Montreal Means Murder: Brian Moore as Canadian Paperback Writer

Between 1951 and 1957, Brian Moore published a series of pulp thrillers comprising seven of his nine earliest novels, only to abandon the genre until late career. The physical fragility of these early thrillers, combined with the author’s efforts to bar republication, have ensured that they are largely unread today. This essay surveys Moore’s early pulp novels, and the influence of the rapidly growing paperback industry on this work. The new market and the thriller genre provided an opportunity to Moore and lesser-known Montreal novelists to present the darker, criminal aspects of his adopted home, that are largely absent in the “literary” novels of the post-war period. Moore’s attitude toward his thrillers is contrasted with those of Ted Allen and Hugh Garner, who mined their own pulp writing for use in their respective later works. The larger goal of this essay is to draw attention to the thrillers Moore disavowed and to contextualise them in relation to both the little-discussed houses that published them and the “literary” novels Moore wrote, beginning with Judith Hearne (1955). The conclusion is that Moore was drawn to the thriller not only as lucrative genre for which he was particularly well-suited, but also for the financial support these books provided, allowing him the freedom to pursue more literary writing.