15 June 2015

A Man's Struggle with Humiliation



Night of the Horns/Cry Wolfram
Douglas Sanderson
Eureka, CA: Stark House, 2015

Shame he isn't around to see it.

The year Douglas Sanderson died – 2002 – his twenty-two novels were many decades out of print. Two years later, Stark House brought back Pure Sweet Hell and Catch a Fallen Starlet. The last of his Canadian thrillers, The Deadly Dames and A Dum-Dum for the President, followed. With this volume, Stark House revives a fifth and sixth title; a seventh, Hot Freeze, will return this fall as part of the Véhicule Press Ricochet Books series.*

I read and wrote about the second novel in this pairing, Cry Wolfram (a/k/a Mark It for Murder),  a few years back. Night of Horns was something new, though it had always stuck in my mind as Sanderson's only Penguin.

Green bars and everything.

"A man's struggle with humiliation", the publisher's pitch, also stuck. Sanderson's previous thrillers dealt with murderers, drug traffickers, human smugglers, white slavers and political assassins. Here it's humiliation?

The struggling man is California lawyer Robert Race. Better known as Bob, he's made a name for himself by defending the disadvantaged. His latest case involves an immigrant named Garcia who is accused of having interfered with several young girls.

A lost cause.

His greatest victory involved Tony Fontaine, a latino teenager who'd been accused of dealing weed. Not only did Race get him off, he's clothing the kid and paying his way through college. Now twenty. Tony sometimes drops by the flat for a home cooked meal. Who can blame him? That Mrs Race – first name: Eve – is quite a cook… or not. What I know for sure is that she's a looker and is extremely amorous. Two years into marriage, the Races are as randy as ever.

Skirts rise, pants drop.

Trouble is that in springing his young charity case Race bribed a witness, and big time crook Al Kresnik knows all about it. He promises to forget everything if the lawyer agrees to pick up a suitcase and hold onto it for a bit. After some hesitation, Race does just that, only to be rolled and very nearly killed. He soon discovers the suitcase gone, along with his wife. This is where humiliation enters the picture.

Turns out that despite the married couple's incessant coupling, Eve had been seeing other men. Top spot was once held by fellow lawyer Paul Taylor, a neighbour from the floor below, but he's since been supplanted by bad boy Tony. It's almost certain that the young drug dealer – let's acknowledge it and move on – was the guy who stole the suitcase and tried to rub out poor Bob Race.

Faced with these harsh truths, the aptly named Race sets off in pursuit of the suitcase, Tony and his wife. It's in this that I found Night of Horns most interesting. Just what is Bob Race after? Retrieving the suitcase might just save his skin, but is he really out to get Tony? Or is it all about Eve?

Night of Horns is typical Sanderson in that the pace is frantic; like pretty much everything else he wrote, it begins and ends in a matter of days. Not much time, but enough for Race and the reader to come to hate Eve.

Do I spoil things in relaying that he finds comfort with a girl named Ginny Ferrer?

Give the guy a break.

Best passage: 
I'd met Mrs Fontaine twice before, once at the court, once at my office when she'd heard that I'd pay Tony's college fees. She had struck me as elderly, ill and pathetic. I guess I wanted her to be like that.
     She opened the door.
     She had on a negligee and a slip. The negligee showed most of the slip and the slip showed most of her breasts. Her feet were bare, her hair hadn't been combed in a while, her eyes were bleary and the rye on her breath would have knocked down a dray horse. 
Trivia: Night of Horns was first published in 1958 London by Secker & Warburg. The first American edition was published by Fawcett under the title Murder Comes Calling. Its back cover features dialogue that does not appear in the novel.


Might this be the work of the same hand that wrote the misleading cover copy on the Fawcett edition of Sanderson's Pure Sweet Hell?

More trivia: Adapted by Terence Dudley for a 1964 episode of the BBC's Detective. Frank Lieberman starred as Bob Race. Eve was played by the beautiful Barbara Shelley.


