East of Temple Bar (1946), by Joan Suter

I just read one of those books that I wanted to remain inside.

“Mom, are you making dinner?”
“No, I’m busy with my book.”
“I thought you finished it an hour ago.”
“I did.”

I should have guessed this about East of Temple Bar, Joan Suter’s first novel, by the opening pages, which felt so engagingly real. Having read only the first chapter, I sent a quick message over to Brian Busby — who recommended it, and whose copy I was reading — to rave about how I wanted my dear friend Kit in England, who had been a sub-editor on The Guardian, to read it. Sadly, she does not have access to a copy. I’m now on the hunt for two copies to purchase: one for her, one for myself. It has certainly made it onto the shelf of books I want to own in first edition.

Joan Suter Walker is best known for her 1953 humorous memoir, Pardon My Parka, the account of her experiences as a war bride moving to Val-d’Or, Quebec, which won the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour in 1954. I can’t believe that it could be better than East of Temple Bar, which stands so strong as a first novel. Something feels so real about the world of Fleet Street in the 1930s that she creates, but that should be no surprise given her biography.

Born in London in 1908, and educated there and in Switzerland, she began by writing advertisements for Harrod’s, then briefly worked as the editor of Children’s Sketch before becoming a sub-editor for the Amalgamated Press, a role fictionalized in her novel. As in the novel, too, she was also a freelance writer of short fiction. Other elements of her biography also feature in her novel — her own varied experiences split between her two primary characters, Eve Smith and Hugh Fenwick — but it is her familiarity with the life of a working reporter and the ethos of Fleet Street that creates the authenticity of character and scene that is the foundation of East of Temple Bar’s success.

At one point, though, I almost stopped reading. After the first chapter of impressive writing, there is a point at which the momentum of the narrative crashes up against an emotional wall. Full stop. Let me explain. You can decide if I am being too harsh. You know I got over it.

Hugh and Eve meet by accident in the autumn of 1930, and through completely believable circumstances she is instrumental in launching his career, and he gives her the push she needs to pursue hers. She is immediately successful, and despite his minor jealousies the two remain supportive friends and end up taking an office together, both ultimately going freelance, and carrying on their several relationships with other individuals. On page 29, though, just before a set of four ominous asterisks, comes the romantic foreshadowing.

It was very silent for a moment in the little office. Hugh opened his mouth to say, “But, Eve, what about you and me? …” But the telephone bell rang and he lifted the receiver to hear the voice of his favourite blonde. He settled back in his chair, the receiver cradled to his ear and winked at Eve, and the moment was lost.

Perhaps if it hadn’t been, the whole course of Eve’s life might have changed. She might never have become Mrs. Roger Pelham and Lewis Randall wouldn’t have wakened up in the middle of the night cursing the day he ever met her.

This is only page 29. And this is not a Harlequin Romance – one does not necessarily trust that all will work out in the end, and Suter has already shown that she is quite willing to force her characters through difficult emotions and her readers with them. I wasn’t sure I wanted to live through what was to come in Eve’s life, to be honest. It is to Suter’s credit that while the foreshadowing was not deceptive, the characters’ lives were handled with care — or maybe the readers’ lives were. Hard to say. At least, this reader felt, at the end, that what Eve and Hugh and Roger and Lewis lived through was very real, and while heart-rending at time, neither contrived nor untenable. I felt Eve’s pain, at so many points, but when she recovered, that felt honest, too. There were one or two places where I wanted to smack her for being a bit obtuse, but I was not a woman in the 1930s, and I recognize that the gendered navigation of that world are beyond my ability to judge in retrospect. The final scene reveals the depth of self-knowledge and strength Eve has gained through her trials: again, not so much as to be unbelievable, but enough to justify her moving forward.

I’m not very good at plot summary without spoilers, so I won’t try. Joan Suter herself married quickly and later divorced, then emigrated to Canada and married a Canadian army major, James Rankin Walker. There are parallels in the book, but they don’t exactly line up, so I can’t read Pardon My Parka and expect to have any glimpse of what happens beyond East of Temple Bar. But I wish I could. I generally think that sequels tend to reveal a lack of imagination (in Hollywood at least), but in this case, I really wish there were one.

