Criminal Notes & Queries

The most recent number of Canadian Notes & Queries – The Crime Issue – arrived last week in our Upper Canada rural mailbox. I was honoured to serve as Guest Editor. It was a pleasure putting it together, though I must admit that the heavy lifting was done by regular editor Emily Donaldson.

As always, Seth's provides the front and back covers. Tell the truth, do you not see yourself in one of his mugshots?

In The Landscape, Seth shares an undated, uncredited insert from The Weekend Magazine – which, as he notes, was itself an insert.

"What’s Old," our regular salute to reissues, coupled with offerings from the country’s antiquarian booksellers features Austin Clarke's When He Was Free and Young and He Used to Wear Silks (Anansi, 2021),  Carmine Starnino's Dirty Words: Selected Poems, 1997-2016 (Gaspereau, 2021), a new translation of Markoosie Patsauq's Hunter with Harpoon (MQUP, 2021). Windsor's Juniper Books offers The Executioners (Harlequin, 1951) and French for Murder (Fawcett, 1954), two old Brian Moore pulps that the late author's estate has kept out of print.

The Guest Editor’s Note, in which I recall childhood trauma brought on by a speeding ticket, is followed by the issue's Dusty Bookcase. This one is unusual in that the volume covered, Grant Allen's fin de siècle novel An African Millionaire, is not only in print, but is a certified Penguin Classic. We all remember studying it in high school, right?

Adam Sol and Manahil Bandukwala provide verse.

The issue's features begin with "Sin City," Will Straw's look at Police Journal, the post-war Montreal crime tabloid that anticipated Allô Police.

In "A Requiem for Skid Row," Amy Lavender Harris writes about a Toronto that has fallen to condos, but lives on in the works of Juan Butler, Austin Clarke, and Hugh Garner.

Novelist Trevor Ferguson (aka John Farrow) writes of his encounters with the criminal element in  "Fringe Elements."

Dedicated readers will remember my interest in the mysterious Kenneth Orvis (aka Kenneth Lemieux), author of Hickory House, The Damned and Destroyed,  Cry, Hallelujah!, and four other novels. You may even remember my 2016 plea for information about the man. Imagine my surprise in discovering that former 39 Steps frontman Chris Barry – whom I've seen onstage in Montreal and onscreen in Hannah and Her Sisters – is the mystery man's nephew.  Chris' "Uncle Ken, We Hardly Knew Ye: Kenneth Orvis’ Nephew Surveys the Writer’s Life, Hustles, and Mysterious Disappearance" helps fill in the gaps.

In "Vale of Fears," Monika Bartyzel looks at the influence of a 1935 murder on the fiction of Phyllis Brett Young, our most unjustly neglected novelist.

Jennifer Hambleton disturbs with "Shut Out: How University Libraries are Increasingly Limiting Public Access.

David Frank writes on the relationship between Jack London and all but forgotten Canadian socialist Wilfrid Gribble.

Chris Kelly looks at Blue City, the 1986 adaptation of the 1947 Ross Macdonald novel of the same name. You remember it, right? Judd Nelson and Ally Sheedy starred.

No?

This GIF may refresh you memory.

I intrude again with an interview with Danny McAuley of Brome Lake Books in Knowlton, Quebec.

David Mason's Used and Rare column concerns book thieves and a revelation about a certain famous author.

In the North Wing - selections from the Lost Library of CanLit Graphic Novels -  Nathan Campagnaro adapts Thomas King’s DreadfulWater.

We've also got a new short story from Caroline Adderson, “All Our Auld Acquaintances Are Gone.”

At a time when newspapers and magazines are slashing space devoted to book reviews, we buck the trend with:

Bruce Whiteman on Erin McLaren’s Little Resilience

Rohan Maitzen on Anna Porter’s The Appraisal and Deceptions

Laura Cameron on Amanda LeDuc’s The Centaur’s Wife 

Brett Josef Grubisic on Michael Melgaard’s Pallbearing 

Alex Good on Pasha Malla’s Kill the Mall 

Paige Cooper on Carrie Jenkins’ Victoria Sees It 

Dancy Mason on Patricia Robertson’s Hour of the Crab 

James Grainger on Andrée A Michaud’s Mirror Lake

Emily Donaldson on Sarah Berman’s Don’t Call it a Cult

The Shelf Talker belongs to The Bookshelf in Guelph. Catherine Bush's Blaze Island is one of their four titles.