A Bonus: Another review, followed by much discussion about identity, categorization, markets and other preoccupations at Sergio Angelini's blog. 

Object: A 261-page trade-size paperback, mine is labelled an advance copy but is otherwise identical to the new Stark House edition that is right now hitting American bookstore shelves. Included is a very fine and informative Introduction by Gregory Shepard.

Access: Though Stark House has no Canadian distribution, Night of Horns/Cry Wolfram and its two other Sanderson books are readily available through the publisher's website.

Collectors may feel frustrated in that Secker & Warburg's true first edition is nowhere in sight. Not online anyway. Copies of the Penguin edition are plentiful and cheap. Prices range from £1.75 to £10.00. Condition is not a factor.

Murder Comes Calling, Fawcett's first American edition, was published the same year using the author's Malcolm Douglas nom de plume. Copies of this edition are just as plentiful and nearly as cheap. Prices range from US$3.44 to US$25.00. Again, condition is not a factor.

Good old University of Toronto has a copy of Penguin's Night of Horns. No Canadian libraries hold Murder Comes Calling.

* Full disclosure: I am Ricochet Books' series editor.

10 June 2015

A Rant on Saul Bellow's 100th Birthday



Today marks the one hundredth anniversary of Saul Bellow's birth.

Take my word for it.

The Canadian Encyclopedia, The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature and the Encyclopedia of Literature in Canada have no entries. Why should they? After all, he was only born in Canada. He only began his education in Canada. He only decided to become a writer in Canada.

Saul Bellow was nine when his family left for the States.

Those aren't formative years, right?

Weird that we named a library after him.

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09 June 2015

About Those Butt-Ugly Laurentian Library Books



"'Butt-ugly' is a bit harsh, don't you think?" writes a friend in response to my description of Macmillian of Canada's not-much-missed Laurentian Library.

I'm not so sure.

I bought my first Laurentian Library book, Canada's First Century by Donald Creighton, in preparation for my first semester at John Abbott College.* Its pages had turned brown before leaving the campus bookstore. My second Laurentian Library purchase, volume two of Mason Wade's The French Canadians 1760-1967,  developed a curled spine, yet I never read the thing.

(Volume two of Mason Wade's The French Canadians 1760-1967 is nearly six hundred pages long.)


The Laurentian Library was meant to be Macmillan's answer to McClelland & Stewart's New Canadian Library. Cousins, they shared many of the same afflictions. NCL suffered no spinal deformities, but its pages were similarly discoloured. The covers of both were susceptible to wear; as with Tsarevich Alexei, the gentlest handling might bring harm.


Begun in 1967, nine years after NCL, Macmillan's series was heavy with Macmillan authors: Hugh MacLennan, Morley Callaghan, Robertson Davies, Ethel Wilson, Mavis Gallant, W.O. Mitchell, young pup Jack Hodgins and others. It was an awkward list conceived with a weak eye on the academic market; the other concentrated on an effort to keep Macmillan titles in print and, by extension, in house. Robert Kroetsch's But We Are Exiles rubbed shoulders with Pierre Trudeau's Federalism and the French Canadians, which was followed by Erik Munsterhjelm's The Wind and the Caribou: Hunting and Trapping in Northern Canada.


The NCL offerings of the same years were the ugliest ever, but Laurentian Library's were uglier still. Future publisher Hugh Kane acknowledged as much in a 1973 memo to John Gray: "Our books are manufactured very cheaply, printed on newsprint, and do not contain introductions." Sadly, his push for a general editor, the introduction of introductions and proper production values were ignored.


Directionless, the Laurentian Library stumbled along for nearly two decades. In The Legacy of the Macmillan Company of Canada (University of Toronto Press, 2011), Ruth Panofsky counts fifty titles and pegs 1979 as the series' final year, but I know of over thirty more, including #77, The Periwinkle Assault by Charles Dennis.


