Showing posts with label Halperin. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Halperin. Show all posts

01 October 2012

A Puppet of Passion in Boxing Trunks



Seconds to Go
Phil Strong [pseud. Danny Halperin]
Toronto: Arrow, 1950

Is anything to be made of the similarity between the name Danny Cannon, protagonist of Seconds to Go, and that of his creator Danny Halperin?

Hope not.

We first catch sight of Danny Cannon at age eleven as he's being beaten by his father Matt. A bat to the head, a fist in the face, whipping with a belt... and who knows what we've missed. But wait, there's more:
     Again and again the belt descended.
     At last Danny could bear it no longer. Like a caged beast suddenly freed, he turned on his father and wrestled with him for possession of the belt. Matt roared with rage; his meaty right hand clutched the boy's throat and he shook that twisting young body as if it were a rattling bag of coals.
     Exhausted, Danny went limp, Matt let him fall to the floor where he kicked him in the stomach. The boy writhed and screamed as the boot connected.
     "Now – now – what's yore answer?" said Matt, breathing heavily, laying down a fine mist of whisky breath close to Danny's face.
     "I – I'll go."
Where to?

Halperin maintains the mystery for a several more pages before having Danny walk through New York's East Side to Liffey's Canned Shrimp and Lobster. What follows is a Dickensian scene set in the Depression with the boy cutting off the heads and legs of shrimp in a dimly lit cellar. "They look like mama'" he tells his sister Gracie, "when she was lying in her coffin after she was dead."

A dance hall hustler, popular because she "did not wear a bras [sic]",  Gracie has taken to rolling drunken sailors in alleyways. Danny too will make good money through beatings.

The first half of Seconds to Go follows a familiar plot. Danny, a quiet boy with a drunken brute for a father, grows up to give is the old man his due. A tough but kindly old trainer provides guidance both in and out of the boxing ring, and the next thing you know Danny boy is a contender.

"Time passes quickly when we are doing something which concerns us passionately. So it was with Danny." The turbulent times he'd endured with Matt and Gracie – never mind shrimp-like mama – seem so long ago. Sadly, new troubles are on the horizon.

The first cracks appear when Danny beds Anne, Dave's floozy of a daughter. The trainer loves his daughter, but because he also loves Danny he feels the need to warn:
     "Look, Danny. This is as hard for me as it is for you –"
     "That's wrong," Danny interrupted. "This is easy for me. All I have to do is tell you to go to hell, Dave."
For a guy who lost his virginity mere hours earlier, Danny really seems to know what's what:
     "Listen to me, Dave. Sometimes you do things that even if they're bad you still have to do them and even if they'll hurt you they still have to be done. Do you know what I mean? I'm sure Anne feels the same way about it. She'll get over the novelty of me pretty soon."
"So you're just puppets of passion, eh?" responds Dave.

In the end, it's Danny who grows bored. As his star rises, he looks down on Dave and Anne, now so very small in his eyes. When big time boxing promoter Manny Easton makes an offer, Danny is only too happy to move on. Manny's wife Clara becomes the first of many women who take Anne's place. Melanie Jackson, Louise Ryrie, Gilda Channing and Mona Paulasohn try to use Danny, but are ultimately discarded leaving the fighter with a "conceited feeling of power over women combined with a monstrous contempt for everything female."

The climax of the novel takes place in the ring, and not in bed. Danny faces Dusty Rush in a championship bout at Madison Square Garden and is beaten to a pulp.

No pun intended.

Miraculously, misogyny vanishes, humility returns and a life with Anne seems a sure bet. I'd say that Danny had some sense beaten into him, but Anne has a different view:
     "That guy Dusty sure knocked something out of me," muttered Danny.
     "I know..." replied Anne slowly, "... and Danny... it's funny how everything turns out for the best!"
     "What d'ya mean?" he asked.
     "I think that guy knocked something bad out of you... and I'm glad!"
The magical, transformative power of the ring extends to the locker room, where Dave's blow to Manny's jaw ends their estrangement. And Clara? Despite her ellipses, Anne manages to fill in the blanks:
     "From what Dave told me... they're still in love with each other... always have been... it's just the way of life that's driven them apart."
So, is there anything to be made of the similarity between the names Danny Cannon and Danny Halperin?

Probably not – but what about Danny Cannon and Danny Fisher?

Worst sentence: The old wallpaper, a fanciful design of faded mermaids, was beginning to peel off the walls from the ceiling down, hanging in unsightly torn sheets like the frozen tears of a sentimental statrue [sic] in a wintry park.


Object: A particularly fragile early Canadian mass market paperback, the glue has dried to a point at which one cannot hope to read the thing without causing damage. Didn't stop me. Books are for reading.

Access: Not listed on Worldcat. The only copy currently offered online comes courtesy of a Toronto bookseller who provides no information as to condition. At C$45, it's probably worth the price.

