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

Remembering Fraser Sutherland

I'm honoured to have been asked by the Globe & Mail to write an obituary of poet, critic, journalist, biographer, and lexicographer Fraser Sutherland. It'll be appearing in print this coming week. For now, you can read the obituary online through this link (note: it's behind a paywall).

Fraser was the first person I interviewed for A Gentleman of Pleasure, my biography of his friend John Glassco. He as unfailingly generous and encouraging. In this way, my relationship with the man was anything but unique.

One of the last times I saw Fraser was at the Montreal launch of The Heart Accepts It All, a selection of Glassco's letters I edited for Véhicule Press. He'd made the effort of travelling from his home in Toronto.

Carmine Starnino, Fraser Sutherland, and Mark Abley
at the launch of The Heart Accepts It All.
The Word, 14 August 2013

Fraser always expressed an interest in my work, particular the discoveries made while working on this long exploration of forgotten and neglected Canadian literature. My final visit to 39 Helena Avenue, the house he'd shared with his wife Alison, was to pick up some old Canadian pulp novels he'd wanted me to have.

I will never forget his kindness.

RIP, Fraser.

Update:

The Globe & Mail, 14 April 2021

The Dustiest Bookcase: M is for Machar

The Dustiest Bookcase:

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

Marjorie's Canadian Winter: A Story of the Northern Lights

Agnes Maule Machar

Toronto: Briggs, 1906

315 pages

Another winter has come and gone... the twelfth since I found this book at the Stratford Salvation Army Thrift Store. It spent the season on my night table, vying for attention with The Sleeping Bomb, The Terror of the Tar Sands, A Gift to Last, The Wronged Wife, and all kinds of unkind works about Maria Monk. Snubbed yet again, Marjorie's Canadian Winter has been returned to the living room bookshelves.

Miss Machar's most popular novel, I feel it must be read in winter.

Why?

Don't know. After all, I'm always up for hearing "Theme from A Summer Place." Doesn't matter what time of year.

Because I dislike spoilers, I've made a point of skipping over all references to Marjorie's Canadian Winter when reading about Agnes Maule Machar. However, for the purposes of this post, I allowed myself this review of the original edition from the December 24, 1892 number of The Critic:

I can attest to the engravings being neat. Sure looks like Marjorie had fun.

Must admit, I'm intrigued by the reference to her encounters with those "not so satisfactory."

Ah, but I can wait 'til at least December. Spring is here! Besides, I found this today folded between pages 62 and 63:

There are conifers that need planting.

'Easter Lilies' by Agnes Maule Machar

For this Easter Sunday, verse by Agnes Maule Machar, daughter of Church of Scotland clergyman John Machar, from her 1899 collection Lays of the 'True North' and other Canadian Poems. 

EASTER LILIES 

            Oh, where are the sweet white lilies
                  That grew by the garden wall?
            We wanted them for Easter,
                  But there is not one at all! 

            Down on the bare brown garden
                  Their roots lie hidden deep,
            And the life is pulsing through them
                  Although they seem to sleep;

            And the gardener's eye can see them—
                  Those germs that hidden lie, —
            Shine in the stately beauty
                  That shall clothe them by-and-by! 

            Even so, in our hearts are growing
                  The lilies the Lord loves best:
            The faith, the hope, the patience
                  He planted in the breast. 

            Not yet is their rich full blossom,
                  But He sees their coming prime
            As they shall smile to meet Him
                  In earth's glad Easter time! 

            The love that striveth towards Him
                  Through earthly gloom and chill;
            The humble sweet obedience
                  Through darkness following still— 

            These are the Easter lilies,
                  Precious and fair and sweet,
            We may bring to the risen Master
                  And lay at His blessed feet!

