The Lonely Patience of Kevin Marlow

High Tide is a Midnight
Ronald Cocking
London: Hurst & Blackett, [1950]

If the past is a foreign country, that of a foreign country will seem particularly alien. Still, I wonder if there was ever an England like the one depicted in High Tide is at Midnight. Was there really a time in which unlisted phone numbers were available to anyone who asked? Was there really a time when a simple call to a beautiful young film star would bring an immediate invitation to tea? Really? At the actress's London flat? Even when you refused to say why you were calling?

These are the sorts of questions that played through my mind when, I suppose, the author would've had me thinking about smuggling, rationing, and the high rate of purchase tax. His hero, Kevin Marlow of the Customs and Excise Department's Special Investigation Branch, is perhaps the dullest to ever feature in a thriller. "You know, Mr. Marlow," says his superior, Sir William Lindlay, "I think you are the most patient officer in the Branch. Not the most brilliant, perhaps, but certainly the most patient; and patience often achieves results denied to the purely clever people."

Clever colleague Craddock having failed, Kevin is assigned to take over an investigation into a smuggling ring thought to be working the English Channel. That evening, whilst going through Craddock's notes in his bachelor flat, he finds the calling card of new screen sensation Margaret Lawson. It's an "odd coincidence", Kevin having taken in her latest film, Strange Tomorrow, just hours earlier.

The very next morning, Craddock collapses, whispering these words to Kevin with his dying breath: "Kennington… Near Kennington. And… the… sea… port. They're… all… in… it."

Kevin doesn't bother following up on Craddock's parting tip. Never does. He begins his investigation by getting Margaret Lawson's phone number, giving her a call, sipping her tea, and coming away wholly unsatisfied:

Kevin decided that he didn't understand at all; nothing fitted. For one thing, he ought to be feeling a considerable resentment towards her because of the fact that she was deliberately obstructing him – yet all he could feel was admiration for her loyalty. Yet she had lied about Craddock, and if his vague suspicions about Craddock were right, that tied her up directly with what was going on – which was a vastly different thing to her being an unwilling party. He was thinking in circles, he suddenly realized – and gave it up. He must get a lot more facts first.

Kevin's method is to visit and revisit his suspects with faith that it will all lead to something. I was reminded more of a Jehovah's Witness than a detective. High Tide is at Midnight is a novella made novel through excessive detail, most of which involves getting the protagonist from visit A to visit B:

At eight o'clock the next morning – a Saturday – Kevin was bowling along over Catford Heath, headed south-east. It was more like April than October – the sky was blue, and there was a golden haze in the crisp air. By eight-twenty-five he was in Farmingham, and he pulled up briefly at a café to drink some steaming hot coffee and eat some buttered toast.
     Then he went on down the arterial road until he came to the Sevenoaks-Maidstone Road, where he turned left. In Maidstone he stopped to consult his road-map, then pressed on down the Hastings Road for a mile, turned off south-east again on the Class 2 road, finally coming out in Tenterden. There he asked the way from a passing farmhand, and some five minutes later he coasted down into a hollow, and tucked under the hill on the left, close to a brook, there it was – a cottage with a small board attached to a gate on which was written 'THE DELL'.

Although Kevin is helped along by the odd "odd coincidence" and has the good fortune to stumble, both literarily and figuratively, upon a good many clues, he proves himself incapable of exposing the smugglers. One of his greatest breaks occurs when, quite by chance, he stops in a village in which every single inhabitant is involved with the ring (vicar included). Even this leads to nothing. Shame Craddock is dead; bet he could've figured things out.

Ultimately, it's Margaret Lawson who blows the lid off the smuggling operation, telling our hero everything. In doing so, she exposes family's participation, thereby risking gaol time for herself, her brother and her parents.

Why would she do such a thing?

Well, you see, the beautiful film star had fallen in love with the Customs and Excise man.

Was there ever really such an England?

The romantic Kevin Marlow:

"You know," he said, "I little thought when I was sitting in the cinema watching your last film a few days ago that I would be soon having you all to myself in a country cottage. I admire your acting enormously."
     She said: "Thank you, sir. But seriously – I'm glad. Oddly enough, I want you to… have a good opinion of me."
     "Why?"
     She shrugged her slim shoulders.
     I don't really know – after all, we're practically strangers. But I suppose that it's because intuitively I respect your judgement. Does that sound ridiculous?"
     "No," Kevin said, smiling. "And it does my ego a lot of good." He looked over the rim of his cup. "While the Mutual admiration Society is in session, I should like to mention something else. I think that you're the most beautiful woman I have ever seen – and I mean that very sincerely. I hope you don't mind my saying that; anyway, it's said."