An Air That Kills (1957), by Margaret Millar

Tags

Mystery

For me, infidelity as the underlying premise of a plot is a hard line that I almost never cross, so Margaret Millar’s An Air That Kills was not an obvious choice in novels to read on my holiday, but Brian Busby, of The Dusty Bookcase and Canadian Notes & Queries, whose opinion I greatly respect, suggests it as one of her best, so I here I am.

Having reached about a third of the way through the book as we sit in a tent in Nakusp, BC, I have to say that I don’t really like any of the players, whether or not I question their moral choices. In fact, it feels to me that even Millar doesn’t like any of the characters. Not a promising beginning, but bear with me. What we have so far is a novel peopled with seemingly reprehensible individuals, engaging in socially questionable behaviours, and as yet no real mystery. And still the story sticks in my head when I am not reading it: not for prurient reasons, but in a more detached way, like the detective tasked with discovering the sequence of events leading up to the crime. But as I say, as yet there has been no crime and still Millar manages to engage me fully in the narrative. This borders on genius, if only because I have no idea why I find this novel so engrossing. But I do. And so I am anxious for our next stop so I can read on.

Grand Forks, BC: I take back what I said about Millar not liking any of her characters: it appears that—to some extent at least—Ralph Turee is a stand-up guy… When Thelma Bream attempts to embroil him in her drama, his honest yet uncompromising responses to her manipulative behaviour reveal at least a modicum of moral and social intelligence.

Vancouver, BC, much later: Ralph Turee’s true nature wasn’t at first obvious, but as the mystery of Ron Galloway’s disappearance progresses, his intelligence begins to overshadow the crassness inherent in his initial description. In the end, it is he who finally discovers the course of events leading up to Millar’s rather abrupt dénouement. Here’s how it all unfolds.

As the story opens, affluent Ron Galloway and his best friend Harry Bream are off to join “the fellows” at Ron’s fishing lodge for the weekend, but Ron never arrives. Harry Bream

worked for a drug company [and was] extremely liberal with free pills, diagnoses and advice. On occasion he was more effective than a regular doctor since he was unhampered by training, medical ethics or caution, and some of his cures were miraculously quick. These were the ones his friends remembered.

“The fellows” are three other of their friends:

Bill Winslow, an executive in his father’s milling company; Joe Hepburn, manager of a firm which manufactured plastic toys and novelties; and Ralph Turee, who taught economics at the University of Toronto. Except for Turee, they were men of average intelligence and above average income., Turee never let them forget this. Chronically broke, he made fun of their money and borrowed it; possessing a superior education, he jeered at their ignorance and used it to his own advantage. But the group was, on the whole, a congenial one, especially after small differences had been dissolved in alcohol.

So far, I am really liking these men.

Ron Galloway is married to Esther, with whom he had an affair, leaving his wife Dorothy, who is now in ill health and understandably very bitter. Esther feels guilty about Dorothy and insecure about Harry’s wife Thelma, who Ron appears fond of, although Ron tells Esther that he thinks Thelma a “fattish little hausfrau with some of her marbles missing.”

Though Thelma and Esther did not get along well, the two men remained the best of friends, partly because Thelma seemed to like Galloway and encouraged Harry to see him, and partly because the two men had been friends ever since their prep school years together.

And so the stage is set.

When Ron doesn’t show up at the fishing lodge, Esther’s first assumption is that he’s with Thelma. Which he isn’t. But her suspicion is not unfounded, a fact that underlies the complicated plot that unfolds… or rather doesn’t, for Millar holds her narrative cards very close to her chest. We are given all sorts of information as Turee acquires it. The narration is limited omniscient: much of what we have is through the filter of Turee’s psyche, but not all. We are certainly not given access to the working of many of the players’ minds. Thelma ensnares Turee—likely as the most sympathetic and sensible of the men—in the drama as soon as Ron is pronounced missing. Sadly for her, his intellectual bent ensures that he follows his curiosity and concern (he is, as his wife observes, “much kinder than [she or any of the other characters] about human frailties”) until he discovers the truth.

