Who was Mary Helena Fortune?
Mary Helena Fortune has an imposing name, but one that is appropriate for an unusual woman and an impressive writer. Born Mary Wilson (1833–1910) of Scottish ancestry, in Belfast, Ireland, she was brought to Canada as a child. In 1851 she married Joseph Fortune, a surveyor, and in 1855 they travelled to Australia to join her father, George Wilson, who was working the goldfields.
In colonial Australia she began to write crime fiction under various pseudonyms for a popular Australian Journal, contributing over five hundred detective stories between 1865 and 1908. Her one-book publication was The Detectives’ Album (1871), possibly the first collection of detective stories published by a woman. She died under mysterious circumstances.
She wrote one of the longest-running series in crime fiction and pioneered the “police procedural.” She was probably the first woman to write stories narrated by a police detective, and certainly the first woman to make a literary specialty of crime fiction. These details come from George Vanderburgh, publisher of the reprint edition of The Detectives’ Album: Stories of Crime and Mystery from Colonial Australia (2002).
059. Did Biggles ever fly North?
Biggles did, although his flight is pretty well forgotten these days.
Biggles is short for Flying Officer James Bigglesworth, the action hero of a series of boys’ adventure novels that were published in England between 1932 and 1998 and were read throughout the Empire and the Commonwealth. Biggles’s big decade was the 1950s.
In the novels, the intrepid aviator was a dauntless adventure hero born of English stock in India and raised at a school in England. He flew a Sopwith Camel during the Great War, worked with British Intelligence, flew a Spitfire with the RAF during the Second World War, and then sought out adventure in South America, Australia, Asia, Africa, Canada, and behind the Iron Curtain.
Ninety-eight of these thrilling, well-loved novels were published. They were written by Captain William Early Johns (1893–1968), an English writer and former Flying Officer who promoted himself to “Captain” following the success of the early Biggles books. The last in the series is Biggles Sees Too Much (1970). In all, Johns wrote close to two hundred works of fiction for young readers, including a series for girls about Joan Worrals, a determined, eighteen-year-old flier for the WAAF during Second World War.
Of specific Canadian interest is the fact that Canadian editions of a number of these novels were published by the Musson Book Company of Toronto. Curiously, one novel that Musson failed to release in Canada is Biggles Flies North (1938), in which the flier heads for the Great Northwest in pursuit of villains who lack common decency and are intent upon the subversion of good old British values in the Dominion upon the eve of the Second World War.
060. Who was Canada’s “King of the Pulps”?
King of the Pulps, published in 2003, is about H. (for Henry) Bedford-Jones (1887–1949). The three authors of the book (Peter Ruber, Darrell C. Richardson, and Victor A. Berch) explain that, between 1909 and the year of his death, Bedford-Jones wrote 231 novels and 1,141 short stories — some 25 million words published in the American and British pulp magazines, which were then very popular, under his own name and a host of pseudonyms,
The phenomenally prolific “pulpster” was born in Napanee, Ontario, attended one year at Trinity College in Toronto, worked as a newspaperman in the United States, came into his own as a freelancer contributor to the pulps, and spent his last years in Palm Springs, California, where he died.
He wrote fast-moving tales in most of the genres: adventure, fantasy, epic heroism, science fiction, horror, crime, true-crime, westerns, etc. In the 1920s he was described as the highest paid pulp writer in the United States. Today, his tales seem simple-minded, yet there is the thrill of the chase to them.
As Allan Hawkwood, he wrote the “Famous John Solomon Adventure Series” in the 1930s, which was set in the Middle East of the same period. His earliest fiction dealt with New France’s Ancien Régime and the Northwest fur trade, but he soon found that imaginative adventure tales set in exotic climes sold best. The Depression dealt a death blow to most of the pulps; those that survived were polished off by television and then paperback originals. These originals were a throwback to the earlier penny dreadful and dime novels.
In 1934 H. BedfordJones jokingly ceded the title “King of the pulps” to a friend and fellow writer, Earle Stanley Gardner, the lawyer who created Perry Mason.
061. Who are the country’s leading stand-up comedians?
Mark Breslin answered this question in his book, The Yuk Yuk’s Guide to Canadian Stand-up (2009). A student of comedy, Breslin knows what is funny ... or at least what is comic. It was 1974 when, in Toronto, he founded the Yuk Yuk’s chain of comedy clubs, which has sixteen locations across Canada.
He was asked to name the “ten most influential Canadian stand-ups” by Bruce Demara, who published the list in “Breslin a No-brainer for Book,” The Toronto Star, November 8, 2009. Here is his choice of names, in alphabetical order:
1. Dave Broadfoot.
2. Brent Butt.
3. Jim Carrey.
4. Larry Horowitz.
5. Elvira Kurt.
6. Mike MacDonald.
7. Howie Mandel.
8. Paul Mandell.
9. Russell Peters.
10. Kenny Robinson.
Although these comics are known to write and perform their own material, he leaves off the list those people who are strictly writers or movie and television personalities known for their light comic touches. Among the Canadian performers and contributors to the Second City revues and Saturday Night Live are such talented comedians and comic actors as Leslie Nielsen, Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Mike Myers, etc. All of them make Canadians — as well as North Americans — laugh (and sometimes groan!).
062. Who discovered the Calypso borealis?
John Muir discovered and described the Calypso borealis, a rare white orchid that he encountered on his trek across the Holland Marsh, north of Toronto. At the time (1865–66) he was in his mid-twenties and a wanderer, working as a sawmill-hand and living in a log cabin outside Meaford, Ontario. In 1892 he established the Sierra Club to protect the environment.
“The flower was white and made the impression of the utmost simply purity, like a snow flower,” he recalled at the age of seventy-one. “It seemed the most spiritual of all the flower people I had ever met. I sat down beside it and fairly cried for joy. It seems wonderful that so frail and lovely a plant has such power over human hearts. This Calypso meeting happened some forty-five years ago, and was more memorable and impressive than any of my meetings with human beings excepting, perhaps, Ralph Waldo Emerson and one or two others.”
These details come from Cameron Smith’s column “Muir’s Long Cabin the Bush,” the Toronto Star, October 11, 2003.
063. Who was Quebec’s “rural cartoonist”?
One of the country’s most charming illustrators was Albert Chartier, born and trained in Montreal in 1912, where he worked as a freelance illustrator. “For almost sixty years, from 1943 until 2002, Chartier drew the monthly comic strip Onésime for Le Bulletin des Agriculteurs, a magazine that,
