Grant Allen's Wicked Novel

For Maimie's Sake: A Tale of Love and Dynamite

Grant Allen

New York: F.M. Lupton, [1889?]

232 pages

This review, revised and rewritten, now appears in my new book:

The Dusty Bookcase:

A Journey Through Canada's

Forgotten, Neglected, and Suppressed Writing

Available at the very best bookstores and through

Biblioasis, Amazon, Chapters/Indigo, and McNally-Robinson.

The Pornographic Edna Jaques

Back-Door Neighbors
Edna Jaques
Toronto: Thomas Allen, 1946

Related posts:

The Erotic Brian Moore

The Homoerotic A.E. Van Vogt

Harlequin: The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name

Suggestive Harlequins: A Romantic Threesome

J is for Jaques, the Poet Laureate of the Home

from My Kitchen Window
(Toronto: Thomas Allen, 1935)

I is for Intellectual Property

Protect yours!

Launcelot Cressy Servos shows us how:

Mr Servos' notice faces a page in which he claims copyright; a second copyright claim follows on the obverse.

Authors, scenario writers, printers, publishers, motion picture producers and others take note: Frontenac and the Maid of the Mist is now in the public domain. Not in the US or the UK, mind, but it's up for grabs in Canada – and I'm telling you that this novel of the Comte de Frontenac and his fictitious lady love is very Canadian. I haven't actually managed to get through Frontenac and the Maid of the Mist, but I have read the jacket flaps. After thumbing through the book itself, I can attest to their thoroughness and accuracy. Skip ahead to the fifth paragraph for the story itself.

That's it, the entire plot, including the climactic final scene. The pen picture painted does indeed make a deep impression. I was most taken by the poetry of Theala's last words in warding off Frontenac and accepting her fate:

"Great Chief! Great Chief!" said she, "I pray thee desist! Go I from you forever to be Maid of the Mist! From this rocky ledge to you torrent I go. To dwell eternal with the Manitou in the Falls below. And my spirit wafted upward on yonder haze, eternal shall be for men always to gaze! As I leave you forever I bid you goodby! Stand and watch my soul rising on yonder mist high!"

You can't write this stuff, but Launcelot Cressy Servos did.

So, let's get on it, shall we? Nearly ninety years have passed since Frontenac and the Maid of the Mist first saw print and we're still awaiting that motion picture adaptation.

Who have we to blame?

Only ourselves.

Harper Hockey Book Watch: Year Ten, Day 77

Oh, we of little faith!

Just as belief had begun to wain, joyous news comes from the East that the prime minister's hockey book is soon to be upon us.

I confess to falling into doubt. In my defence, the prime minister has been promising his hockey book for the better part of the millennium, going so far as to tease Jane Taber and Tonda McCharles about a 2012 publication date. I questioned the book's coming not two months ago, noting that it was not listed in the Fall Preview issue of Quill & Quire. I wondered why it was not included in Simon & Schuster's Fall Catalogue, and disgraced myself further by pointing out that neither book nor author were mentioned on the publisher's website.

Okay, so there's still nothing on the Simon & Schuster website, but this cover has been released to the media:

While cover image may not be familiar to Stephen Harper's fellows in the Society for International Hockey Research – BUY YOUR MEMBERSHIP HERE FOR THIRTY DOLLARS! ANYONE CAN JOIN! – hockey historians will recognize the Toronto Blueshirts ("Blue Shirts" in the Simon & Schuster press release). Colourized here most garishly (in the tradition of Turner Classic Movies), supporting members have been removed (in the tradition of Joseph Stalin).

The nonbelievers will weigh in, but I'm grateful.

I give thanks to Simon & Schuster for signing our prime minister.

I give thanks to the Harper Government™ for subsequently deciding to allow Simon & Schuster to publish Canadian authors.

I give thanks to Greg Stoicoiu and George Pepki.