As always, we finish off with Stephen Fowler's Exhumations. His pick this issue is Writing Thrillers for Profit: A Practical Guide by Basil Hogarth (London, Black, 1936), a volume that once belonged to "a recently deceased author of detective novels." Stephen suggests that it may have been a "joke gift." I'm betting he's right.

The CNQ Crime Issue can be purchased through this link.

It's a steal.

Little Willie, Willie Won't Go Home

Willie the Squowse

Ted Allan
Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1977
57 pages

What I admire most about Ted Allan was his ability to take an idea and rework it repeatedly, in the process supporting himself, his wife, and his children. "Lies My Father Told Me," a very, very short story – 782 words – was written on the instant for a 1949 issue of The Canadian Jewish Congress Bulletin. It went on to become a radio drama, a television drama, a stage drama, and a feature film for which Allan earned an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay.

On March 29, 1976, the evening of the award gala, Allan joined Federico Fellini (Amarcord) and Robert Towne (Shampoo) in learning that he'd lost to Frank Pierson, who'd written the script for Dog Day Afternoon. The bad news came from Gore Vidal:

Allan's screenplay is brilliant and moving, but it was not original. I think he received the nomination because the story had been published in a monthly Canadian newspaper, and not, say, The New Yorker. I'm guessing that not too many people in Hollywood heard the adaptation he'd written for CBC Radio. I'll wager fewer still saw the hour-long European television production, in which Allan moved the setting from Montreal to Dublin. I've yet to meet anyone who remembers the play. From what I understand, it included musical numbers.

The very same year that "Lies My Father Told Me" appeared in The Canadian Jewish Congress Bulletin, Allan dashed off a pseudonymously published pulp novel, Love is a Long Shot, for News Stand Library, the paperback imprint of Export Publishing. Thirty-five years later, he rewrote the novel and managed to place it with McClelland & Stewart. It won the 1985 Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour. In between the two different versions, as "John Smith," Allan adapted the plot as a CBC movie titled Love on the Nose. As I understand, he later shopped another adaptation, this one titled Love is a Long Shot, around Hollywood. 

All this brings me to Willie the Squowse, which is by far the shortest and most enjoyable book I've read this year. It began as a story written for his children – unpublished, it would seem – which was bought by George Pal. It was reimagined by Hungarian expat László Vadnay as The Great Rupert. Look carefully, and you'll see Allan's name on the movie poster:

Sadly, Pal didn't direct the film, and Allan had nothing to do with its screen adaptation. According to son Norman Allan, Ted Allan hated the film.

In 1950, the year The Great Rupert was was released, the CBC broadcast Allan's radio adaptation. I find it charming. You can hear it through this link. 

Twenty-three years after that, Allan entered "Willie the Squowse" in the 1973 Times Children's Story Competition. It earned earned second place, was published in The Times Saturday Review, and was subsequently included in The Times Anthology of Children's Stories (London: Cape, 1974). I believe it's on that strength of this late notice that, at long last, "Willie the Squowse" appeared as a book on its own. Printed in Great Britain, all indications point to my McClelland & Stewart edition as a Cape co-publication; no effort has been made to alter the anglicisms.

The story takes place somewhere in England, in two houses – one well-kept, the other run-down – built back to back. Mr and Mrs Pickering live in the nicer place. They're supported by their son, Richard, who teaches at a university. An impoverished animal trainer named Joe lives in the lesser house. Willie, his most recent project, is a squowse – squirrel father/mouse mother – who swings on a trapeze, marches like a soldier, and can hum "Alouette." Seems pretty impressive, but theatrical agent Pete has a better understanding than I of the box office: "Sorry. The women would scream. There'd be panic in the theatre. No manager could risk it. An elephant act, a dog act, a seal act, even a cat act, but not a squowse act, Joe."

The failure to attract interest means Joe and Willie must leave their squalid lodgings the very next day. Joe falls asleep quite easily, but not Willie. The restless squowse paces about until he notices a small hole in the wall separating his home from the Pickerings'. While exploring, he's knocked out by a chunk of falling plaster. Because Joe can't find the squowse the next morning, he comes to the conclusion that pal Willie has left him. 

