Coincidences proliferate, flashing with authorial intent. “The tiles were covered with designs of yellow and brown overlapping squares which overlapped more and more as they converged towards the center of the room.” Thomas and “I” see Lionel pounding his head against a wall, saying, “Why! Why!” At the ends of conversations various characters say, “The pains in my legs are killing me.” Characters give slightly different perspectives on the same event, or have the same experience at different times: the wind blowing ash onto one’s trousers— “It doesn’t annoy me, it delights me”. They are all at one remove: neighbours, lovers, friends; former friends, lovers, and neighbors. With a light touch Marois moves the scenes towards an expected climax.

At the crucial three-quarter mark, Lobster is executed by the state for a murder he doesn’t remember. Then “I” murders another character to no consequence, and the repetitions persist. You stop reading for character-driven action, because the characters aren’t agents: they’re a chorus in separate rooms. The resulting effect is distinctly, annoyingly familiar. But there is no revelation at the end of The Telephone Pole. It nags at the brain. Marois seemed to have left his novel without closure, and then killed himself. I was cruising through dead-end leads on him when I came across Auden’s “The Guilty Vicarage,” an essay on the subterranean structure of murder mysteries (Harper’s 1948), and “The Visionary Detective”, an essay by Joyce Carol Oates in the NYRB—where else—about Derek Raymond’s detective novels (June 20th, 2013). Together they argue that a murder mystery is grounded in two things: the relationship between the detective and the victim, and a setting’s absolution after a murder.

The one is plain: a past fictional Montreal unsettlingly like the one you’ll find today if you take the 40 into downtown. The other element is less clear. Who are the victim and detective supposed to be?

A typical murder mystery a la Agatha Christie or author of your choice relies on clues that would allow a reader to spot the killer. The clues are in relationships between characters and details about the setting. The Telephone Pole seems to work this way, setting up a complex of relationships and revealing the psychology of the setting as if with dynamite. But the pieces don’t fit together. The victim, Dorothy, is killed for no reason. Her death doesn’t reveal a vice particular to the setting except a disjointed absence of values. There is no detective. Montreal is left disfigured. The only motive force that develops coherently is a transgressive, transcendent crossing-over. The Telephone Pole’s subversions of the murder-mystery genre are not just to prove what can be done, as with so much lackadaisical subversion. Marois was pointing at his death.

Old Port Train depo, 1968. Via @pentaxclic on Flickr

As I looked for him I passed in and out of an authorial overlay on the world, a reading that either was there, or wasn’t. Like a detective I obsessed and badgered, worked overtime, scraped by, and drank when I could. I wanted to talk with someone who knew Marois, the young bilingual college dropout from Sherbrooke, whom Dennis Lee and Scott Symons respected but felt they didn’t entirely know. His eye for detail, his humor and pathos suggest he wanted the hard heart of life without compromise.

I called twenty-five or so R. LeBlanc’s in Montreal and Toronto, looking for the Richard LeBlanc The Telephone Pole is dedicated to. LeBlanc is likely still alive. He published a book of poems with Beat Raven in ‘86. I reached a Francophone man who told me about that his parents had recently died. I didn’t find LeBlanc. I filled the flyleafs with leads and place-names Marois mentions. Leaning against the wall near the Argo bookstore, I called David Godfrey’s BC farm. His phone rang for a while. The voicemail box was full. I called a few weeks later waiting for the bus down Papineau in the rain. The mailbox was still full.

I called up Anansi and explained myself to Jolise Beaton. She said she could send an email on to Dennis Lee. I sent her an email for him and followed-up, but never heard back. I enlisted a McGill librarian to find Buitenhuis’ New York Times review, but neither of us could find it.

I did a tour of the English bookstores whose owners might know something, starting with Odyssey on Stanley, because Mr. Wolf probably wouldn’t. He thought I was asking about the location replaced by the sports megabar. I went to S.W. Welch on St. Laurent, to pet the resident cat. Nothing there except the owner’s pleasant blue eyes under furrowed brows. Once I asked him if was looking for help and he said “we had an employee once… in the nineties”. I asked at Cheap Thrills on Metcalfe, where I used to loiter after class. It smells dank and slants but the music is pretty good. If you’re lucky you’ll find a well-introduced, obscure bookclub book or a new book sold by a shoplifter. No dice. I skipped the beautiful but vain Encore in NDG. Its shopkeepers aren’t old enough. I saved The Word for last. I stopped at the black-painted bricks. The doorbell tinkled and the door creaked open. I asked Adrian. Whatever engrossing thing goes on behind his eyes coalesced to a bright point. He remembers the book— “That’s a rare one.” He used to hang out at The Swiss Hut, but he didn’t meet Marois.

