Of Whips, Veins, and a Bottomless Pool of Warmth

Arctic Rendez-vous

Keith Edgar

Toronto: Collins White Circle, 1949

192 pages

I've finally finished my review of Arctic Rendez-vous, promised here last month.

No apologies. You'd have taken a long time, too.

Arctic Rendez-vous features the worst, most cringe-inducing sex scenes I've read since Donna Steinberg's I Lost It All in Montreal. Here's a sample:

The fragrance of her hair was in his nostrils and her gentle breath sent a warn zephyr against his chest.
   She whispered shyly, “I don’t know what came over me, Taffy — I —"
   Taffy said shakily, “I love you too, Marta, I always have.”
   Marta was quiet for a moment, then she raised her head and kissed him on the mouth.
   A vein was hammering in his temples and there was an uncomfortable warmth creeping through his thighs.
   His mouth sought for and found her moist sweet lips and she pressed close to him. Taffy, Darling, I want you so much — so much —"
   He slid his hands down her smooth back, the part of him that was still rational thinking that her body was suddenly hot, hot all over. He could hardly speak, his voice was so husky.
   “Are you sure, Marta? Are you sure?”
   “Please, Taffy. Please take me. Please. Please.”
   “I love you Marta, you know that don’t you?”
   The pressure of her thighs against him was unbearable. His mouth groped with desperate hunger for her lips and together they sank down into a bottomless pool of warmth and breathless wonder.

Those with strong stomachs can find the review posted at Canadian Notes & Queries online:

A Femme Fatale in the Frozen North

A bonus: In my my previous Arctic Rendezvous post, I remarked that the woman on the cover, Marta, should have black hair, adding that her breasts should be conical. This brought an emailed query, the answer to which is provided in this passage:

She trembled in his arms and twisted to bury her face in his shoulder, moaning softly. He slid his hands up her shoulders, pressing her to him until the hard cones of her breasts started a vein throbbing in his throat. 

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The Amazon Customer Review 2018 Ontario Election Edition: Interesting and Easy to Read

Election Day in Ontario. If the pollsters are correct, Doug Ford is set to become the province's twenty-sixth premier. That's him smiling on the cover of Ford Nation, the book he wrote with his brother Rob.

Ford Nation ranks as one of the most remarkable achievements in Canadian publishing. Doug announced that he was writing the book at a 13 September 2016 news conference.  Two months later, there is was, finished and in stores.

Again, a remarkable acheivement... made more so by the fact that co-author Rob had died nine months earlier.

At that news conference, held in his mom's garden with Rob's widow Renata by his side, Doug described the work in progress as "the most exciting book that this country has ever seen when it comes to politics."

Does the finished product live up to Doug's claim? I haven't read Ford Nation myself, and so rely upon Amazon customer reviews:

I wonder if Renata is receiving royalties?

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The Dustiest Bookcase: C is for Child

The Dustiest Bookcase:

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

They're in storage as we build our new home.

Patience, please.

The Village of Souls

Philip Child

Toronto: Ryerson, 1948

294 pages

I've long championed Child, praising God's Sparrows and Mr. Ames Against Time here and elsewhere. The Village of Souls was his debut novel. It was first published in 1933 by Thornton Butterworth of London, England, a full fifteen years before there was a Canadian edition. Ryerson went some way in making up for the delay. This may be the publisher's most beautiful book.

Roloff Beny, a man I'd known only as a photographer, provides the cover and the illustrations that open each chapter.

Child wrote just five novels. I haven't read this one for the simple reason that it's set in seventeenth-century New France. As mentioned a couple of weeks back, I'm not drawn to historical fiction. Should I be giving The Village of Souls a chance? According to Ryerson, I'm missing out on a novel that "will live as a Canadian classic."

The Ryerson edition of The Village of Souls was published seventy years ago. The novel hasn't seen print since.

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A Publisher's Worst Book?

A sunny weekend in St Marys was made brighter still when I finally finished Arctic Rendez-vous, the sixth novel by part-time pilot and sometime novelist Keith Edgar.

Now all I have to do is write a review of the damn thing.

Arctic Rendez-vous ranks in the lower tier of Canada's post-war pulps. The early pages are by far the most interesting, taking its hero, Taffy Calhoun, from chatting up a young lady in the Imperial Room of Toronto's Royal York Hotel, to a tense business meeting at the Bank of Commerce Building.

Things then shift to the Arctic archipelago... where my interest waned.

I would've given up on Arctic Rendez-vous had not been the errors – the many errors – that plagued the book. Something of a surprise, they kept me going because I'd long considered the novel's publisher, Collins White Circle, to be the most competent producer of Canadian post-war paperbacks. I've read White Circle editions of Ralph Connor, Hugh Garner, Stephen Leacock, and David Montrose, but never encountered anything nearly inept.

Ignoring typos – "riffe" for "rifle" is one example – let's look at the title: Arctic Rendez-vous. The title page and back cover have it as "Arctic Rendezvous."

This, I'm willing to overlook – hell, no less a publisher than Penguin got the title wrong with no less an author than Brian Moore – but then comes the back cover copy:

"Here is the story of a man and a woman, savage and elemental, matching their hatred and a strange attraction in a race for a guilty secret and sunken fortune..."

In fact, the fortune is not sunken, though there are several pages in which Taffy believes that might be the case. The "ghost-ship Baychimo" doesn't feature in the novel. Taffy and Marta are racing to reach the Unaikto, a fictional ship that was abandoned after becoming icebound.

