Talking Ted Allan with Dick Bourgeois-Doyle

The second of my two conversations with Leacock Medal scholar Dick Bourgeois-Doyle is now available here on Soundcloud.

The topic is Ted Allan's Love is a Long Shot – in its 1949 and 1984 incarnations – and why I believe the latter was ineligible for the award.

I first wrote about Love is a Long Shot in the 2011 Fall/Winter issue of Canadian Notes & Queries; then reworked the piece for The Dusty Bookcase book. I'm sharing it here for the first time:

NEVER SO DISTURBING

Love is a Long Shot

Alice K. Doherty [pseud. Ted Allan]

Toronto: News Stand Library, 1949

160 pages

Can a writer, even a deceased writer, be stripped of the Leacock Medal? It’s a fair question, particularly when one considers the late Ted Allan, who received the honour in 1984 for Love is a Long Shot. This slight, uninspired novel tells the story of seventeen-year-old David Webber and his sometimes ribald adventures tending the till in a thirties-era Montreal cigar store-cum-bookie joint. It features a cast of characters that are characters; each ultimately and invariably proving themselves loveable types despite earlier indiscretions. Readers familiar with Lies My Father Told Me, the 1975 film that earned Allan an Academy Award nomination, will recognize some of these folks, including David’s frustrated inventor-father and his ideas for moveable cufflinks and permanently creased trousers.

This is not to suggest that there’s anything deceitful here; not with the film, at least. The overlap between Lies My Father Told Me and Love is a Long Shot is trifling, and in no way makes the latter ineligible for the Leacock. The medal’s rules inform: adaptations are fair game, we need only discount works of which “significant or substantial parts have been previously published in book form.”

Like so many tomes, the 1984 Love is a Long Shot includes a list of the author’s previous works. Allan’s first novel, This Time a Better Earth (1939), is followed by The Scalpel, The Sword (1952), the commercially successful biography of Norman Bethune that he wrote with Sydney Gordon. There’s Quest for Pajaro (1957), the science-fiction novel Allan published under nom de plume “Edward Maxwell,” and his children’s book Willie, the Squowse (1973). Also included is a comprehensive list of Allan’s plays and screenplays. What’s missing is telling: an earlier Love is a Long Shot.

Published by News Stand Library in September 1949, two months before newspaperman Al Palmer’s Sugar-Puss on Dorchester Street, this Love is a Long Shot holds the distinction of being the first pulp noir novel set in Montreal. Its setting is a Depression-era city that’s as dark as the second Love is a Long Shot is light. Where in the remake David Webber gets his job through a helpful, good-natured uncle, our desperate protagonist—recently orphaned teenager Katie Doheny—is out of options. Like David, she takes a job in a cigar store that’s little more than a front for illegal gambling. The early pages of the girl’s bleak world are broken by fleeting moments of black humour—all of which Allan reused in his Leacock-winning novel. Here, for example, is the most memorable, a comic scene that features Molly, the wife of the cigar-store owner. It begins with a boast:

“Never wore a corset in my life. Never had to.” She swaggered out from behind the counter.  “If you don’t believe me, feel,” she said, offering me her hip.

     “I believe you,” I said.

     “Feel. Feel. Don’t be shy.”

     I touched her quickly with the tips of my fingers.

     She started to laugh again, a loud, hearty laugh. “How old are you?”

     I dug the broom into the floor, pushed hard and told her my age.

     “I bet you never had a man.”

The Molly of the 1984 Love is a Long Shot, also married to the cigar-store owner, is equally proud:

“Never wore a corset in my life. Never had to.” Weaving from behind the counter, she offered me her backside. “If you don’t believe me, feel.”
     “I believe you.”
     “Feel, feel, don’t be shy.” She wiggled her behind. I touched her hip quickly with the tips of my fingers. This made her cackle. You have to hear a woman with a bass voice cackle before you can believe the sound.
     “So help me, he’s blushing. How old are you?”
     “I’m twenty-one,” I lied.
     “I bet you’re still a cherry.”

Any further frivolity in the original Love is a Long Shot is soon overwhelmed by the noir. The greatest difference between the two novels lies in their depictions of organized crime. While the Leacock-winning Love is a Long Shot has the “syndicate” as a group of misbehaving boys, the 1949 original comes uncomfortably close to ugly reality.