Money means nothing and everything in Willie the Squowse. Mr and Mrs Pickering are troubled by their reliance on Richard until they receive a fantastic letter stating that stock purchased long ago will now be paying off in weekly cheques of two hundred pounds. These they convert into ten pound notes which Mrs Pickering pushes through a hole she's made in the kitchen wall. "I want to know the money is near us," she explains to her husband. "I want to feel it around us." They never touch the money, nor do they tell Richard about their windfall, and so he continues to support his parents. 

Just the thought that the money is near brings the Pickerings peace of mind:

During their walks around the the park they noticed two trees they'd never noticed before. They heard music they had never heard before. And most of the neighbours seemed to be very neighbourly, which was something else they had never noticed before. They didn't worry when it rained and they didn't worry when the sun shine and sometimes they giggled thinking how silly they had been to worry so much.

What they don't know is that the money isn't there. For reasons I won't describe, Willie, who has taken up residence in the wall shared by the two houses, has begun pushing ten pound notes toward the new residents of his former home. 

Because Willie the Squowse is so short I'll say no more, except to recommend it. I'm even more keen on Allan's 1950 CBC radio adaptation. Ted Allan played Joe in that production. As I say, he really knew how to make money from his work.

Sadly, I'm nowhere near so savvy.

Object: A very slim hardcover with black boards. The jacket is, of course, by Quentin Blake. I count fifty Blake illustrations in the book itself. 

Access: Sadly, Willie the Squowse is no longer in print. Happily, used copies are plentiful online. The most common is the American edition, published in 1977 by Hastings House. The last edition was published in 1980 by Puffin.

Willie the Squowse has been translated several times: French (Histoire d'un souricureuil), Spanish (Willie el ratiardilla), German (Willi die Eichmaus), Finnish (Ville Hiirava pankkiirina), and Chinese (松老鼠阿威).

The complete text to Willie the Squowse can be found here on Norman Allan's website. 

Related posts:

Remembering Ted Allan on His Hundredth

Pulp Noir à Montréal

The Author as Thespian

He and His Arrow

Quest for Pajaro
Edward Maxwell [pseud Ted Allan]
London: Heinemann, 1957
116 pages

Before the title page, the reader encounters this:

It has the appearance of a publisher's note, but I suspect it was written by Allan. Either way, the fiction has already begun.

Quest for Pajaro is told in the first person. It's narrator, Edward Maxwell, is a son of great wealth and privilege. As a very young man, he designed and flew experimental aircraft. When came the Second World War, he joined the Royal Air Force, eventually becoming Chief of Staff to Air Vice Marshal Sir Matthew Brown Frew (right).

The war now over, Maxwell has settled into early middle age, living on the Buckinghamshire estate left by his parents. Of his personal life, he has only this to say: "I was married at the age of twenty-four, divorced a year later, and the less said about that unfortunate incident the better. At the age of thirty-seven I had still not found any woman I cared to share my life with."

Maxwell may be a bit off women , but his youthful enthusiasm for experimental aircraft has continued unabated, manifesting itself in an sleek jet he calls the "Arrow." The name will cause the Canadian reader to pause and brush away a tear. 

The Avro Canada CF-105 Arrow

Ted Allan was living in the UK when Quest for Pajaro was written, but I don't imagine for a minute that he wasn't following news from home about the real life Arrow, the most advanced jet aircraft of its day.

If anything, Maxwell's Arrow is even more remarkable in that it is both jet and rocket propelled. On the evening before the first test flight, which he himself is to pilot, our hero invites mathematician friend Alan Ryerman to discuss the project over dinner. A good amount of gobbledygook follows, much of it speculation as to what might happen if the Arrow cracks the "thermal barrier." Ryerman raises the intriguing possibility that his host might simply disappear. This speculation has to do with the speed Maxwell expects to achieve, combined with the speed of the Earth's rotation, the speed of our planet as it circles the sun, the speed of our solar system in the Milky Way, the speed of the galaxy itself, and... well, you get the idea.

As I say, gobbledygook. It's to Allan's credit that he keeps it brief.

The next morning's test flight begins just as hoped. Maxwell passes Mach I, then fires up the rockets. He sees a full circle rainbow, and immediately becomes confused as to whether the cloud ceiling is up or down. Then the clouds disappear, as does colour and all sense of motion. And then he blacks out. 