Related posts:

'The Eastern Winds' by Liliian Leveridge

Dorothy Dumbrille's Easter Prayer

Easter Verse by Ethel Ursula Foran
'Easter Dawn' by Jean Blewett
'The Easter Parade, 1915' by Robert Stanley Weir

Uncollected Easter Verse by Arthur Stringer

'Communion Pascale' de Émile Nelligan

Montreal Most Strange (w/ mysterious directions)

Blood on My Rug
E. Louise Cushing
New York: Arcadia, 1956

223 pages

Miss Talmadge visits her St Catherine Street bookstore on a Sunday afternoon. This being Montreal, the decade being the 1950s, her business is closed for the day, but she's looking for something to read... because, I guess, the bookseller doesn't have much of a home library. Her choice is Anne Morrow Lindbergh's Gift from the Sea. Miss Talmadge is about to leave when she remembers that there's a letter that must be answered, and so she enters her back office, where she finds a man lying "messily dead" on her treasured rose Khalabar rug.

Miss Talmadge  phones the Homicide Bureau, stirring a napping telephone operator, who in turn sets bored policemen into action. A siren is heard, a car draws up, and Detective Inspector Richard MacKay emerges. Miss Talmadge finds reassurance in the "laughter lines at the corner of his eyes and quirk at one side of his mouth."

Within fifteen minutes, Inspector MacKay has learned the victim's name (George Albert Smithins) and hometown (Red Deer, Alberta). He shares both with Miss Talmadge, whom he's already determined had nothing whatsoever to do with the murdered man. 

Blood on My Rug is the third of E. Louise Cushing's five murder mysteries. Having read the first and second, I knew to expect little by way of intrigue. Mackay, who is so sharp in his first quarter-hour on the case, turns a sluggish dullard. Accompanied by Miss Talmadge, he interviews four of the five young women who work in her bookstore. The fifth, Ellen Pope, left Montreal on the evening of the murder. It's most unlike her, but MacKay doesn't follow up. Why should he? After all, two days later a telegram arrives to say that she's in Lachute caring for sister who has taken ill. 

As in Cushing's previous mysteries, the most suspicious character – indeed, the only suspicious character – will be found to have committed the crime. Though presented as a hero, MacKay errs repeatedly in dismissing evidence pointing to the murderer as "the long arm of coincidence."

St Catherine Street, 1956

It all  makes for a frustrating read, which is not to suggest that it isn't fascinating. What makes Blood on My Rug a real page-turner is its depiction of Montreal as an exclusively English city. There are no francophones. There are no French street names. There are no French newspapers. Every business has an English name. Cushing's Montreal is also one in which the discovery of a dead body might cause distress, but recovery is quick. Here's Miss Talmadge and her maid on the morning after the murder:

Miss Talmadge wakened early Monday morning, which was most unusual for her. She lay looking at the morning sun which glimmered coldly on her white curtains and decided to get up. After all, it was hardly fair to let the burden of any excitement that there might be at the store that morning fall on the girls.

     She stretched out a lazy arm and rang for Daisy, thereby startling that damsel greatly.

     "Did you ring?" she asked uncertainly.

     Miss Talmadge grinned at her. "I did," she said cheerily. "I think I'll go down to the store early, Daisy. Will you shut the window and bring me my breakfast, please?"

The missing Miss Pope's body will be found stuffed in a trunk at neighbouring Brown's Luggage Shop, but none of her co-workers are particularly disturbed. The luggage store closes for the day and police investigate, but business at the bookstore continues as if nothing has happened.

Trust me, Montrealers aren't so cold.

I spoil little in revealing that the solution to the murder comes courtesy of a note the victim hid in the copy of Gift from the Sea Miss Talmadge took home that bloody Sunday. The discovery drew my interest as I'd earlier found this within the pages my copy of Blood on My Rug:

A note found inside a book in which a note is hidden in a book. Whatever can it mean?

The directions continue on the reverse. I'll happily scan the back and send it on to anyone who requests on the understanding that if it leads to treasure we split it 50-50.

If it leads to a body, you're on your own.