Young Katie falls for “tall, rugged-looking, tanned” mob boss Hazen Black, a relatively young man rendered impotent by a life of debauchery. In what is surely one of the darkest scenes in Canadian literature, the appropriately-named Black masturbates while instructing his henchman Herbert to rape Katie:

Herbert grabbed me and held his hand over my mouth. I tried to bite it. “Go ahead,” Black was shouting. “Go ahead, damn it, go ahead.” His eyes looked insane. His breath was coming in short gasps, as if he’d been running. He was close to me, but hadn’t touched me yet. “Go ahead. Pick up her dress… do it, do it, do it.”

The original Love is a Long Shot ain’t that pretty at all—nor is it funny. Printed only once, in a fragile, disposable edition that credits the author variously as “Alice K. Doherty,” “Alice H. Doherty,” and simply “Alice Doherty,” it slipped by the judges of the 1984 Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour. The most one can say about the award-winning Love is a Long Shot that is that is was far superior to the previous year’s winner, Gary Lauten’s No Sex Please… We’re Married. Allan didn’t deserve the honour; the $3,500 cheque should have rightfully gone to fellow nominee John Gray, whose debut novel, Dazzled, had been issued by the anaemic Irwin Publishing. It’s a sad fact that the best novel Ted Allan ever wrote was one that he chose not to recognize. A cheap mass-market paperback issued under a pseudonym that the publisher couldn’t get right, it has been out of print for over half a century.  

Related posts:

Pulp Noir à Montréal

Love is a Long Shot on the Nose

He and His Arrow

Little Willie, Willie Won't Go Home

Talking Joan Walker with Dick Bourgeois-Doyle

This past weekend I had the pleasure of speaking with Dick Bourgeois-Doyle of Canus Humorous about the life and work of Joan Walker (née Suter), whose memoir Pardon My Parka received the 1954 Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal.

You can listen to our conversation here at Soundcloud, or if you prefer, the transcript can be found through this link to Canus Humorous.

Related posts:

On the High Heels of Pleasure

The Incomplete Repent at Leisure

Joan Suter, Angus Hall, and the Collector

Ten Poems for National Poetry Month, Number 4: 'You' by Ram Spudd Stephen Leacock

For the month, the fourth of ten poems

I find interesting, amusing, and/or infuriating.

Verse from Ram Spudd, "one of nature's gentlemen," as celebrated in Stephen Leacock's Moonbeams from the Larger Lunacy (Toronto: Gundy, 1915).

YOU

                                          You!

With your warm, full, rich, red, ripe lips,

And your beautifully manicured finger-tips!

                                          You!

With your heaving, panting, rapidly expanding and contracting chest,

Lying against my perfectly ordinary shirt-front and dinner-jacket vest.

                                 It is too much

                                 Your touch

                                 As such.

                                 It and

                                 Your hand,

                           Can you not understand?

Last night an ostrich feather from your fragrant hair

                                Unnoticed fell.

                                I guard it

                                Well.

                                Yestere’en

                           From your tiara I have slid,

                               Unseen,

                               A single diamond,

                               And I keep it

                               Hid.

Last night you left inside the vestibule upon the sill

                               A quarter dollar,

                               And I have it

                               Still.

Related post:

Lunar Attractions; or, The Leacock I Like

Ten Poems for National Poetry Month, Number 3: 'My Little Suffragette' by Thaddeus A. Browne

For the month, the third of ten poems

I find interesting, amusing, and/or infuriating.

Thaddeus A. Browne had a decades-long career as an Ottawa civil servant, though his Citizen obituary (9 March 1935) makes more about his standing as a literary figure.

I'm not sure that Browne was a widely known as a writer of poems and prose; I'd never encountered his name before buying The White Plague and Other Poems (Toronto: William Briggs, 1909). Of its twenty-two poems, 'My Little Suffragette' is the second to take on soldiers in petticoats. 

MY LITTLE SUFFRAGETTE

                         Little blue-eyed suffragette,
                         What for suffrage calling yet?
                         Stop your worry, cease your fret,
                              Don't you see the harm it brings? 

                         If a vote were given you,
                         Many things no doubt you'd do,

                         You might mould the world anew

                              As upon its course it swings. 

                         But I want to tell you this,

                         Winsome little suffrage miss,

                         You are keeping me from bliss

                              By your interest in such things. 

