Showing posts with label Orvis. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Orvis. Show all posts

27 September 2021

Six Forgotten Novelists at the Atwater Library


This coming Thursday – September 30 – I'll be speaking on "Forgotten Montreal Novelists" at the Atwater Library.

Forgotten Montreal novelists? Where to begin! I've selected six. I'll be talking about their lives with a focus on a novel by each.

These being strange days, I won't be appearing in person. Wish I could. The good thing is that you can watch through Zoom. The link to register is here.

C'est gratuit!

07 June 2021

Criminal Notes & Queries


The most recent number of Canadian Notes & Queries – The Crime Issue – arrived last week in our Upper Canada rural mailbox. I was honoured to serve as Guest Editor. It was a pleasure putting it together, though I must admit that the heavy lifting was done by regular editor Emily Donaldson.

As always, Seth's provides the front and back covers. Tell the truth, do you not see yourself in one of his mugshots?


In The Landscape, Seth shares an undated, uncredited insert from The Weekend Magazine – which, as he notes, was itself an insert.

"What’s Old," our regular salute to reissues, coupled with offerings from the country’s antiquarian booksellers features Austin Clarke's When He Was Free and Young and He Used to Wear Silks (Anansi, 2021),  Carmine Starnino's Dirty Words: Selected Poems, 1997-2016 (Gaspereau, 2021), a new translation of Markoosie Patsauq's Hunter with Harpoon (MQUP, 2021). Windsor's Juniper Books offers The Executioners (Harlequin, 1951) and French for Murder (Fawcett, 1954), two old Brian Moore pulps that the late author's estate has kept out of print.

The Guest Editor’s Note, in which I recall childhood trauma brought on by a speeding ticket, is followed by the issue's Dusty Bookcase. This one is unusual in that the volume covered, Grant Allen's fin de siècle novel An African Millionaire, is not only in print, but is a certified Penguin Classic. We all remember studying it in high school, right?


Adam Sol and Manahil Bandukwala provide verse.

The issue's features begin with "Sin City," Will Straw's look at Police Journal, the post-war Montreal crime tabloid that anticipated Allô Police.


In "A Requiem for Skid Row," Amy Lavender Harris writes about a Toronto that has fallen to condos, but lives on in the works of Juan Butler, Austin Clarke, and Hugh Garner.

Novelist Trevor Ferguson (aka John Farrow) writes of his encounters with the criminal element in  "Fringe Elements."

Dedicated readers will remember my interest in the mysterious Kenneth Orvis (aka Kenneth Lemieux), author of Hickory House, The Damned and Destroyed,  Cry, Hallelujah!, and four other novels. You may even remember my 2016 plea for information about the man. Imagine my surprise in discovering that former 39 Steps frontman Chris Barry – whom I've seen onstage in Montreal and onscreen in Hannah and Her Sisters – is the mystery man's nephew.  Chris' "Uncle Ken, We Hardly Knew Ye: Kenneth Orvis’ Nephew Surveys the Writer’s Life, Hustles, and Mysterious Disappearance" helps fill in the gaps.


In "Vale of Fears," Monika Bartyzel looks at the influence of a 1935 murder on the fiction of Phyllis Brett Young, our most unjustly neglected novelist.

Jennifer Hambleton disturbs with "Shut Out: How University Libraries are Increasingly Limiting Public Access.

David Frank writes on the relationship between Jack London and all but forgotten Canadian socialist Wilfrid Gribble.

Chris Kelly looks at Blue City, the 1986 adaptation of the 1947 Ross Macdonald novel of the same name. You remember it, right? Judd Nelson and Ally Sheedy starred.

No?

This GIF may refresh you memory.


I intrude again with an interview with Danny McAuley of Brome Lake Books in Knowlton, Quebec.

David Mason's Used and Rare column concerns book thieves and a revelation about a certain famous author.

In the North Wing - selections from the Lost Library of CanLit Graphic Novels -  Nathan Campagnaro adapts Thomas King’s DreadfulWater.

We've also got a new short story from Caroline Adderson, “All Our Auld Acquaintances Are Gone.”