But most of all, I thank Roy MacGregor for his dedication in bringing Stephen Harper's hockey book to print. We may never know Mr MacGregor's contribution. Steven Chase, his Globe and Mail colleague, tells us that he provided the prime minister "editorial services". Tristan Hopper of the National Post writes that "the final book was smoothed out with the help of both a full-time researcher and hockey author Roy McGregor [sic]". Mr MacGregor is a modest man.

The publication date of A Great Game is fortuitous in that it fairly coincides with the end of the Conservative Party's upcoming Calgary convention.

How many copies will the party purchase?

Enough to guarantee top spot on the Maclean's bestseller list is my guess.

Related posts:

Ignatieff's Ink and Harper's Hockey Book
The Harper Hockey Book Watch (Updated!)
Harper Hockey Book Watch: Year Eight, Day 253
Harper Hockey Book Watch: Year Nine, Day 39
Harper Hockey Book Watch: Year Nine, Day 222

Harper Hockey Book Watch: Year Nine, Day 236
Harper Hockey Book Watch: Year Nine, Day 237
Harper Hockey Book Watch: Year Ten, Day 27
Harper Hockey Book Watch: Fin (et raison d'être)

Back to School with Senator Linda Frum

The McGill University Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 1 (September 1983)

Bright young things begin taking their seats at McGill today. When exactly the tired asses of the Senate will be doing likewise is Stephen Harper's secret, but it's a safe bet that Linda Frum will be there. Will anyone notice? The Ontario senator hasn't been terribly active since her 2009 appointment, but look back a few years and you'll see she her working hard raising funds for the Conservative Party. Look back a decade and you'll find her doing the same for the Canadian Alliance. Look back three decades as you'll see her really on the move as editor of the new McGill University Magazine.

Sure, it doesn't look like much today, but in the time of typesetting cylinders, wax rollers and blue pencils The McGill University Magazine was pretty impressive. All this put together by just two people? It's understandable then that the paper's appearance in bulk at the University of Toronto, 542 kilometres to the west, sparked rumours. Some said that it was laid out at The Varsity, while others speculated about funds flowing from Murray Frum, Linda's dentist/developer father. The most cynical spoke of American money.

The most cynical turned out to be correct.

This debut issue was modest: twelve pages comprising fewer than 146-column inches of text in a font that the Ulverscroft Large Print people might think too big. It fairly stumbles out of the out of the gate with the first piece, an awkward "General Statement Of Principles":

The McGill University Magazine dedicates itself to the preservation of those of McGill's ancient traditions still extant, and to the revival of those now lost. Without its customs, a university is merely a machine for teaching, indistinguishable from its rivals; with them, it is a great and thriving institution that extends across time to unite our ancestors and our posterity in common enterprise.

Three more principles follow: the demand for academic excellence, the rejection of public funding for higher education, and the peculiar insistence that the prosperity of the university take priority over that of the country. Something about the protection of private property appears tacked on as an afterthought.

Throughout the paper runs an unquestioning nostalgia for the university's past, the very decades in which its editor would have been faced with a cap on the number of Jewish admissions. One page is devoted to "Songs of Old McGill", another features a few sports photos from the 'twenties, 'thirties and 'fifties. An 1874 Thomas Naste editorial cartoon about bank failures in the United States is tweaked in memory of the victims of "Korean Air Flight 077 [sic]", while another 19th-century American editorial cartoon is directed at students who objected to cruise missile testing in Alberta:

 
Given the paper's skewed view of the past, it makes perfect sense that its cover story about the McGill Daily begins by misquoting alumnus A.J.M. Smith (B.A 1925, M.A. 1926), then denying him credit:

What follows is a three-page interview between former editor Richard Flint and some anonymous soul. Who could it be? There may be a clue in the shared queer obsession – pun intended – nameless interviewer and paper have with the Daily's annual Lesbian and Gay issue. The front page of the 1983 edition is reproduced no less than four times in these pages; no other issue of the Daily features. The interviewer raises the subject more often than any other, leading to this exchange in which Mr Flint is accused of giving "homosexuals extra space in the Daily":