This is not to say that there was no Baychimo. It was abandoned in 1931, the very same year as the fictional Unaikto. A ghost-ship, it was last seen in 1969.

That's Marta being groped on the cover.

Her hair should be black.

Her breasts should be conical.

More anon.

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My Lady Greensleeves

Constance Beresford-Howe

New York: Ballantine, 1955

220 pages

The author's fourth novel – and lone historical novel – My Lady Greensleeves holds the distinction of being her worst received. Eighteen years passed before she returned with her fifth, The Book of Eve.

In the three-page "About Constance Beresford-Howe" tacked to the end of the novel, the author reveals that My Lady Greensleeves was inspired by a sixteenth-century scandale involving Anne Hungerford, husband Sir William Hungerford, and William Darrell, who was accused of being Anne's lover.

Beresford-Howe uses Anne as a model for the novel's Avys Winter; Sir William is Piers Winter, and Durrell becomes Avys's kissing cousin Henry Brandon.

I don't much care for historical fiction, but regret that I've not read this one. It would be interesting to see just how much the author drew from history. Sir William Hunderford's father was beheaded for violating the Buggery Act of 1533. Does Piers Winters' papa meet the same fate? All evidence indicates that William Durrell committed infanticide at the birth of a child he'd fathered with a servant girl. He was accused of tossing the newborn into a fire.

Kudos to the cover artist for depicting the heroine in green sleeves.

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The Queen is Dead

Verse for Victoria Day, composed by Jean Blewett upon news of the monarch's death. This version is taken from The Cornflower and Other Poems (Toronto: Briggs, 1906).

QUEEN VICTORIA

1837 

The sunshine streaming through the stained glass
Touched her with rosy colors as she stood,
The maiden Queen of all the British realm,
In the old Abbey on that soft June day.
Youth shone within her eyes, where God had set
All steadfastness, and high resolve, and truth;
Youth flushed her cheek, dwelt on the smooth white brow
Whereon the heavy golden circlet lay. 

The ashes of dead kings, the history of
A nation's growth, of strife, and victory,
The mighty past called soft through aisle and nave:
"Be strong, O Queen; be strong as thou art fair!"
A virgin, white of soul and unafraid.
Since back of her was God, and at her feet
A people loyal to the core, and strong.
And loving well her sweetness and her youth. 

1901 

Upon her woman's head earth's richest crown
Hath sat with grace these sixty years and more.
Her hand, her slender woman's hand, hath held
The weightiest sceptre, held it with such power
All homage hath been hers, at home, abroad,
Where'er hath dwelt a chivalrous regard
For strength of purpose and for purity,
For grand achievement and for noble aim. 

To-day the cares of State no longer vex;
To-day the crown is laid from off her brow. 

Dead! The great heart of her no more will beat
With tenderness for all beneath her rule.
Dead! The clear eyes of her no more will guard
The nation's welfare. Dead! The arm of her
No more will strike a mighty blow for right
And justice; make a wide world stand amazed
That one so gentle as old England's Queen
Could be so fearless and so powerful! 

Full wearily the sense of grief doth press
And weight us down. The good Queen is no more;
And we are fain to weep as children weep
When greedy death comes to the home and bears
From thence the mother, whose unfailing love
Hath been their wealth, their safeguard, and their pride.

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A Teenage Rock Photographer Between the Covers

Longtime readers may remember me writing here of teenage adventures smuggling cameras into concerts. Sadly, in middle age, those acts still rank amongst my most daring. What I  failed to mention is that the resulting photos ended up in the pages of Bandersnsnatch, the student newspaper of John Abbott College, for which I served as entertainment editor. We were offered press screenings to Hollywood films and had tickets waiting at the Centaur Theatre box office, but music dominated our coverage. Anyone distributed by Polygram had a

A Durutti Column column

leg up because the company sent us records. The Durutti Column received more notice in Bandersnatch than all the Southam and Thompson papers combined.

Lest anyone think we teens could be bought with freebees, two non-Polygram acts, David Bowie and Gang of Four, received by far the most column inches. I penned the paper's reviews of Scary Monsters, "Up the Hill Backwards," Baal, "Under Pressure," and "Cat People," as well as reissues of his own teenage work with the Mannish Boys, the King Bees, and the Lower Third.

Gang of Four didn't have nearly so long a history. Bandersnatch was there from the beginning, praising Entertainment! and the Gang of Four EP. I wrote those reviews, and saw the band's 4 July 1981 concert at Montreal's Beer Gardens. The photos I took at that show – with smuggled camera – decorated further reviews of Solid Gold, Another Day/Another Dollar, and everything else I wrote about Gang of Four.

Going over old issues of Bandersnatch – even then, I knew to save them – I see those same photos have taken on a sepia tone. They're cleaner in Red Set: A History of Gang of Four, a new book by my friend Jim Dooley.

I first met Jim the year after those heady days at Bandersnatch came to an end. Back then, I doubt either of us would've dreamt – or even dared dream – that he'd one day write the authoritative history of this band we both loved so much. I can say with certainty that I never thought the photos I took all those years ago at the Beer Garden would feature in that same book.

I'm honoured. Jim is one of the most astute critics and music historians I've ever read.

Today marks the UK release of Red Set, published by London's Repeater Books. On June 19, the book will be available in Canada and the United States. Well worth the wait.

Again, I'm honoured.

Congratulations, Jim!

Congratulations all around!

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My Career as a Teenage Rock Photogapher