Favourite sentence: 

"I know it's not very pleasant for you," he said pleasantly.

Dedication:

Irene Love Archibald, who was dead eleven years when Blood on My Rug was published, wrote under many names. As "Margaret Currie," she had a long-running column in the Montreal Star, at which her husband was editor. She left us with one book: Margaret Currie: Her Book (Toronto: Hunter Rose, 1924).

Trivia: Miss Talmadge tells Inspector Mackay that on the evening of the murder she was at the "Capital Theatre," which I take to be a reference to the Capitol Theatre, also on St Catherine Street. It was torn down in 1973. MacKay doesn't ask the name if the movie. I've read enough mystery novels to recognize his laziness. 

Object: A squat book bound in light green cloth. I'd been looking for a copy for about a decade. The one I purchased was first listed last month on eBay with a US$99.95 opening bid.

There were no takers.

The seller relisted at US$9.95.

I was the lone bidder.

An ex-library copy, it's in far better shape than might be expected. Sadly, the catalogue card has been removed. What attracted most was the dust jacket, which features a pitch for The Sting of Death by Perry D. Westbrook and these "RECENT ARCADIA MYSTERIES":

Run from the Sheep - Eline Capit
The Crime, the Place, and the Girl - D. Stapleton

A Few Drops of Murder - Isabel Capeto

Access: As far as I can tell, the only publicly available copy in this country is held by Library and Archives Canada. The book is more accessible south of the border. According to WorldCat, the Library of Congress, seven American universities, and two American public libraries have copies. What intrigues is that those two public libraries serve Kiowa, Kansas (pop 1026) and Mandan, North Dakota (pop 18,331).

No copies are currently listed for sale online.

Related posts:

Bewitched, Bothered, but not Bewildered

No Picnic

Giving Madge Macbeth Her Due

The frontispiece to Madge Macbeth's Kleath (Boston: Small, Maynard & Co, 1917)
Artist: George William Gage

A brief follow-up to the previous post on Madge Macbeth's The Long Day.

Madge Macbeth never visited the Yukon, but that didn't prevent her from setting her 1917 novel Kleath in Dawson City. I don't own a copy, and haven't read it, though it is available online. 

This isn't about that book, rather the film it inspired.

Two years after publication, the motion picture rights to Kleath were sold to the Mayfair Photoplay Corporation by her American publisher Small, Maynard & Co. Macbeth received a 65% cut, amounting to $442. The resulting film, The Law of the Yukon (1920), takes its title from a Robert Service poem. The Bard of the Yukon was given sole credit.

Exhibitors Herald, 1 May 1920

I wonder how much Service was paid for lending his name.

Bet it was more than $442.

The film The Law of the Yukon has nothing to do with Service. It's not in any way based on his "verse Classic." If you don't believe me, I'm providing the Service poem in full. If you do believe me, feel free to skip.

THE LAW OF THE YUKON

This is the law of the Yukon, and ever she makes it plain:

"Send not your foolish and feeble; send me your strong and your sane— 

Strong for the red rage of battle; sane, for I harry them sore;

Send me men girt for the combat, men who are grit to the core;

Swift as the panther in triumph, fierce as the bear in defeat,

Sired of a bulldog parent, steeled in the furnace heat.

Send me the best of your breeding, lend me your chosen ones;

Them will I take to my bosom, them will I call my sons;

Them will I gild with my treasure, them will I glut with my meat;

But the others—the misfits, the failures—I trample under my feet.

Dissolute, damned and despairful, crippled and palsied and slain,

Ye would send me the spawn of your gutters—Go! take back your spawn again.

"Wild and wide are my borders, stern as death is my sway;

From my ruthless throne I have ruled alone for a million years and a day;

Hugging my mighty treasure, waiting for man to come,

Till he swept like a turbid torrent, and after him swept—the scum.

The pallid pimp of the dead-line, the enervate of the pen,

One by one I weeded them out, for all that I sought was—Men.

