Showing posts with label Footner. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Footner. Show all posts

04 December 2023

The Ten Best Book Buys of 2023!



With sadness, I report that 2023 was another year in which all my favourite acquisitions were purchased online. This is not to suggest that every transaction was a good one. In March, I won a lot of twelve Marilyn Ross Dark Shadows books, three of which bear the signature of their true author, New Brunswick's W.E.D. Ross. 

My lengthy victory dance came to an abrupt end when they arrived loose in a recycled Amazon box. Most were in poor condition, some featured stamps from used bookstores, and one had a previous owner's name written on its cover. Added to all this was the shipping charge, which far exceeded the amount paid for the books themselves, and was several times greater than what Canada Post had charged the seller.

Had all gone well, this copy of Barnabas, Quentin and the Frightened Bride (New York: Paperback Library, 1970) would've surely made the cut.

Enough negativity! It was a good year!

What follows is 2023's top ten:

In Nature's Workshop

Grant Allen
London: Newnes, 1901


I bought three Grant Allen books this year – the novels This Mortal Coil (1888) and At Market Value (1895) being the others – but this is the one I like the most. The posthumously published second edition, it features over one hundred illustrations by English naturalist Frederick Enock (1845-1916).


Hot Freeze

Martin Brett [Douglas
   Sanderson]
London: Reinhardt, 1954

For years I've been going on about Hot Freeze being the very best of post-war Canadian noir; it was one of the first novels reissued as a Ricochet Book. I was aware that there had been a UK edition, but couldn't find a copy with dust jacket.

Found it!
Hilary Randall: The Story
   of The Town
Horace Brown
Toronto: Voyageur, [n.d.]

While working to return Brown's 1947 novel Whispering City to print, I learned that Saturday Night editor B.K. Sandwell had thought Hilary Randall just might be the great Canadian novel. Self-published roughly four decades after its composition, my copy is inscribed!

Wedded for a Week; or, The
   Unseen Bridegroom
May Agnes Fleming
London: Milner, [n.d.]

As with Grant Allen, I can't let a year go by without adding more Fleming to my collection. The Actress' Daughter was the first, but I much prefer this 1881 novel, if only for its two titles.

Writing this I realize that I haven't read a Fleming in 2023. 

A Self-Made Thief

Hulbert Footner
London: Literary Press,
   [n.d.]

As my old review of 1930's The Mystery of the Folded Paper suggests, I'm not much of a Footner fan, Still, at £4, this last-minute addition to a large order placed with a UK bookseller seemed a bargain. The dust jacket illustration, which I hadn't seen, is unique to this edition.

Pagan Love
John Murray Gibbon
Toronto: McClelland &
   Stewart, 1922

Had I not read this novel, it's unlikely this wouldn't have made the list. Pagan Love entertained at every turn as a take-down of the burgeoning self-help industry and corporate propaganda. Odd for a man who spent most of his working life writing copy for the CPR.

Dove Cottage
Jan Hilliard [Hilda Kay
   Grant]
London: Abelard-Schulman,
   1958

There are books that grow on you. Reviewing Dove Cottage this past March I likened it to an enjoyable afternoon of community theatre, but it has remained with me in a way that the local real estate agent's performance as George Gibbs has not.

Three Dozen Sonnets &
   Fast Drawings
Bob McGee
Montreal: Véhicule, 1973

This year marked the fiftieth anniversary of Véhicule Press. Three Dozen Sonnets & Fast Drawings was the press's very first book. A pristine copy with errata slip, it appeared to have been unread.

No longer.

Awful Disclosures of Maria
   Monk
Maria Monk
New York: Howe & Bates,
   1836

A first edition copy of the text that launched an industry. Not in the best condition, but after 187 years, much of it being pawed over by anti-papist zealots, what can one expect.

My work on the Maria Monk hoax continues. 


