12. Morgan's Castle by Jan Hilliard

Well looks like I've hit the big time.  Those who follow me closely will have spotted Brian Busby's generous offer to send me the latest Ricochet Books release in the comments section of my review of The Three Roads.  Busby has his own excellent blog and is also the editor at Ricochet Books is an imprint of local publisher Véhicule Press and they do great work, finding and re-releasing in lovely paperback (proper paperback size too, none of this trade paperbacks nonsense) a range of Canadian genre novels, mostly excellent crime and pulp fiction from the mid-20th century.  Go check out their catalogue, it's amazing.  Well he very kindly followed up on his offer and sent me an efficient little package containing this lovely paperback reprint of a lost Canadian semi-classic.  It was surprisingly thinner than I had expected and I jumped right in.

I find it difficult to characterize this novel.  As a rule, I don't read introductions or afterwords (and even try to avoid blurbs) of a book until I have finished the book itself.  The idea is to avoid assumptions and just approach it as directly as possible.  I realize that even with those rules, I had several unexamined assumptions in my head and they were wrestling with the text itself in my brain as I read it.  This is particularly the case with the "gothic" novel.  The famous cover conceit of women with great hair fleeing a castle/manor/cabin with one light on has overshadowed the actual genre itself, one that was already problematic to define.  Morgan's Castle is certainly gothic adjacent in its setup, but the tone and unfolding of events are very different, almost like a dark comic social satire of gentile Canadians behaving badly.

The story takes place in rural Ontario in the early 60s and involves a teenage girl, Laura Dean and her widower, artist father. They live in survivable genteel poverty with better off family members not too far away.  Her aunt Amy as well as her adult brothers are all concerned about her future in about the most selfish way possible:  they want to ensure that she is quickly married off so none of them have to deal with the responsibility of supporting her.  They seem awful right from the get-go.  At first I thought it would be a kind of father and daughter against the world set-up, but her father is portrayed just as negatively.  He is a completely self-obsessed, indulgent and shameless dilettante who only seems to care about his daughter's future in how it will impact him (negatively if she leaves him alone but positively if she can marry into money from which he could benefit).  I'm seething against all these people just a few chapters in!  Laura herself is somewhat of a cypher, a sweet and pleasant girl but still very young and inexperienced.  Though the book is mostly from her perspective, the reader never really gets any sense of her character.

Her aunt Amy is very close friends with Charlotte Morgan, who is the matriarch by marriage of Hilltop House, a mansion overlooking the winery that brought her dead husband their wealth.  Charlotte's lone son Robert's wife was recently made a widower himself (by either an accidental or suicidal ingestion of arsenic sprinkled on berries) and she has designs on making Laura his new bride.  So she invites Laura to spend the summer with her at Hilltop House (or Morgan's Castle as the townsfolk call it).  We get this great set-up where the dad also comes, though very much unwelcome, and refuses to leave ostensibly to watch over his daughter but really because he gets luxurious room and board.

This is where my expectations became confounded.  There is no suspense in Morgan's Castle.  Right away, you hate Charlotte and Amy for their conspiring to manipulate this maiden's future.  Laura is sort of isolated the way you might expect in a gothic thriller but she really isn't as there are so many people around all the time.  It also becomes pretty obvious that the various deaths around Hilltop House could only be the responsibility of one person and the omniscient text all but confirms this.  There is some tension with timing at the end but ultimately this more like a social drama with a psychopath in the middle of it all.

Busby's introduction, which is mostly about the author's life and work than a dissection of the book itself, describes at is having the richest vein of black humour of all her books.  I think perhaps I should have read the introduction first (there are no spoilers, which I appreciate, as this is so often not the case), as I might have picked up on that. I wonder if this book is inspired by a savage critique of uncaring families, perhaps of one that Hilliard (actually Hilda Kay Grant) herself had experienced?  Every single character, except the young and a few side characters (whose best trait may be cluelessness or deliberate obtuseness to avoid social discomfort) are utterly self-serving.  The meagre reputation of small-town Ontario is the ultimate priority.  This rings true to my own upbringing in small town Vancouver Island.

I'm not sure I loved this book.  It was enjoyable and very well-written.  The pastoral Niagara Valley is richly portrayed and the people feel very real (and really awful).  As I said, I was a bit muddled with expectations as I was reading it but I think ultimately the heroine is too vacuous a character for me to have cared for her and the denouement does nothing to fill this out.  There was no satisfying punishment for the bad done, which is not a critique of the book (perhaps some might find this a superior conclusion), but also not to my simple tastes.  You should buy this book to judge for yourself at is nonetheless an important work in Canadian literature.