At a time when newspapers and magazines are slashing space devoted to book reviews, we buck the trend with:
Bruce Whiteman on Erin McLaren’s Little Resilience
Rohan Maitzen on Anna Porter’s The Appraisal and Deceptions
Laura Cameron on Amanda LeDuc’s The Centaur’s Wife 
Brett Josef Grubisic on Michael Melgaard’s Pallbearing 
Alex Good on Pasha Malla’s Kill the Mall 
Paige Cooper on Carrie Jenkins’ Victoria Sees It 
Dancy Mason on Patricia Robertson’s Hour of the Crab 
James Grainger on Andrée A Michaud’s Mirror Lake
Emily Donaldson on Sarah Berman’s Don’t Call it a Cult
The Shelf Talker belongs to The Bookshelf in Guelph. Catherine Bush's Blaze Island is one of their four titles.

As always, we finish off with Stephen Fowler's Exhumations. His pick this issue is Writing Thrillers for Profit: A Practical Guide by Basil Hogarth (London, Black, 1936), a volume that once belonged to "a recently deceased author of detective novels." Stephen suggests that it may have been a "joke gift." I'm betting he's right.


The CNQ Crime Issue can be purchased through this link.

It's a steal.

26 December 2019

The Very Best Reads of a Very Strange Year



It's been a disorienting and disruptive year. The home we'd expected to build on the banks of the Rideau became entangled in red tape, an inept survey, and a tardy Official Plan. In our impatience, we left our rental and bought an existing house a ten-minute drive south. We may just stay. If we do, an extension is in order. I'm writing this on a desk at the dead end of a cramped second storey hallway.

All this is shared by way of explanation. I reviewed only twenty books here and in my Canadian Notes & Queries 'Dusty Bookcase' column. Should that number be boosted to twenty-three? Three of the books were reread and reviewed in translated, abridged, and dumbed down editions.

Yes, a strange year... made doubly so by the fact that so very many of the books reviewed are currently available. Selecting the three most deserving of a return to print  an annual tradition – should've been challenging, but was in fact quite easy:

The Arch-Satirist
Frances de Wolfe
   Fenwick
Boston: Lothrop, Lee &
   Shepard, 1910

This story of a spinster and her young, beautiful, gifted, bohemian, drug-addled half-brother poet is the most intriguing novel read this year. Set in Montreal's Square Mile, is it a roman à clef? I'm of that city, but not that society, so cannot say with any certainty.
M'Lord, I Am Not Guilty
Frances Shelley Wees
New York: Doubleday,

   1954

A wealthy young widow moves to a bedroom community hoping to solve the murder of her cheating husband. This is post-war domestic suspense of the highest order. I'd long put off reading M'Lord, I Am Not Guilty because of its title, despite strong reviews from 65 years ago. My mistake.

The Ravine
Kendal Young
     [Phyllis Brett Young]
London: W.H. Allen, 1962

The lone thriller by the author of The Torontonians and PsycheThe Ravine disturbed more than any other novel. Two  girls are assaulted – one dies  in a mid-sized New England town. Their art teacher, a woman struggling with her younger sister's disappearance, sets out to entrap the monster. 


The keen-eyed will have noted that The Ravine does not feature in the stack of books at the top of this post. My copy is currently in Montreal, where it's being used to reset a new edition as the fifteenth Ricochet Book.


Amy Lavender Harris will be writing a foreword. Look for it this coming May.

Of the books reviewed, those in print are:


A succès de scandal when first published in 1895, The Woman Who Did is Grant Allen's most famous book. It doesn't rank amongst the best of the fifteen Allen novels I've read to date, but I found it quite moving. Recommended. It's currently available in a Broadview Press edition.


The Black Donnellys is pulpmaster Thomas P. Kelley's most enduring book; as such, it seems the natural place to start. Originally published in 1954 by Harlequin, this semi-fictional true crime title been in and out of print with all sorts of other publishers. The most recent edition, published by Darling Terrace, appeared last year.


Experiment in Springtime (1947) is the first Margaret Millar novel to be considered outside the mystery genre. Still, you'd almost think a body will appear. See if you don't agree. The novel can be found in Dawn of Domestic Suspense, the second volume in Syndicate Books' Collected Millar


The Listening Walls (1952) ranks amongst the weakest of the Millars I've read to date, which is not to say it isn't recommended. The 1975 bastardization by George McMillin is not. It's the last novel featured in The Master at Her Zenith, the third volume in The Collected Millar.


I read two versions of Margaret Saunders' Beautiful Joe in this year. The first, the "New and Revised Edition," was published during the author's lifetime; the second, Whitman's "Modern Abridged Edition," was not. The original 1894 edition is one of the best selling Canadian novels of all time. One hundred and fifteen year later, it's available in print from Broadview and Formac.


