"A good kidnapping story always has wide appeal."

If You Want to See Your Wife Again...
John Craig
London: Cassell, 1973
223 pages

Struggling writer Dan Cramer once had a good gig. He spent two years working on Women's Editor, a daytime soap starring "beautiful blonde Jill Mason." That good gig looked to be steady until department store scion and sponsor Richard Bannister came along, married Jill, and brought the soap to a sudden end.

No star, no show.

After cancellation, Dan devoted twelve months to a script that drew the attention of Hollywood – until it didn't. Casting director Laurel Plunkett went back to working on television commercials – until she assaulted an advertising executive with a box of Crunch 'n Crackle crackers. Women's Editor producer Josh Darwin did much better in landing the interview show Dialogue with Darwin, but he is not happy. A mover and shaker, ever eager for a new project, he shares his latest idea over drinks with Dan and Laurel. Josh wants to produce a movie – a really good movie (or maybe TV special) – about a kidnapping:

"For the sake of argument suppose the three of us kidnap Jill. Start from there and use your imagination. How would we do it? What would we do to throw the police off the track? What complications would arise?"

Josh suggests they meet the next week to hash out ideas over dinner, but Dan does one better in writing a complete screenplay. The producer is so impressed that he suggests the three act out the script for real.

The premise is sound. Dan is desperate for money, Laurel has started down the same path to poverty, and both share resentment toward Jill for up and marrying rich Richard. The scene in which they decide to go along with Josh is impressive in that it is so convincing. Craig has a real talent for dialogue, something recognized in contemporary reviews.

If You Want to See Your Wife Again... is a dark comedy. Being a charitable sort, I blame laughs that fall flat on the passage of time; it has, after all, been more than a half-century since publication. The distance brings new perspective and an appreciation of the novel as one documenting the years of swingers and sexy stewardesses. Its plot is reliant on the post, pay phones, newspapers, radio, and department stores. I was so caught up in the atmosphere that I did not anticipate the twist.

I should have.

I did anticipate the final page, which features a marriage proposal.

The laziest of endings, it is the most common in Canadian literature.

One day I'll make a list.  

Trivia (personal) I: If You Want to See Your Wife Again... follows Every Man for Himself (1920) and Die with Me Lady (1953) as the third novel I've read that takes place in part on the Toronto Islands.

Trivia (personal) II: After leaving university, my first writing job was for Time of Your Life, a cheap daytime soap aired on CTV. I was one of five writers. The most unbelievable thing about If You Want to See Your Wife Again... is the idea that Dan alone would write five episodes a week.

Trivia (impersonal) III: Adapted to the small screen in 1972 as Your Money or Your Life. a CBS Tuesday Night Movie starring  Ted Bessell, Elizabeth Ashley, and Jack Cassidy. You can watch it here on YouTube. I haven't yet been able to make it past the first four minutes, but will not be defeated!

About the author: John Craig is credited with over a dozen books. The author bio for If You Want to See Your Wife Again... is one of the most unusual I've ever read.

Paul Craig competed in the 1976 Montreal Olympics, but as not awarded a medal. Younger brother John qualified for the 1980 Moscow Olympics, but did not participate due to the boycott.

Object and Access: My first British edition appeared in stores two years after the true first, published in 1971 by Putnam. A Dell mass market paperback (above) followed in 1974, after which the novel fell out of print.

There have been four translations: French (La malle et la belle) German (Geschäft mit der Todesangst), Spanish (Quieres ver a tu mujer otra vez?), and Danish (Men i sm a sedler!), all published between 1972 and 1974. The French appears to have enjoyed at least two editions, one of which features this curious cover:

The only automobiles that figure in the novel are Laurel's beat-up MG (she's a horrible driver) and a VW Beetle. The artist seems to have been unfamiliar with North American pay phones.

Related posts:

A Foggy Night in Hogtown

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The Man with the Midas Touch

Sword of Desire

Robert W. Tracy [Alvin Schwartz]
New York: Arco, 1952

176 pages

As far as I can tell, "Fort Crime!" is the first Alvin Schwartz story I ever read. It concerns a criminal organization that uses heavy artillery in committing crimes. Superman, Batman, and Robin figure.

"Fort Crime!" first appeared in published in World's Finest Comics #71 (September-October, 1954). I read the story when it was reprinted twenty years later in World's Finest Comics #224 (August 1974).

Alvin Schwartz had long since walked away from comics by the time I caught up with him, but in 1954, when "Fort Crime!" first appeared he was still very active in writing for the comics. He was just as active in 1952, the year Sword of Desire saw print, churning out stories for Batman, Superboy, Superman, and the Superman daily comic strip.