Crimes: or, I'm Sorry Sir,
   But We Do Not Sell
   Handguns to Junkies
Vicar Vicars [Ted Mann]
Vancouver: Pulp, 1973

As far as I know, Crimes is Ted Mann's only book. When published, he was an editor at National Lampoon. The Bombardier Guide to Canadian Authors was in his future, as were NYPD Blue, Deadwood. and Homeland.


What to expect next year? More Allen and Fleming, I'm betting.  Basil King seems likely.



27 February 2023

Go West, Young Woman



The Prairie Wife
Arthur Stringer
London: Hodder & Stoughton, [n.d]
251 pages

In the summer of 1985, I bought a copy of The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature and read it from cover to cover. This is nowhere near as impressive as it might seem; what I read was the original two-column 843-page edition (1983), not the two-column 1099-page second edition (2001). Nevertheless, it was through the Companion that I first learned of Arthur Stringer. The author's entry, penned by Dick Harrison, amounts to little more than a half-page. Here are some of the things I learned:
  • born 1874 in Chatham, Ontario;
  • studied at the University of Toronto and Oxford;
  • wrote for the Montreal Herald;
  • established his literary career in New York;
  • "made an enduring contribution to Canadian literature with his prairie trilogy: Prairie Wife (1915), Prairie Mother (1920), and Prairie Child (1921)."
Harrison gets the titles of the trilogy wrong – The Prairie Wife, The Prairie Mother, and The Prairie Child are correct – but never mind, what stuck with me was Prairie. As decades passed, I forgot all about Chatham, Toronto, Oxford, Montreal, and New York, and came to think of Stringer as a Western Canadian. It wasn't until 2009, when I read The Woman Who Could Not Die (1929), my first Stringer, that I was reminded he was an Ontario boy. A Lost World novel set in the Canadian Arctic, I liked it well enough to keep reading and begin collecting his work.

My Arthur Stringer collection (most of it, anyway).
Cliquez pour agrandir.
Admittedly, much of my interest has to do with his enviable popularity, the deals he cut with Hollywood, and his marriage to Jobyna Howland. This is not to suggest that I didn't like the books themselves. My favourite Canadian novel of the early twentieth-century is Stringer's The Wine of Life (1921), which... um, was inspired by his marriage to Jobyna Howland.


A second admission: I put off reading The Prairie Wife, the first volume in Stringer's "enduring contribution to Canadian literature," for no other reason that it is set in rural Canada. Before you judge, I rush to add that this Montrealer has lived in rural Canada these past two decades. Country living attracts, but not novels set in the country. This may explain how it is that I was swept up by its early pages.

The Prairie Wife takes the form of a series of entries, written over the course of more than a year to someone named Matilda Anne. Its writer, Chaddie, begins by describing a voyage from Corfu to Palermo and then on to the Riviera. She is of the moneyed class – that is until Monte Carlo, where Chaddie receives a cable informing that the "Chilean revolution" has wiped out her nitrate mine concessions. Made a pauper, Chaddie's first action is to dismiss her maid; the second is to send word to her German aristocrat fiancé:
I sent a cable to Theobald Gustav (so condensed that he thought it was code) and later on found that he'd been sending flowers and chocolates all the while to the Hotel de L'Athenee, the long boxes duly piled up in tiers, like coffins at the morgue. Then Theobald's aunt, the baroness, called on me, in state. She came in that funny, old-fashioned, shallow landau of hers, where she looked for all the world like an oyster-on-the-half-shell, and spoke so pointedly of the danger of international marriages that I felt sure she was trying to shoo me away from my handsome and kingly Theobald Gustav — which made me quite calmly and solemnly tell her that I intended to take Theobald out of under-secretaryships, which really belonged to Oppenheim romances, and put him in the shoe business in some nice New England town!
After a respectable period of mourning lost wealth, Theobald Gustav throws her over. Just as well, really, because the Paris Herald had reported on of a traffic accident that had occurred when he'd been in the company of a "spidery Russian stage-dancer." On the rebound, Chaddie proposes to Scots-Canadian Duncan Argyll McKail, whom she'd met in Banff the previous October. He is too much in love and far too practical to turn her down.

