WHERE THE PLOT THICKENS
=i=
Scarcely anyone is there, now writing mystery stories, who,
with the combination of ingenuity--or perhaps I should say
originality--dependableness, and a sufficient atmosphere comes up to
the high and steady level of Frank L. Packard. Born in Montreal in 1877
of American parents, a graduate of McGill University and a student of
Liége, Belgium, Mr. Packard was engaged in engineering work for some
years and began writing for a number of magazines in 1906. He now
lives at Lachine, Province of Quebec, Canada, and the roll of his books
is a considerable one. In that roll, there are titles known and
enthusiastically remembered by nearly every reader of the mystery tale.
Is there anyone who has not heard of _The Miracle Man_ or _The Wire
Devils_ or Jimmie Dale in _The Adventures of Jimmie Dale_ and _The Further
Adventures of Jimmie Dale_? _The Night Operator,_ _From Now On_,
_Pawned_, and, most recently, _Doors of the Night_ have had their public
ready and waiting. That same public will denude the book counters of
_Jimmie Dale and The Phantom Clue_ this autumn.
Packard differs from his fellow-writers of mystery stories in his flair
for the unusual idea. In _Pawned_ each character finds himself in pawn to
another, and must act as someone else dictates. _Doors of the Night_ is
the account of a man who was both a notorious leader and hunted prey of
New York's underworld. _From Now On_ is the unexpected story of a man
after he comes out of prison; and Jimmie Dale, Fifth Avenue clubman, was,
to Clancy, Smarlinghue the dope fiend; to the gang, Larry the Bat, stool
pigeon; but to Headquarters--the Grey Seal!
Stories of the underworld are among the most difficult to write. The thing
had, it seemed, been done to death and underdone and overdone when Packard
came along. In all seriousness, it may be said that Packard has restored
the underworld to respectability--as a domain for fictional purposes at
least! It is not that his crooks are real crooks--though they are--but
that he is able to put life into them, to make them seem human. No man is
a hero to his valet and no crook can be merely a crook in a story of the
underworld that is intended to convey any sense of actuality. Beside the
distortions and conventionalisations of most underworld stories, Packard's
novels stand out with distinctiveness and a persistent vitality.
=ii=
When a book called _Bulldog Drummond_ was published there was no one
prescient of the great success of the play which would be made from the
story. But those who read mystery stories habitually knew well that a
mystery-builder of exceptional adroitness had arrived. Of course, Cyril
McNeile, under the pen name "Sapper," was already somewhat known in
America by several war books; but _Bulldog Drummond_ was a novelty.
Apparently it was possible to write a first rate detective-mystery story
with touches of crisp humour as good as Pelham Grenville Wodehouse's
stuff! There is something convincing about the hero of _Bulldog Drummond_,
the brisk and cheerful young man whom demobilisation has left unemployed
and whose perfectly natural susceptibility to the attractiveness of a
young woman leads him into adventures as desperate as any in No Man's
Land.
For Cyril McNeile's new story _The Black Gang_, after the experience of
_Bulldog Drummond_ as a book and play, Americans will be better prepared.
An intermediate book, _The Man in Ratcatcher_, consists of shorter stories
which exhibit very perfectly McNeile's gift for the dramatic situation. He
gives us the man who returned from the dead to save his sweetheart from
destruction; the man who staked his happiness on a half forgotten waltz;
the man who played at cards for his wife; the man who assisted at suicide,
either ordinary short stories nor ordinary motifs! I should hesitate to
predict how far McNeile will go along this special line of his; but I see
no reason why he should not give us the successor of Sherlock Holmes.
=iii=
_Black Cæsar's Clan_ is the good title of Albert Payson Terhune's new
story in succession to his _Black Gold_, a mystery story that was
distinguished by the possession of a Foreword so unusual as to be worth
reprinting--one of the best arguments for this type of book ever penned:
"If you are questing for character-study or for realism or for true
literature in any of its forms,--then walk around this book of mine (and,
indeed, any book of mine); for it was not written for you and it will have
no appeal for you.
"But if you care for a yarn with lots of action,--some of it pretty
exciting,--you may like _Black Gold_. I think you will.
"It has all the grand old tricks: from the Weirdly Vanishing Footprints,
to the venerable Ride for Life. Yes, and it embalms even the
half-forgotten and long-disused Struggle on the Cliff. Its Hero is a hero.
Its Villain is a villain. Nobody could possibly mistake either of them for
the Friend of the Family. The Heroine is just a heroine; not a human.
There is not a subtle phrase or a disturbingly new thought, from start to
finish.
"There is a good mystery, too; along lines which have not been worked
over-often. And there is a glimpse of Untold Treasure. What better can you
ask; in a story that is frank melodrama?
"The scene, by the way, is laid in Northern California; a beautiful and
strikingly individualistic region which, for the most part, is ignored by
tourists for the man-made scenic effects and playgrounds of the southern
counties of the State.