Sword of Desire is not for children. It opens on the meeting of a senate committee looking into a "white slave" syndicate. The most recent witness, a woman who wore a clinging black silk dress and "gracile lizard skin pumps" – much is made of this – has been found naked and dead in a vacant lot. Senator Kingarden, who heads the committee, has had enough:

"Let's stop acting like a collection of sanctimonious old women poking Puritanically around the outer edges of wickedness. Let's be realistic and recognize that you don't investigate a crime by turning up your noses at the smell. If it's our business to legislate, then we can't afford to be so refined that we regard our noses as mere facial ornamentation. We've got, if I may say so, a genuine stink on our hands and the sooner we use the natural organs that God gave us for dealing with it, the sooner we'll get results."

Tough talk, though it is clear that Kingarden has no intention of bringing fellow senators' noses or other organs an inch closer than need be. Instead, he proposes that psychoanalyst Dr Genorius Veresi be brought in to help with the investigation by going undercover as a john. There is some pushback from committee members, though not nearly so much as one might expect.

"One of those rare geniuses of healing that has come out of the new schools of psychology which regard sex as the basis of all man's inner desires," Veresi is a controversial figure who employs unorthodox methods. Schwartz hints that the doctor restricts his practice to married women who have little or no sexual desire. The doctor's treatment, which comes from years of intense study, involves a fleeting touch that unleashes sexual desire.

It's not what you think, nor is it wear you think. In the first case, Veresi grazes the underside of a patient's wrist.  

Consider it a superpower. The doctor uses it to induce women in the syndicate to reveal all.

There were many points at which I nearly gave up on this novel. The whole thing seemed so silly and, to be completely honest, the sex scenes were mild in the extreme. Still, I'm glad I made the effort.

It was, I think, in "Contact Two," the sixth chapter of sixteen, that something twigged. I recalled something about Wilhelm Reich, "orgone energy," and "orgone theory," which were all the rage in the post-war years. I'm fairly certain I skimmed over something about it all in university. I next came upon a 2005 online response to a query in which Schwartz describes Sword of Desire as a "take-off on Reichian Orgone psychology." That he seemingly felt the need to explain suggests limited appeal for today's reader, Reichians excluded. 

I will say that after "Contact Two" things really begin to pick up, even for those who know little of Reichian theory. It's here that Sword of Desire becomes a true detective story.

As might be expected, a woman proves to be both Veresi's Kryptonite and his Lois Lane.

Sword of Desire was read for the 1952 Club, co-hosted by Kaggsy and Simon. Other books from 1952 I've read and reviewed here over the years include:

Dark Passions Subdue - Douglas Sanderson

Destination: Universe! - A.E. van Vogt

Die With Me Lady [Weep No More, Lady] - Ronald Cocking

Flee the Night in Anger - Dan Keller [Louis Kaufman]

Hot Star - Robert W. Tracy [Alvin Schwartz]

The Lively Corpse [Rose's Last Summer] - Margaret Millar

Murder Over Dorval - David Montrose [Charles Ross Graham]

Pierre le magnifique - Roger Lemelin

Vanish in an Instant - Margaret Millar

Of these, the one I most recommend is Vanish in an Instant, which is one of my very favourite Margaret Millar novels. She wrote so many!

I would be remiss in not also praising Murder Over Dorval by the mysterious David Montrose (Charles Ross Graham), which I helped return to print as part of the Véhicule Press Ricochet Books series. Coincidentally, I'm now involved in reissuing another of the titles listed above.

More to come! 

Object: A red hardcover wrapped in a jacket with uncredited illustration. The novel itself is followed by  several pages of Arco promo material, six of which flog "ARCO SOPHISTICATES." The first title listed is Touchable, Schwartz's 1951 Arco collaboration with Lee Scott. It's the first Alvin Schwartz novel I ever read.

Access: Published once, then never again, McMaster and the University of Toronto have it in their holdings.

I purchased my copy two years ago as part of a lot of twelve Arco books. There were only two I wanted, the other being Alvin Schwartz's Man Maid (New York: Arco, 1952), but the price was right at an even US$100. At the time, two copies of Sword of Desire were listed online, the cheaper being US$100!

Never mind! As I write this, just one copy of Sword of Desire is listed for sale online. The price is a mere seven quid! Get it while you can!

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Dick Tricks Chicks Into Hot Pix!

An Alvin Schwarz Cover Cavalcade

A Gypsy in the Jazz Age; Or, Reader Meet Author

Eyes of a Gypsy
John Murray Gibbon
Toronto: Macmillan of Canada, 1926
255 pages

This past Saturday marked the sesquicentennial of John Murray Gibbon's birth. That this aging Canadian Studies and English Literature graduate first learned of him only ten years ago seems absurd. For goodness sake, the man coined the term "Canadian Mosaic."

Two years have passed since I first read Gibbon's third novel, Pagan Love, which I've described as the most remarkable, unconventional, and challenging Canadian novel of the 'twenties. Eyes of a Gypsy was Gibbon's fourth novel. Could it possibly live up to expectation?