RF: No, we don't.
MUM: But you do, you really do.
RF: We certainly don't give a tenth of our coverage to the gay community, which if we were to be fair is what we would give.
MUM: Wouldn't it seem to the other 90 per cent of the campus that you are ignoring their interests?
RF: No. To the minority who are homophobic, there is a problem. That have a dangerous bigotry. This is the problem with reflecting student opinion. If student opinion is bigoted, should we reflect that? I don't think so. The intolerance encouraged by what I would call the Right, these days represented by our Student Society and some of their publications, is really quite pathetic.
MUM: We are not questioning the right to print what you want, but we wonder whether your commitment to letting other sides be heard is as strong as it should be.
RF: I think the Daily is the most accessible publication I have ever seen. There's no doubt about it. We have a number of people whose politics are vastly different from the rest of the staff's. They are accepted. Sure, the majority of the staff have left-leaning views.
MUM: Why then, for example, do we not see any articles against McGill's divesting from South Africa?
RF: Something like divestment is a thing where even our most right-wing staffers don't disagree.
MUM: You wrote an editorial denouncing the right of a representative of a group called the South African Foundation, John Chettle, to speak at McGill...
RF: I don't think people who deny free speech to others should enjoy free speech themselves.

And on it goes for another page and a-half, ending with this:

Now, I've never had an account with the Bank of Montreal myself, but there has been some contact. As a member of a student paper, back in 1980 I voted to close our account with the bank. Old timers will recall that it wasn't until five years later, under pressure from Joe Clark, that the Bank of Montreal finally stopped lending money to the Botha government.

The Bank of Montreal receives the lone – pun unintended – acknowledgement of support in the debut issue of the McGill University Magazine. There are no ads. What Messrs Fogler, Donato, Hart, Evans and Muggeridge did to warrant "special thanks" I cannot say. What I do know is that the Magazine received some funding from the Institute of Educational Affairs, an American organization founded by William Simon and Irving Kristol. The IEA also helped support David Frum, Tony Clement and editor Nigel Wright – yes, that Nigel Wright – in establishing their own magazine at the University of Toronto. Still more of the Institute's money was given to Libertas, a paper that was starting up at Queen's University. It was edited by John Mulholland, son of William Mulholland, Chairman and CEO of the Bank of Montreal.

It's who you know, I guess.

The McGill University Magazine promised an exclusive interview with once-and-future Quebec Premier Robert Bourassa in its second issue. I couldn't be bothered to pick up a copy. Still, I was impressed; it was quite a coup for a fledgling "student publication".

It's who you know, I guess.

It bears repeating.

Related posts:
Senator Linda Frum's McGill University Magazine

Senator Frum's Cold War Campuses

Some Senators Write (or Say They Do)

Encyclopedia Brown Spoils the Day

A Body for a Blonde
Ken McLeod [pseud. Kimball McIlroy]
Toronto: Harlequin, 1954

Prior to this perilous trek through our neglected, forgotten and suppressed I'd read few mysteries. There was an Agatha Christie, something by Margaret Millar and something else by Ross Macdonald, but most were written by Donald J. Sobol, the creator of Encyclopedia Brown. An admirer of the boy detective, during my days at Allancroft Elementary School I studied his every case. Pretty much everything I know about solving crimes comes from good, good Leroy Brown; and so, it's really to his credit that I was able to finger the murderer by page seven of this pre-romance Harlequin. I spent the rest of the novel wondering just how long it would take the characters to clue in.

A Body for a Blonde isn't nearly as startling or shocking as the publisher would have you believe. That man behind the door is not being tortured; he's standing under a cold shower. The blonde is not that of the title, but his pal's tiny, baby-faced girlfriend. She should not be in diaphanous negligee.