Turee’s discovery of the truth, almost serendipitously, as he is given a fellowship to a university in California where Thelma had moved, is somewhat disappointing. After the complex development of character and social interaction throughout the novel, the mechanism of the actual crime is delivered through a simple albeit very disturbing conversation amongst Ralph Turee, Harry, and Thelma in the final act. Turee’s opinion half-way through the book is certainly justified: “All of Thelma’s high hopes had been built on deceit and her wonderful plans made entirely at the expense of other people.”

Returning to why this book is so good then: I still can’t pin it down, but it is. I suppose it is because the author’s intelligence underlies the narrative so subtly: in the way she structures her ideas; in the irony of her narrative voice; in poignant, if sometimes unflattering descriptions of her characters; in her insight into the nuances of the morality of the society she portrays. I have to say, though, that the moments of satisfaction I felt when reading mostly came in scenes of Ralph Turee reflecting on the situation: his analysis of his social circle is ultimately uncompromising, balancing the moral lassitude exhibited by the characters around him.

The Secret of Willow Castle (1966), by Lyn Cook

Way back in 2012, I was out in Ontario celebrating the 100^th anniversary of the War of 1812, staying in Brant County, one-time home to Sara Jeannette Duncan, E. Pauline Johnson, Adelaide Hoodless, and other notable early Canadian women. Although Brantford was fascinating, I was rather sad that it lies so far from Westport, up near Kingston, where author Lyn Cook lived at that time. I had spoken to Lyn Cook a number of times by telephone; she was a delightful woman: sharp, engaging, knowledgeable, and with a sense of humour that made me really want to meet her in person. But alas, on that trip, it was not to be. The next best thing, though, was visiting the… bookstore? library? home? of Mr. Nelson Ball, who had been slowly selling off his Canadiana library over the years, and who had a store of Lyn Cook first editions. Having already depleted my book budget, I could only choose one, so I purchased The Secret of Willow Castle, the favourite childhood book of Lisa Wood, my host in Brantford. She loved this book so much, she tells me, that she forced her parents to take her to Napanee, to see where it takes place. Doubtless Napanee has changed since 1834, but one always hopes to find something of the story still lingering…

For The Secret of Willow Castle is based on real people: Henrietta MacPherson and her family existed; she appears on both the 1861 and 1871 Canadian census records, still living with her parents. A comment in the end matter of the book tells us that “in the town of Napanee, Ontario, Henrietta’s home still stands now, as it did in 1834, on the river bank looking towards the falls. The mills are gone but a plaque in a hillside park marks their place, and the willows still trail their branches in the quiet waters of the pond.” The house is in fact now the Napanee town museum, with its own website. So too is there ample historical evidence of Henrietta’s cousin John Alex, who weaves his way in and out of her life, an inspiration to her growing sense of honour and responsibility. John Alex is in fact John Alexander MacDonald, destined to be the first Prime Minister of Canada. There are sufficient indications of his growing political acumen, and discussion of his future should he choose to enter politics, but never is he firmly identified. The unaware reader does not stumble over the politics in the story, which are natural comments made by the adults, not ideologies masking as narrative. Politics are only interesting to Henrietta because she is a curious child who wants to know what the adults around her are discussing. The reader, like Henrietta, learns just enough to stay interested: “’Tis not usual for young ladies of eleven to be interested in politics, childie, but if you want to know, I’ll tell you” (31), her father tells her, and includes her in his discussion with John Alex about William MacKenzie’s leadership, couching his discussion in terms that young Henrietta will understand.

Despite its extensive and solid connection with Canada’s real history, I read The Secret of Willow Castle with no introduction other than that a friend had liked it. I knew nothing of the history of Napanee, or its connection to John A. MacDonald or Canadian history as a whole. To me, The Secret of Willow Castle was an entrancing story of a young girl being raised by an affluent and morally honourable family in the early 1830s. The tone of the novel reminded me of Louisa May Alcott’s Eight Cousins (1875), undoubtedly my favourite book as a girl, as the sense of a young girl needing to learn her place in the world, not only as a woman but as a member of an entitled family, resonates in both.

