04 November 2016

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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01 November 2016

Stringer's 'The Song-Sparrow in November'



Verse for the month from the 1949 McClelland & Stewart edition of Arthur Stringer's The Woman in the Rain and Other Poems.


Don't know it? You should.

The London Free Press had this to say of the 1907 Little, Brown first edition:
The Woman in the Rain is a volume without which now no collection of poetry in Canada, meant to be representative of the best, written by Canadians, can be complete. 
I've got mine... and it's signed!



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25 October 2016

Mister Allen Writes a Murder Mystery



Recalled to Life
Grant Allen
n.p.: Velde, 2009

Una Callingham remembers nothing before the death of her father – and that she remembers with great clarity. A flash of light revealed his bloodied body dead the floor and the back of another man escaping through an open window. The shock of it all rendered Una an amnesiac, famous throughout Victorian England as the one person who might be able to bring the killer to justice. The poor girl's condition was so severe that she was reduced to something akin to infancy. Una must again learn to speak, dress and, one presumes, use the water closet. After four years of seclusion and instruction, she emerges, aged twenty-two, as an inquisitive and highly intelligent woman who is intent on solving the murder of her father.

Recalled to Life is one of Allen's more commercial endeavours; he would've told his friends to give it a pass, but I'll not give the same advice. An entertaining novella, it touches upon the scientific advancements that consumed much of the author's non-fiction. For example, Una's father was working on a camera that takes photographs in rapid succession, much like real-life murderer Eadweard Muybridge. In fact, one of these photographs shows the very scene the poor girl remembers, but from a different angle. It's a remarkable piece of evidence, one that confirms Una's earliest memory.

What so attracted me to Recalled to Life – when I still haven't read The Woman Who Did – is that Una's investigations lead to Canada. In fact, the latter half takes place in the Dominion, then not three decades old, as Una tracks the man she believes to be her father's killer to British Columbia. It is the weaker half, and flirts with melodrama at the end, yet I admit to having been taken by surprise when the murderer is revealed.

Could be that I'm not much of a detective.

Allen isn't exactly remembered as a mystery writer, but the intricacy of his plots and his talent for creating interesting, often quirky characters are just the thing one wants in the genre. Shame he didn't do more... I write of a man who published 51 books in his fifty-one years.

Favourite passage:
"Canada!" Minnie exclaimed, alarmed. "You 're not really going to Canada! Oh, Una, you're joking!"
Trivia: After What's Bred in the Bone, Recalled to Life is the second Allen I've read to feature a railway accident, and the third in which the railway influences the plot (see: Michael's Crag).

Object and Access: A 127-page trade-size paperback with blindingly white paper, my copy is one of two print-on-demand books in my collection. Coincidentally, the other is Allen's Michael's Crag, the work of Whiskey Priest and Caustic Cover Critic JRSM.

Valde Books can't compare. I bought it for the sole reason that in five years of hunting I'd never seen a copy for sale or auction. It's a sad fact that Recalled to Life was not terribly successful. It was first published in 1891 by J.W. Arrowsmith of Bristol, a house Allen biographer Peter
 Morton informs had "a surprising reputation for detecting potential best-sellers: the Grossmiths, Chesterton, Jerome and Edgar Wallace all appeared under its imprint." Sadly, with Recalled to Life Allen didn't join their ranks. The only other English-language edition came from Henry Holt in New York (above), though it has been translated into Swedish (Återkallad till livet, 1911) and Finnish (Elämään palautunut, 1920). Not one copy of any edition is listed for sale online.

English-language editions are held by the Kingston Frontenac Public Library and ten of our universities. Library and Archives Canada fails miserably.

The first edition can be read online heregratis – courtesy of the Internet Archive.

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