I'd never heard of The Periwinkle Assault before today. The second volume of something called the Broken Sabre Quartet, it was followed by Mavis Gallant's neglected novels Green Water, Green Sky and A Fairly Good Time. The last Laurentian Library title of which I'm aware – #83 – is The Winter of the Fisher by Cameron Langford. It was published in 1985. Did The Winter of the Fisher mark the end of the series? If so, should we not acknowledge that the Laurentian Library went out on a fairly high note?

I'm not talking about the cover. I'm sure it was ugly.

Butt-ugly?

I've never seen a copy.

* September 1979, if you must know.

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01 June 2015

Passion Over Reason in a Bland Bachelor's Lap



The Unreasoning Heart
Constance Beresford-Howe
New York: Dodd, Mead, 1946
235 pages

This review, revisited and revised, 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


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28 May 2015

Brian Busby's Dusty Bookshelf



Honoured to be today's Bookshelf feature over at Patti Abbott's blog. Amongst other things, I reveal the purpose behind all those 19th-century anti-papist tracts I've been collecting.

You can all stop worrying.

Patti's debut novel, Concrete Angel, has just received a star review in Library Journal. The publication date is June 9, but the sharp-eyed may find it's already arrived in their local bookstore.


19 May 2015

CBC's Awful List, Radio-Canada's Disheartening List and Perhaps the Best Book List I've Ever Seen



It's been nearly a year since CBC Books unveiled its crummy 100 NOVELS THAT MAKE YOU PROUD TO BE CANADIAN. Don't know about you, but I feel pretty much the same about my citizenship.

CBC Books' 100 Novels list was as poorly conceived as it was presented. Writing here last July, I dismissed it as a grab bag of recent novels peppered with a few CanLit course mainstays. Given the claim that "everything from cultural impact and critical reception to reader response" was considered, I wondered how it could be that Anne of Green Gables and The Tin Flute were not included. There were other omissions, of course, but none nearly so glaring.

A week later, CBC Books issued a patch – CBC Books 100: Bonus 10* – featuring Anne of Green GablesThe Tin Flute and eight other recommendations "from passionate readers all over the world":


Also included was this short note: "one of the most popular suggestions was the great Nobel Prize-winning Alice Munro. We think Alice is one of the greatest Canadian writers to ever hold a pen, but this list is reserved for novels only."

And so a decades-old debate comes to an end. You lose Mary Rubio. You too, Coral Ann Howels. Lives of Girls and Women isn't a novel, it's a collection of short stories. Yes, this list is reserved for novels only… except that they then added Farley Mowat's Never Cry Wolf.

CBC Books hasn't fixed that gaffe – not yet anyway. Nothing but silence has followed the end of that note on Munro:
Celebrate Alice by checking out all our coverage of her life and legacy and stay tuned – we may have more 100 lists up our sleeves.
God, I hope not.


Now Radio-Canada, has weighed in with Les incontournables, 100 Canadian books to read once in your lifetime. (I suggest that at least once is what's meant). The best that can be said is that it's not as bad a list. Les incontournables shares all the faults of CBC Books' 100 Novels, but to lesser degrees. Where the former includes fourteen English-language titles, the latter has six in French. Those figures alone signal that neither list is to be taken seriously. Both share an even greater flaw in that they rely so heavily on recent works. Most of the titles found on the 2014 CBC Books list were published between 2000 and 2013. Yes, most

Take a moment to let that sink in.

The new Radio-Canada list includes 41 titles published between 2000 and 2014 – including Jean-François Lépine's Sur la ligne de feu, which was released all of seven months ago. To borrow from Jean-Louis Lessard's comments on Les incontournables, il faut laisser le temps faire son oeuvre.


Has it all been worth it? Yes and no. CBC Books' 100 Novels was meant to "start a dialogue", but the only comments I heard were from friends who expressed surprise at how few they'd read. Les incontournables, on the other hand, seems to have inspired M Lessard to produce Liste des œuvres québécoises importants. His criteria: the quality of the work, cultural or social impact, the representativeness of the time and influence. It's about as perfect and well-considered as any book list I've ever seen; anyone looking to read the essential works of French-speaking Quebec will find no better.