The story begins with young Henrietta MacPherson—having recently celebrated her 11^th birthday—awaiting the arrival of her favourite cousin, John Alex. John Alex brings her a present, but in her excitement, she demands that she receive it immediately. The moral current of the novel is set here, for her father allows her to open the present, but not to actually use it until she learns to behave in a more controlled manner. John Alex agrees, noting that she will learn such control as she grows older. While Henrietta is not—and does not become—a meek, obedient child, such as this scene might suggest both the author and the parents would like, she does learn both control and responsibility through the course of the story. Allowed to accompany her father to the gristmill they own, she discovers a mysterious new friend, Sarah, who has created a “secret castle” in a willow tree by the river. The girls become fast friends, hiding notes in the tree when they cannot meet, but contriving to meet whenever they can. The friendship between the girls is the underlying thread that weaves through the other events in Henrietta’s story: being barred from a skating party; attending a fair; meeting the neighbour’s slave, Jim, and questioning the morality of his situation; helping to settle a long-standing feud with another family; visiting the local wise woman for medical aid; being surprised with a trip on a river schooner; and participating in the day-to-day life of young girls in the mid 1800s. The girls’ lives are thrown into turmoil, though, when Sarah, an orphan servant to a neighbour, is at risk of being sent away to a family fallen on hard times. Just as the crisis reaches its climax, Henrietta falls dangerously ill.  Narrative expectation tells us that all must work out in the end, and the reader can almost—but not quite—see the path of Sarah and Henrietta’s story before it unfolds. There is no overarching dramatic tension in the story—despite a few tense scenes—but drama and excitement are not the point of The Secret of Willow Castle. This novel has significantly more substance than the faster-paced sensationalist story often written for youth today. The Secret of Willow Castle is both an extremely well researched and seemingly faithful representation of early Canadian life, and a heart-warming portrayal of a young girl’s growth into a strong, liberal-minded young woman to whom friendship and family remain paramount.

Murder by Accident (1947), by Leonie Mason (Joan Walker)

“This is a book for those who prefer to take their murders quietly” (dustjacket)

I’ve been in conversation with Brian Busby, of The Dusty Bookcase and Canadian Notes & Queries, about a number of authors of obscure Canadian mysteries, and he has kindly lent me his copies of Joan Walker’s East of Temple Bar (published in 1946 under her maiden name, Joan Suter) and Murder by Accident (published the following year under the pseudonym Leonie Mason). By the time these books were published in England, Walker had already (just) moved to Canada, where she married Major James Rankin Walker. Her early life as a war bride became the fodder for her Pardon My Parka, which won the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour in 1954… but that is not (mostly) what this blog is about.

This blog is about mysteries. Most notably, British mysteries and how hooked I am on them as a genre. Not only do I devote most of my television viewing time to shows like Vera, Shetland, and Agatha Christie’s Poirot and Miss Marple, but recently having contracted covid, I have not only binge-watched the entirety of the Endeavour – Morse – Lewis -verse but also revisited a number of favourite authors: Dorothy Sayers, Ruth Rendell, P.J. James, and of course Agatha Christie. So Leonie Mason’s Murder by Accident is in esteemed company. In the world of early Canadian women’s novels that I have read, though, it lies beside such questionable delights as Mabel Broughton Billett’s Calamity House (1927) and The Robot Detective (1932), and Mary Coad Craig’s The Two Decanters (1930), in much the same way as the Brokenwood Mysteries overshadows the trite Midsomer Murders or the dark, convoluted Hinterland.

In his review of Murder by Accident, Brian points suggests that its greatest failing lies in the title being “somewhat of a spoiler.” I have to admit that it turns out to have been an anti-spoiler for me. Brian’s comment led me to expect the initial poisoning to have actually been accidental, and I thus suspended my disbelief far more in reading than I usually would with mystery novels. “I don’t trust those mushrooms not to have been accidental… so let’s see what she does with this.”