Object: A compact 222-page hardcover in black boards. I purchased my copy last year – avec Crime-Book Society belly band – for £26 from a bookseller in North Lincolnshire. The back cover features a pitch for the publisher's "New and Forthcoming Thrillers", including: The Man I Didn't Kill by Norman Deane (pseud. John Creasey), Fog is a Shroud by McKnight Malmar, and The Lady in the Wood by John Dellbridge. The one I'm most interested in is the ultra-uncommon Under the Quiet Water by Canadian Frances Shelley Wees.

Access: Not found in a single library on this side of the Atlantic. Cousins overseas will find it only at  the British Library, Oxford University and Trinity College, Dublin.

No copies are listed for sale online.

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A Harlequin Valentine from Syd Dyke

Holy Deadlock
A.P. Herbert
Toronto: Harlequin, 1954
Cover: Syd Dyke

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In Appreciation of Syd Dyke, Illustrator

Writing here last week, I described Syd Dyke as unappreciated. I stand by that word. Apart from a few pieces posted a couple of years back at Fly-by-night, I've found seen no recognition of the man; and yet he was responsible for so many of the most interesting and attractive Canadian post-war paperback covers. Dyke illustrations are usually easy to spot: look for a peculiar angle and a ridiculous amount of entirely superfluous detail.

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?

Lobby Girl
Gerald Foster
Toronto: News Stand Library

Another book, another lobby, another lobby girl. Unglue your eyes from those gams, head north and a bit west so as to dodge the blonde's bosom and you'll see: a potted plant, a bellhop carrying a hatbox and… what exactly? A crystal ball? And what's up with that that guy's dainty looking ring?

To say Dyke was the finest of the New Stand Library artists is probably not much of a compliment; with Paperjacks and New Canadian Library, NSL is responsible for many of the ugliest, most ineptly produced books to have ever come out of this country.

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.

Never See the Sun
Hall Bennett
1950

Carnival of Love
Anthony Scott
1950

Strange Desires
Alan Malston
1950

Too Many Women
Gerry Martin
1950

He Learned About Women… Too Many Women.

After – perhaps before – News Stand Library literally went up in flames, Syd Dyke began working for Harlequin. There he showed a bit more restraint, but then the titles themselves were less quirky. He provided covers for books by Agatha Christie, W. Somerset Maugham and son of Napanee H. Bedford-Jones, but his specialty was westerns. Of all his Harlequins, my favourite is Hospital Nurse (1954), which fairly anticipates the path the publisher would pursue a decade later.

Hospital Nurse
Lucy Agnes Hancock

Gotta love those floor tiles.

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Unsettling Garners

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.

Hugh Garner's Best Stories
Richmond Hill, ON: Pocket Books, 1971

A Nice PLace to Visit
Toronto: Ryerson, 1970

A Nice Place to Visit
Richmond Hill, ON: Pocket Books, 1971

Violation of the Virgins
Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1970

Violation of the Virgins
Richmond Hill, ON: Pocket, 1975

Out of print, each and every one. Well, next month Waste No Tears will be available again, in original cover tweaked to give Garner his due. Pre-orders are being taken by the usual sources.

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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The Return of Hugh Garner's Neglected Novel

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.

Time was Rohmer could be found in every bookstore and library in the land. Ultimatum, his 1973 debut novel, topped Canadian bestseller lists for nearly six months in hardcover, and did even better in paperback. Such was its success that the Americans noticed, publishing this edition:

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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Trudeau Redux: Compare and Contrast II

Pierre Trudeau and Joni Mitchell at her induction into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame,
O'Keefe Centre, Toronto, 5 October 1981.

Stephen Harper awards Justin Bieber the Diamond Jubilee Medal,
Scotiabank Place, Ottawa, 23 November 2012. 

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Trudeau Redux: Compare and Contrast

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.

The Globe & Mail, 4 August 1990

Object: A 202-page hardcover in tan boards. The HarperCollins Canada edition is so similar to the American Farrar, Straus & Giroux that the author bio reads:

Access: Concordia University, the institution at which the author taught for thirty-seven years, does not have a copy.

More than decent copies of the Canadian first edition are available online for as little as eight dollars. The American first edition can be had for a buck. Neither HarperCollins Canada nor Farrar, Straus & Giroux went back for second printings.

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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Six Exits to Shrewsdale