No, A Body for a Blonde isn't startling or shocking, though it does contain a decent dose of humour. In the main, this is supplied by George Sloan, a hard working, seemingly well-paid writer plying his trade in post-war Toronto. George has just finished his latest when two burly movers appear at the door, interrupting his celebratory drink. He makes a mistake in granting the men entry, then compounds same by allowing them to leave a heavy steamer trunk in his living room. After they've left, George opens the trunk to find the cooling corpse of a dead man.

"Jee-zus!" says George.

His third mistake comes in picking up a gun that's lying on the body. It goes off, the cops rush in, and George is arrested for murder.

This would never happen in Idaville, Encyclopedia's hometown, but Toronto is different. George ends up drinking gin with jailer Joe in a holding cell. His one chance at salvation seems to lie in fiancée Mabel Jones, "a tall, beautiful, willowy girl who had paid her way through college by doing photographic modelling."

You know the type.

Former model Mabel is now a lawyer. Before she can get George off – nothing naughty intended – he makes a break that leads to her apartment and the shower scene so inaccurately depicted on the cover.

A Body for a Blonde is very wet. George, Mabel and their friends Roly and Rita spend about as much time drinking as they do trying to figure out who really dunnit. The whole thing comes off like a party game. There's a good amount of ribbing and ribaldry throughout, as when attention turns to George's blonde bombshell of a neighbour – yes, she of the title – Estelle Hilton:

Roly said, "I agree with George. I still see the thing just the way we had it figured out before. You two girls are just jealous of Estelle."

     Rita said,"Humph! That blowzy sex-bag? Nothing between her ears and everything between her..."

    Roly said, "Rita!" 

    "Well, it's true. Just because she's got a lot of blonde hair on her head and sticks out in all the right places you dopes figure she couldn't possibly be mixed up in a murder."

Meanwhile, the cops are so convinced of George's guilt that they don't really bother to investigate and are blind to strong evidence that might clear the writer.

The Toronto Police Service comes off very badly in this novel. It's because George gets a corrupt cop drunk on seized hooch that he's able to escape his holding cell. Minutes later, the murderer strikes again, killing within the very same police station. Whether sober or drunk, George moves freely through the city, climbing fire escapes breaking into apartments, and strolling through the lobby of the Royal York Hotel. He's present for two police raids on Mabel's miniscule apartment, but is not found.

See cover.

Worst of all, the murderer turns out to be a fairly senior member of the force.

Now, don't go accusing me of spoiling the novel; at worst I've ruined the first seven pages. Encyclopedia Brown would agree. A Body for a Blonde is recommended, but not as a mystery. A light read, a fun read and a bit of a ribald read, it should be kept away from the children of Idaville.

An observation: Though published in 1954, A Body for a Blonde at times reads like a novel from an earlier decade. Reference is made to Minsky's, the New York burlesque club that that city shut down in 1937. During his incarceration, George reads Zippy Stories, a New York-based magazine that didn't survive the Depression.

I've long been interested in this Canadian edition of Zippy from March 1939:

In Canada, the de la Roche surname was then nothing but a creation of Mazo de la Roche (née Roche), whose middle name just happened to be Louise. Could it be that the wealthy author of Jalna stooped so low as to contribute to a cheap, titillating mag? Of course not – but how to explain that name?

About the author: I have Thad McIlroy, the author's son, to thank for filling me in on his father's life and career:

My father, born Thaddeus Kimball McIlroy II (I'm "III"), was a dual citizen, born in New York City to an American father and a Canadian mother.

He went to elementary school in Canada and high school in the U.S. Then he mostly lived in Toronto and enlisted with the Canadian army, becoming a captain with the Royal Canadian Artillery and posted overseas. He stayed on in Europe after the war writing the official history of the Artillery in the 2nd War. He wrote for Saturday Night and for Esquire. He had radio plays performed on CBC.
     When he married my mother and started raising a family he moved over into public relations (as many journalists did, and do) in order to secure a steady income. 