Maxwell regains consciousness in a one-room hut belonging to a Basque goat-herd and his wife. Their only child, an exquisitely beautiful daughter named Angelita, nurses our hero back to health. Just shy of twenty-one, at birth she suffered a brain injury which has rendered her mute.

There's a something of the fairy tale about Angelita. Though incapable of speech, she's able to communicate with birds through cooing and whistling. Her only friends, they fly in and out of the hut as in a Disney movie, and are talkative companions on walks.

Maxwell tells Pedro, the goat-herd, that he needs to send a telegram, only to be told that this remote corner of the Pyrenees has no such service. He offers to take a letter to Pajaro, the closest village, from which it will eventually make its way to San Bettino, then San Sebastian, and then to whichever destination it is addressed.

Maxwell accepts, sending a letter to Ryerman detailing his location. Days pass, during which our bedridden hero and Angelika become increasingly close. Eventually, Maxwell's letter is returned marked with "the careless script of officialdom" that the recipient is deceased. The cancellation date reads "19 Mayo, 1977."

It's only then that our hero realizes he's somehow flown into the future. The Arrow took off on the morning of 15 May 1956, months before the exquisite Angelika was even born! 

Bruce Petty's jacket illustration, itself exquisite, is more appropriate to a romance novel than a work of science fiction. But then, Quest for Pajaro is more a love story than a tale about a man and his plane. It's Maxwell love for Angelita – come now, you can't pretend you didn't see that coming – that drives the second half of the book. There's really something for everyone, fans of travel adventure included.

Much as I liked Quest for Pajaro, by the end I couldn't help but think it was better suited to the screen than the page. And so, it came as no surprise to discover that it had once been optioned. Thirteen days after the launch of "satellite moon" Sputnik, Queen of Hollywood gossip Louella Parsons reported: 

The Calgary Herald, 17 October 1957

The film has yet to be made, of course, but I'd love to see it done today as a period piece that moves between 1956 and 1977.

I wonder whether Ted Allan's papers, held at Simon Fraser University and Library and Archives Canada, contain a script. If so, I wouldn't be surprised if it pre-dates the novel.

Quest for Pajaro enjoyed just one printing. I purchased my copy earlier this year from a Wallingford, Oxfordshire bookseller. Price: £4. Until a few weeks ago, when I began encouraging friends to add the book to their collections, copies could be purchased on the cheap. As of this writing, the least expensive with jacket is being offered by an Australian bookseller at A$40.00. Not one of the listings identifies Ted Allan as Edward Maxwell.

The fiction that Maxwell is a real person is given a bit of a twist on the dust jacket's front flap:

Ted Allan wasn't a well-known writer when Quest for Pajaro appeared in bookshops. His previous books were This Time a Better Earth (London: Heinemann, 1939), a pseudonymously-published pulp titled Love is a Long Shot (Toronto: News Stand Library, 1949), and The Scalpel, The Sword (Boston: Little, Brown, 1952), a biography of Norman Bethune, co-authored by Sydney Gordon. He was, however, managing to support his family through work for the BBC and CBC.

The Gazette (Montreal)
27 September 1975

Looking back on his career, I'm not sure Ted Allan was ever a "well-known writer," though my thirteen-year-old self knew his name through Lies My Father Told Me (1975), which I first saw in first run at Cinema Place Ville Marie. I liked the film so much that my mother presented me with son Norman Allan's novelization as an Easter gift.

Was Lies My Father Told Me the high-point of Ted Allan's career? He was nominated for a Best Original Screenplay Oscar, while the film itself received a Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film. I have no argument with those who instead point to Allan's script for the John Cassevetes film Love Streams, winner of the 1984 Golden Bear.

How is it Love Streams is so forgotten?

Ten Allan was an interesting man and an accomplished writer. One correspondent suggests that Allan's life would make for a riveting biography. Sadly, the days in which the flush publishers would be interested in such a project are long past.

Still, I hold out hope that Ted Allan will better recognized by people twenty-one years in the future than he is today.

Coincidence: The Arrow was rolled out to the public on 4 October 1957 (below), the very same day Sputnik was launched.

What exciting times!

Object and Access: A bland black hardcover in dust jacket by Bruce Petty. My Lord, his work is wonderful. Here's another example:

Pray for a Brave Heart
Helen MacInnes
London: Collins, 1955

Library and Archives Canada and three Canadian universities hold copies of Quest for Pajaro.

