"As inarticulate as the feeling of a Newfoundlander for rum"

Here's a bit from Murder Over Dorval (1952) by David Montrose, second in Véhicule Press' Ricochet series of vintage Canadian hard-boiled reprints:

"You take these great, over-engined, chrome-bedizened American monstrosities of cars … they now have gears that change themselves. To someone who likes to drive a car, that’s about as sensible as a machine for making babies would be to anyone who likes to manufacture them naturally.

“My Riley is different. My Riley takes a delicate hand on the gear lever, like a good jockey's grip on a racehorse’s reins. And the results are about the same. About the time I’m going fifty, when I’m just ready to shift into high, I can look in the rear-view mirror and the American cars that got away from the stop light the same time I did are a blur in the distance."

The Riley was a British car, yet the prose here would not be out of place in a U.S. paperback original. A blend of British and American. That's one good way to think about Canada, at least in the middle of the last century.

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For a uniquely Canadian touch, here's how protagonist Russell Teed loves the car he has just described for you:

“ … I’d tell you how much I love it if I could, but the feeling of a car-lover for his machine is as inarticulate as the feeling of a Newfoundlander for rum: you just have to sense it.”

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Here's my post on The Crime on Cote des Neiges, the first of the David Montrose reprints from Véhicule.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Hard-boiled Canada: The Crime on Cote des Neiges

David Montrose's 1951 novel The Crime on Cote des Neiges, first in a series of vintage Canadian hard-boiled reprints from Montreal's Véhicule Press, would fit comfortably into Hard Case Crime's list alongside books by Richard Powell, David Dodge, and Mickey Spillane (though without Spillane's frothing jingoism).

At the same time, small differences in language and larger ones in sensibility make it a treat for native Montrealers like me and, perhaps, an interesting study for readers from exotic places like Europe, Australia and the U.S. A sofa is a chesterfield in Montrose's world, as it was in my childhood. Characters flee not to the hills, the mountains or the shore, but "up North," to the Laurentian mountains. A woman trying to discern if a house is occupied will call out not "Anybody home?" but "Who's home?"

Other differences are more noticeable. Our hero, Russell Teed, encounters beautiful, mysterious women, as would any wisecracking American P.I., only Montrose's descriptions are racier than their American counterparts.

And how about this, from Teed's client:

"In days like these, when the government has taken over most social responsibility, wealth doesn't carry social obligation any more. It's wicked to be wealthy, in the eyes of the majority, and young rich people too often act as though they were trying to live up to that reputation."

The wealthy client is a staple of American hard-boiled writing, but would an American crime writer use words like "social responsibility"? Would an American crime character talk of "social obligation"?

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You likely smiled when you read the phrase "vintage Canadian hard-boiled" in this post's first paragraph. But think: Prohibition was a staple of American crime and crime fiction in the 1920s and '30s, and any number of U.S. crime novels and stories refer to cross-border booze-running from Canada. Who wrote about the Canadian side of the trade and the open cities that developed from it? One answer: Montrose.

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My Montreal compatriot and age-group cohort John McFetridge offers some thoughts on Montrose's interesting use of Montreal weather.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011