Arriving in bookstores as I write, the eighteenth Ricochet Books title. Whispering City is based on the Quebec City film noir of the same name. First published in 1947, it is one of the most sought after post-war Canadian paperbacks. A lone copy of that only other edition is listed online at $305.90.
The new Ricochet edition will set you back $15.95.
I provide a new intro.
Copies can be purchased through the usual online booksellers and at the Véhicule Press website.
Earlier this month, I tried to sell a friend on Basil King, as is my habit. I mentioned that in 1909 his novel The Inner Shrine outsold every other book in the United States, adding that he very nearly repeated that accomplishment the following year, and again the year after that. In this regard, King bested fellow Prince Edward Islander L.M. Montgomery, who never once made the annual top ten.
The annual top ten?
I refer here to lists compiled by The Bookman and Publisher's Weekly. The former cobbled together the first in 1895, the year Scotsman Ian Maclaren's Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush was all the rage. It didn't take long for a Canadian to appear. In 1896, Gilbert Parker's The Seats of the Mighty placed third, blocked from the top spot by Francis Hopkinson Smith's Tom Grogan and A Lady of Quality by Frances Hodgson Burnett, which I'm sure you've all read.
Gilbert Parker – later, Sir Gilbert Parker – was a publisher's dream. Scribner's 1912 twenty-four volume Works of Gilbert Parker is a beautiful thing. The more expensive editions come with a tipped in handwritten autographed letter.
Parker is one of eight Canadians to hit the American year-end top ten. What follows is a year-by-year list of those authors and their titles, beginning with Parker's The Seats of the Mighty. Some may question the inclusion of Saul Bellow and Arthur Hailey. My position on both men is simple. Saul Bellow was born in Lachine, Quebec. He was a nine-year-old when his family left Canada for the United States. Arthur Hailey immigrated to this country after the Second World War and became a Canadian citizen.
Long-time Toronto resident John Irving's The Hotel New Hampshire, which placed second in 1981, is not included because it wasn't until 2019 that he became a Canadian citizen.
W.H. Blake's translation of Louis Hémon's Maria Chapdelain, which in 1922 was the eighth bestselling book in the United States is excluded. Though the novel has been described as a "a classic of French-Canadian literature," Hémon was French, not French-Canadian. His visit to this country lasted months, not years. My late friend Michael Gnarowski argued that Hémon would've become a citizen had he not been struck and killed by a train whilst walking the tracks outside Chapleau, Ontario. On this we disagreed.
1901
#4 – The Right of Way by Gilbert Parker
1902
#6 – The Right of Way by Gilbert Parker
#10 – The Weavers by Gilbert ParkerThe Weavers again, yet unlike The Right of Way, this one never made Broadway, nor was it adapted by Hollywood.
1909
#1 – The Inner Shrine by Anonymous [Basil King]
Reverend King's sixth novel, The Inner Shrine was the year's literary sensation. I think that much of the interest had to do with questions over authorship. Did it come from the pen of Edith Wharton? Henry James? How about the daughter of Willian Dean Howells?
1910
"Are you sure you and Young Ab didn't didn't have some kind of an argument and then that that [sic] temper of yours didn't get the better of you?"Detective Sergeant Bower of the OPP has a similar theory. A grim, unfriendly man he isn't so much intent on investigating as obtaining an a confession.
The last thing Young Ab said before he went to sleep was that the alarm was set for four o'clock and that we'd better get some sleep.Sadly, The Clue of the Dead Duck remains relevant. It hasn't aged.
But sometimes when I'm just about to go to sleep things seem very clear to me. If I've done something wrong during the day, it's in those few minutes before I go to sleep that I worry about it. Now I started thinking, suppose there's an accident? Suppose somebody gets shot? The faces of all the people I knew around Irishman's Lake, all the people who accepted me right now because I was under Black Ab's protection, came up in my mind. But as I lay therein the dark, these faces seemed to be looking at me accusingly. Old ladies had their heads bent together and were looking out of the corners of their eyes at me, and I was scared.
God of the harvest, once againOur joyful tones we raise,For all Thy goodness, day by day,We give Thee thankful praise.With blessings rich, from fertile field,And gifts from fruitful tree,We wish, this day, our thanks to yieldWith earnest hearts, to Thee.We ploughed the ground, we sow'd the seed,But Thou didst send the rainIn grateful show'rs, in time of need.And now we've reap'd the grain.The sun with grateful heat did shine;The dew did nightly fall;And now, for loaded tree and vine —We give Thee thanks for all.The bee, in well-fill'd honey cells.Her sweets for us hath stow'd,The crystal water in the wells,For us from springs hath flowed.The lowing herd, the prancing steedReceived we from Thy hand.And we, this day, return oar meedOf praise, throughout the land.Then let us sing with earnest hearts,Tho' joyful be each lay,And thankful ev'ry song that startsOn this Thanksgiving Day.
