The Hartford Courant, 28 September 1943

The brothers were brought to Hartford for a trial, found guilty, and sentenced to death. While Nicholas was, of course, executed, Robert was spared the same fate by a public defender who managed to convince the Board of Pardons that he should not be held to the same account. It was pointed out that Nicholas had come up with the scheme to rob Mrs Wegner and it was he who had killed the old lady. Added to the obvious, was a novel argument that the older brother had been played a dominant role in the relationship, with Robert's transvestism presented as evidence of his submissive nature.

In writing about the Rossi brothers, both UPI and AP repeatedly employed the very same words: "born of the same Italian mother, but different Negro fathers." It could not have been easy growing up the son of a white mother and black father in early 20th-century Montreal. I'm left wondering  just how Nicholas came to attend Howard University. And then it was off to law school in Philadelphia? While I question that Nicholas Rossi fought "more than 100 bouts under the name Squire Williams," traces of a record linger. He was, for example, a runner-up in the 1937 Philadelphia Golden Gloves Championships.

But what of those pulp fiction murder mysteries? Scouring the references, I've not been able to find anything credited to a Nicholas Rossi or Nick Williams... or Squire Williams for that matter. When arrested, police recorded his occupation as "writer". Interesting to note, I think, that along with money, jewels and furs, the brothers had stolen a typewriter from the Wegner house.  Sixty-eight years after his death, Nicholas Rossi remains the only writer to have been executed by the State of Connecticut... the only Canadian, too.

The Milwaukee Sentinel, 20 June 1945

Brother Robert remained in prison until 1964 when his sentence was commuted. The Connecticut Board of Pardons was told that the former maid intended to leave the state to accept a job in a New Jersey hospital. There the trail ends.

My thanks to Kirstin Jones for the photograph of Mrs Wegner's gravesite. 

I first learned of this tragic episode in Canadian literary history through Kristian Gravenor's cool Coolopolis blog. Kristian's post on the Rossi brothers can be found through here.

A Likely Story

Flee from Terror [The Final Run]
Martin Brett [pseud. Douglas Sanderson]
New York: Popular Library, 1957

Bought early last year from a trusted online bookseller, I put off reading this book because of the cover. It wasn't the absurd image on the front – that was kinda fun – but the description on the back:

All that stuff about a master spy, his doublecrossing wife and a daredevil American adventurer, just didn't appeal. The voluptuous mystery woman on the other hand...

I've since discovered that Flee from Terror features no spy, ergo no spy's wife. The American isn't so much a daredevil or an adventurer as a mindless mule. And that voluptuous mystery woman? Her physical attributes are never described, and you can read her like a book.

Sanderson's hero is John Gregory, a son of Wisconsin – Wausau, I'm guessing – now living in Venice. Once an oilman, he's making a living by running diamonds in the soles of his shoes to Yugoslavia at three Franklins a trip. The novel opens with Blishen, his employer, offering $10,000 for a final run. At that price, who can resist?

What Blishen doesn't know is that Gregory would've done it for free. Anna, the love of his life – things are still going strong after seven weeks – has asked him to smuggle her brother out of Yugoslavia. Minutes before he's due to leave, Gregory finds the supplier of his smuggling shoes dead in his flat. The American sets out just the same, but I couldn't tell you when. It's here that Flee from Terror falls apart.

The Final Run, to borrow the UK title, takes place at night. It begins with a drive, Gregory's dumb chauffeur at the wheel, from Venice to Montfalcone (131 km). There the American picks up a mysterious envelope and suffers the frustration of an interrupted tumble with Anna. It's then off to Trieste (30 km) for the second envelop. More mystery ensues when Anna is beaten unconscious by a gang of unknowns. Gregory pays a barkeep to hide his girl, bribes guards at the Yugoslav border (36 km), and makes his way toward Ljubljana (76 km):

The darkness lay around us. It was raining again, and the wipers squeaked jerkily over the windshield. We crawled along the high rock faces, bouncing and jolting, the flints flying up and hitting the under-chasis like pistol shots. We were doing a little under thirty miles an hour [44 km/h]. A stranger would have been lucky to get fifteen.

The chauffeur proves turncoat but remains dumb. Gregory manages an escape in true cartoon style by hanging from a tree limb jutting from the side of a cliff. When he finally reaches Ljubljana our hero finds his contact dead. Gregory is beaten senseless, regains consciousness who knows when, and is rescued by the very same man who had betrayed him just hours before. How many hours? I have no idea.

The reader is now treated to a low-speed sprint to the border, with detour to pick up Anna's brother and some unpleasantness from peasant folk when the dumb chauffeur runs over a goat. It's all trivial stuff when compared to Gregory's trials at the hands of Yugoslavian border guards. The rubber gloves come out.

Amazingly, improbably, our hero manages to get back to Italy. He picks up Anna in Trieste (142 km from Ljubljana), then makes his way back to Venice (159 km).

It's been a long night.

The Spectator, 21 September 1956

Back in the day, The Spectator gave this novel a bit of a boost, praising the author's talent for torture scenes and Hemingwayesque staccato. While I know next to nothing about the former, I've long recognized that Sanderson, at his best, can punch on par with Papa. The flaw, the great flaw, in this novel lies in all that running around in the dark. The problem is not the prose, but the plot; Flee from Terror is not improbable, it's impossible.

Sometimes story gets in the way.

Ribaldry: Seventeen pages in, Gregory runs into Bishen's wife, a former cabaret dancer with whom he had a fleeting fling:

"Hear you lost your gondolier. Overfamiliarity."
   For an instant her mouth curled. She hated me. She'd have killed me had there been no laws against it. Then the cabaret came to the fore and she smiled again. She said, "He gave me private poling lessons, darling. He was very good at it. The new one's so grim looking I won't even try."