Jimmie Dale, Alias the Gray Seal by American Michael Howard proved a worthy prequel to Frank L. Packard's Gray Seal adventures. Published by the author, it's available through Amazon.

This year, as series editor for Ricochet Books, I was involved in reviving The Damned and the Destroyed, Kenneth Orvis's 1962 novel set in Montreal's illicit drug trade. My efforts in uncovering the author's true identity and history form the introduction.


Praise this year goes to House of Anansi's 'A List' for keeping alive important Canadian books that have escaped Bertelsmann's claws. It is the true inheritor of Malcolm Ross's vision.


And now, as tradition dictates, resolutions for the new year:
  • My 2018 resolution to read more books by women has proven a success in that exactly fifty percent of books read and reviewed here and at CNQ were penned by female authors. I resolve to stay the course.
  • My 2018 resolution to read more French-language books might seem a failure; the only one discussed here was Le dernier voyage, a translation of Eric Cecil Morris's A Voice is Calling. I don't feel at all bad because I've been reading a good number of French-language texts in researching my next book. Still, I'm hoping to read and review more here in the New Year.
  • At the end of last year's survey, I resolved to complete one of the two books I'm currently writing. I did not. For shame! How about 2020?
  • Finally, I plan on doing something different with the blog next year by focusing exclusively on authors whose books have never before featured. What? No Grant  Allen? No Margaret Millar? No Basil King? As if 2019 wasn't strange enough.
Bonne année! 

Addendum: As if the year wasn't strange enough, I've come to the conclusion that Arthur Stringer's debut novel, The Silver Poppy, should be one of the three books most deserving a return to print.


But which one should it replace?

18 July 2019

Reviving a Searching Novel about Drug Addiction



Kenneth Orvis' The Damned and the Destroyed arrives in bookstores this week. The fourteenth in Ricochet Books' series of post-war Canadian noir reissues, I'm particularly keen on this one. If anything, Lee Child is even more of a fan, choosing the novel for his entry in Books to Die For: The World's Greatest Mystery Writers on the World's Greatest Mystery Novels (New York: Atria, 2012).


Child writes about purchasing a copy – the 1966 Belmont edition (above) – after having been drawn by the cover:
What lay inside was not quite as advertised – although by no means a disappointment. Quite the reverse, actually. This was a solid, high-quality thriller.
First  published in 1962, set in 1954 Montreal, I first read The Damned and the Destroyed four years ago. My opinion of the novel – shared here – was at the time lukewarm. That I pushed to have it republished as a Ricochet Book says something about first impressions. The Damned and the Destroyed has never let go. My interest in the novel and its author is such that I wrote the introduction to this, the first print edition in more than half a century.

Enjoy... as much as you can a story of smack and death.

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30 October 2017

CNQ at 100



It doesn't seem right to describe the new issue of Canadian Notes & Queries as special – every issue is special – but this one, the one hundredth issue, marks a remarkable milestone. That it did so in its fiftieth year is both a reflection of an often precarious past and its stability this past decade under publisher Dan Wells.

I came on board with my first Dusty Bookcase column in issue 81 (Spring 2010). My subject back then was The Miracle Man, the very first book I'd ever read by Frank L. Packard. This time around, the column takes the form of an investigative update on thriller writer and passer of forged cheques Kenneth Orvis (a/k/a Kenneth LeMieux). His is not exactly a household name, though regular readers may remember my reviews of his debut, Hickory House (1956), and Cry Hallelujah! (1970), his greatest flop.


I've also contributed an essay, "For All Its Faults," which has been described by historian Christopher Moore as an evisceration of the killing of the New Canadian Library. In this unpleasant task I was supported by Daniel Donaldson's razor sharp editorial cartoon.


On a related note – two, actually – my daughter Astrid provides an editorial cartoon to "Hints and Allegations," a chapter from Elaine Dewar's GG-nominated The Handover, the shameful story of how it was our country's greatest publisher was given away to a foreign multinational.


Also featured is Andreae Callanan's "The Xenotext's Woman Problem," winner of this year's CanLit Crit Essay Contest. Nick Mount writes on CanLit's beginnings, Anna Porter shares memories of McClelland & Stewart as it was in the 'seventies, and Jim Polk looks at fifty years of the House of Anansi. In "Will Anyone Care?" Mark Sampson lays bare his obsession to preserving his work. The issue is rounded out by contributions from Seth, Pierre Nepveu (translated by Donald Winkler), Robert Wringham, Mary H. Auerbach Rykov, Mark Bourrie, Kamal Al-Solaylee, Jason Dickson, David Huebert, David Mason, J.C. Sutcliffe, Rohan Maitzen, André Forget, Alex Good, Bruce Whiteman, Stephen Fowler.