17 July 2012

Talking Montreal Noir with Nigel Beale



Audio of my recent interview with Nigel Beale can be found here. Lots of talk about Brian Moore, Ted Allan, News Stand Library, Véhicule's Ricochet Books series and more!

29 June 2011

Another Tie, Another Place



The Canadian and America editions of Neil H. Perrin's Death Be My Destiny, both published by News Stand Library, both bearing covers drawn by the same anonymous hand. How to explain the differences? Do Canadians prefer blondes? Do we choose hard liquor over red wine? Are our ties a touch more garish, our women more modest? Can it really be that our seedy hotels are so luxurious? It all seems wrong... even that bit about the ties.

Still no trigger on that gun, I see.

Update: Over at Fly-by-night, bowdler has posted an image of the uncommon dustjacket that adorned the American edition.

25 April 2011

One Long, Tedious Suicide Note



Death Be My Destiny
Neil H. Perrin [pseud. Danny Halperin]
Toronto: News Stand Library, 1949

The most interesting thing about Death Be My Destiny is that it begins with protagonist Karel Martin setting himself up as a teenage bellhop/pimp. The misbehaviour and misadventure that follow can be described with fair detail in five sentences. I know this to be true because I did just that in an early draft of this post. Bland and simple, like the novel, the synopsis isn't worth reading.

That Death Be My Destiny followed This Was Joanna, the first Neil H. Perrin book, by just two months, might explain its failings. Like many pulp novels, it starts strongly, then wanders weakly, eventually becoming nothing more than fragments as it crawls toward the final sentence: "Tomorrow you will read in the papers that I died by my own hand." You see, there's a gimmick to all this; Death Be My Destiny presents itself as the autobiography of a man who is about to put a gun to his head.

To reach that messy ending, Halperin – or Perrin, if you prefer – peppers the novel with some pretty good lines, none of which quite fit. "When you cut a friend's throat never use a dull knife," seems clever until one realizes that Karel has no friends. What's more, the advice is used to close a chapter in which no throats not figuratively, not literally are cut.

As with This Was Joanna and the strikingly bizarre The Door Between, the most interesting writing concerns sex:
What happened between us was, technically, absolute perfection. Marcia, in those hushed hours of the night, was mine as completely as she was ever, could ever, belong to anyone. Her little flushed cries of joy were like a sweet oil lavished over my battered ego, and my conceit flowered mightily as, enraptured, she surrendered.
I felt nothing. Her joy was dust in my mouth. Her very real tremors seemed slightly comical to me as if the carnality was a circus with Marcia the fragile clown and I the phony ringmaster cracking his terrible whip.
There is fun to be found in passages like this, but here they are few and far between.

What more to say? Death Be My Destiny passes by like Karel Martin's life, not worthy of mention. So, I leave off – as I always do with Perrin – by recommending The Door Between, that weird and wonderful follow-up to Death Be My Destiny.

Oh, one last thing: Karel's revolver might be loaded, but you'll note that it has no trigger.

Object: I've gone on a bit about News Stand Library's shoddy production standards – here and here and here and here and here and here but this is the worst of the lot. A difficult book to read in more ways than one, the print blurs, fades and at times disappears completely. Good on NSL for spelling the author's nom de plume correctly.

Access: Death Be My Destiny is an uncommon book, but it's also a bargain. The four copies currently listed online can each be had for under fourteen dollars. Of the world's libraries, academic and otherwise, it appears that only Library and Archives Canada holds a copy.

26 December 2010

The 75-Year-Old Virgin and Others I Acquired



Published in 1935 by les Éditions du Quotidien, a first edition by one of the most important Canadian writers of the twentieth century. I bought Sébastien Pierre this year for ten dollars. A full 75 years after publication, its pages remained uncut. Three of the 23 illustrations featured are revealed here for the first time.

Such a sad commentary on the country's literature, and yet... and yet this same sorry situation enables souls like myself to amass a fairly nice collection of interesting and unusual Canadiana.

Case in point: Thomas P. Kelley's pseudonymous No Tears for Goldie (1950), which was purchased in February for a mere five dollars. No hits on Worldcat, absent from Abe, nothing at all at AddAll.

Rare, bizarre, but not really worth a read.







Of the obscurities reviewed here these past twelve months, the three I most recommend:


These are not great works of literature, but they are engaging and very interesting. Each depicts a dark, disturbing and gritty Canada found in very few novels of their time.

Financially speaking, my best buy was a very nice first edition (my second) of Tender is the Night (sans dust jacket), which I found just last month for $9.50 in a Montreal bookstore. The year's favourite purchase, however, is of negligible commercial value: a 1926 edition of Anatole France's Under the Rose. I came across this at a library sale, flipped through a few pages, and happened to spot the name Peregrine Acland, a subject of ongoing research, stamped ever so discretely in the front free endpaper.



What luck!

Still no luck, I'm afraid, in tracking down Sexpo '69, that elusive novel of lesbian erotica set at Expo 67. Will I never find a copy?