What she does is weave a relatively successful mystery, albeit incorporating perhaps more than its fair share of tropes… but then, were the recognized elements of the British detective drama as ubiquitous in 1947 as they are now? So many of them can be attributed to Agatha Christie (certainly the drawing room conclusion scene, which Murder by Accident manages to avoid), and her first novel was published only in 1922.

As to tropes: Green Acres, the guest house owned by Christie and Henry Burton, is obvious (and yes, it not only was, but is a real thing: I have had the delightful experience myself); it also reminds me strongly of one of my favourite mysteries, Mary Stewart’s Wildfire at Midnight (1956), which also draws on the conventions of the “country hotel” trope, complete with love triangles, marital discord, and a femme fatale. Similarly, Mason’s cast of characters, like any Agatha Christie novel, spans the gammut, including the members of the Ladies’ Auxiliary, but missing the vicar and his entourage. Hotel guests Major Guy Warren, recently demobbed from the Intelligence Corp, and Angela Nash, the young, attractive secretary of the first murder victim – the acerbic author Anna Rawlings – combine forces and with the help of Guy’s friend Peter Martin, CID, unravel the mystery of what appear to be a series of coincidental accidents occuring at Green Acres. Other guests include the femme fatale, soon-to-be-divorced Lydia French; Anna’s toy-boy husband, Frank; and the greedy businessman George Heskett, who is attempting unsuccessfully to coerce the Burtons into selling the guest house.

And so the stage is set: but the story could go either way. That it turned into an enjoyable afternoon of reading is unquestionably for the same reason that the authors won two literary awards in the 1950s: Leonie Mason has a rather engaging narrative voice and facility with language. There is levity, too, although this is in no way a humourous book. The cabbie in the opening scene, who “had a private theory about bumps and potholes in the road” (5), and thus aimed for them to – successfully – increase his fare, reappears at times like Macbeth’s gatekeeper. The local poachers, when a shot is fired in the woods, are ”seething with indignation”: they “are far too good at the job to mistake Angela and Christie for a brace of pheasants” and not willing to become “the laughing stock of the place for their bad aim” (123). I enjoy a book, too, that includes as the final sentence of a chapter full of deep discussion of plots and motivations: “They queued up to use the boot scraper just outside the front door and they they went in to lunch” (183). One gets the sense that the irony of the prosaic action is intentional.

Overall, I’d have to say that I really enjoyed Murder by Accident, but I have to agree with Brian that the climax was highly disappointing. It was easy to anticipate, and the run up to the final scene included all of the information necessary, leaving no possibility of a satisfying denouement. We are just left there: “Oh. Okay then. Right. Next novel.”

Speaking of which: I now feel that I need to read Pardon My Parka (1953) and Repent at Leisure (1957), both of which deal with war brides. The opening pages of Murder by Accident hold some interesting comments about war brides, and I wonder how this fits in with Joan Walker’s biography. She married Ogilvie MacKenzie-Kerr in London in 1938, but had obviously divorced by 1946 when she married James Rankin Walker in Toronto. She had emigrated to Canada in April 1946, just as the novel was being published, so one wonders about her characters. Guy is glad he had avoided “making a fool of himself … with some unsuitable girl who had seemed to be the sun and the moon and the stars during a brief forty-eight hours’ leave” (11). And Lydia married during the war: “At first it was such fun. Leaves. … Dancing until all hours … and then when peace broke out, Rodney didn’t” (13). The tensions in the plot are underpinned by relationships built and destroyed during the war years, when men were deployed or on leave, and women stayed on the home front and… well, it depended, apparently, on the woman. But Joan Suter, Mrs. Ogilvie MacKenzie-Kerr, became a war bride herself. So where does that leave us? I’ll have to read on.

More by Mona Weiss…

After receiving this morning a particularly heartening comment on one of Mona Weiss’s poems, I decided to poke about in our records to see what else we knew about this poet. Not much, it turns out, so hopefully her family will get back to me with more. I did, however, find digitized copies of the complete run of The McGilliad, the magazine of the McGill University Arts Undergraduate Society, to which she contributed in 1931. Here is the complete set of poems (including the poem in the previous post) she published in The McGilliad, which only ran for 1930-1931.

