POETRY SPECIAL: Wayside Bundle - Constance Hargreaves (actually Frank Baker)

 

Here's an unusual post for Pretty Sinister Books and the second one inspired by a post I read at A Hot Cup of Pleasure, a book blog hosted and written by Neeru.  This is not unrelated to the content of my own blog for the book that Neeru wrote about in the inspirational post is the renowned Miss Hargreaves, a marvelous fantasy about a fictional character who comes to life.  I wrote about Miss Hargreaves and its author Frank Baker in this blog's inaugural year and it continues to attract the attention of people who rarely come here to read about murder, mayhem and horror. Miss Hargreaves is the antithesis of the kind of books I usually write about, but it still celebrates the human imagination and is, ultimately, a treatise on the power of creativity.  These are also aspects of genre fiction that I discuss in the many books of crime, adventure and supernatural that usually pop up here.

Wayside Bundle (1959) is a book of poetry by Constance Hargreaves, the title character of Baker's fantasy novel. She never existed but in the imagination of Norman Huntley, the protagonist of that novel. Baker, as a gift for his literary friends who had read the novel and fallen in love with the character, created this volume of her poetry alluded to over the course of the novel.  Features of her character's personality crop up in the subject matter of the poems which makes it all the more enjoyable for anyone who has read the novel Miss Hargreaves.  

THINGS I LEARNED: Many of the poems are written in doggerel verse, a feature of her writing mentioned in the novel, but there are also non-rhyming poems and more formal structures like a couple of sonnets and two poems that use the arcane form of a triolet, a short poem of eight lines with only two rhymes used throughout. I'd never heard of a "triolet" until I read these two examples.  I had to look up whether or not the form actually existed.  Here is a brief overview of a triolet according to the American Academy of Poetry: "French in origin, and likely dating to the thirteenth century, the triolet is a close cousin of the rondeau, another French verse form emphasizing repetition and rhyme. The earliest triolets were devotionals written by Patrick Carey, a seventeenth-century Benedictine monk. British poet Robert Bridges reintroduced the triolet to the English language, where it enjoyed a brief popularity among late-nineteenth-century British poets." For an example of the triolet devoted to a serious topic rather than the usual lighthearted verse, they cite Thomas Hardy's "How Great My Grief," a poem I did not know. In fact, I didn't know Hardy wrote anything other than bucolic and melodramatic family saga novels.

And so since I apparently am one of the lucky souls who has acquired one of the rare 350 copies of Wayside Bundle -- ostensibly by Constance Hargreaves, but really written by Frank Baker -- I offered to post some of the poems here.  Neeru mentioned in a comment on her post that some of the Hargreaves poems from this pamphlet (it's a mere 24 pages of handmade laid paper and stapled to a flimsy cardboard cover) are published in Bloomsbury's reprint of Miss Hargreaves.  This is the edition that nearly everyone in the book reviewing blogosphere has read since it was released in 2009 and why there is a mini cult surrounding the novel these days. Neeeru left a list of the poems in her comment and I've decided to post some of the poems that were not reprinted in that edition.

Without further ado, ladies and gentlemen, the poetry of Miss Constance Hargreaves!

This is a footnote that appears at the bottom of "to the Reader"
Miss Hargreaves refers to her relative in the novel when first introduced to Norman's parents

The Magic Grandfather - Doris Miles Disney

Something Special!  The exclamation mark in a circle on the bottom of the front flap of The Magic Grandfather's hardcover 1st edition dust jacket indicates that this Doris Miles Disney mystery defies simple subgenre categorization. I was excited to read it.  Would it deliver the goods like so many of L. P. Davies' similarly tagged and utterly unique crime novels? Would it too be a daring shake-up of crime fiction conventions? Well, yes and no.