And so, this is how Chaddie, an American socialite who'd shared the company of Meredith and Stevenson, and had sat through many an opera at La Scala, ends up in a one-room shack with flattened tin can siding on the remote Canadian prairie.

Duncan – annoyingly, his bride refers to him as "Dinky-Dunk" – is a civil engineer from the east. He's got it in his mind to make a fortune through farming, and has purchased a 1700-acre parcel of land one hundred or so kilometres northwest of, I'm guessing, Swift Current.

"He kept saying it would be hard, for the first year or two, and there would be a terrible number of things I'd be sure to miss," Chaddie writes Matilda Anne. 

No doubt!

Harrison doesn't use the term "Prairie Realism" in his Stringer entry, but I will; The Prairie Wife is a good fit with later novels by Frederick Philip Grove, Martha Ostenso, and Robert Stead. Can we agree that Prairie Realism was never terribly realistic? Though pre-Jazz Age, Stringer's story begins as a crazy Jazz Age adventure in which a carefree debutante marries a man she may or may not love. In her earliest pages to Matilda Anne, she writes:
O God, O God, if it should turn out that I don't, that I can't? But I'm going to!  I know I'm going to! And there's one other thing that I know, and when I remember it, It sends a comfy warm wave through all my body: Dinky-Dunk loves me. He's as mad as a hatter about me. He deserves to be loved back. And I'm going to love him back. That is a vow I herewith duly register. I'm going to love my Dinky-Dunk.
Chaddie continues:
But, oh, isn't it wonderful to wake love in a man, in a strong man? To be able to sweep him off, that way, on a tidal wave that leaves him rather white and shaky in the voice and trembly in the fingers, and seems to light a little luminous fire at the back of his eyeballs so that you can see the pupils glow, the same as an animal's when your motor head-lights hit them!
There's a clear separation between the opening pages and the rest of the novel. Whimsy gives way to practicality, as Duncan chases his fortune. Remarkably, Chaddie settles on the prairie, and into matrimony, rather nicely. Harrison writes of "disillusionment as the marriage deteriorates," but this reader saw nothing of the kind. True, there are moments of discord, as in the strongest of marriages, but Dinky-Dunk and Chaddie – he calls her "Gee-Gee" – are soon in one another's arms. She does come to love her Dinky-Dunk.

The frontispiece of the A.L. Burt photoplay edition, c.1925.
I don't know what Harrison means when he writes of Chaddie's "mature resolve as she begins an independent life on the Prairies." The married couple only become closer as the novel progresses, and the two are increasingly reliant on a slowly growing cast of characters. The earliest, hired man Olie, is a silent Swede who at first can't keep his eyes off Chaddie. This male gaze has nothing to do with objectification, rather her ridiculously impractical city dress. Pale Percival Benson Wodehouse, whom this reader suspects to be a remittance man, is next to appear. He was sold the neighbouring ranch from "land chaps" in London. Nineteen-year-old Finnish Canadian Olga Sarristo enters driving a yoke of oxen. Two weeks earlier, what remained of her family had burned to death in their own shack one hundred or so miles to the north. To Chaddie, stoic and stunning Olga is like something out of Norse mythology, "a big blonde Valkyr suddenly introducing herself into your little earthly affairs." Olga is a welcome addition to the farm; every bit as capable physically as Olie and Duncan. Last to arrive is Terry Dillion, a fastidious young Irishman who had once served in far off lands with the British Army.

Together they support Duncan's big gamble, which involves putting all he has on a sea of wheat covering his 1700 acres. Threatened by draught, fire, and hail, the crop survives, making him a wealthy man. His riches are further increased by a new rail line to be built across his land. The final pages have Duncan and Chaddie poring over house-plans mailed from Philadelphia. "We're to have a telephone, as soon as the railway gets through," she writes Matilda Anne. 