One by one I dismayed them, frighting them sore with my glooms;

One by one I betrayed them unto my manifold dooms.

Drowned them like rats in my rivers, starved them like curs on my plains,

Rotted the flesh that was left them, poisoned the blood in their veins;

Burst with my winter upon them, searing forever their sight,

Lashed them with fungus-white faces, whimpering wild in the night;

Staggering blind through the storm-whirl, stumbling mad through the snow,

Frozen stiff in the ice-pack, brittle and bent like a bow;

Featureless, formless, forsaken, scented by wolves in their flight,

Left for the wind to make music through ribs that are glittering white;

Gnawing the black crust of failure, searching the pit of despair,

Crooking the toe in the trigger, trying to patter a prayer;

Going outside with an escort, raving with lips all afoam,

Writing a cheque for a million, driveling feebly of home;

Lost like a louse in the burning . . . or else in the tented town

Seeking a drunkard's solace, sinking and sinking down;

Steeped in the slime at the bottom, dead to a decent world,

Lost 'mid the human flotsam, far on the frontier hurled;

In the camp at the bend of the river, with its dozen saloons aglare,

Its gambling dens ariot, its gramophones all ablare;

Crimped with the crimes of a city, sin-ridden and bridled with lies,

In the hush of my mountained vastness, in the flush of my midnight skies.

Plague-spots, yet tools of my purpose, so natheless I suffer them thrive,

Crushing my Weak in their clutches, that only my Strong may survive.

"But the others, the men of my mettle, the men who would 'stablish my fame

Unto its ultimate issue, winning me honor, not shame;

Searching my uttermost valleys, fighting each step as they go,

Shooting the wrath of my rapids, scaling my ramparts of snow;

Ripping the guts of my mountains, looting the beds of my creeks,

Them will I take to my bosom, and speak as a mother speaks.

I am the land that listens, I am the land that broods;

Steeped in eternal beauty, crystalline waters and woods.

Long have I waited lonely, shunned as a thing accurst,

Monstrous, moody, pathetic, the last of the lands and the first;

Visioning camp-fires at twilight, sad with a longing forlorn,

Feeling my womb o'er-pregnant with the seed of cities unborn.

Wild and wide are my borders, stern as death is my sway,

And I wait for the men who will win me—and I will not be won in a day;

And I will not be won by weaklings, subtle, suave and mild,

But by men with the hearts of vikings, and the simple faith of a child;

Desperate, strong and resistless, unthrottled by fear or defeat,

Them will I gild with my treasure, them will I glut with my meat.

"Lofty I stand from each sister land, patient and wearily wise,

With the weight of a world of sadness in my quiet, passionless eyes;

Dreaming alone of a people, dreaming alone of a day,

When men shall not rape my riches, and curse me and go away;

Making a bawd of my bounty, fouling the hand that gave—

Till I rise in my wrath and I sweep on their path and I stamp them into a grave.

Dreaming of men who will bless me, of women esteeming me good,

Of children born in my borders of radiant motherhood,

Of cities leaping to stature, of fame like a flag unfurled,

As I pour the tide of my riches in the eager lap of the world."

This is the Law of the Yukon, that only the Strong shall thrive;

That surely the Weak shall perish, and only the Fit survive.

Dissolute, damned and despairful, crippled and palsied and slain,

This is the Will of the Yukon,—Lo, how she makes it plain! 

Not much in the way of plot, is there.