Like most of Doris Miles Disney’s crime fiction The Magic Grandfather (1966) is one of her many books in Doubleday’s Crime Club. In the late 1950s and 1960s the editors devised a special marketing tactic with clever logos to indicate if a book has a Favorite Sleuth, is a Damsel in Distress story, a Chase and Adventure thriller, Classic Puzzler or fits into some other subgenre (see the chart with all the logos below). The “Something Special” tag and logo indicates a book not easy to stuff into any recognizable subgenre yet were always standouts for plotting and characters. The Something Special books almost always prove to be intriguingly constructed novels that play with detective fiction conventions, add modern touches to the plot, and still manage to surprise and bring a smile to my face. I have made a concerted effort to seek out as many of these books with the exclamation mark logo as I can find and read. More often than not these books are the cream of the crop of the Crime Club imprint. Only rarely do they disappoint with a final twist that was not a surprise at all.

The Magic Grandfather (1966) has a relatively simple plot: it’s revenge pure and simple. But there are secrets in the past that remain hidden until the final utterly bizarre chapter. In a nutshell – Etta Lane has been living happily as a widow for over 27 years until Dan Ferris, her ex-father-in-law, who has been hunting for her since 1925 finally finds her. Then he slowly makes her life hell blackmailing her for something criminal that happened in her past and extorting her lucrative dividends from wisely invested stocks. The secret in the past involves her dead husband Jim, Ferris’ son. Just what exactly happened we will not know until Part Two in the novel which takes place in 1925. We learn about Etta's life with Jim and his father in a vaudeville touring company that climaxes in a courtroom trial for the crime Ferris alludes to throughout Part One. The story wraps up in an 13 year flash forward to 1965 when Sarah Prince, who was a precocious and intrusive 5 year-old in 1952 back in Part One, comes of age and is in her first year of college. On her Thanksgiving holiday she visits Dan Ferris who now lives in Etta Lane’s house in order to deliver him some food for his lonely holiday. What she sees and hears is a nightmare come true and explains the various mysteries left hanging back in Parts One and Two.

So is this deceptively simple plot really Something Special? As you know I’ve seen every trick a writer can pull in detective and crime fiction since I first fell in love with the genre as a teen back in the 1970s. It’s a matter of being able to perform even the oldest trick in the book with finesse and panache that will make me stand up and cheer. I’ve also sampled more than my fair share of very weird books with bizarre endings like the one that appears in The Magic Grandfather. And sorry to report, my friends, I saw this trick coming pages before the shattering climax.

Oh yes! I figured out the entire book, all the twists, even the detailed and unusual vaudeville act that Dan Ferris alludes to repeatedly but never once describes to anyone, and of course the bizarre final scene was telegraphed all because of a simple few sentences that occur in Part One. And though I shouted aloud “I KNEW IT!” when I got to the end I was a bit let down that it was all so obvious.  At least to me. I enjoyed what Disney attempted to pull off. But she let the ace fall from her sleeve rather clumsily.  I really wanted this to be a winner for me like so many of the Crime Club's "Something Special" mystery novels. Simultaneously and ironically, I was rather astounded that I managed to get it all so accurately.

This may be a truly flipped out suspense thriller with genuine shocks for some of you. Granted it is well constructed and has genuinely suspenseful moments. The characters are well done and you are rooting for Etta from the outset and hoping Dan gets what's coming to him. But savvy readers who have seen a lot of horror movies and read a lot of Robert Bloch, John Keir Cross and seen a few specific Alfred Hitchcock episodes from his two TV series will most likely be able to figure it all out. And that's a disappointment.

As a concluding coda for any of you still interested in reading this book I offer a warning. By all means avoid buying the Zebra paperback which has as its cover illustration a massive spoiler that will fairly ruin the book before you even read the first sentence. I mean MASSIVE. Unbelievable!  I have chosen not to include that cover among the paperback reprint edition photos used here.  This title was one of Disney's most financially successful, if not artistically competent, books with at least six editions in English that I uncovered, two from the same publisher. But what editor or publisher would ever allow that kind of artwork on a mystery novel? The mind boggles. Also, one publicity blurb I found online says that Dan Ferris, the title character who survives to age 90+, is murdered. And that is utterly wrong. Caveat emptor! And Caveat lector, too.