Betting the House

Hickory House

Kenneth Orvis [pseud. Kenneth Lemieux]

Toronto: Harlequin, 1956

Bookie Alfredo Rossi can see the writing on the wall. The Feds are cracking down, and it's only a matter of time before they move in on him and sidekick Benny Kramer. Fortunately, Al has been good with his savings; he dresses like a million dollars, but is otherwise quite frugal. Al's also a guy who keeps an ear to the ground. He's heard rumblings about a corrupt mayor in some city on Lake Michigan. He's also heard that this same mayor, Carson Peters, keeps paperwork pertaining to his various illegalities in his office safe.

Al knows just the guy, a safecracker named Lou Kovaks, who can get him those papers. The poor sap was once a steady client – "Lou doesn't pick stretch runners as well as he does the locks on safes" – before he took one too many chances on the job. He's been serving time in the prison at Dannemora, but is just about to be sprung. Al is there when it happens: "'What's the matter, Al... afraid I'd be late for the first race?'"

Instead of the track, Al drives Lou to that city on Lake Michigan. Along the way, he fills the safecracker in on the job, complete with photograph:

"It's an old Continental," he stated soberly, "I've blown a dozen them in my time. A good jamb shot and the door pops open like a cuckoo clock when the hands point up."

Piece of cake. After Lou is paid, he leaves town and the novel. Al sticks around and blackmails the mayor into allowing him to set up Hickory House, a swanky nightclub and illegal gambling den on the edge of town. All goes swimmingly until the joint attracts the attention of big-time mobster Budsey Everest.

Hickory House is a first novel. In his 1985 memoir, Over and Under the Table, author Kenneth Orvis tells us it was written over an intense seven-month period: "Total absorption in plotting writing, and editing erased every other want and need except eating, sleeping, bathing, and defacating [sic]." I found this surprising, not because Hickory House is a bad book (it's perfectly fine), but because it's so short and simple. There is no real depth to the characters: Benny is devoted, Peters is corrupt, his tramp of a daughter is a tramp, and Al really know how to dress. Everyone plays their part, and the plot unfolds pretty much as you might expect.

Seven months?

Who am I to say it wasn't worth it? Hickory House went in and out of print within a month, but Orvis maintains that it brought all sorts of attention:

My novel had opened many new doors. After several radio and TV interviews and short pieces in local newspapers, more copywriting accounts than there was time for were easily available.

One can't help but envy.

So, yes, a worthwhile debut... for Orvis, if not the reader.

Shame that Harlequin forgot to put his name on the cover.

Object and Access: A 157-page mass market paperback. This past summer I snatched up the lone copy being sold online from a bookseller in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia. Price: US$12.95.

Not on Worldcat.

Good luck.

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Arnold Viersen Has a Rhyme for Manure

                    Your lights are on, but you're not home.
                    Your mind is not your own.

The week Arnold Viersen was born, Robert Palmer's "Addicted to Love" topped the Billboard Hot 100. Who dares call it coincidence?

Like Preston Manning George Pepki before him, the rookie MP for Peace River-Westlock has a rhyming dictionary and knows how to use it. Anyone requiring evidence need look no further than his most recent speech in the House of Commons.

The poet first captured my attention this past May, when he presented this at the Conservative Party Convention:

Straight outta Barrhead, Alberta (pop. 4,432).

Viersen is a seer. Leadership no-shows like Tony Clement were included only because lines like this are to good to let slide:

                        I've got the chops,
                        Like to drink hops.
                        Even on twitter
                        I'm a heavy hitter.
                        In Cabinet for ten years,
                        Leave the Libs in tears.
                        The man from Muskoka,
                        I'm our party's Lee Iococa.

