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| Holy Deadlock A.P. Herbert Toronto: Harlequin, 1954 Cover: Syd Dyke |
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14 February 2014
A Harlequin Valentine from Syd Dyke
10 February 2014
In Appreciation of Syd Dyke, Illustrator
Just think how much time went into the staircase gracing He Learned About Women… (Toronto: News Stand Library, 1950). And is that check-in sign really necessary?
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| Lobby Girl Gerald Foster Toronto: News Stand Library |
I much prefer his style to that of prolific NSL regular D. Rikard. The differences between the two illustrators is best seen in their approaches toward Al Palmer's Sugar-Puss on Dorchester Street. Rickard's 1949 cover has Sugar-Puss walking beneath a brightly lit marquee, bringing too much light to what is a dark, if somewhat silly story. Dyke's 1950 cover, produced for the American market, better captures the novel's atmosphere, though it does make our two lovebirds, Jimmy and Gisele, look like pimp and prostitute.
Credit goes to both illustrators for capturing Giselle's breasts, "large and firm; a legacy of her Norman ancestry."
Bricks and mortar aside, Dyke shows some restraint in terms of detail with Sugar-Puss on Dorchester Street. To be fair, the illustrator would on occasion go for something relatively simple.
Dyke's cover for In Passion's Fiery Pit (1950) by the Joy Brown (later Carroll) is a favourite. Don't blame the illustrator for the cut-off title, it's typical of News Stand Library.
What follows are four more of my favourite Syd Dyke NSL covers.
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| Never See the Sun Hall Bennett 1950 |
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| Carnival of Love Anthony Scott 1950 |
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| Strange Desires Alan Malston 1950 |
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| Too Many Women Gerry Martin 1950 |
He Learned About Women… Too Many Women.
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| Hospital Nurse Lucy Agnes Hancock |
Gotta love those floor tiles.
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06 February 2014
Unsettling Garners
Hugh Garner's pseudonymous second novel, Waste No Tears, goes to press next week, returning after a sixty-four year absence as part of the Véhicule Press Ricochet Books series. I'm proud to have played a part in its resurrection, and am particularly pleased with myself for having asked Amy Lavender Harris to pen the Introduction. Anyone at all familiar with her work will understand.
Waste No Tears is not a feel-good novel, but then one would never expect such a thing from a book pitched as "The Novel about the Abortion Racket". The cover, by unappreciated Winnipeg boy Syd Dyke, has haunted me from the day I first set eyes on it.
Published in 1950 by Toronto's New Stand Library, it's a rare book – so rare that two decades later George (then Doug) Fetherling had to give it a pass when writing on Garner for Forum House's Canadian Writers & Their Works series:
It is a novel so scarce that it cannot be found in Canada's largest public library, it's largest university library or even the National Library's copyright deposit.Odd thing about Garner: his books were graced with some of the most disturbing images. He was, of course, a Governor General's Award-winner, once considered one of our greatest short story writers, but you'd never know it to look at these.
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| Hugh Garner's Best Stories Richmond Hill, ON: Pocket Books, 1971 |
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| A Nice PLace to Visit Toronto: Ryerson, 1970 |
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| A Nice Place to Visit Richmond Hill, ON: Pocket Books, 1971 |
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| Violation of the Virgins Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1970 |
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| Violation of the Virgins Richmond Hill, ON: Pocket, 1975 |
Can't wait? There's a decent copy of the original New Stand Library edition listed online. But it'll cost you US$249, and it won't have Amy's Introduction.
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03 February 2014
Still Reading Richard Rohmer. Is Alice Munro?
More than a month into the New Year and I'm still at it. So are my pals Chris Kelly and Stanley Whyte.
The books themselves have been a breeze; the last, Exxoneration, was really just a novella made to look like a novel through maps, technical drawings, clip art and appendices.
More padding than Craig Russell.
The real challenge has come in hunting down the darn things.
The scene isn't in the novel. Never mind, the adventures of a no nonsense President piloting Air Force One around the arctic and ordering an invasion of Canada could not have failed to excite. New York publishers were much less interested in Exxoneration, the 1974 sequel, in which the invasion party retreats, leaving two hundred burning Yankee corpses on the tarmac outside arrivals at Toronto International Airport. There has never been an American edition.
North of the border, it seemed Richard Rohmer could do no wrong. Each fall a new novel, each novel a bestseller. His success was limited to Canada, and his success puzzled. In the 2 October 1976 Globe & Mail, no less a mind than the great Stephen Lewis searched for an explanation:
Perhaps it's all the hype and determined salesmanship of McClelland and Stewart. Perhaps, more likely, it's that Rohmer neatly touches Canadian themes in a country starving for Canadian themes. Perhaps the very superficiality engages interest without emotion, so that there's no investment of the mind and spirit, and the reading is easy. Or perhaps we're just a not very discriminating public…Perhaps it's all four, but I think the second is key. My pre-teen self was starved for Canadian fiction, and the wire racks of Kane's Super Drug Mart in Kirkland, Quebec, provided what the Lakeshore School Board did not. Rohmer's talent lay in an uncanny ability to tap into his fellow citizens' fantasies and fears. Separation, about the threatened succession of Quebec, was published the month before the surprise victory of the Parti Québécois in the 1976 provincial election.
