Going Through Hoops
The Islander
July 19, 1998
by Anne Moon
HAL SISSON has worn a Brazilian gold good-luck charm around his neck for the past 25 years, and his luck is still holding.
At 77, the retired lawyer has survived open heart surgery, starred in western Canada's longest-running burlesque show, is one of Canada's top croquet players, has a collection of 6,000 marbles and has just published his first novel. He hasn't been as lucky in selling it.
So from his Fairfield Road condominium he's launching a marketing campaign. His first book, Coots, Codgers and Curmudgeons, a collection of lightly humorous recollections co-written with his law partner, sold 5,000 copies and is out of print now, although available through the Greater Victoria public library. The library also has three copies of his novel, Caverns of the Cross (Arsenal Pulp Press, 198 pages, $16.95) but it's not prominent on bookstore shelves.
It's an adventure story, set in 1999, when the current Pope has just died and the new one is considering whether to endorse a "natural" form of oral contraceptive that heroic Nestor LaPretre has wrested from the south American rain forest. The new Pope, who comes from Brazil, also sports the golden fist good luck charm, a figa, strung into his rosary. Caverns of the Cross is a complex tale, wrapped around obscure religious societies, corporate greed and priestly corruption. It's short on character development, long on action. His agent has suggested it would make a good B movie.
Its exotic settings are a long way from Moose Jaw, Sask., where Hal Sisson grew up, and where he was kicked out of his local Protestant church for trying to organize dances in the church basement. He was the son of two teachers and neighbour to a criminal lawyer who inspired Sisson's career choice. Law school came after Sisson had served in the Royal Canadian Air Force in the Second World War, which brought him to Vancouver Island for the first time. He had dabbled with journalism while going to university but decided that the law paid better.
It was a career he enjoyed because there was a more leisurely pace then and he had the time to write. He joined the British Music HalI Society, went to Las Vegas, met the stand-up comedians, and doctored the English scripts to suit their North American audiences. For years, he turned out scripts for Sorry 'Bout That, a burlesque show that toured the Prairies with Sisson as its star.
After he retired to Victoria in 1984 with his wife, Doreen, he started to write seriously.
"I'm good at picking up stories and embellishing them," he says. A collection of those stories turns up in Coots, Codgers and Curmudgeons, which he wrote with his law partner, Dwayne Rowe, who now lives in Sidney. He writes about Prairie justice, of the baby sitter who got stuck to the newly varnished toilet seat and about his last schoolyard game of marbles.
It was recollecting this game, where he lost his prized marble, known as the Naked Lady, but won the girl, that took Sisson back to his boyhood hobby. He started to collect marbles and now he has over 5,000, tucked in plastic pockets, and stored in suitcase-sized boxes.
He goes to marble meets all over North America and came fourth in a field of 27 in a game of marbles in Las Vegas.
A man of enthusiasms, he discovered the game of croquet while attending a legal convention in the very proper seaside town of Eastbourne in England. He introduced croquet to Peace River, Alta., and now organizes games at the croquet courts at the Juan de Fuca Recreation Centre, which he says are the best in North America. He describes it as a game of strategy and skill, played against the clock, and involves hitting two balls through 13 hoops.
Croquets top man in Canada is Bill Langstroth, singer Anne Murray's estranged husband, and it was he who asked Sisson to become western regional representative of Croquet Canada.
It's that sort of networking that Sisson uses to his advantage. He picked up a yarn about a Slave Lake fur trader called Twelve Foot Davis who insisted on being buried with his feet facing down the hill just above the local Hudson's Bay Company store, "so he could piss all over the competition" for eternity. A local publisher rejected that story because of the word "piss", so Sisson turned it over to Peter C. Newman, who was writing a history of the Hudson's Bay Company. "It just proves that if you're a big enough someone you can use 'piss'," Sisson observes. Newman used the anecdote and has since provided promotional plugs for Sisson's two books.
Now Sisson is polishing a third book - a humorous murder mystery. His detective, no great surprise here, is "an aging ex-lawyer who lives in Victoria."
Sisson's only brush with murder came early in his career in 1953 when he defended a trapper accused of murder. He lost the case; the man was hanged and Sisson received $400 ... "and I worked my guts out for two months."
Sisson rejects telephone answering machines - "If they, really want me they can call me back" - and the Internet - "I do my research at the library" - but does use a computer as a word processor to write - usually in the middle of the night. "Nobody bothers you. You've had three or four hours of sleep so you are fresh. You just put your butt in the chair and start doing it."
For the last 10 years, he's also put his butt in gear three times a week at the Victoria YM-YWCA's Healthy Heartbeat class. He's busy fighting the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAl) as a member of the Council of Canadians and he is campaigning for Progressive Conservative party hopeful David Orchard, because he admires Orchard's stance against free trade.
And he's hoping to get more books published "before kick-off time."
Anne Moon is a Victoria freelance journalist and a regular contributor to the Islander Books pages.