An observation and query to close this rant: Where Les incontournables includes titles that are out of print, all of CBC Books' 100 Novels – including the Bonus 10 – are in print. Surely this isn't a coincidence. And what are we to make of the fact that nearly every one is currently published by a foreign-owned house?

McClelland & Stewart is owned by Bertelsmann. The CBC is in decline. Suddenly, I'm not feeling so proud.

* Curiously, the list itself was rebranded as "CBC Books 100: Novels that make you proud to be Canadian".


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18 May 2015

Victoria Day Verse from Victoria



An ode to the city, a tribute to Her Late Majesty, but more than anything a pitch to tourists, Victoria the Beautiful (self-published, 1917) is one of only two poems I've been able to find by city resident Levi Houghton (d. 1918). The other, My Trip Through the Rockies (self-published, 1917), is interesting for its use of the words "mount" and "mountain" – forty-four appearances in 83 lines.

Here he rhymes "Nature's splendour" with "say I'll mend her".

Enjoy!
VICTORIA THE BEAUTIFUL 
                    Canada's vast and myriad acres, —
                         Central prairies wheat's domain, —
                    Ancient cities of th' Atlantic, —
                         All have share in praise's strain.
                    But of thou,—Dominion's fairest.
                         Brightest, sceniest, beauteous spot.
                    Those who chant of other places.
                         These are they who know thee not.
                                                                                VICTORIA! 
                    Honoured name on British tongue, —
                         She who dignified the Throne,
                    Left a name, 'twill last as long,
                         Long as thou dost bear her own!
                    City thou, — Dominion's Queen.
                         Regal true in Nature's splendour;
                    None like thee can e'er be seen, —
                         None can say I'll mend her.
                                                                                VICTORIA! 
                    O, this City, all that's fair:
                         Thy boulevards beyond compare,
                    Trees of every shade and hue, —
                         Chestnut, maple, lilac, yew.
                    Rustic scenes and shady bowers.
                         City of roses, city of flowers!
                    Hollies green, some variegated, —
                         Glorious England here translated!
                                                                                VICTORIA! 
                    England's beauty known so wide;
                          (Surely thou art England's sister-twin,)
                    Truly thou art dignified,
                         Fair without and fair within!
                    Old Ocean laps thy numerous Bays,
                         Bright Sol bedecks thy Parks,
                    With emerald green thy winding ways.
                         Call forth extolled remarks!
                                                                                VICTORIA! 
                    Rocky headlands, sandy beaches;
                         Mounts aspire to meet the sun;
                    Nature loving thou dost teach us,
                         Whilst we round with motors run.
                    Gnarled old oaks and Douglas pine,
                         Gardens grand delights our fill,
                    But who can yet compare design
                         With the broom on Beacon Hill!
                                                                                VICTORIA! 
                    O'er the Straits of Juan de Fuca,
                         Olympic stately mountains see, —
                    Delighting visiting onlooker,
                         And he hails the sight with glee!
                    Cousin Sam's in thousands coming
                         Year by year to see thy glory,
                    And he ne'er forgets his roaming, —
                         Tells abroad thy wondrous story!
                                                                                VICTORIA! 
                    For 'round thee he's been a-hunting
                         Cougar, bear, and deer and moose,
                    Likewise also gone a-fishing.
                         All his business cares cut loose.
                    Oak Bay Links, and those of Colwood,
                         Reached he these by street-car ride;
                    Boating, bathing, tennis, billiard,
                         All these pleasures, — more beside!
                                                                                VICTORIA!
                    Mild's the clime, and summer not too hot;
                         'Tis minus Zero of the prairie;
                    Come and visit this blest spot,
                         Come yourself and bring dear Mary.
                    Come in Winter, come in Spring,
                         Come in Summer, Autumn too,
                    And when you come this song you'll sing:
                         "Victoria the whole year through!"
                                                                                VICTORIA!

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