Separation proved to be the end of the Rohmer's rapid-fire round. When he returned with his fifth novel, four years later, the momentum was gone. Balls! was another bestseller, sure, but nothing like the others; most of the publicity focussed on the ribald title. Its 1980 publication marked the beginning of a long slow decline.
Just five Rohmer novels are in print today, three of which are bound up in an omnibus edition. How different are the days when we were not only reading Rohmer but passing him around. My copy of Ultimatum had once been given as a gift by Eric Kierans.
Our local library doesn't have one of Rohmer's thirty-one books, nor does its much larger sister in Stratford. The copy of Exodus/UK pictured at the top of this post had to be brought in from Huron County through an interlibrary loan. Starting in on it late last night I noticed this:
Time was we all read Richard Rohmer.
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01 February 2014
Trudeau Redux: Compare and Contrast II
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| Pierre Trudeau and Joni Mitchell at her induction into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame, O'Keefe Centre, Toronto, 5 October 1981. |
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| Stephen Harper awards Justin Bieber the Diamond Jubilee Medal, Scotiabank Place, Ottawa, 23 November 2012. |
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29 January 2014
Remembering John Buell: A Lot to Make Up For
A Lot to Make Up For
John Buell
Toronto: HarperCollins Canada, 1990
John Buell died last month. I know because a friend forwarded the obituary his family placed in The Gazette. The newspaper itself did nothing. The fourth estate, which in life never properly recognized the novelist, has been silent on Buell's passing.
Edmund Wilson, the great American critic, praised John Buell's novels. Forget him. Wilson knew nothing about Canadian literature. O Canada, the book he crafted for the centennial, is an embarrassing late career cash-in. And yet, for all his flailing, Bunny landed truth with Buell.
John Buell's novels came onto us in fits and starts. The first, The Pyx (1959) and Four Days (1962), were followed by a decade of silence; then came The Shrewsdale Exit (1972) and Playground (1976). A Lot to Make Up For, his fifth and final novel, broke an even longer silence. Short, yet complex, it centres on three damaged characters: Adele Symons, Stan Hagan, and Martin Lacey. Things come together. A single mother, Adele is cleaning houses in Quebec's Eastern Townships. Stan is searching for her, intent on righting past wrongs. Martin offers Stan room and board in exchange for help with his crops. Addiction plays a role in all three lives. Past addiction. A Lot to Make Up For is a story of recovery, redemption and restoration. Positive, it gives hope, yet there is no happy ending.
The words end, but not the story.
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| The Globe & Mail, 4 August 1990 |
Access: Concordia University, the institution at which the author taught for thirty-seven years, does not have a copy.
In the autumn of 1991, HarperCollins Canada reissued the novel as a trade paperback. I've never seen a copy. A Lot to Make Up For is the alone amongst Buell's five novels in having not been translated.
"In lieu of flowers, please make a donation in John's name to the charity you support."
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27 January 2014
Brian Moore's Forgotten First Feature: Speculation and Scattered Thoughts on a Film I've Never Seen
As with the pseudonymously published novel on which it's based, the great Brian Moore laid no claim to Intent to Kill. His name does not feature in the credits. Fifty-five years after its release, there's no mention of Moore in the film's IMDb listing. Biographies of the man pay little or no attention to this screen adaptation, but I think it worthy if only because it was the first of his novels to be adapted for the screen. Just consider the wonderful stuff that followed: The Luck of Ginger Coffey, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, Black Robe, The Statement.
Need more?
Well, Intent to Kill marked cinematographer Jack Cardiff's debut as a director, and Jimmy Sangster, he of Hammer Horror fame, wrote the screenplay. That's Sangster on the left discussing the script with Cardiff and producer Adrian Worker:
What's more, much of Intent to Kill was shot in Montreal at a time when few features were being made in Canada.
Trust the Brits to do it… and in wintertime.
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| The Gazette, 18 December 1958 |
All I've seen of Intent to Kill comes courtesy of this trailer, posted here last week:
It would seem that Sangster remained quite faithful to the book. Each scene in the trailer is just as it is in the novel. The only liberty comes in remaking American doctor Robert McLaurin as an Englishman, thus sparing us Richard Todd's attempt at a Boston accent. Down, down, down the list of credits, I see only three characters that don't appear in the novel: "Carol Freeman", "Carol's friend", and "Kathy". The first of these will be of some interest to readers of a certain a genre for being one of Jackie Collins' very few film roles.
Maybe I'm just distracted by the beauty of Betsy Drake, best remembered as Cary Grant's third wife.
Looking further, I see Sangster deviating from Moore's novel. This scene, with Richard Todd, Herbert Lom and siren Lisa Gastoni aboard a BOAC jet in Dorval, does not feature.
And here, in another scene not in the novel, Lom anticipates his role as Chief Inspector Charles Dreyfus in the Pink Panther franchise:
In the second volume of his autobiography, In Camera, Richard Todd dismisses Intent to Kill as "a stinker", but then he didn't want to do the film in the first place. The reviews I've been able to dig up are overwhelmingly positive. The only reason I've not seen Intent to Kill is that its DVD release is substandard. A pan and scan transfer of a CinemaScope film? One should never encourage such things.
Coincidence: Richard Todd was riding high when Intent to Kill was made, thanks largely to his role in The Sixth of June, based on the novel of the same name by Montrealer Lionel Shapiro.
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