Kimball McIlroy's only other published novel was The Fertile Four-Poster (New York: Crown, 1969). "Nothing came of it," writes Thad, "in particular: no paperback, not many copies sold."

He was working on a third novel, The Paddle that Wouldn't Float, when he died.

Object: A 158-page mass market paperback, with full-page ads for Raymond Marshall's Lady – Here's Your Wreath and Come Blonde, Come Murder by Peter George.

Access: A paperback original, A Body for a Blonde enjoyed one lone printing. Copies are scarce – just three are listed for sale online – though prices are reasonable at US$25 to US$35.

Worldcat provides no listing.

Get 'em before it's too late.

Related posts:

Harlequin Blondes: Terror Struck Them Dumb

H is for Hoffer

List 75: Canadian Literature
Vancouver: William Hoffer, Bookseller, [1989?]

In spite of his obvious weirdness I found myself liking him. When he launched into a diatribe, which he  did often, he would become intoxicated by his own rhetoric, then leap up bellowing and, like an actor, pace the store as though it were the stage of a theatre. He was, perhaps, the first person I ever met whose voice merited the word stentorian. 

– David Mason, The Pope's Bookbinder

How did I come to have this? A response to an advert in Books in Canada, perhaps. When it landed at my Montreal flat, sometime around the death of Doug Harvey, this catalogue was like nothing I'd ever seen. The bookseller seemed to be daring customers to purchase.

From the introduction:

There isn't very much Canadian literature, and most of it is garbage. It is the junk literature of a junk age. It is beneath those who care about anything.

The attacks begin with item #6, Margaret Atwood's Second Words: Selected Critical Prose (Anansi, 1982):

Having spent considerable time wandering 2nd hand bookshops, it recently occurred to me that the only people ever overheard congratulating or recommending this author are teen-aged girls of the least promising variety. Our animosity is, in this case, genuine. The more quickly this author is forgotten the better it will be for Canada. In the meantime we are optimistic in regard to selling our stock of copies to unpromising customers, Any regular customer who orders it may expect to be dropped from the mailing list.

I was not a regular customer; in fact, I never bought a book from William Hoffer. Spoiled terribly by Montreal's low book prices and the indifference paid things Canadian in New York, I found his prices high. Here Hoffer asks $75 for the Canadian first of Brian Moore's The Emperor of Ice-Cream (McClelland & Stewart, 1965), a book I'd bought for $2 in a Sherbrooke Street bookstore not three years earlier. I was lucky; another store had it for six.

He titled one of his catalogues Cheap Sons of Bitches.

My plea was poverty, but I still feel bad for having given nothing in return for this catalogue. Twenty-four or so years later, it continues to inform and entertain.

Cold eye or not, Hoffer knew Canadian literature far better than most other booksellers. Today, when my queries concerning Bertrand W. Sinclair are met with a blank stare, I consider this entry:

By 1994, the year I moved to Vancouver, William Hoffer was gone. He'd closed up shop, sold his stock, and was living in Moscow with a wife, two teenaged stepsons, and a growing collection of handmade toys. When he returned to BC, it was to be treated for the cancer that killed him. It's probably just as well that we never met. In his very fine memoir, The Pope's Bookbinder (Biblioasis, 2013), David Mason portrays Hoffer as a man of contradictions, about whom people held conflicting opinions. It only follows.

To Mason, Hoffer delighted in sowing the seeds of strife; he decimated the conviviality that had once existed within the bookselling community, very nearly destroying the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of Canada in the process. Hoffer comes off as being as brilliant as he was demented. Yet, like me, Mason returns to Hoffer's catalogues.

 "You would be the only bookseller I ever met who purported to despise the only area you know anything about," he once wrote Hoffer.

I think "purported" is the key word.