                         You have worried my poor mind,

                         You have been to me unkind;

                         Good it is that Love is blind,

                              Or he might have taken wings. 

                         What! you did it just to tease!

                         Little minx, give me a squeeze.

                         Love you give me ecstasies

                              What's your choice of wedding rings?

Remarkably, the poet did marry... though not until middle age.

 Thaddeus Augustine Browne
1878-1935
RIP

Ten Poems for National Poetry Month, Number 2: 'The Tame Apes' by Robert E. Swanson

For the month, the second of ten poems

I find interesting, amusing, and/or infuriating.

Verse from Robert E. Swanson's Rhymes of a Lumberjack (Toronto: Thomas Allen, 1943). The accompanying illustration is by Bert Bushell.

Not the sort of thing I expected from the publisher of "Poet Laureate of the Home" Edna Jaques.

THE TAME APES

            Tame apes of the jungle they call us,
                 He-men of the forest are we;
            Who spend our money on poker and booze,
            And don't give a damn if we win or lose.
            And a carefree life in the forest we choose,
                 On the slopes by the Western Sea. 

            We live a tough life when we're working,
                 We play just as rough in the town;
            We're suckers for women who wear high heels,
            With well-moulded bodies and looser ideals,
            That trip down the street, dolled up in their seals;
                 Just waiting for us to come down. 

            We paint the town red when we're spending.
                 It's drinks on the house by the crock.
            Then our friends are many, and women smile.
            It's "What is your hurry? Please tarry a while."
            But when she's all spent—we walk the last mile
                 Down to the Union dock. 

            Then it's "Give you an upper? The hell you say!
                 You bums can sleep on the floor!"
            The world seems cold, and people will shun.
            But a tame-ape brother won't see it undone—
            He's still got a crock! ... the son of a gun!
                 So you step in his stateroom door. 

            "Say! ... Who's pushing' camp up at Kelley's?
                 They tell me you're running full slam.
            Now the air is blue with cigarette smoke—
            Someone is trying to tell you a joke;
            You kinda forget you're going' broke
                 To the jungles: but who gives a damn? 

            So back to the jungles you're headin' once more—
            To the brush where the tame-apes roam;
            To the little old camp, by a railroad track,
            Where the blue smoke curls from the bull cook's shack,
            And the smell of the bunkhouse welcomes you back.
                 By Gawd! but you soon feel at home. 

            And before the dawn breaks in the morning,
                 From his bunk the tame-ape will roll.
            While still it is dark, he heads for the brush;
            When the push-ape hollers, he'll scramble and rush—
            Get down on his knees, in the cold damp slush,
                 And scratch for his choker hole. 

            Soon the hooker will holler for the straw-line;
                 Then the apes in the brush don mad.
            One runs with the end up the hill, sheer;
            When he hollers out "Line!" you get in the clear,
            And bound over logs and chunks like a deer;
                 If you're slow ... well, it's just too bad. 

            Then you think of the stake thhat you squandered.
                 And the plans that you conjured before;
            So you make them again, in the very same way—
            You'll head into town with your heard-earned pay;
            But you know in your heart you'll be king for a day,
                 Then come back to the woods once more. 

            But life to a woodman is freedom,
                 Not measured in dollars sublime;
            But to come and go and quit when he please,
            Not beg for a job on bended knees.
            No roadie to tycoons, with rich properties,
                 Who would see him in Hell—for a dime.

Ten Poems for National Poetry Month, Number 1: 'Snow in April' by Marjorie Pickthall

I haven't given National Poetry Month the attention it deserves. The first year of the Dusty Bookcase saw  James MacRae, he of William Arthur Deacon's The Four Jameses, recognized. The following April, National Poetry Month was pretty much given over to fellow James, Cheese Poet James McIntyre. The year after that, I produced a chapbook and promoted an evening celebrating the first James – by which I mean MacRae (né John J MacDonald) – in beautiful St Marys, the small Ontario town he'd chosen to call home.

National Poetry Month month has received little recognition since. I aim to make amends by posting verse – one poem every three days – until the cruelest month runs its course. Some I like, some I very much dislike; all are shared for no other reason than I find them amusing, interesting and/or infuriating.