Related posts:

Remembering Ted Allan on His Hundredth

Pulp Noir à Montréal

The Author as Thespian

The Dustiest Bookcase: N is for Niven

The Dustiest Bookcase:

Short pieces on books I've always meant to review (but haven't).

Old Soldier
Frederick Niven
London: Collins, 1936
256 pages

Twelve years of The Dusty Bookcase and I have yet to read a single book by Frederick Niven.

It isn't for lack of trying.

Regular readers will remember that I spent good money on an old Collins White Circle edition of The Flying Years, but couldn't make it past it's dull, dull, deathly dull cover.

I did better with The Three Marys – which I bought for its cover – only to give up after reading the publisher's description, in which it's revealed that the hero, portrait painter Robert Barclay, is involved in a rail accident: "Barclay is killed, and the books [sic] ends on this note of tragedy." 

Bit of a spoiler, right?

I own only two other Niven titles: Mine Inheritance and Old Soldier. The former is "a story based on the Red River Settlement, Canada," though you wouldn't know it from the jacket of the Collins first edition:

Leaving aside the fact that the clothing is from the wrong century, are those mountains I see?

Mine Inheritance appears to have been popular; plenty of cheap used copies are currently offered online. Sadly, mine is an abridged edition intended for use in Canadian schools.

This leaves Old Soldier, about which I know next to nothing. I say next to nothing because I made the mistake of hunting down 85-year-old reviews. The first mentioned something about a store... and then I smartened up and stopped reading.

What's the book about?

No idea. But I will read this Niven novel! What's more, I'm going to do it this year!

I wonder what the cover looked like.

Related post:

Three Little Women and One Big Spoiler

Stringer's Swan Song

The Devastator
Arthur Stringer

Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1944

198 pages

Arthur Stringer's first novel, 1903's The Silver Poppy, concerns a young woman named Cordelia Vaughan who passes off a manuscript left by a dead man as her own. When published, the stolen work tops the bestseller lists, and its supposed authoress becomes the toast of Manhattan The narrator of The Silver Poppy, English poet John Hartley, discovers Cordelia's fraud, but is too much of a gentleman to destroy her life.

The Silver Poppy was one of my favourite reads of 2019.

I thought of The Silver Poppy often when reading The Devastator, Arthur Stringer's final novel. It too features a male narrator who becomes enmeshed in the life of a seemingly successful female novelist. This time out, the novelist is authentic.

It's narrator, Paul Ruxton, is not an aspiring writer, rather a New York attorney who'd once handled a copyright infringement case for London publishers Dearness & Dengate. Some time has passed, and now Mr Dengate has asked Ruxton to assist Sibyl Sencourt, one of D&D's more lucrative authors, as she disembarks for a new life in the New World. Ruxton acquiesces, waiting three hours on a windy Hudson River wharf. The reader is meant to understand that the lawyer's patience has much to do with Miss Sencourt's most recent novel, The Night of Denial, which he's found "sufficiently interesting, with its frankness and phrasing and its rather manlike sturdiness in exploring the timeworn paths of illicit passion."

Sibyl Sencourt is not quite the woman Ruxton was expecting; petite and practical, there's a whiff of tweed about her. In the months following their meeting on the wharf, they share nothing more than two unmemorable lunches, which accounts for Ruxton's initial surprise by Sibyl's request that he accompany her to a New Year's Eve celebration. Things soon become clear:

What she wanted, she explained, was a first-hand picture of that bacchanalian American evening in one of New York's most bacchanalian hotels. And if I would shepherd her through that night of tumult she'd expect, in the circumstances, to pay all costs.

On the evening in question ‐ 31 December 1939 ‐ the attorney is gobsmacked when Sibyl appears made-up and dressed-up in a low-cut gown. She's definitely on the prowl, but only for material. "It was more ink than wine we spilled that night," Ruxton reports, noting that his date spent the evening observing others, often removing a fountain pen and pad from her clutch in order to jot down a sentence or two.