Related post:

A is for Amtmann

G is for Glassco

Yes, G is for Glassco. After all, it's not been a week since the launch of The Heart Accepts It All: Selected Letters of John Glassco, edited by yours truly.

Most of Glassco's correspondents were writers – and all but one are writers whose work I've read. The exception is the prolific Geoffrey Wagner, a professor of literature at City University in New York City. The American academic was very important to Glassco's career, playing an advisory role in dealings with publishers of pornography. It was through Wagner's efforts that Glassco was finally able to place The Temple of Pederasty, a work Maurice Girodias had twice turned down.

Wagner's own bibliography is remarkably varied, encompassing titles like Wyndham Lewis: A Portrait of the Artist as the Enemy (Yale UP, 1957), Another America: In Search of Canyons (Allen & Unwin, 1972) and Five for Freedom: A Study of Feminism in Fiction (Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1973), along with sadomasochistic porn penned under the pseudonym P.N. Dedeaux. His novel of "Prussian discipline", The Prefects (Taurus, 1970), uses lines from Glassco's Squire Hardman as an epigraph.

As I say, I haven't read anything by Geoffrey Wagner, but I think this might be the place to start:

The Heart Accepts It All includes four letters to Wagner, in which Glassco shares his thoughts on Penthouse Forum, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, high school hockey, The Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine, sadomasochism, riding crops and other things equestrian. They're worth reading in their entirety, but for reasons that will become clear I present this small excerpt from a letter to Wagner dated 3 December 1968:

Dear old Bizarre! It was an oasis back in the dreary fifties. Yes, I remember the wonderful photo of Mlle. Polaris, the Queen of the Wasp-waists, in her extraordinary corset, which John Willie unearthed and reprinted. I contributed a letter to his correspondence column. He was a Pioneer.

This sent me on a lengthy hunt through the 1824 pages of The Complete Reprint of John Willie's Bizarre (Taschen, 1995). I'd hoped to come across something credited to Miles Underwood, S. Colson-Haig, Silas N. Gooch or any of Glassco's many other pseudonyms. When nothing turned up, I started reading the letters themselves, thinking that I might just recognize something in their style and content.

And so it was that in issue #22 I found this piece of correspondence under the heading "WHITE CIRCLE CLUB":

I am fascinated by your magazine because, even though I am in my thirties, this is the first time I have been able to avail myself of the sincere, uninhibited thoughts of others regarding leather and bondage. So, due to Bizarre, I know my hidden desires are not quite so isolated as I had feared.
     An attractive girl, clad in snug, well-tailored jodhpurs or breeches which are well reinforced with suede or some other soft, resilient leather at the seat and the inner sides of the legs is certainly a lovely sight. And the thought that such a girl might entertain the desire to put me in bondage, or that she might enjoy giving me some discipline, is encouraging to say the least.
     But it is frustrating, here in staid old New England, to find the company of such a person. To be sure, I attend horse shows and ride often at nearby stables, but with no success, despite many conversations with attractive girls.
     So, why not suggest that those whose thoughts are similar to mine put a little circle of white paint on each of their riding boots, and at the rear, just where the heel is stitched to the soft leather? By so doing we could identify others with whom we have ideas in common.
     But, at any rate, I enjoy using your magazine as a "clearing house" for thoughts from other readers, one of whom might be intrigued in having a six-foot, 170-pound bachelor for her prisoner.
                                                                             J. FOSTER     

Now, Glassco didn't live in New England, but twenty kilometres to the north; he was also a few inches short of six-feet and would've been in his forties at the time. But then these sorts of letters are invariably replete with lies, exaggeration, camouflage and masquerade, aren't they?

In both style and substance, the words read like Glassco. Could J. Foster and J. Glassco of Foster, Quebec be one and the same? I can't say for certain. What I do know is that they shared proclivities, frustrations and, ultimately, loneliness.

Polaire

(nee Émilie Marie Bouchaud)

1874-1939

RIP