11. Jackrabbit Parole by Stephen Reid

This is another one of my white whales. I had been looking for this book for years!  I finally found it in a used bookstore in the touristy section of Stephen's Point in Richmond, B.C. (really quite lovely out there if you ever get a chance to go).  I really don't understand why this book is so hard to find. According to the afterword, it was actually quite a bestseller when it came out.  Stephen Reid was certainly very well known at the time.  My family had just left Vancouver Island when he first got arrested and I later heard quite a lot about him, but didn't actually return to Canada until after his much-publicized second arrest.  In any case, his story was long on my radar and I'd been scouring used bookstores across Canada for years.

After I finished Jackrabbit Parole, I went back to the internet to square off the reality of his life versus this narrative.  It's interesting, the wikipedia article feels too short and appears to have some inaccuracies, likewise for his wife, Susan Musgrave.  She is probably an even bigger literary figure in Canada (though both their lives are so entwined it's sort of hard to compare).  It was really sad reading.  He geniunely seems like a decent guy and his ending was quite tragic.  For those of you who don't know, he was part of a celebrated gang of bank heisters called "The Stopwatch Gang" because he wore one around his neck and got in and out within minutes.  He finally got arrested in the 80s and started writing in prison.  The manuscript for Jackrabbit Parole came across Susan Musgrave's desk, who fell in love with both the book and the author.  

He got out eventually and they lived together on the Island, had kids and he started a solid career as a writer and teacher.  Then in 1999 to everyone's shock, he got busted in a shootout following a botched heist in Victoria.  The generally accepted explanation is that his addictions caught up with him again, but I wonder if there also isn't something about the bank robbing life that is hard to let go.  He ended up doing another 15 years in prison, which must have been just brutal at his age.  He eventually got day parole and died a few years later.  What was really heartbreaking is that their daughter who was 10 when he went up, ended up herself an addict and died in her early thirties from a fentanyl overdose.  You really feel for Susan Musgrave, who stuck by both of them to the end.  Must have been so exhausting and stressful.

The book itself is really good.  It was worth the wait.  At first, I found it overwritten, with way too many metaphors and descriptions of quotidian things.  It is a first book, for sure, but as you get involved in the narrative, the style starts to flow into you and the end result is a rich picture of a certain time and place.  The attention to things like using a car radio or making coffee actually would be probably quite interesting and valuable to a younger reader of today to whom all those things would be indicators of a very different time.  

He depicts a criminal milieu that was very specific to Canada in the 80s and still lingers with us today.  The first part takes place in the States, but it still feels very Canadian.  Bobby Andersen (the protagonist and avatar for Reid) is as classic a Canadian expat as is the Canadian doctor who moves to Santa Barbara except he is robbing banks.  I was a safe little middle class kid on Vancouver Island, but the world of real bad guys was always lurking for some reason (one of my classmates older brother was tied up in a bed in a cabin and burnt to death, rumoured to have been done by the Hells Angels).  I don't know what the hell it is, but there are some hard dudes in the hinterlands of this country, despite the relatively good economy and half-decent welfare system.  Jackrabbit Parole gives you a bunch of them, especially the Quebecers and a privileged peek into their world.   

The heists are excellent, really detailed and absolutely capture that 80s aesthetic.  There is a great moment near the end at the final robbery when he is exhausted and stressed after months of being on the run and just before they are heading out for the hit, everything suddenly clicks into place for him.  You realize that he is wired to do this and it is what gets him to his zone, despite everything else that may not be working in his life. It helped me to understand why Reid would have gone back to robbing banks after decades as a successful poetry professor. 

10. Epidemic! by Frank G. Slaughter

I had to pick this one up as it is about a disease catastrophe. I had some slight reservations that I couldn't put my finger on. They were revealed as I read the book. I was hoping and the trade dress and slim paperback somewhat suggested that I would be getting an apocalyptic disease story.  I mean it's about the Black Plague hitting New York in the beginning of that city's roughest period, coinciding with major garbage strikes, the residential arson campaigns by landlords against the poor, crime wave, etc.  Well I know now that Frank Slaughter was a true best-seller middle-brow writer, the kind who walks that thin and often somewhat boring line between entertainment and literature.  It's oddly serious and though a lot of shit goes down, it all feels distant and never really loses control.  It was also much longer than it physically looked.  Took me a while to read.

The beginning is promising. A ship comes in to the NY harbour with a sketchy captain and a drunken first mate.  They took on cheap labour and flea-infested rats in Cameroon, which was having a revolution so there was no news on the outbreak of the plague there.  Slaughter goes into some detail on how the disease actually works, which was cool.  The captain is already sick but his priority is to get to his hot to trot waitress, Gladys.  The rats, of course, are just super psyched to get off the boat to the piles of rotting garbage.  I always love the narrative of the vector spread in disease books.  It's an opportunity for the author to really have some fun with little vignettes, neat characters and locations.  I haven't read it since I was young, but currently the opening of Stephen King's The Stand is a truly memorable example.  Here it is kind of fun, we get Gladys and the captain, whose tryst goes terribly awry (he dies on her couch and she throws him out her window!), a homeless alcoholic who was sleeping near the docks with whom the rats cuddled and a few other threads from there.