More information can be found here at the CNQ website. And this link will take you to the subscription page, which will bring you issues 101, 102, and 103.

Every one special.


29 June 2017

More News from a Messy Desk in a Dusty Room



I wrote in the previous post that changes were afoot... and now they've begun. Starting this week, most new reviews of our suppressed, ignored, and forgotten will be posted at the Canadian Notes & Queries website. In fact, the first, of Kenneth Orvis's Cry Hallelujah!, went up just yesterday.

I've been researching Orvis on and off for three years now. A fascinating figure, he was born and raised in Montreal, yet I've not been able to find a single person who knew the man. Between 1956 and 1974, Orvis published a total of seven novels (he claimed the number was eight). Cry Hallelujah! stands out in that it doesn't focus on crime or espionage, but evangelism. Published in 1970, it followed his two biggest sellers, The Damned and the Destroyed (1962) and Night Without Darkness (1965), bombed terribly, and sent Orvis's career into a tailspin from which it never recovered.

You'll find my new review of this old book here:
'A Thriller Writer's Very Bad Career Move'

None of this is to say that this blog will disappear. I'll still be posting other things, including the occasional review of some old book or other. And, um, there's also The Dusty Bookcase – the book – coming from Biblioasis. Look for it in early August.

Related posts:

24 November 2016

Kenneth Orvis Cover Cavalcade (and a mystery)



What follows fails. It was intended as a visual feast of first edition covers for every book written by the mysterious Kenneth Orvis.

Close but no cigar.

Hickory House, the author's scarce Harlequin debut is here, as is Over and Under the Table, his much less common swan song. What's missing is Walk Alone, Orvis's second book. Described by Orvis as a novel, it features in every one of his bibliographies, yet WorldCat does not recognize; Library and Archives Canada has no copy, nor does the Library of Congress. No used copies are listed by online booksellers. Search engines bring nothing. I've yet to find a single review or advert.


Like its author, the book is a elusive... or is it simply a phantom?

Either way, these are the others, complete with snippets of poorly written cover copy:

Hickory House
Toronto: Harlequin, 1956
Cover illustration by Norm Eastman
Hickory House – the result of a lifetime's hopes and ambitions. After lean years of insignificant books with their small bets and mean losers, hurried movings and furtive payoffs, now Al Rossi was a Big Time operator with a whole city answering to him.
The Damned and the Destroyed
London: Dobson, 1962
When Maxwell Dent returned from the Korean War after helping to smash an enemy ring supplying narcotics to U.N. forces, he thought he had turned his back forever on this nefarious trade with all its unpleasant associations. Yet here he was in Huntley Ashton's elegant Westmount home being asked to undertake a similar task in Montreal.
Night Without Darkness
Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1965
 Jacket design by Peter Edwards
Anton Fox, a Communist militant, has abducted a Western scientist, Beldon, and plans to use his new discovery, known as "paralysis mist", to get control of the Communist bloc – and take the Cold War off the ice.
Cry Hallelujah!
London: Dobson, 1970
Jacket design by Geoffrey Harrold
A beautiful girl with a vision starts a revivalist mission in a decrepit hall in Greenwich Village – her congregation a handful of down and outs and the prostitutes from the brothel opposite.
Into a Dark Mirror
London: Dobson, 1971
Jacket design by Colin Andrews
Mark and Toni become inextricably involved in a crime hunt in France when they are there to investigate the extraordinary disappearance of their fathers after a war reunion. 
The Disinherited
London: Dobson, 1974
Here is an audaciously original novel of human conflicts and suspense. In a story of nonstop tension it details the agony of the wrongly-accused and the guilty, and the public attitude toward them.
The Doomsday List
London: Dobson, 1974
Several CIA agents have been 'eliminated' in various particularly brutal ghoulish ways. These murders have taken place at regular intervals in different European countries, and Adam Beck from another top-secret agency, is detailed to investigate.
Over and Under the Table:
The Anatomy of an Alcoholic
Montreal: Optimum, 1985
Cover design by Emmanuel Blanc
I feel very excited. Over and Under the Table will be advantageous to family members of alcoholics, school children, ministers of religion and persons who work on a day to day basis with alcoholic members of our society.
Major R. Mackenzie
Director, Public Relations, The Salvation Army, Montreal
My thanks to St Marys Public Library, which managed to get me a copy of Over and Under the Table as an inter-library loan from McMaster University. Thanks to McMaster, too!