Of course, I will.

A Happy New Year to all!

11 December 2010

And These Were Her Magnificent Breasts



This was Joanna
Niel [sic] H. Perrin [pseud. Danny Halperin]
Toronto: News Stand Library, 1949

Of all the novels read this past year, not one has left so great an impression as Neil H. Perrin's The Door Between. In the second of two posts about the book, I described it as "one of the most peculiar Canadian novels I've ever read". Here I reconsider: The Door Between might well be the most peculiar Canadian novel I've ever read. It's portrayal of 1948 Toronto as a dark, sexual sin city, populated by stricken, agonizing souls certainly runs counter to the staid and sober images that linger in popular culture.

These same sorry sods would find fit in This was Joanna, which was published twelve months earlier. We never actually meet Joanna – she's found dead on page one by an unnamed fisherman, as depicted on the cover of the publisher's American edition: "...for one witless moment he looked down on the haunting perfection that was Joanna, the closed eyes in a kind of rapture, the long, strained throat, twisted torso, magnificent breasts, profound hips, proud legs, crouched in death like a supple cat."

Profound hips...

This is not the dead woman's story, rather it concerns an ex-lover, a nameless newspaperman who attempts to solve the mystery that was Joanna. His quest brings him into contact with her other past paramours. As with The Door Between, sexual disfunction and perversity pervade. We see this on Joanna's wedding night, as described by her husband Charles:
At last she stood nude before me. When I looked at her I was shocked to see the most brazen smile on her face.
Then, without hesitation, her fingers sure, carefully, slowly, she began to undress me. I went slightly hysterical then. I began to shudder to laugh, to giggle, to squirm. I simply went berserk. In the grip of nameless emotions that shook my whole body and dazed my mind I began to fight with her, to hit her, to drag her toward the bed.
What Joanna thought of this I don't know. We have never discussed it. I only know that later, all passion spent, as I lay beside her in the muttering gloom, I realized that on our wedding night I had gone mad, had beaten my wife and had virtually raped her.
Joanna never forgives Charles, whose desperate attempts to win her back render him a cuckold. The tryst with the newspaperman is just the first in a series of extramarital flings. It's with penultimate lover Ted Wrisley that Joanna's amorous adventures come to a climax. A sensualist who owes much to J.-K. Huysmans' Jean Des Esseintes, Wrisley introduces Joanna to "the arts of which immortal Ovid and the Marquis de Sade have written." He takes delight in showing his "chamber of horrors" to the newspaperman:
On the walls of the room were hung all sorts of gadgets of torture; long needles, small, hairy whips, knouts, knives sharp as razors, silken threads of unbelievable length. Over the mantlepiece were afixed two large peacock feathers; the end of one was a rubber stopper, the end of the other a handgrip. I dared not ask the significance of these feathers for fear of being told.
Suspended from the ceiling were two long cords, obviously used to hold a person up from the floor by his (or her) thumbs. On the floor, as if alive, lay the stuffed corpse of a sinuous cobra. The most unspeakably evil paintings adorned the walls and, in one corner of the room under a blue light, sat the grinning statue of Priapus, the phallic symbol of the ages.
This was Joanna was banned in Ireland.

Wrisley's playroom – which, incidentally, is soundproof – stands as Priapus in what is otherwise a remarkably flat environment. Like an American soap opera, This was Joanna is set in a neutral everyplace that is populated by the pampered and privileged. How bland compared to the torrid Toronto of The Door Between! I can't help but compare – had it not been for one I would not have read the other – and yet... and yet I still recommend the novel. This was Joanna might not be the most peculiar Canadian novel I've ever read, but it's up there.

Trivia: News Stand Library's American edition of This was Joanna, published in November 1949, two months after the Canadian, marks the last time the book saw print. Why Halperin's pseudonym was changed from Neil H. Perrin to Grant R. Brooks remains a mystery.

Object: A mass market paperback that is typical of News Stand Library's shoddy production values. Streaks of black ink run along the edges of a dozen or so pages, making for challenging reading. The author's name is misspelled on the cover and title page (but is correct on the spine and back cover). "I before E, except after C", I suppose.


Access: Only the University of Calgary has copies (both the Perrin and Brooks editions). This was Joanna might be all but absent from libraries, but that doesn't mean it's expensive. Ten copies – all fairly decent – are currently listed online at between US$7.50 and US$30. One bookseller describes his offering as "a bit misscut [sic]". Par for the course, really.

31 March 2010

Climax!: A Happy Ending



The second part of my review of Neil Perrin's The Door Between, this now appears, revised and rewritten, 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

Related post:

29 March 2010

Toronto's Tortured Sexual Souls



The Door Between
Neil H. Perrin [pseud. Danny Halperin]
Toronto: News Stand Library, 1950
160 pages

The first part of my review, this now appears, revised and rewritten, 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