The Prairie Wife is the first Stringer novel I've read with a woman narrator. Early pages aside, I found Chaddie's voice oddly convincing. This audio recording by Jennifer Perree, stumbled upon in researching this novel, reinforced my conviction. An enjoyable story, an entertainment, it left me wanting to hear more from Chaddie.

And there is more!

Stringer wrote more than forty novels, but The Prairie Mother is the only one to spawn a sequel, The Prairie Mother (1920)  – and then another in The Prairie Child (1922).

Like Dinky-Dunk, Stringer really knew how to make a buck.  

Favourite sentence:
The trouble with Platonic love is that it's always turning out too nice to be Platonic, or too Platonic to be nice.
Bloomer: 
I can't help thinking of Terry's attitude toward Olga. He doesn't actively dislike her, but he quietly ignores her, even more so than Olie does. I've been wondering why neither of them has succumbed to such physical grandeur. Perhaps it's because they're physical themselves.
Trivia: In 1925, The Prairie Mother was adapted to the silver screen. A lost film, the trade reviews I've read are lukewarm, mainly because there is no gunplay. Chaddie is played by comedic actress Dorothy Devore, one of many who fell in making the transition to talkies. New to me is Herbert Rawlinson, who played Duncan. Olga is played by Canadian Frances Primm, about whom little is known, A pre-Frankenstein Boris Karloff plays Diego, a character that does not feature in the novel. Most interetsing to the silent film buff is Gibson Gowland (Olie), the man who played McTeague in Erich von Stroheim's Greed.

Motion Picture Magazine, December 1924 
Object: My copy was purchased last year from a bookseller located in Winterton, Lincolnshire. Price: £9.00. Sadly, the jacket illustration is uncredited.

The rear pushes all three books in Stringer's trilogy, The Prairie Child not yet available in a bargain edition. The flaps feature a list of other Hodder & Stoughton titles, including works by Canadians Ralph Connor (The Sky Pilot of No Man's Land [sic]), Hulbert Footner (The Fugitive Sleuth, Two on the Trail), Frank L. Packard (The Night Operator, The Wire Devils, Pawned), Robert J.C. Stead (The Homesteaders), and Bertrand W. Sinclair (Poor Man's Rock).

Access: The Prairie Wife first appeared in 1915, published serially over four issues of the Saturday Evening Post (16 January - 6 February). That same year, it appeared in book form in Canada (McLeod & Allen) and the United States (Bobbs-Merril). Both publishers used the same jacket design:

Evidence suggests that The Prairie Wife is Stringer's biggest seller. A.L. Burt published at photoplay edition tied into the 1925 Metro-Goldwyn Mayer adaptation. Is that Boris Karloff as Diego on the right?


At some point, Burt went back to the well to draw Prairie Stories, which included all three novels in Stringer's prairie trilogy. As far as I've been able to determine, The Prairie Wife last saw print in The Prairie Omnibus (Grosset & Dunlap, 1950), in which it is paired with The Prairie Mother

Used copies of The Prairie Wife can be purchased online for as little as US$8.95.

21 December 2019

The Globe 100 One Hundred Years Ago: Poets are Struck Dumb and Capitalism Proves Embarrassing


The Globe, 6 December 1919

Last month, the Globe & Mail published 'The Globe 100', its annual list of the year's best books.

Why the hurry?

One hundred years ago, the best books were announced in December. The number of 1919 titles ‐ 247 in total ‐ hints at a particularly healthy harvest, though there's not much in the way of celebration. The list's introduction recognizes the "serious aspect" of then-recent titles being added to bookshelves: "One might have expected after the anguish of the war a reaction towards the amusing and frivolous, but in war's wake comes the necessity of reconstruction." So many new books deal with "the world-wide feeling of unrest":
The obligation, cheerfully assumed, of providing for the welfare of half a million returned soldiers has forced upon people an interest in every angle of the labor which many of them never felt before. This has been accentuated by a series of embarrassing strikes, and also the labor conferences in Ottawa and in Washington.
Must say, "embarrassing" is not the adjective I would've used.