The authoress's investment in a New York New Year's Eve pays off when a highly-spirited man commands the attention of a neighbouring table. He's Leo Ortell, a handsome, charismatic, self-absorbed, showy, dimwitted Hollywood actor who just happens to be one of Ruxton's clients. In the recent past, the attorney has had to "untangle him from a couple of petticoats." Sibyl is intrigued, seeing in Ortell the inspiration for her next novel, and so follows the actor west by taking a job in Hollywood. Months pass. Ruxton hears nothing from Sibyl until she reappears in New York for a Book-of-the-Hour Club launch. There she tells Ruxton that she must get closer to Ortell to write her novel, and so is set on marrying the actor. "You mean," says the attorney, "that you want to carry the watch home and take it to pieces and find out just what makes it tick."

The first of many weak points in this novel comes in that marriage. Setting aside his history as a philanderer, Ortell had always maintained that matrimony would hurt his box office appeal. How Sibyl manages to land the actor is unexplained, as is the subsequent revelation that she's fallen in love with her new husband. One of the strengths of the The Devastator is what happens next. In keeping with his past, Ortell quits Sibyl for Dorinda Perraton, a supple bathing beauty and aquatic queen he'd met on the set of his most recent film. But Dorinda proves unstable, causing scenes at the Mocambo Club and at the Trocadaro... and then she leaves him. 

The Mocambo Club in 1941, the year in which it opened.

That a woman gives up on Ortell ‐ and not vice versa ‐ should mean something, but Stringer doesn't make much of it; his focus is in reuniting the actor and his writer wife. Ruxton performs as unenthusiastic go-between in bringing estranged couple together: "no particular credit attaches to the agent who reunites two individuals already hungering for union."

Ruxton invites both to his home, then pretends that he's been called away. Returning two hours later, he finds a reconciled couple given to gush. Before long, Ortell begins going on about Sybil's stalled work in progress: 

"It's a wonderful book, Ruxton... And it's going to top everything Sibyl's already done."

     "What's it about?" I was foolish enough to ask.

     "It's about a two-legged vampire who feeds on the flesh of every friend he ever had. You understand ‐ a character study. He thinks he'd a mental wonder, while all the time masquerading as a moron ‐ just a shop window if you get what I mean."

     I proffered the opinion that it wasn't easy to make morons interesting.

     "But that's where Sibyl's a wonder, maintained her husband. "She turns him inside out and makes him so real you carry away the feeling he must have lived in the next block to you."

     I still wonder why some spirit of perversity should have prompted me to question: "Then who's the model?"

     I caught Sibyl's imploring look, and catching it, was glad Ortell had not seen it.

     She had none," he triumphantly proclaimed. "The bounder came out of her head. But I can't understand why she doesn't get busy and wind things up."

This is going to get good, right? Having fallen in love with Ortell, how can Sibyl finish her novel? Does she even want to finish her novel? If she does, will the reading public recognize what her actor husband doesn't ‐ that Ortell is the moron's model?

Sadly, just as The Devastator looks about to take flight, it takes an unexpected turn, skids about, and comes to a choking halt.

Against character, Ortell decides to join the war effort. Older than the average serviceman, the actor is rejected by the Air Force, the Navy, and the Army, but is somehow accepted in the Marines, becoming a member of the 1st Battalion, otherwise known as Edson's Raiders.

Here I note that the author's son, Hugh Arthur "Barney" Stringer (1919-2002), served as one of the Raiders. In fact, The Devastator is dedicated to the man:

Barney Stringer's all-too-brief obituary is well worth reading, but not The Devastator. In the novel's second half, focus shifts to Ortell's own engagements in the Solomons, where he proves himself a hero and leader of men. The transformation from egoist to self-sacrificing altruist is not convincing. Pages devoted to praising Major General Merritt Austin Edson, Sr, under whom the author's son was then serving, are out of place. Still, what struck this reader as most incongruous where four pages of aphorisms drawn from Sibyl Sencourt's novels.

They're not bad ‐ "Genius seems to be the faculty of having faith in everything, and especially one's self," for example ‐  though one wonders why they go on and on and on. My theory is that, at age seventy, Stringer saw The Devastator as perhaps his last opportunity to set in print pithy notes he'd made but had never used.

I may be wrong.

Either way, would that I had his stamina!

I admire Arthur Stringer's industry.

I always have.

Trivia: In The Silver Poppy, plagiarist Cordelia Vaughan is likened to a vampire for the way she exploits others. The same description is used twice in The Devastator, one of which is quoted above. The earlier occurs when Ruxton questions Sibyl's decision to marry the model of her novel: "'I'm not exactly a vampire," she protested, "I think I can give Leo something that he needs.'"

