The Man from the Sea: U-Boat Aftermath in the Great Bras d'Or!

Trevor S. Raymond is a teacher and librarian with the Peel Board of Education and editor of Canadian Holmes.

In a 1979 memoir of 26 years in small-town newspapers, James B. Lamb wrote of contemporary Canada being “socialist in outlook and Marxist in theory” and of French Canadians “taking over the country” (see CBRA 1979, entry 2009). Similar views appear in this dreadful novel. There is a Prime Minister, “eloquent, intelligent, and with the arrogant assurance of inherited wealth”, whose right-hand man is one Raymond Duval, formerly a “leading member of the collection of anarchists, Marxists, Trotskyites and activists of every sort” and now merely “a kind of French nationalist nut.” But this “crown prince of Canadian politics” is “hell bent to make us all French-Canadians” (“First Ottawa, then the nation”). Canadians, oblivious to the menace, unaware that the metric system “including French kilopascals” is a plot, are so supportive of Duval that he is “supposed to be a shoo-in to become our next Prime Minister.” Happily, our hero discovers that Duval was once second in command of a Nazi U-boat and is a war criminal.

In the hands of a competent storyteller, this clap-trap might be made passable for a quick read on a bus, but the only time Mr. Lamb is remotely interesting is when he is being a journalist, describing the interior of the Royal Canadian Military Institute. The rest is cliché-ridden rubbish. The dialogue is too silly to be funny. The plot, such as it is, lurches around irrelevant disgressions. The villain’s final encounter with the hero is ludicrous.

Had this been issued as a pulp novel in mass-market format, someone might have picked it up in a bus depot. As it is, its price and its unattractive, large-size paperback format should steer it quickly to the oblivion it deserves.