The Winnipeg Tribune
9 June 1919
I'll add that novels like Bertrand W. Sinclair's entertaining and troubling The Hidden Places (Toronto: Ryerson, 1922) lead me to question whether the obligation of providing for the welfare of returned soldiers was "cheerfully assumed."

As if labour troubles weren't bad enough, the Armistice has had a devastating effect on Canadian verse.


"The coming of peace did not bring such a chorus as might have been expected," notes the Globe. "Peace came on the poets so suddenly that it struck them dumb." In this, no country suffered a greater silence than Canada. It dominated the list of best poetry books in 1918 Globe – eight of thirteen titles – but in 1919 is reduced to just two volumes: Canadian Singers and Their Songs, an anthology compiled by Edward S. Caswell; and Flint and Feather, the complete poems of the late Pauline Johnson.



It gets worse. Flint and Feather was first published in 1912.

The fiction list isn't nearly so affected. Its 104 titles is dominated by foreigners Robert W. Chambers, John Galsworthy, Joseph Hocking, Anthony Hope, Peter B. Kyne, Compton McKenzie, Kathleen Norris, Sax Rohmer, Sheila Kaye-Smith, Booth Tarkington, and Francis Brett Young, but within we find sixteen novels by Canadian authors:
The Touch of Abner - H.A. Cody
Sky Pilot in No Man's Land - Ralph Connor
The Heart of Cherry McBain - Douglas Durkin
On the Swan River - Hulbert Footner
The Substitute Millionaire - Hulbert Footner
Bulldog Carney - W.A. Fraser
In Orchard Glen - Marian Keith
Mist of Morning - Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
Janet of Kootenay - Evah McKowan
Rainbow Valley - L.M. Montgomery
Polly Masson - William H. Moore
The Lady of the Crossing - Frederick Niven
Joan at Halfway - Grace McLeod Rogers
Sister Woman - J.S. Sime
Burned Bridges- Bertrand W. Sinclair
The Man Who Couldn't Sleep - Arthur Stringer
The Girl of O.K. Valley - Robert Watson
I've long been on the hunt for Stringer's The Man Who Couldn't Sleep. The brief description provided by the Globe encourages a doubling of my efforts:


I'll also be on the lookout for Polly Masson by William H. Moore, a novel described as "propaganda of a praise-worthy kind... designed to bring about a better state of feeling between English and French-speaking Canadians."

Future Governor General John Buchan's Mr. Standfast appears twice.

Guess they really liked it.

Should I have counted Mr. Standfast as a Canadian book? As it stands, the country claims just fifteen percent of the fiction titles. On the other hand, Canada dominates in "Economic" (a category that doesn't feature in previous Globe lists):
On Labor problems Canadians have made valuable contributions, "Labor and Humanity" by Hon. Mackenzie King has reached its fourth edition and has been made a textbook at Harvard University. Prof. MacIver of the University of Toronto, Prof. Leacock of McGill and Dr. Lavell, formerly of Queen's appear prominently his year among those who have helped to create a better understanding of labor and reconstruction.
Industry and Humanity, the Right Honourable Mackenzie King's newest book, is the first in a list of fifteen. Other titles by Canadians include:
Production and Taxation in Canada - W.C. Good
The Canadian Commonwealth - Agnes C. Laut
The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice - Stephen Leacock
Labor in the Changing World - R.M. MacIver
Bridging the Chasm - Percival F. Morley
I wondered about The Canadian Commonwealth and The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice. Turns out that I don't own either. I do have copies of The Heart of Cherry McBainBurned BridgesIn Orchard GlenBulldog Carney, and Sky Pilot in No Man's Land.


Chances are I'll read them before Production and Taxation in Canada. 


Related posts:





29 August 2016

Cheese! What a Story!



The Mystery of the Folded Paper
Hulbert Footner
New York: Collier, n.d.

The British title is The Folded Paper Mystery.

Any better?