I was won over in the early pages set on the good ship Alaric. Twenty-two-year-old Maurice Arden is our hero. An artist, he comes from a long line of commercial printers who have for generations scraped by in supplying cards, pamphlets, posters, and packaging for other businesses in and around Manhattan. As his father's only son, Maurice is set to inherit the struggle, and could not be more unhappy at the prospect. 

The recent discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb having made Egypt all the rage, Maurice had left Manhattan – and fiancée Gladys in boozy Greenwich Village jazz clubs – for the ancient, dry Valley of the King. There he'd been inspired to create works that should prove profitable. Who knows, one might be used on the cover of a chocolate box. 

And now Maurice is on his way home.

The Alaric isn't a grand liner, but it's what the family firm can afford. All glamour and elegance is supplied by fellow passenger Jacqueline Stuart, an uncommonly beautiful woman of Scots/Romani heritage, always "two steps ahead of Vogue," who appears each evening at the Captain's Table. Maurice learns the captain is a cousin, which explains her passage on so modest a vessel.

Last year's twenty-four Dusty Bookcase reads included one, two, three, four novels in which maritime accidents feature, so it came as no surprise that the Alaric strikes the hull of an overturned ship and begins to take on water.

Of the five maritime disasters, the sinking of the Alaric is the least catastrophic. No one dies. No one is hurt. No one gets wet. More anxious for his paintings than he is his soul, Maurice sets foot in the last lifeboat. At the moment it is about to be is lowered, he is joined by Jacqueline:

"What the hell! thundered the officer. "How wasn't she sent off with the first boats?"

   "My fault entirely," explained the lady with dazzling teeth and an accent surprisingly Scotch. "I do hate to be hurried. This 'women and children first' business can be overdone. Doesn't give us a chance to ready for this world or the next."

Their bob on the ocean is not long – they are soon rescued by the passing Belladonna – but it is long enough for Maurice to become smitten. And who can blame him. The banter they exchange reveals Jacqueline to be witty, confident, clever, and full of life. Her reasons for visiting the Old World had nothing to do with Egyptomania, rather a scandal involving a United States senator. What happened exactly is uncertain – the novel offers three differing accounts – though all rely on the glamazon's talent as a fortune teller to New York's high society.

Two ships that might otherwise have passed in the night, the Alaric and Belladonna have passengers who know one another. It's a small world after all. In Jacqueline's case, it's the senator. For Maurice, it's his friend Kenneth MacLean, an architect from the Canadian west who is traveling with his sister Peggie, herself a painter.

Eyes of a Gypsy seems a simple novel, but isn't. The introduction of Peggie (page 28) suggests formula. Blonde, pretty, wholesome, innocent, she stands in stark contrast with the dark, beautiful, sophisticated, worldly-wise Jacqueline. Skipping ahead seventy-two pages, we get this: 

The Scots-Canadian girl brought nature, the beloved mother. Jacqueline filled his dreams with more tempestuous emotions. 

And so, a love triangle.

Yes, a triangle, because Gladys is no longer in the picture. After the Belladonna docks, Maurice is told that his father has just died, and is handed what may be the greatest "Dear John" letter in all of Canadian literature:

This reader began settling in. I've read enough novels with love triangles to know that resolution typically occurs in the penultimate chapter.

I should have known better.

Eyes of a Gypsy does not follow a conventional path because these are not conventional characters. Moreover, Gibbon is not a conventional writer.

Time, events, relationships, and scenes move quickly in this novel.

In short weeks, Maurice manages to turn the family firm around. Peggie and Kenneth make a brief visit to friends in Montreal, return to New York, rent a studio, but are soon off to their parents' home in the Kootenays. Jacqueline follows, because her Romani blood is drawn to great expanses, but also to because the senator threatens. This leaves Maurice all alone, until Peggie invites him to visit.

Montreal, 1926

Once in Canada, the novel slows considerably. Plot and personages give way to loving descriptions of settings, the first being Montreal, the city in which the author spent most of his working life. The descriptions of the Kootenays, more lengthy, are accompanied by digressions on folk music, folk tales, trail riding, and First Nations culture.

It is a book the can be divided neatly in two. The first fourteen chapters have something in common with Pagan Love in that they deal with art, commerce, advertising, influence, and polished sophistication, but breaks in the last twelve which focus on the relatively simple lives and lore of those who rely on the land. That I prefer the first part says something about me. Both say much about Gibbon life – read Daniel R. Meister's Canadian Encyclopedia entry and see!

Two months ago, I won a copy of the author's first book Hearts and Faces (New York: Lane, 1916) at auction. It's set in the Bohemian Paris in which he'd studied art. I look forward to reading it and perhaps getting to know a bit more about the man, but am I wrong in wanting more about Gladys?

