FRANK DICKENS, FIFTH CHILD OF NOVELIST Charles Dickens, was a North West Mounted Police inspector whose career from 1874 to 1886 was marked by recklessness, laziness and heavy drinking. He was, in other words, a born writer.

Esteemed Sorbonne scholar Eric Nicol has finally published the truth about this hitherto misunderstood frontier genius in The Astounding Long-Lost Letters of Dickens of the Mounted (M&S 1989 $24.95). By a stroke of luck, Nicol--known to dabble in humour columns for The Province, but strictly as a break from his scrupulous research--was able to uncover the hitherto overlooked Frank Dickens papers in the bowels of the UBC Special Collections Library. "Eric Nicol's discovery is hot stuff," says National Geographic's chief adjudicator of amazing stuff found lying around, Emmett Q. Smith, "It'll rank right up there with the Ogopogo video."

The Canadian Encylopedia claims Francis Dickens should be blamed for "worsening relations between the Blackfoot and the NWMP," and that he was singularly responsible "for the growing antipathy of the officer cadre toward Englishmen." Nicol's research, however, throws out the window this long-accepted belief that Dickens Jr. was a hopeless failure who eventually quit the Mounted Police due to deafness. "He drank too heavily in response to rejection slips," Nicol says, "His was clearly a literary ailment."

It was asinine Canadian publishers who led to the downfall of the sensitive Frank Dickens. Dickens' letters back to England reveal that nobody wanted to publish his insightful literary portraits of such prairie luminaries as Sitting Bull, Louis Riel and Col. Harry Flashman. Meanwhile a few dusty copies of Diary of Francis Dickens--edited by Vernon laChance and published in 1930 by The Jackson Press, Kingston, Ontario--can still be found in Canadian university libraries. This previous Dickens diary--clearly a fake--cannot be trusted now that Eric Nicol has so diligently uncovered the truth with his publication of The Astounding Long-Lost Letters of Dickens of the Mounted.

[Alan Twigg / BCBW Winter 1989] (written in jest)