Object: Cheap wartime paper bound in blue boards. My copy was purchased last year from a bookseller in Chatham, the Ontario town in which Arthur Stringer was born. Price: US$21.59. It's inscribed, signed, and dated by the author.

The rear dust jacket lists thirteen recent Bobbs-Merril titles, the most famous being The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand.

Access: Library and Archives Canada has a copy, as does the Toronto Public Library, the London Public Library, the Chatham-Kent Public Library, the Vancouver Public Library, and eleven of our universities.

Only one copy is currently listed for sale online. Price: US$23.00 (w/ US$30.00 shipping!). A library discard, sans dust jacket, it is not recommended. Give it a pass. You can do better.

Related posts:

A Literary Vampire Alights upon an Impoverished Poet

The Very Best Reads of a Very Strange Year

Nothing Tops Sugar-Puss on Dorchester Street

Recently arrived titles at Montreal's The Word Bookstore. Palmer's epic and the others depicted can be purchased through the store's website.

New copies of Sugar-Puss on Dorchester Street and other books in the Ricochet series* can be purchased through Véhicule Press.

* Full disclosure: I'm Series Editor.

Related posts:

'THE NEONS GO UP ON MONTREAL'
Sugar-Puss Returns!

Arthur Stringer Unshackled (then bowdlerized)

The Wife Traders: A Tale of the North
Arthur Stringer

Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1936

319 pages

Tooloona: A Novel of the North

Arthur Stringer

London: Methuen, 1936

248 pages

There's a good chance that anyone who's read more than a couple of Arthur Stringer books has been here before. I don't mean Iviut Inlet, the Inuit community in which The Wife Traders is set, I refer instead to the novel's premise. Like A Lady Quite Lost (1931), Man Lost (1934), and Intruders in Eden (1942), it involves a privileged American who, having suffered a crisis, seeks sanctuary and spiritual cleansing in the most remote regions of Canada.* This time out, that man is Owen Winslow, who flees his Park Avenue apartment and expansive Long Island house for a cramped cabin in Ungava.

Richard Stendal, not Owen Winslow, is the novel's main character. He's been pursuing Celina, the beautiful, leggy wife Winslow abandoned. Though Celina appreciates Stendal's assistance in these trying times, referring to him as her "knight," she remains faithful to her husband. Stendal likes to think Winslow is dead, while Celina is certain that he's alive.

Turns out Celina right.

By chance, the missing man's image is captured – if only fleetingly – in a film of an Inuit walrus hunt in Ungava. When screened, months later at a meeting of Explorers' Club, one of the men in attendance recognizes Winslow in the footage.**

Celina asks Stendal to travel to Ungava, find her husband, and convince him to return to New York.

It seems a rather large request, but then Stendal has been so very helpful in the wake of Winslow's disappearance, right?

The Wife Traders begins with Stendal's arrival at Iviut Inlet, at which the walrus hunt had taken place. There he finds the errant husband shacked up, quite literally, with a young Inuit woman by the name of Tooloona. Winslow considers her his wife.

Now, given Stendal's thing for Celina, one might think that he'd let matters lie and report the bigamy upon his return to New York. If so, one would be mistaken. Instead, Stendal does all he can to break up the couple, going so far as to bribe Ootah, the local shaman, into telling Tooloona that she must leave Winslow.

Stendal's motivation isn't spelled out until quite late in the novel, though I imagine more thoughtful readers than myself might spot it early on. From the start, Stendal sees Tooloona as primitive, a savage, an animal. Even after she saves his life, he compares her to a "faithful dog." Yet, inwardly, he struggles with his growing physical attraction to Winslow's new mate:  

He failed to remember the day or the occasion when he first grudgingly admitted that her body was a beautiful one, that there was something arresting in even the triangulated face with dark tangle of lashes along the smooth cheek, too pale to be called a daffodil-yellow and too dark to be compared to a gardenia. But he had not been compelled to revise his earlier estimate of her. Nothing was gained, he knew by contending that she was an undersized and flat-faced barbarian who exuded the odor of fish oil. It was the white man's duty to be loyal to his white race.

And there you have it.