Favourite line: Early in the novel, a catty passenger on the Alaric says this of Jacqueline.

"If she can show us as much of the future as she does of her back, she is a wonder all right."

Dedication:

By great coincidence, my wife owns a copy of Ethel Watts Mumford's Hand-Reading Today: A New Angle of an Ancient Science (New York: Stokes, 1925), which she bought after reading Diana Souhami's The Trials of Radcliffe Hall (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1997). The latter is one of the best literary biographies I have ever read.

New Broadway Magazine (June 1908)

Object and Access: An orange hardcover, typical of its time, I purchased my copy in 2023 from an Ontario bookseller. Price: $21.00. Sadly, it lacks the dust jacket (which I've never seen).

As I write this, just one copy, also jacket-less, is listed for sale online. Price: $66.00. 

Get it while you can.

Related post:

Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Self-Improvement

The Nine Best Canadian Novels of the 1920s

Thomas D'Arcy McGee: 200 Years

Thomas D'Arcy McGee

13 April 1825, Carlingford, County Louth, Ireland

7 April 1868, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

RIP

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D'Arcy McGee's Query (with a response)

D'Arcy McGee, All Compliment to Thee

'Death of D'Arcy McGee'

'IN MEMORIAM! The Hon. T.D. McGee'

Remembering Edith Eaton and D'Arcy McGee

'Erin's Address to the Hon. Thomas D'Arcy McGee'

A Poet's Angry Words for the Fenian Brotherhood

'Mort de Thomas D'Arcy McGee'
Thomas D'Arcy McGee: 150 Years

The Great Gatsby: 100 years

I was on my lunch break when I first read of Jay Gatsby's death. This was in the back room of the Rockland Centre Sam the Record Man. Twenty-one, I was in charge of the singles department.

The description, as imagined by Nick, is so subtle that the tragedy passed without me seeing it. In my old Bantam edition it begins and ends on a single page. I returned to the beginning because I couldn't quite believe it.

I write about Canadian literature. The Great Gatsby is not a Canadian novel, but it but it is my favourite novel. 

On this, the one hundredth anniversary of its publication, it is only right to recognize it.

I didn't realise that you wrote poetry. I didn't realise you wrote such bloody awful poetry

Say what you will about Satan, he's no dummy.

I think I'm right about this, but am not sure.

He had no place in my family's place of worship. I never once heard mention of the Prince of Darkness in church school, confirmation class or even a sermon. This could have something to do with having been raised Anglican.

I am not sure.

My early reading on Satan was extremely limited. It began in October 1974 with 'The Ecchorcist,' MAD magazine's parody of The Exorcist, continued with Joy Carroll's horror romance Satan's Bell (1976), and more or less ended with novelizations of the films The Omen (1976) and Damien:The Omen II (1978).

Since beginning the exploration that is the Dusty Bookcase, I've learned a bit more about Beelzebub through American expat Jules-Paul Tardivel. He believed novels to be "weapons forged by Satan himself for the destruction of mankind," but seized one of "the enemy's war machines" in writing Pour la patrie (1895). Set in the far off future of 1945, the devil is very much present and very much focussed in destroying Quebec as the last bastion of Catholicism.

No one I've read far had more to say about Satan and what he's up to than the late evangelist John Wesley White – author of Re-entry (1970), The Man from Krypton (1978), Arming for Armageddon (1983), and Thinking the Unthinkable (1992) – though I'm not sure how much he can be believed. I very much doubt that this song is intended to bring the listener to love Satan:

I may be wrong.

From everything I've read, Satan is cunning, creative, devious, and extremely intelligent. What he isn't is a good poet.

I can say this with certainty having browsed Michelle Remembers, the 1980 bestseller credited with providing the spark for the Satanic Panic. I'm planning on writing about it later this year, but for now, this being the first day of National Poetry Month, I thought it might be appropriate to share one of the many samples of Satan's verse recorded in the book by authors Michelle Smith and Lawrence Pazder:

            If you say one word I say to you,
            You'll say it all until it's through.
            You'll run out of time, run out of space,
            Run at the mouth all over the place.
            You can only go inside your head,
            And if you go there, then you're dead.

            So you see, I've turned it inside out;

            I've turned you around, turned you about,

            You always come back to me,

            The only way out is to see through me.

            The more goes out, the more comes in,

            You'll start to end when you begin.

So begins a theological debate. Is there something lacking in the Prince of Darkness – a heart, perhaps – that prevents him from being anything other than a rotten poet or is his verse intentionally bad so as to bring hell on Earth?

Frankly, I'm beginning to have doubts that Satan composed any of the poems in Michelle Remembers.

My thanks to fellow CanLit scholar Brad Middleton, who generously donated two copies of Michelle Remembers to The Dusty Bookcase.

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