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21 November 2016

Kenneth Orvis: A Plea



Do you know this man?

I've been slowly making my way through the complete works of Kenneth Orvis (a/k/a Kenneth Lemieux). Eight books in total – perhaps nine? – it hasn't
been at all taxing. My favourite thus far is The Damned and the Destroyed, a 1962 novel dealing with drug dealing in 'fifties. I admit that my preference has everything to do with the fact that it is set in Montreal, the author's hometown and mine.

I'm certain I never heard a word about Kenneth Orvis growing up – then again, I never heard anything about John Glassco, whose biography I would write and whose letters I would edit. Two very different men, though they did share a penchant for drink; Over and Under the Table, Orvis's 1985 memoir, is subtitled The Anatomy of an Alcoholic.

The challenge in writing about Glassco was that he loved to fabricate; the man fancied himself "an accomplished liar" and "great practitioner of deceit." Things were made easier by the paper trail he left in his wake. And then there were his friends... many of whom became my friends.

I thank him for that.

Glassco died in 1981, more than four years before Orvis's Over and Under the Table saw publication. According to the author's bio on the back cover, the author had recently relocated to Montreal and was at work on a new novel.

As I say, Glassco had friends. Did Orvis?

Of course, he did.

And so, this plea – directed at friends, family, acquaintances and colleagues – for information about the man. This for a future article about Orvis and his work.

My email address: brianjohnbusby[at]gmail.com... or you can just leave a comment.

All leads appreciated. No stones unturned.

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16 November 2016

Betting the House



Hickory House
Kenneth Orvis [pseud. Kenneth Lemieux]
Toronto: Harlequin, 1956

Bookie Alfredo Rossi can see the writing on the wall. The Feds are cracking down, and it's only a matter of time before they move in on him and sidekick Benny Kramer. Fortunately, Al has been good with his savings; he dresses like a million dollars, but is otherwise quite frugal. Al's also a guy who keeps an ear to the ground. He's heard rumblings about a corrupt mayor in some city on Lake Michigan. He's also heard that this same mayor, Carson Peters, keeps paperwork pertaining to his various illegalities in his office safe.

Al knows just the guy, a safecracker named Lou Kovaks, who can get him those papers. The poor sap was once a steady client – "Lou doesn't pick stretch runners as well as he does the locks on safes" – before he took one too many chances on the job. He's been serving time in the prison at Dannemora, but is just about to be sprung. Al is there when it happens: "'What's the matter, Al... afraid I'd be late for the first race?'"


Instead of the track, Al drives Lou to that city on Lake Michigan. Along the way, he fills the safecracker in on the job, complete with photograph:
"It's an old Continental," he stated soberly, "I've blown a dozen them in my time. A good jamb shot and the door pops open like a cuckoo clock when the hands point up."
Piece of cake. After Lou is paid, he leaves town and the novel. Al sticks around and blackmails the mayor into allowing him to set up Hickory House, a swanky nightclub and illegal gambling den on the edge of town. All goes swimmingly until the joint attracts the attention of big-time mobster Budsey Everest.

Hickory House is a first novel. In his 1985 memoir, Over and Under the Table, author Kenneth Orvis tells us it was written over an intense seven-month period: "Total absorption in plotting writing, and editing erased every other want and need except eating, sleeping, bathing, and defacating [sic]." I found this surprising, not because Hickory House is a bad book (it's perfectly fine), but because it's so short and simple. There is no real depth to the characters: Benny is devoted, Peters is corrupt, his tramp of a daughter is a tramp, and Al really know how to dress. Everyone plays their part, and the plot unfolds pretty much as you might expect.

Seven months?

Who am I to say it wasn't worth it? Hickory House went in and out of print within a month, but Orvis maintains that it brought all sorts of attention:
My novel had opened many new doors. After several radio and TV interviews and short pieces in local newspapers, more copywriting accounts than there was time for were easily available.
One can't help but envy.

So, yes, a worthwhile debut... for Orvis, if not the reader.

Shame that Harlequin forgot to put his name on the cover.


Object and Access: A 157-page mass market paperback. This past summer I snatched up the lone copy being sold online from a bookseller in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia. Price: US$12.95.

Not on Worldcat.

Good luck.

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