Object: A 144-page mass market paperback, fifty-five years after publication it's holding up very well. The back cover, about which I've complained too much, features a scene that does not appear in the novel.

Access: The novel first appeared under the author's true name as The Final Run (London: Secker & Warburg, 1956); only the University of Toronto and Calgary University have copies. No Canadian libraries hold the Popular Library Flee from Terror edition.

The Secker & Waburg first is scarce. Expect to pay at something close to $50 for something in a decent dust jacket. The print run for the Popular Library would've been massive. Good looking survivors begin at five dollars.

A French translation, Un bouquet de chardons, was published by Gallimard in 1957. There's not a hit on WorldCat.

K is for Kindle

An African Millionaire
Grant Allen
London: Grant Richards, 1897

A thing of beauty is a joy forever, but is it really fair to burden one's descendants? Consider the advantages offered by ebooks: they weigh nothing, can be moved easily, and free up the wall you were eyeing for that 70" Sharp Aquos flat screen. What's more, you never actually own an ebook – that "Buy now with just 1-click" button being just another of Amazon's lies. After death, your ebooks will go away with time.

Ebooks being evanescent, it's entirely understandable that little effort is put into their design. The eBooksLib offering above was thrown together so quickly that no one noticed the title was wrong. To be fair, the author's name is correct; which is something that can't be said of everything coming from eBooksLib.

I first encountered this particular ebooks "publisher" while looking for a copy of Recalled to Life, Grant Allen's novel about a young woman who loses her memory through the shock of her father's murder. Henry Holt published the first and only American edition in 1891:

The eBooksLib edition is, I think, more memorable.

Those interested in design will be disappointed to learn that eBooksLib has since dropped images, adopting a uniform format that consists of nothing more than muted colour and text. Their place in my heart has been usurped by the Library of Alexandria (of Los Angeles, California). While the designs aren't terribly flashy, image selection intrigues.

That tigers are not native to Africa may explain why the mammal doesn't feature in Allen's book. Comparing author and designer, it would seem that the latter has the greater imagination.

Here we have the Comte de Frontenac (1622-1698)  in 18th-century drag, anticipating the Chevalier d'Eon.

The Library of Alexandria's Pioneers of France in the New World prompts a question:

What did Marguerite de Navarre have to do with the settlement of New France?

The answer, of course, is nothing – though she was alive in 1534 when Jacques Cartier claimed the Gaspé Penisula for her brother, Francis I.

The Library of Alexandria tries to play it safe with Charles William Crolby's story of Samuel de Champlain, using the distorted image of a flag for a country that came into existence twenty-three decades after his death. Lest anyone become confused, Library of Alexandria (again, of Los Angeles, California) would like you to note that this title is Made in the United States of America.

Library of Alexandria's Canada might not be the tropical paradise presented by Tutis Classics, but it still looks like a good place to winter.

What better place to spend those months than in the Duck Lake district of Northern Ontario. Couples who think that the kids might best be left behind are reminded that Reverend Young's little volume was first published by the Religious Tract Society as part of their "Every Boy's Bookshelf" series.

Bookshelves. Who needs them.

Note: The Grant Richards edition of An African Millionaire pictured at the beginning of this post is valued at US$650. And Henry Holt's Recalled to Life? Not a single copy is listed for sale online.

from An African Millionaire

Grant Allen's Wicked Novel

For Maimie's Sake: A Tale of Love and Dynamite

Grant Allen

New York: F.M. Lupton, [1889?]

232 pages

This review, revised and rewritten, now appears 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.

The Pornographic Edna Jaques

Back-Door Neighbors
Edna Jaques
Toronto: Thomas Allen, 1946

Related posts:

The Erotic Brian Moore

The Homoerotic A.E. Van Vogt

Harlequin: The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name

Suggestive Harlequins: A Romantic Threesome

J is for Jaques, the Poet Laureate of the Home

from My Kitchen Window
(Toronto: Thomas Allen, 1935)

I is for Intellectual Property

Protect yours!

Launcelot Cressy Servos shows us how:

Mr Servos' notice faces a page in which he claims copyright; a second copyright claim follows on the obverse.

Authors, scenario writers, printers, publishers, motion picture producers and others take note: Frontenac and the Maid of the Mist is now in the public domain. Not in the US or the UK, mind, but it's up for grabs in Canada – and I'm telling you that this novel of the Comte de Frontenac and his fictitious lady love is very Canadian. I haven't actually managed to get through Frontenac and the Maid of the Mist, but I have read the jacket flaps. After thumbing through the book itself, I can attest to their thoroughness and accuracy. Skip ahead to the fifth paragraph for the story itself.

That's it, the entire plot, including the climactic final scene. The pen picture painted does indeed make a deep impression. I was most taken by the poetry of Theala's last words in warding off Frontenac and accepting her fate:

"Great Chief! Great Chief!" said she, "I pray thee desist! Go I from you forever to be Maid of the Mist! From this rocky ledge to you torrent I go. To dwell eternal with the Manitou in the Falls below. And my spirit wafted upward on yonder haze, eternal shall be for men always to gaze! As I leave you forever I bid you goodby! Stand and watch my soul rising on yonder mist high!"

You can't write this stuff, but Launcelot Cressy Servos did.

So, let's get on it, shall we? Nearly ninety years have passed since Frontenac and the Maid of the Mist first saw print and we're still awaiting that motion picture adaptation.

Who have we to blame?

Only ourselves.