On Murder & Montreal

by: Nathalie Atkinson

In between bottles of Dow and Molson’s, and often on an empty stomach, private investigator Russell Teed drinks a lot of Canadian rye. Enough that Bob and Doug McKenzie would be proud. Teed, a Westmount heir, not a heavy, isn’t exactly hardboiled but he’s street-savvy — the gumshoe equivalent of a forensic accountant.

Working from his cramped office in the CanAm building on Montreal’s Dominion Square, Teed is the creation of Charles Ross Graham, writing as David Montrose. The first two Montrose books appeared in 1951 and 1952 as part of Collins’ White Circle pocket books series (of which there were several hundred similar crime novels). They disappeared just as quickly: scarcely a copy can be found in any library in Canada.

Montreal-based Véhicule Press has been around since 1973, “and for over 25 years now, even longer,” says publisher Simon Dardick, “I’ve wanted to publish these books.” He’s collected several copies of Montrose’s four novels from secondhand bookshops over the years. “Then I’d look at some of the racism in it and think I can’t do it. Until I realized that it’s like taking the N-words out of Mark Twain: we put our little [publisher’s note] at the beginning instead — because I think they’re really valuable documents.”

Finally, Véhicule Press reissued The Crime on Cote des Neiges and Murder Over Dorval — the first two — last fall in a new reprint series called Ricochet (a nice bilingual touch). “It took a few beers to figure that one out,” he laughs. The covers are souped-up versions of the original art. It’s a small niche, Dardick admits, but sales on the 1,200 initial print run of the first two titles have been moderate; “there seems to be an appetite for it,” which means they’ll be adding titles to Ricochet. Montrose’s third Teed novel, The Body on Mount Royal, will come out next spring, with a contemporary artist designing a new cover in the pulp style.

“It’s a lovely antidote,” says Dardick, “to a lot of serious literary stuff we publish — it deserves to be looked at, and given some respect. To me, for Canadians, this is an interesting part of our history — our literary history, and our social history.”

Montrose’s prose can sometimes be a bit purple, in that Mickey Spillane way. Take Teed’s description of a femme fatale: “Her lower lip was more sensual than a Renaissance Venus. An archbishop would want to kiss that lower lip, would want to bite it until he drew blood.” But it’s also surprisingly good — more Dashiell Hammett than Spillane. When Teed pays a visit to a well-appointed modern apartment on Peel, “It looked just beautiful. It looked like a $10,000 cheque to an interior decorator.”

That they’re set in Montreal’s jazz and sometimes-seedy cabaret 1950s heyday is all the better — Teed plays all-night card games on Jeanne-Mance near Sherbrooke and goes on recce to remote cabins (just substitute the Laurentian Highway for Sam Spade’s Bay Area roads).

“Montreal becomes a character in the city,” Dardick says. “Decarie Boulevard, which is such a downmarket street now because of the recessed highway that goes right through the middle of it, used to be, as Montrose refers to it, the place to go to be seen.”

“I love the idea that they’re situated in Montreal, but we didn’t want to put Montreal in the name of the imprint,” he adds, “because if I can find something good that focuses on Winnipeg or Toronto, there are gems out there and it does interest me to reprint them whenever we can.”

Véhicule is also looking into rights for Ronald J. Cooke’s The Mayor of Cote St-Paul, first published in 1950, and The House of Craig Street (although the street’s name has since been changed to Viger).

Dardick is also intrigued by Brian Moore, the multiple Governor General’s Award winner for fiction and Booker-prize nominee. He explains that Moore seldom acknowledged his early writing of genre thrillers such as The Executioners. “He never wanted it to be known and what I’ve heard is he just disavowed them, because back in those days you didn’t write this type of book.”

A lot like Graham. “I think that Graham worked for a chemical company and middle management, it was just not done,” Dardick says. “I’ve always wondered whether he lived in Montrose Avenue in Westmount and that was his way of choosing a pseudonym.”

Meanwhile, Véhicule is still actively searching for the rights owners, since Graham a.k.a. Montrose died in 1967 (although the novels will become public domain in a few years). The foreword to the first book offers all that is known about Graham: that he was born in New Brunswick, lived in Nova Scotia and was an economist and chemical analyst with a penchant for crime writing. He was married twice, and he wrote four novels.

After that, the trail goes cold.

EXCERPT

“Dawn had done it. Looking from the edge of the bluff, all Montreal was spread below, from the rich stone mansions on Redpath Crescent at the top of town, to the turrets of the Chateau Apartments on Sherbrooke, to the narrow busy million-signed crampedness of St. Catherine, to the railroad tracks, St. Henri’s squalor, the canal, Verdun, the river. The St. Lawrence river, winding up here from the Atlantic to bring ocean ships farther inland than anywhere else in the world.

A mighty city. A mighty city for the Sark to live on like a maggot on a piece of rich fat meat. I wasn’t too sorry he was dead.” – From The Crime on Cote des Neiges by David Montrose (Véhicule Press)

OTHER PULP REPRINTS

True pulps aren’t paperbacks but earlier magazines printed on cheap pulp paper, which flourished domestically in Canada after the 1940 War Exchange Conservation Act by William Lyon Mackenzie King’s government. The influential writer Frank L. Packard, who during the Canadian pulp era created a character named Jimmie Dale, (also known as The Gray Seal), a template that later inspired Walter Gibson’s The Shadow. The pocket books sometimes called pulp, with artsy outrageous covers that came out in the 1940s and 1950s were for commuters to lug and slip into their pockets.

“We don’t deal generally in Canadian pulp material,” says dealer Neil Mechem of Girasol Collectibles in Mississauga. “It’s not generally collectible and Canadian material is not widely collected.” Mechem makes the rounds of the key spring pulp shows: the Fantastic Pulp Show & Sale in May in Toronto and the ones in Chicago (Windy City) and Ohio (Pulpfest), where does find that in addition to readers of pulp, “we’re seeing people coming into it for the nostalgic and historical value of it as pop culture is concerned.” It’s enough that Girasol has a niche pulp replica series – a complete facsimile reprint of whole magazines, even assembled in the same fashion, with a staple, and a Spider line of trade paperback series that re-sets text alongside original illustrations.

“It’s like anything else in quantity,” Mechem adds. “There’s the good the bad and the ugly. There is a lot of hack writing there’s a lot of that but there’s that in every genre.”

Tony Davis, a Toronto pulp aficionado and editor of the annual The Pulpster, recently went to the National Archives in Ottawa to check out the collection for a book he’s working on. Library & Archives Canada has made their “Tales from the Vault!” collection of Canadian pulp fiction (from 1940-1952) available for research, and online. Davis finds most of the Canadian-authored pulps at American shows. “I tend to find more from American vendors than I do from Canadian. The Americans usually say oh, it’s Canadian.” And lucky for Davis, accordingly they’re priced cheaply.

from: National Post