With the thirst we all share to lionize and condemn the past, it was perhaps inevitable that some dredger of horrid depths would stumble upon the rich oeuvre of Gins B. Jambenbi. Although long considered well and truly and for the best lost, his three novels have been resurrected much against their will in a new edition by The Grand Grapevine Press and Daily Circular.
Jambenbi was the pseudonym of one Carl-Thomas Sanford. All information on Sanford comes from a biography collected in an afternoon by one Jeremy Lewiston for Punch Magazine, intended to fill an empty column in an issue in the final throes of the Muggeridge years. The biography never saw press in that form, having been cut when Zud Soap’s check finally cleared and the column no longer required fluff, but was serialized on the inside of Chomps Chewing Gum (spearmint) labels from September 1972 to August 1976. Local legend has it that the biography has never been assembled, perhaps due to Chomps wrappers peculiar tendency to dissolve in a strong breeze. Below is the most complete summary that has, to my knowledge, ever been assembled.
Born in a rural county, Sanford studied plumbing and poetry as a means of escape from his meagre upbringing. When he saved enough to make the trip from the far countryside to the thriving metropolis of Biggleswade, he also discovered a love of best-forgotten literature. Particularly, he loved spy novels, and, according to his biographer, he read hundreds of them.
Thus ends his biography.
Sanford’s writing reflects that he understood that people like spy novels and find them exciting, and that spy novels tend to have a lot of driving-around bits, with which the novelists develop some fair amount of their paper real estate getting the spies from such-and-such grimy hovel of villainy to such-and-such fabulous scene of splendor just in the nick of time to stop some bounding great plot to take over the something or destroy it or some such nonsense. Unfortunately, he misunderstood the part of that which most people likely find exciting, and what he lacked in understanding, he made up for in the lack of an editor. He wrote what he knew, and, judging by his artistic output, he found his own mid-sized, sleepy metropolis to be endlessly thrilling.
He had written his third novel before some trusted chum informed him that paying full-fair-and-transfer on the number seven at Saxon Circle and staying on until Mead End before boarding the express north to Sandy did not, as action qua action, hold the readership in thrall. However, that selfsame bus-to-train transfer is the meat of the final Gambol Tralford Spy Extravaganza, “Go Forth Westly.”
Tralford is perhaps also worth mention. Sanford had no special knowledge of the internal machinations of the intra-bellum British government, nor of any technology unrelated to plumbing. Because of this, his dashing hero, Gambol Tralford, full-time Spy and part-time plumber, spends much of his time in transit musing about the movement of water throughout the city. The first Tralford excursion, “Northly Came the Snow,” finds Tralford making his way from the Marks and Spencer in the A1 retail park (south) to the Sainsbury’s in the A1 retail park (north) in a taxi driven by a person variously described as a shockingly attractive woman, a grim governmental taskmaster sent to keep Tralford in line, and the slavering villain swearing vengeance upon the sleepy and unsuspecting world by putting some sort of unnamed but certainly dangerous toxin in a fountain behind a tapas bar on Potsworth Road. Tralford’s romantic, professional, and existential crises (respectively) are interspersed with a surprisingly detailed explanation of the inner workings of the city storm drains, and a vitriolic attack on the city’s contemporary attempts to reclaim six to eight percent of storm waters for non-potable uses such as watering grass or pumping through that self-same fountain. Sanford, calling out city fathers by name and speaking with some intensity about the abysmal quality of their parentage, believed that reclaiming more than three percent was folly, and that to attempt to reclaim more would end in death and apocalypse for the city’s economy. The suggestion being, even if he thwarted the toxin-in-fountain plot, the reclamation plan would decimate the countryside with the full force of hell on a bicycle, rendering the south of England a desert in four to six months.
The second of the three novels, “East by South Danger,” involves a pleasant train ride from London to Edinburgh, interrupted in Biggleswade when a pipe on the train bursts and floods most of the carpeting on the number five cabin. Tralford, naturally, manages to use a wet/dry vacuum and some sort of wrench that is doubtless quite technically interesting to a plumber to stop a gang of international jewel thieves. Their plot revolves around flushing small but quite valuable gems into septic systems across the country for retrieval later by parties unknown.
Long deprived of these classics, modern readers were perhaps delighted to see the announcement of what I can only describe as an undeservedly and shockingly handsome trio of hardcover treatments of these lost works of arguable fiction. The three were, according to the first press announcement, to have been bound in red, green, and blue leather, respectively, with a nautical theme incorporating compasses and, for some reason, a stencil of a monstrous marlin on a line. In the press photographs, these appurtenances appeared to be pressed in a thick and luxurious silver leaf.
The press release, of course, led to a series of discoveries of which you are no doubt aware in a distant sense, although you certainly (and rightly) dismissed them as some admixture of twaddle and lies. First, of course, was the announcement that Sanford remains alive and well, having retired to Croydon. With some little haste, the Grand Grapevine Press and Daily Circular negotiated a limited edition of 100 signed copies, at an inflated price, before news floated to the top of the cycle that the Mess’r Sanford living in Croydon and who had carefully signed the run of flyleaves for binding into the books was not Carl-Thomas Sanford, author of the much-ballyhooed Tralford canards, but Thomas Carl Sanford, author of nothing longer than a grocery list.
The second press release, of course, announced the cancellation of the handsome editions and substitution of an edition which appeared to have been printed on the same stock and printer as the Press’s other venture, the Grand Grapevine Daily Circular and Valu (sic) Coupon.
The unbound and bleeding broadsheet of single-fold newsprint seems more than these novels deserve, but are, perhaps, more than we who craft similarly-forgettable language might ever hope, in a resurrected memory in centuries hence. Certainly, should a reader with 75¢ in quarters see one of the Grand Grapevine Libraries vending boxes located at semi-regular intervals on Third Street, Bedford, and feel the urge, the possibility of reading these three remains extant.
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