I would have dropped "Mystery," which isn't much in evidence. The first page introduces Finlay Corveth, a young go-getter who mines the criminal underworld for material he uses in his short stories. Today he's on the hunt for of a brass ball that went missing during a break-in
at Nick Peters' flat. Tony Casino grabbed it from the bed frame, used it to knock out Nick, and then took off with the thing in his hand. What Tony and Fin don't know is that the ball contains an antique locket, which in turn contains a folded paper upon which is a message that leads to the basement of a large house in on the outskirts of New York. Sealed in the brick wall behind the furnace is a box that holds information relating to the line of succession in a fictional monarchy on the Black Sea.

I haven't spoiled a thing. The Mystery of the Folded Paper tells a familiar tale; the reader will recognize it with the entrance of pretty Mariula, a sixteen-year-old private schoolgirl with a mysterious past.

There will be a murder and a suicide, and yet this is one of the happiest novels I've ever read: boy meets girl, boy never loses girl, and girl turns out to be a princess. Pay no mind that the boy is twenty-five and the girl is sixteen.

So, yes, a happy story... and not at all taxing! Anyone not paying attention will be set right by frequent explanations and summaries.

Small wonder that few people have bothered writing about The Mystery of the Folded Paper; those who have invariably mention the appearance of the author's friend Christopher Morley as a character.

Is he, really?

The Mystery of the Folded Paper features someone named Christopher Morley, but he's a theatre director, not a writer. I suppose it may be that the character shares something of Morley's... um, character, but I'm not interested enough to investigate further.

It's also noted that The Mystery of the Folded Paper is the first of Hulbert Footner's Amos Lee Mappin mysteries.

I was sorry to hear it.

Mappin is a bland figure. A bloated bachelor, spoiled by privilege, he lives a life of luxury and leisure in an expansive Manhattan apartment run by manservant Jermyn. Fin bows to the older writer's judgment, as younger writers so often do, for no other reason than he has published a few books. Though Mappin's deal with the criminal mind, he doesn't bring much insight. His greatest contribution comes in the way of funds.

Things are left to Fin, the boy who meets the girl, to carry the story to its predictable conclusion. Energetic, chatty and crazily optimistic, he's  always ready with a word and smile, as in this scene which finds him running for his life beside a woman whom he's endangered:
"You're doing fine!" Fin said to Daisy, grinning. "It's no cinch to run uphill!"
Though I can't recommend The Mystery of the Folded Paper, Fin's boyish over-the-top enthusiasm and cheery, positive attitude make it worth a fleeting look. This snippet of dialogue should suffice:
"Cheese! Tony, you sure are some nervy kid! It's a treat to hear you! You must tell me some more stories!"
Reaching the end of the novel, I couldn't help but wonder whether the whole thing wasn't a parody of something I'd never read. Again, I'm not interested enough to investigate further.

No, the only truly intriguing thing about The Mystery of the Folded Paper is this: With all Fin's snooping around the criminal class, never mind the stories he publishes about its crimes, wouldn't he have been offed long ago?

I suppose it's worth nothing that Fin doesn't feature in any of the other Amos Lee Mappin mysteries.


Object: A well-constructed 350-page hardcover in crimson boards with gold stamping, my copy belongs to Collier's Front Page Mysteries series. It was purchased earlier this year at London's Attic Books. Price: $10.00.

Access: First published in 1930 by Harper in the United States and Collins in the United Kingdom. As one might expect, a cheap Burt edition followed. I haven't been able to determine just when the Collier edition appeared.

Used copies are not plentiful, but they are cheap. The least expensive, a jacketless, cocked copy of the Collins first, is listed online for US$7.61. The only copy of the Collier edition - not quite so nice as mine - can be had for US$20.00. One Pennsylvania bookseller is trying to get away with selling the Burt reprint as a first edition. Price: US$300. Steer clear.


Remarkably, The Mystery of the Folded Paper was reissued in 2014 by Coachwhip Publications.

Seven of our university libraries hold copies.