Showing posts with label Warren. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Warren. Show all posts

09 October 2018

The Dustiest Bookcase: K is for Kelley


Short pieces on books I've always meant to review (but haven't).
They're in storage as we build our new home.
Patience, please.

I Found Cleopatra
Thomas P. Kelley
West Linn, OR: Fax Collector's Editions, [1977]
111 pages

Thomas P. Kelley was a regular in the early years of the Dusty Bookcase. From 2009 to 2012, his writing was the focus of a steady parade of posts, which included reviews of No Tears for Goldie (1949), Bad Men of Canada (1950), and two markedly different versions of The Fabulous Kelley (1968), a loving memoir about his snake oil-selling father.*

All this came to an end my review of 'The Soul Eater', a lost world story Kelley published in the May 1942 number of Uncanny Tales. Of all the things I've written on Kelley, it's my favourite. So what made me stop?

Something to do with the remaining Kelley titles in my collection, I suppose.


I wasn't much interested in taking time to separate truth from fiction in his books about the DonnellysSimon Gunanoot, and the Mad Trapper of Rat River. Things would've been different if I'd found a copy of this:


After The Black Donnellys and Vengeance of the Black Donnellys, I Found Cleopatra is Kelley's most reprinted work. First published in the Weird Tales (November 1938) – and again in Uncanny Tales (July 1941) – the novel has appeared three times in book form, most recently  in 1980 by Borgo Press. I found and bought my Fax Collector's Editions copy last summer.

It's now in a storage locker just outside the town of Merrickville, Ontario.

Wish it wasn't.


* Here I ignore my growing suspicion that Kelley was the author of No Place in Heaven, a 1949 News Stand Library pulp published under the name "Laura Warren."

Note: Not to be confused with I Found Cléopâtre, the 1988 account of my discovery a Montreal drag bar with the longest and cheapest Happy Hour in the whole damn city.


Related posts:

11 July 2014

The Gayest Femme Fatale



No Place in Heaven
Laura Warren
Toronto: News Stand Library, 1949

News Stand Library flogged No Place in Heaven as a scandalous memoir, but I think it's a work of fiction. Somehow I can't bring myself to believe that the manuscript of a repentant, dying woman ended up with a crooked, fly-by-night Toronto paperback publisher.

Laura Warren (née Fletcher) looks back on life from her deathbed, beginning with the miracle of her birth, not six months after her parents' marriage. Ma and Pa, vaudeville performers both, shoot for Hollywood stardom, but lose a race with a locomotive. Baby Laura is left to be raised by her Aunt Bessie who runs a New York rooming house catering to artistic types.

"Living in Aunt Bessie's rooming house [sic] was like taking the vow of chastity and then moving into the YMCA", says Laura. "You took a chance just bending over to pick up a bar of soap." It's a little hard to imagine our heroine growing to be such an innocent eighteen-year-old, but there you are. She gets a job as a hat check girl at the Kit Kat Club, where she meets Tony Warren. The reader pegs him as a good-for-nothing louse, but not Laura. She falls for him bad, he takes her virginity and then they marry.

But, wait, isn't he a louse?

Tony joins the Marines, is shipped out to fight the "Japs", and a baby is left on Aunt Bessie's doorstep. Laura cares for the child until old high school friend Marie Gibbs, she of the "moist hour glass [sic] figure", reveals herself as the mother and Tony as the father. Minutes later, Aunt Bessie tells Laura that the Japs have done in her husband. By her own admission, the poor girl goes a bit loopy:
     I sobbed to a shuddering stop.
     "Revenge is mine, saith the Lord," I giggled. "But don't forget Aunt Bessie, the world is full of Tonys… yep, the woods are full of them… like Japs. And little Laura is going out and shoot 'em down," I pointed my finger, "boom, boom, boom, like that, like I had a gun."
It's impolite but accurate to say that little Laura slays the "Tonys" by being a tease. She sends her first victims to find relief with a prostitute known as Syphilis Sal. Laura leads the wealthy wife of a kept man to believe that she is his mistress, and walks out on vain Max Arnott after convincing him that he is far too small to satisfy a woman. Her most interesting victim is gay bookseller John Ossington, whom she tortures by bedding, bedding, bedding and bedding the young object of his desire.*

All is done with a smile on her face.


No Place in Heaven is the fourth title tackled in a focused effort to uncover unrecognized Canadian novels buried in News Stand Library's pulp. While nothing here is reminiscent of NSL authors Hugh Garner and Ted Allan, I wouldn't rule out Thomas P. Kelley.

More than anything, No Place in Heaven brought to mind No Tears for Goldie, Kelley's pseudonymous 1950 novel, with Aunt Bessie sitting in for kind-hearted Aunt Maggie. Both are built of workmanlike prose enlivened by ribaldry – but then much the same could be said about many News Stand Library titles. I could be wrong. Could've been written by someone else. And there's always some slight possibility that Laura Warren was a real person. Hope not. I hate to think of her in hell.


Favourite passage:
     "You're the sexiest looking bast'd I've seen in ages," she slurred, "I'd like to sleep with yoooo."
Object: A poorly produced, 160-page mass market paperback, my copy was printed for the American market. The cover artist – unidentified – does not do Laura Warren justice.

Access: No listing on WorldCat. Two copies are currently for sale online – one Fair Canadian at US$7.95 and one Very Good American at US$20. Can't say which is the better buy. Get 'em while you can.
* "Bedding" isn't quite the word – the trysts take place in a boathouse – but you know what I mean. 
Related posts:

05 June 2009

News Stand Library Cover Cavalcade



As patrons flock to SoHo's Openhouse Gallery to take in cutting edge art commissioned by Harlequin Enterprises, thoughts turn to News Stand Library. The publisher's early rival, New Stand was much more willing to use sex and scandal to sell its wares. In nearly every way, their books were cheaper, nastier and inferior. It makes perfect sense that Harlequin published Brian Moore's first book, while Hugh Garner's second, the pseudonymous Waste No Tears, came from News Stand. And yet, the two competitors did share a few writers, including prolific pulpist Thomas P. Kelley.


The most valuable of all New Stand titles, Kelley's The Gorilla's Daughter – ' OFFSPRING of MAID and MONSTER' – cannot be had in any condition for under C$400. Its cover is more polished than most; a typical example of the publisher's look would be that found on the author's Jesse James: His Life and Death.


The type is ugly and in places difficult to read. Note that the author's name is misspelt, an error found time and again on News Stand covers. Here we have Bentz Plagemann , author of Each Night a Black Desire, identified as Bentz Plageman.



By my count, a dozen covers suffer similar mistakes. Niel H. Perrin is Neil H. Perrin, Murry Leinster is Murray Leinster and Ursula Parrot is good time gal Ursula Parrott. The cover of Alan Marston's Strange Desire reads 'Strange Desires by Alan Malston'.

Other blunders are more curious, and may reveal the true names behind pseudonyms. Just who wrote Private Performance the Glen Watkins on the cover or the Eliot Brewster credited on the title page? Perhaps the most amusing error is found on the cover of Terry Lindsay's Queen of Tarts, which has the title as 'Quean of Tarts'.


In keeping with the previous post, here are my three all-time favourite News Stand covers. A couple appear to use work produced in a high school art class, but what I find most appealing are the pitch lines above each title. 'Never Will HELL Admit a Gayer Sinner than Laura Warren' reads the first – printed on the cover of a book written by... Laura Warren. An unforgiving editor, perhaps?