Adrian King-Edwards in front of The Word bookstore.

After two months dead ends I met with one of this issue’s editors at a facsimile of the Swiss Hut, the Chalet BBQ in NDG. Its booths are arranged in such a way as to give you the illusion you are sitting in a train and its waitresses are surly. He ordered half a chicken like a civilized person and I sat behind a slice of Boston cream pie and explained that everyone was dead, didn’t know Marois, or wouldn’t respond. He was encouraging. “Some ghost stories never include the genuine article.” There’s a point at which a detective finds himself isolated, following a theory that seems to exist only in his skull. I had that feeling, except to people generally there was no mystery. Nobody else had had a chance to read the book, since I needed my copy, and Marois had been dead for forty years.

I felt it. Going home from work at midnight I’d stumble on a place he talked about; the southeast corner of Bleury and Sherbooke, or Mountain Street, or the bus terminal on Dorchester, now René-Lévesque. Marois’ Montreal is right there, on the street, and his writing would repeat in my head; if the structural scheme of the novel was playing itself out, the repeated phrases transformed me into a character in the book, because their points of view were sliding into mine. Not all of the places: the old an all-night restaurant in the Old Port called L’Aiglon is gone. The ferry between Montreal and Levis, if it ever existed, no longer does. Still, settings from books carry their lives forward relentlessly, and if you let them they will catch you.

I wanted a real lead. There had to be one. Marois had done this on purpose; I knew it with the uncanny intuition of paranoia. I reread the book. There’s mention of “an old Indian in Whitehorse who strangled his lover with a beautiful rendition of Ambrose Bierce’s “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.” Only an author bent on an intertext would shoehorn it in like that. I clambered over to the tiny copy of Bierce’s story, from the McgGill book fair. The first sign I was on the right track: “The commandant has issued an order that any civilian caught interfering with the railroad, its bridge, tunnels, or trains, will be summarily hanged.” The second clue is that one character’s internal monologue sounds just like this sentence of Bierce’s: “‘To be hanged and drowned,’ he thought, ‘that is not so bad; but I do not wish to be shot. No; I will not be shot; that is not fair.’ ” Lionel sits in his room smoking, being contrite. In Lionel’s dreams people say, “Put it back,” repeating what a shopkeeper said when he was caught stealing for the first time. Peyton Farquhar from Bierce’s story hears a voice say, “Put it back, put it back!” as he wrestles the noose off, drowning. His body is resisting the indelible surge of pain from not suffocating. It would be better to be hanged and drowned. Then again—spoiler—Peyton Farquhar was already dead.

I put the story down. Lionel, the suicidal one, dreams what Bierce—yes, Bierce, who walked off into Mexico and was never heard from again—wrote about being better off with a noose around your neck. I submitted to Marois’ lugubrious wit. The confirmation was there— if you went looking for Marois, you were going to find him, as they say in French. Late in The Telephone Pole Lionel says to himself, “How much longer Lionel? Three, four months? […] ‘Oh no,’ he thinks to himself smiling. ‘Much longer than that. Much much longer.’ Lionel looks down at the street. After all he’s just a young man.”

I could find no physical trace of Marois besides the book, whose cover was falling off. I’d dog-eared and underlined it, defacing the only artefact of a story looking like it would never finish. There is Marois’ phrase: “It makes a difference.” When an acquaintance dies, especially if you know what he sounds like, it makes a difference. A silence falls that will not lift. It’s an amputation of feeling that brings you closer to death.

William, Dorothy, and the first-person character walk across the Jacques Cartier bridge at night. Without other leads, I got to the foot of the bridge around 2 am. The tenement apartments of Ville Marie were lit up yellow and brown to the right. A fast wind blew off the water, clearing the smell of the lower city: cigarettes, litter, run-off, asphalt and exhaust. When the wind blew it smelled like being far away. We use a magical word for that smell and that feeling: ‘off-island’. As young bookseller told me while we watched a lightning storm over St. Henri, ‘Montreal is the last of the great city-states.’ Well, if we delude ourselves, so be it. It was June, warm. The nights were clear; the days hadn’t gotten muggy yet, and if there was thunder it came all at once, in the evening. The neighborhood was still and I heard my footsteps knock and ring. Looking forward, a metal cage stretched in front of me until it appeared to close on the other side.