Maybe the family might know, too, who S.K. is…

“To S.K.” and “Discovery.” The McGilliad 2.3 (January 1931): 10.

“Desertion” and “To S.K.” The McGilliad 2.4 (February-March 1931): 82.

“Burma Road” (1942), by Edna Jaques

Jaques, Edna. “Burma Road.” Lethbridge Herald (13 February 1942).

I found this while looking (rather unsuccessfully, I might add) for anything about Asia or the War in Canadian newspapers by Dora Sanders in the early 1940s.

At first I thought to myself: “Surely Burma is jungle, and humid, not a dry, dusty desert?” but then I consulted my oracle, Madame Google, who tells me that there is extensive desert in Burma, but that are not (as I also suspected) any hyenas.

Still, readers would not miss the intent, I am sure.

Dora Sanders in the Circle of Young Canada

Dora Sanders’s contributions to the “Playtime for Little People” column on the Circle of Young Canada page of the Toronto Globe: “To The Robin” (26 June 1915), “My Flower” (15 January 1916), “Daylight Savings” (1 July 1916), and “Wonderments” (19 August 1916).

Dora Sanders’s contributions to the “Playtime for Little People” column on the Circle of Young Canada page of the Toronto Globe: “To The Robin” (26 June 1915), “My Flower” (15 January 1916), “Daylight Savings” (1 July 1916), and “Wonderments” (19 August 1916). Playtime Prizes of one dollar each were “given to boys and girls from 11 to 13 years old for the best letter on any subject, the best story or nature letter, and the best poem, photograph or drawing.” Dora won “best poem for April” in 1915 and “best poem for January” in 1916 but it is not certain if “My Flower” was in fact the winning January 1916 poem. The correlation between publication and winning is tenuous; not all winning poems appear to have been published. Dora Sanders’s daughter Pat Carney, in her memoir Trade Secrets (Toronto: Key Porter, 2000), notes that her mother “published her first poem, ‘Song of the Trees,’ the the Globe in 1915″ (26), but I at least could not find it in the Globe’s online archives.

Here are all the poems I did find. They are barely legible, but hopefully can be parsed.

New entries coming soon: Dora M. and Byrne Hope Sanders

There are still so many women to include…

I’m creating entries for Dora M. Sanders, aka Dora Sanders Carney, journalist, author, and mother of BC politician Pat Carney. Her biography came out in 1980, which does not put her on our radar, but she also (we discover) was a journalist in the 1930s, which does. Her sister, Byrne Hope Sanders, is also on our list of women to include, so I will be adding her soon, as well.

Meanwhile, I have run across a couple of articles by Dora M. Sanders in the Maclean’s archives that reveal her position regarding women’s rights, especially politically. The first article —dealing with border crossings—seems prescient, given her own experiences during the Japanese invasion of Shanghai in 1939.

Sanders, Dora M. “Shackled!” Maclean’s (February 2, 1933), 17, 41.

Sanders, Dora M. “Women Won’t Be Free,” Maclean’s (August 15, 1933), 8, 33.

More about Katharine and Helen Bagg

Today, I am going through all of our authors to discover who has or has not been added to Wikipedia… Yes: all 800 authors. It’s rather time consuming, especially when I go down the inevitable rabbit holes the internet provides, like discovering a beautiful photograph of Joyce Marshall on an island in an Ontario marsh, or coming across a twist in the convoluted biography of Marian Osborne that needed to be untangled, or landing upon this blog post from 2017 about the children of Stanley Bagg of Montreal, lamenting that the Dictionary of Canadian Biography has left out his four daughters, two of whom (Katharine and Helen) are authors in our project…

The post is written by Janice Hamilton, Stanley Bagg’s great-great-granddaughter, who assisted us in our initial creation of our entries; we are really grateful to her, here, for filling in more details of these authors lives.

Christmas Greetings and All Good Wishes for the New Year

This Christmas greeting card, signed by E. Cora Hind in 1938, includes poetry by Edna Jaques, Christina Willey, and Helen Bowes.