Strapping fifteen-year-old Randy Piers and younger brother Tom are preparing Old Pete the pack pony for a three-day fishing excursion to Mosquito Creek when up pops Lester Barnes. The Piers boys are none too pleased. A softie from New York City dolled up in a dude ranch outfit (here I'm paraphrasing Tom), Lester asks if he can come along. Good Canadians, Randy and Tom are far too polite to deny the visitor's request.
Lester's investor dad shells out dough for additional grub and the trio set out from Copperville. The town is a product of the author's imagination, but British Columbia's Mosquito Creek, is very real. And there is gold.
The trio manage to reach Mosquito Creek without further incidence, but once there Lester slips on a rock and is carried away by a fast moving current. Randy tries to save him, only to be swept away himself. Both are rescued by surprisingly spry old sourdough Jake Olsen. Once the boys are safe and on solid ground, he suggests they get out of their wet clothes.
Make nothing of that, Jake doesn't want them to catch cold.
The old man makes a living, of sorts, panning for gold in Mosquito Creek. Lester learns that Jake once sought fortune in the Klondike, leading to my favourite line of dialogue:
"Oh boy! Were you up there?" Lester almost squealed with excitement. "Tell us some yarns, oh please!"
Jake shares a chilling story about a friend freezing to death, but nothing more. With winter a few months away, the old man is more focussed on building a cabin. He hires the Piers brothers to pan for gold while he gets to it. Lionel can't join in because he and his father are returning east to what I'm assuming is a Park Avenue penthouse.
As the jacket illustration suggests, Gold in Mosquito Creek is a novel of adventure and danger. The railway bridge and slippery rock provide something of a template; if something can go wrong, it will go wrong. Randy fails to tie a tent flap, so wakes up to sleeping skunk. Jake fells trees to make his cabin, until a tree falls on him. Thoughts that a bear might eat their provisions are followed by a bear eating their provisions. At a Copperville picnic, Tom worries over keeping his new ice cream pants clean, only to have them stained by grape juice. Back at Mosquito Creek, he doesn't wear hiking boots, and so strains his ankle. Will the boys encounter another bear? You can bet on it.
Lurking in the background is a "tough-looking hombre" (here I'm quoting Tom), whom the Piers brothers first encounter in Copperville, just as they're beginning to work for Jake:
The swarthy man is a foreigner, but not a good one like Lester's wealthy investor dad. The reader is made aware of just how bad the earring-wearing man is by the fact that he's been tardy in paying a dentist's bill.
As it turns out, the swarthy foreigner is the leader of the Gold Ring Gang; a "saturnine" man serves as his number two. They've been moving about Copperville for some time. The third member of the gang was shot at the Bodega Hotel – reason unknown – and ends up sharing a hospital room with Jake (who almost lost a foot on account of that dang tree). This is how the bad men learn that the old sourdough has two or three thousand dollars worth of nuggets squirreled away at his camp.
It's at this point that Gold in Mosquito Creek shifts gears, revealing Dickson Reynolds as Helen Dickson Reynolds, author of He Will Return. The plot turns ridiculous, the dialogue laughable, and I felt I was finally getting my money's worth.
The gang is successful in stealing Jake's gold. In doing so, one or more of their members tries to shoot Randy and Tom goes missing. It's assumed that the younger of the two Pierce boys has been kidnapped or killed. Their parents are not consulted when Copperville Constable Denny Day enlists young Randy to spy on the gang's hideout. Somehow he assumes the men won't recognize the boy they tried to kill. It's all bit of a disaster, as reflected on these two pages. The dialogue is worth the read:
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Everything in Gold in Mosquito Creek is fairly cut and dry. It's not a mystery novel, yet mysteries remain, the foremost being that an American criminals might cross the border, driving thousands of kilometres in a stolen car to a remote region of British Columbia. The Gold Ring Gang spend weeks in Copperville, taking rooms in the Bodega Hotel. The town's police know they are there and do nothing; not even when one of the gang is shot.
That's something, right? Someone shot in a small town
Maybe not.
All this for a haul of nuggets amounting to between two and three thousand dollars ($33,000 - $49,500 today).
Was that really worth it?
They tried to kill Randy.
I'll never understand the criminal mind.
Object and Access: Gold in Mosquito Creek was first published in 1946 by Thomas Nelson & Sons, New York, NY. A bulky book bound in red boards, the Museum Press edition shares nothing in terms of design. The Nelson edition features a cover and six illustrations by American artist Grattan Condon. His rendition of the scene depicted on the British jacket is superior.
There has never been a Canadian edition.
My Museum Press copy was purchased earlier this year from a British bookseller. Price £2.50. Evidence suggests that it was a Christmas gift.
Library and Archives and seven of our academic libraries hold copies of the Museum and/or Nelson editions.
As I write, one Museum copy is being sold online. Price: £8.00.
The Nelson edition is nowhere in sight.
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