I'll allow that Viersen's not much good at reading prose,

but when it comes to verse he really shines. Consider "Farmers: Heart of Rural Canada," which the MP performed in the House on 6 May 2016:

     Springtime is here; our farmers are in their fields
     Assessing the moisture, gauging their yields.
     When rain is sparse and times are tough
     And the price of hay is especially rough,
     As Conservatives we understand
     It takes hard work to till the land.
     Alberta NDP passed a law for working on prairie farms:
     More expensive food – don’t care who it harms.
     They said, “John dear, we want your food
     But only feed your cows when we’re in the mood;
     No overtime or you pay the price.”
     Beef and pork will cost more than twice.
     We’re standing up for farmers, feeding cows ’till nine.
     We’re standing up for farmers, working overtime.
     You eat their beef, you sit on leather,
     Your feet are shoed in stormy weather.
     Without their food, life would be grim
     Unless you plan to be awfully thin
     Family farms are getting fewer.
     Once they’re gone, we’re in deep manure.
     Don’t egg me on, the yolk’s on you.
     If farmers leave, what will we do?
     Bottom line – You want to eat?
     Support our farmers – Buy their wheat.

"Don't egg me on, the yolk's on you." That line alone is worth every cent of the $170,400 the MP will earn this year.

To think it has been immortalized in Hansard.

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Testing Jimmie Dale's Patience (and mine)

Jimmie Dale and the Phantom Clue
Frank L. Packard
Toronto: Copp, Clark, 1922

This third Gray Seal book begins where the second, The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale, leaves off. Gentleman Jimmie and lady Marie LaSalle are entwined, adrift in a small boat on the East River. Wizard Marre is dead... and with him the last remnant of the Crime Club that had once threatened their lives. Eventually, Marie breaks the embrace and begins to row. Jimmie looks on, "drinking in the lithe, graceful swing of her body, the rhythmic stroke of the heavy oars." All is calm and the pace is slow, despite Marie's exertion, until they reach Manhattan.

Marie acts quickly. Gaining terra firma, she flings the oars in the water, then pushes the boat – and Jimmie – back into the river.

"Jimmie! Oh, Jimmie!" Her voice reached him in a low, broken sob. "There was no other way. It's in your pocket, Jimmie. I put it there when – when you were – were holding me."

Jimmie watches as Marie disappears into the crowded street, and I nearly threw the book against the wall.

The pattern repeats. Jimmie Dale and the Phantom Clue begins in

much the same way as The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale. Our hero has vanquished the villains of the previous volume only to learn that another threatens Marie. Fearful that the link between she and he will expose the millionaire clubman's secret identity as the Gray Seal, Marie disappears to take on her new foe. The difference this time is that she expects to call on Jimmie's help every once in a while, as detailed in a letter she had left in his pocket.

There follows a new set of Gray Seal adventures; some work toward the defeating Marie's new nemesis, a mysterious figure she calls the Phantom, while others don't. The plots are clever and the writing is on par, but it's all a bit too familiar... and familiarity breeds contempt. I grew tired of reading details of Jimmie's costume changes and elderly

 butler Jason's pride at having "dandled" the infant Jimmie on his knee. We're told three times that the underworld's slogan is "Death to the Gray Seal!" (down from four in The Adventures of Jimmie Dale and eight in the The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale). Because the adventures were first published apart in pulp magazines, one might expect a certain amount of repetition and reminding, but the absence of an editor's red pen here just adds to the stagnant nature of the book.

I like to think that Jimmie Dale and the Blue Envelope Murder, the next Gray Seal volume, opens with the two crimefighters together, perhaps married with children, but I  really don't care enough to investigate.

At the end, I cast my mind back to the beginning, and wondered why Jimmie hadn't simply swum to shore.

Object: A 301-page novel in bland blue cloth with damaged dust jacket. The cover illustration is by A.D. Rahn. I purchased my copy in 2012 at London's Attic Books. Price: $15.00.

I have a second copy, one of the ten Gray Seal Edition Packards I bought two years ago. Price: US$25.00 (for the ten).

Access: First published in 1922 by Copp, Clark (Canada) and Doran (United States). The following year, Hodder & Stoughton put out the first UK edition. As far as I can tell, the novel was last published in 1942 by Novel Selections as Jimmy Dale and the Phantom Clue.

The novel is held by nineteen of our universities, but not one library serving the public. Library and Archives fails, as does the more reliable Toronto Public Library.

Twenty-two copies of one edition or another is listed by online booksellers, ranging in price from US$4.50 (a cheap A.L. Burt reprint) to US$100 (the Copp, Clark Canadian first, "near fine in very good dj"). My advice is to try Attic Books.

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