A bold statement is made on the dust jacket of the American edition:

I've not seen the jacket for Methuen's first British edition, but don't imagine it makes a similar claim. The editor's red pen is found throughout, beginning with the title. The Wife Traders – problematic at best – is replaced with Tooloona. Other changes are much less apparent. Now and then a sentence is struck, and there are occasional word substitutions, like "wonton" for "bitch." The twentieth chapter sees the longest single cut – nearly two pages – in which Winslow criticizes Stendal's assessment of the Inuit as smelly.

The most eye-popping sentence in The Wife Traders does not feature in Tooloona. Anyone curious will find it on page 83, at the very end of Winslow's inept defence of the Inuit woman:  

"I'll concede that she has her own ars erotica. That's imposed upon her, I suppose, by her environment. She has to be warmer-blooded, in a country like this, just as she has to wear warmer clothing. You can write it down to Nature's plan for keeping the race going. Where the soil is thin there must be no mistake about planting the seed. I'm not a medical man enough to know how true it is that the Innuit vulva is more prominent and prehensile than the white woman's."

The Wife Traders is a well-intentioned book, but doesn't transcend the time in which it was written.

Or does it?

The Inuit are seen through the eyes of Stendal, Winslow, and Celina (yes, she eventually shows up). Stendal is a white supremacist. Winslow appreciates Inuit culture, but only when it doesn't cross his own beliefs. Interestingly, it's late-to-arrive Celina who has the greater recognition and appreciation of the Inuit – Tooloona above all. Though Winslow likes to think that he understands the Inuit of Iviut Inlet, his fragile ego leads to tragedy.

Someone is killed.

It wasn't the character I wanted dead.

* Stringer's 1927 novel The White Hands, in which a pair of Jazz Age sisters are sent off North Ontario, provides a bit of a twist on the premise.

** I can't help but note that in Helen Dickson Reynolds' truly strange He Will Return (1959), abandoned wife Constance Owen-Jones discovers her husband is still alive through a newsreel street shot. 

The Critics Rave:

Trash – and not "good trash" –  but none the less will appeal to the vast majority of those who demand nothing but "escape" from their reading. The story of a New Yorker who escapes civilization by joining a tribe of Eskimos in the Far North, "buying" a mate, and evading the claims of wife and home; succeeds in making so-called civilized ideals sufficient excuse for immorality.

– Kirkus, 15 June 1936

Trivia: Iviut Inlet is found nowhere outside Stringer's imagination. It later appears in his 1940 novel The Ghost Plane.

Objects: I have three editions of the novel, the earliest being the Bobbs-Merrill first edition. Bound in green boards, it has stood the test of time. In black boards, Tooloona, the first (and only) British edition, has shown itself a touch more fragile.

To these eyes, the most interesting in my collection is the third. Published in 1955 by Harlequin, it marks the last time Stringer has seen print. As far as I've been able to determine, it's faithful to the Bobbs-Merrill text. Both front and back covers would not make the grade today.

"What secret made him choose the arms of a dark savage instead of the elegance of a penthouse?"

Oh, I don't know. Might it have something to do with being more attracted to women than interior decoration?

Odd that Harlequin describes Tooloona as a "dark savage." Stringer doesn't. 

Access: The Wife Traders was first published in 1936 by Bobbs-Merrill and McClelland and Stewart. Tooloona followed later that same year. And then, of course, we have the 1955 Harlequin paperback.

Used copies of The Wife Traders begin at US$6.50 (the Harlequin paperback in "Good-Very Good" condition). As of this writing, only two are listed online. Get them while you can! The Bobbs-Merrill appears more common. Asking prices range between US$17.00 and US$85.00. Copies with dust jackets begin at US$30.00.

No copies of Tooloona are listed for sale online.

Library and Archives Canada, the Toronto Public Library, the London Public Library, Memorial University, the University of New Brunswick, Mount Alison University, Acadia University, Dalhousie University, the University of Toronto, McMaster University, Guelph University, the University of Saskatchewan, the University of Alberta, Simon Fraser University, the University of British Columbia, and the University of Victoria hold one edition or other of The Wife Traders.

No Canadian library has a copy of Tooloona.

Note: I was inspired to read The Wife Traders by the 1936 Club week. 

Links to reviews of other 1936 titles can be found through here. I've only ever reviewed one other title from that year: Arthur Meighen's The Greatest Englishman of History.

Related post:

But Why Would You Want Him To?:

The Very Strange Story of a Delusional Abandoned Wife