In an interview published under the title 'Look to Poems for New Ideas' in the 24 April 1920 issue of trade journal Exhibitors Herald,  Isaac Wolper, the president of Mayfair, hints at the truth:

Because The Law of the Yukon is a lost film, I've relied on old reviews for what it's about. The most detailed I've found comes courtesy of the 11 November 1920 edition of the Daily Colonist:

Morgan Kleath comes to Gold City, a bustling mining camp in the Klondike country, in the film "the law of the Yukon," which was shown for for the first time at the Variety Theatre yesterday. Kleath makes his way to the "San Domingo," the principal gathering place and meets Tim Meadows, the proprietor, who had induced him to come to Gold City to establish and edit a daily paper.
     Tim introduces Kleath to his daughter Goldie, whom he worships and guards with jealous care. Kleath invites Goldie to dance. Joe Duke, who as been paying attention to Goldie, conceives a violent dislike for Kleath and with the aid of his friend Jake Nichols, is able to pick a quarrel with him.
     A fight follows, in which Duke receives a sound thrashing. Jake, seeing the turn of events and, striving to aid his fried, stabs Morgan Kleath in the arm.
Barney McCool, a good natured old Irishman, who is known as "the biggest liar in Gold City," takes a strong fancy to Kleath and becomes his good man, Friday. He takes the wounded man to his log cabin and Dr. Meredith, the only physician in the town, waits on him. Mrs. Meredith, hearing of the newcomer, calls on him. She at once becomes infatuated with Kleath. Goldie to is strongly drawn to him.

     Everybody is anxious to know Kleath's past. His silence furnishes food for speculation. On two different occasions – once when he had picked a lock with a rusty nail, and once when he opened Tim Meadow's safe after the combination had been lost, he played into the hands of his enemies. These enemies, seeking to discredit him, circulate a story that Morgan Kleath is a yeggman, a criminal fugitive from the States.

     Duke, harboring revenge, sees his way clear to rob Tim Meadow' safe and have suspicion point towards Kleath. Duke and his partner, Jake Nichols, are successful in luring Goldie and Morgan Kleath to a deserted cabin, where they are forced to remain all night. During the night Duke and Jake commit the robbery.

     Kleath's feat of opening the safe is remembered and he is arrested and charged with the grave crime. Before leaving the deserted cabin, Kleath extracts a promise from Goldie that she will not mention the fact that they spent the night there. This, of course, is done to protect her good name. Kleath's silence compels the court to declare him guilty. Goldie, unable to keep silent, lays bare the whole circumstance. A stranger, a woman, appears dramatically and reveals the history of Kleath's past life (an honorable history, by the way) and herself as the accomplice of Duke and Nichols. Duke, infuriated at the turn of events, shoots the woman. After a lapse of time Kleath and Goldie leave the Klondike for the "Outside" as man and wife, and this the story ends happily, as it should. 

Exhibitors Herald, 12 June 1920

Because I haven't read the novel, I can't speak to the accuracy of the plot synopsis found in the this review from the November 1917 issue of the Canadian Magazine:

"...the story, if set for moving pictures, undoubtably would be a success."

In her 1957 memoir, Boulevard Career, Madge Macbeth devotes all of five sentences to Kleath: 

It was published in Boston and for several weeks I was deliriously happy. Then I learned that it was being filmed without my knowledge or consent. The Author's League of America took the matter up but there was nothing to be done because in my ignorance I had turned all rights over to the publisher. The film appeared under Robert Service's title, The Law of the Yukon, and my name was not mentioned!

     I got enough money from the venture to buy a cheap fur coat.

The $442 she received in 1920 would amount to under six thousand today. So, yeah, a cheap fur coat.

All this leaves me with this question: We can't see the movie, but should we be reading the book? 

A Bonus: In the Exhibitors Herald article, I happened to catch Isaac Wolper referencing The Miracle Man, almost certainly the most important lost film based on a Canadian novel:

Ideas lift a picture far above the commonplace level. Analyze one of the greatest pictures ever produced, 'The Miracle Man.' What made it great? Why was the public response to it so eager and spontaneous? The crux of the reason is expressed in one word. 'Idea'! The picture conveyed a poetic idea beautifully expressed.

Related posts:

Madge Macbeth's Great Gold Rush Hoax

Images from a Lost Film of a Forgotten Novel

The Miracle Man on Paper and Nitrate Film