Unfortunately, the fun stops here as we transition to the main narrative, which centers around a hospital in Manhattan next to a promising new housing development.  The main character is a world-class immunologist who is on temporary leave from the U.N.  He is absolutely the perfect person to be in charge of fighting the epidemic.  He is in a love triangle with his close friend, surgeon Bob, and the nurse Eve.  There is also a conflict with the irascible tycoon who is paying for the housing development and a police inspector trying to hunt out the Commie (though this word is never used) infiltrator arming the youth gangs who are vandalizing the project.

As you can see, there is a lot going on.  Unfortunately, the bulk of the narrative is either very detailed surgical procedures (Slaughter was a doctor and this was his area of expertise, so they seem accurate) or board rooms of men discussing their plans to fight the epidemic.  I think for some people, this kind of book is quite engaging.  It's a thought experiment.  What would you do if you were in charge of NYC in 1961 and the black plague arrived?  Two comparisons came to mind when I was reading this book.  It's like one of those 60s action movies with the cool poster but when you watch it it's mainly men sitting in unpleasant rooms talking or a tabletop RPG session where the players spend the entire time planning what they are going to do.  I speak only for myself, but I need to get to the action.

From a sociopolitical perspective, this book is an odd mix.  It has currents of conservative thought with its portrayal of commie-driven otherwise mindless bad people.  And yet also strongly argues for public medicine and communal, socially-cohesive policy when it comes to things like vaccines and quarantines.  I don't think Slaughter was particularly political and did not think too deeply about politics, but it is an interesting snapshot of a very different worldview about disease management than we see today.  Oh yes, I also have to give Frank points for his portrayal of Eve, the nurse.  She is actually quite tough and the big tension between her and the immunologist is that he keeps trying to protect her and cut her out of dangerous situations and she is just like fuck that and actually ends up saving the day with straight-up physical action against the commie.  Spoiler alert but this is the reason she chooses to go with the more down-to-earth surgeon, because he will not keep her in a glass cage.

 

9. Callan by James Mitchell

I bought this book at a serendipitous stop at small BMV books on Yonge and Eglington on a cold winter walk with some friends in Toronto.  It was mostly popular type resell books (though some good finds in that category as well as I got my daughter some Stephen Kings), but upstairs they had one vintage section that was actually quite a treasure trove of nice old paperbacks.  I chose Callan purely on it being a Corgi and a young Edward Woodward on the cover.

Turns out the background to this book is somewhat complex.  Initially, Callan was a TV series, written by James Mitchell, with an initial pilot that was the story of this book.  The series was a success, going from black & white to colour.  Mitchell then wrote this book.  It was initially titled Red File for Callan, then A Magnum for Schneider and finally this one, just Callan.  They later made a longer theatrical version of it as well.

If I wasn't drowning in content, I would start watching the Callan series.  People speak very highly of it.  It is missing 10 episodes but there are still like 40 more out there and they are supposed to be an excellent piece of tough spy fiction.

Callan seems to be written as a response to Bond.  This is grimy English kitchen sink espionage.  Callan is an ex-locksmith, ex-commando who became really good at killing people in Burma, got promoted twice and demoted twice and then when demobbed got busted stealing from a grocers because he was bored.  At the beginning of Callan, he is working as an accountant in a messy office with a bizarrely abusive boss.  He has to work there because it is the only place the special office where he used to work carrying out assassinations will allow him to work.  He wears crappy suits and old shoes excessively polished. His apartment is tiny and a mess.  He loves playing wargames with miniatures. 

At first, I thought the book was going in another more Pendleton-y direction because it starts right out with his ability to kill and there is one goofy part where he uses "akimi" or some shit that is supposed to be a killing karate blow.  As you can see from above, it does not go in that direction. Everything is quite squalid and depressing.  His boss has a shitty office in some old building.  His only "friend" is a quavering ex-con pickpocket named Lonely who stinks when he gets scared which is pretty much all the time.

The job here and his chance to get back to the agency is to kill a man named Schneider, who has his own much more succesful import export operation and we later learn is also smuggling weapons to commie insurgents to Indonesia, insurgents who are killing British soldiers.  Callan is supposed to follow orders and not ask any questions, but the core of this book and the reason he is no longer working as an assassin despite his skill is that he has somewhat of a conscience and struggles with guilt over his last kill.  The real antagonist in Callan is his boss.

It moves a little slow in parts and is overall quite dark.  However, the action when it happens is economical and intense.  I grew to like Callan and wanted him to get out of his predicament.  I won't seek these out, but would not say no to another one at a time when my on-deck shelf is not overflowing.