We begin with 'Snow in April' by once-celebrated, now neglected Marjorie Pickthall. It isn't one of her best, but I like it. So, now that April's here, from The Complete Poems of Marjorie Pickthall (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1927):

SNOW IN APRIL

                  Over the boughs that the wind has shaken,

                  Over the sands that are rippled with rain,

                  Over the banks where the buds awaken

                  Cold cloud shadows are spreading again.

                  All the musical world is still,

                  When sharp and sudden, a sparrow calls,

                  And down on the grass where the violets shiver,

                  Through the spruce on the height of the hill,

                  Down on the breadths of the shining river

                  The faint snow falls.

                  Last weak word of a lord that passes—

                  Why should the burgeoning woods be mute?

                  Spring is abroad in the spiring grasses

                  Life is awake in the robin's flute.

                  But high in the spruce a wind is wailing,

                  And the birds in silence arise and go.

                  Is it that winter is still too near

                  For the heart of the world to cast out fear,

                  When over the sky the rack comes sailing

                  And suddenly falls the snow?

Related posts:

National Poetry Month Bookend

Local Poet!

A Mildly Eccentric Man Turns Nasty

A Local Poet is Recognized

Verse for an April a Century Past

Now That April's Here, Virna Sheard's 'April'

'April Night' by Archibald Lampman

The Heart Accepts It All – John Glassco

Joan Suter, Angus Hall, and the Collector in Me

I've got several paying projects on the go, all with tight deadlines, meaning there won't be any reviews here for the next month or so. Something to do with feeding the family, you understand.

However, I did want to share a few things about one of those paying projects: a review of Joan Suter's novel East of Temple Bar for my column in Canadian Notes & Queries. 

Until this year, Joan Suter's name meant nothing to me; I encountered it while researching Joan Walker, whose 1957 novel Repent at Leisure I reviewed here in January. Not much has been written about Walker or her career; most of what has, jacket copy included, refers to Repent at Leisure as a debut novel.

Marriage of Harlequin
Joan Walker
Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1962

I have Daryn Wright and Karyn Huenemann to thank for setting me straight. Their Joan Walker entry at Canada's Early Women Writers brings the revelation that Repent at Leisure wasn't the author's first novel, or even the second, but the third. Published in 1946 under her maiden name, East of Temple Bar was Walker's true debut. The same year saw her follow-up, Murder by Accident, which appeared under the pseudonym "Leonie Mason."

Copies of East of Temple Bar aren't plentiful, but they are inexpensive. I wanted the dust jacket, so and splurged all of £7.50 on mine. Money well spent, it brought this front flap:

East of Temple Bar was published in London by C & J Temple. A fragile pale green hardcover with thin pages, its worthy of study by those interested in supply constraints faced by printers in post-war England. My copy, purchased online from London's Small Library Company, once belonged to British novelist Angus Hall (1932-2009). As he would have been thirteen or fourteen when it was published, I'm guessing Hall bought it used when he was a young Fleet Street journalist.

East of Temple Bar revolves around Eve Smith and Hugh Fenwick, two friends who meet while working on Fleet Street. Like Hugh, Angus Hall became a film and theatre critic. Like Eve, he eventually left Fleet Street for a life as a novelist.

Hall's first novel, Love in Smoky Regions, was published in 1962 by Constable. It appears to have been very well-received; just look at the TLS quote on the cover of this paperback edition:

The High-Bouncing Lover (Hammond, 1966) was his second novel. Apparently, it's about a failed writer. I can't help but note that The High-Bouncing Lover was one of the working titles for The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald's first commercial failure.

By the time the 'seventies hit, Hall had made a reputation for himself as a horror writer. His 1969 novel Devilday was adapted to the screen as Madhouse (1974), starring Vincent Price.

He also wrote the novelization of this 1971 Hammer Horror:

And then there's this, which may frighten some readers:

I count sixteen titles in total, though it's hard to say for certain. Sadly, like Joan Walker (née Suter), Angus Hall is more or less forgotten. What remains of his personal library now rests with the Small Library Company. How it ended up there is an interesting story, told through this Abebooks podcast. One of the Company'a goals is "to find good homes for the books."

Angus Hall's copy of East of Temple Bar has found a good home on my Upper Canadian bookshelves. My only disappointment is that he didn't write his name in it.

Related posts:

On the High Heels of Desire

The Incomplete Repent at Leisure