"If, now and again, my puppets or my plot-wires creak a bit noisily,--what
then? Creaking, at worst, is a sure indication of movement,--of
action,--of incessant progress of sorts. A thing that creaks is not
standing still and gathering mildew. It moves. Otherwise it could not
creak.
"Yes, there are worse faults to a plot than an occasional tendency to
creakiness. It means, for one thing, that numberless skippable pages are
not consumed in photographic description of the ill-assorted furnishings
of the heroine's room or cosmos; nor in setting forth the myriad phases of
thought undergone by the hero in seeking to check the sway of his pet
complexes. (This drearily flippant slur on realism springs from pure envy.
I should rejoice to write such a book. But I can't. And, if I could, I
know I should never be able to stay awake long enough to correct its
proofs.)
"Yet, there is something to be said in behalf of the man or woman who
finds guilty joy in reading a story whose action gallops; a story whose
runaway pace breaks its stride only to leap a chasm or for a
breathcatching stumble on a precipice-edge. The office boy prefers Captain
Kidd to Strindberg; not because he is a boy, but because he is human and
has not yet learned the trick of disingenuousness. He is still normal. So
is the average grown-up.
"These normal and excitement-loving readers are overwhelmingly in the
majority. Witness the fact that _The Bat_ had a longer run in New York
than have all of Dunsany's and Yeats's rare dramas, put together. If we
insist that our country be guided by majority-rule, then why sneer at a
majority-report in literary tastes?
"_Ben Hur_ was branded as a 'religious dime novel.' Yet it has had fifty
times the general vogue of Anatole France's pseudo-blasphemy which deals
with the same period. Public taste is not always, necessarily, bad taste.
'The common people heard Him, gladly.' (The Scribes did not.)
"After all, there is nothing especially debasing in a taste for yarns
which drip with mystery and suspense and ceaseless action; even if the
style and concept of these yarns be grossly lacking in certain approved
elements. So the tale be written with strong evidence of sincerity and
with a dash of enthusiasm, why grudge it a small place of its own in
readers' hours of mental laziness?
"With this shambling apology,--which, really, is no apology at all,--I lay
my book on your knees. You may like it or you may not. You will find it
alive with flaws. But, it is alive.
"I don't think it will bore you. Perhaps there are worse
recommendations."
=iv=
Hulbert Footner does not look like a writer of mystery stories. A tall,
handsome, well-dressed, extremely courteous gentleman who, had he the
requisite accent, might just have arrived from Bond Street. He has a trim
moustache. Awfully attractive blue eyes! He lives on a farm at Sollers,
Maryland. No one else, it seems, is so familiar with the unusual corners
of New York City, the sort of places that get themselves called "quaint."
No one else manages the affairs of young lovers (on paper) with quite so
much of the airy spirit of young love. I can think of no one else who
could write such a scene as that in _The Owl Taxi_, where the dead-wagon,
on its way in the night to the vast cemetery in a New York suburb, is held
up for the removal of a much-needed corpse. Such material is bizarre. The
handling of it must be very deft or the result will be revolting; and yet
the thing can be done. In the latter part of that excellent play, _Seven
Keys to Baldpate_, George M. Cohan and his company bandied a corpse from
attic to cellar of a country house. This preposterous scene as presented
on the stage was helplessly laughable. Mr. Footner's scene in _The Owl
Taxi_ is like that.
The man has a special gift for the picturesque person. I do not know
whether he uses originals; if I suspect an original for old Simon Deaves
in _The Deaves Affair_, I get no farther than a faint suspicion that ...
No, I cannot identify his character. (Not that I want to; I am not a
victim of that fatal obsession which fastens itself upon so many readers
of fiction--the desire to identify the characters in a story with someone
in real life. The idea is ridiculous.) Mr. Footner knows Greenwich
Village. He knows outlying stretches in the greater city of New York; he
knows excursion boats such as the Ernestina, whose cruises play so curious
a part in _The Deaves Affair_. I have a whetted appetite for what Footner
will give us next; I feel sure it will be like no other story of the
season. A great deal to be sure of!
=v=
The peculiarity about _Gold-Killer_ is the mystery behind the excellent
mystery of the book. I mean, of course, the mystery of its authorship. I
do not any longer believe that the book is the work of Siamese twins--in a
physiological sense of the word "twins." I know that there is no John
Prosper--or, rather, that if there is a John Prosper, he is not the author
of _Gold-Killer_. Yet the book was the work of more than one man. Were two
intellects siamesed to write the story? Those who, in my opinion, know the
facts point to the name on the title page and say that John is John and
Prosper is Prosper and never the twain shall meet, unless for the purpose
of evolving a super-_Gold-Killer_. Whether they will be able to surpass
this book, which opens with a murder at the opera and finishes
(practically) with a nose dive in an airplane, is beyond my surmise.
If they will try, I give them my word I will read the new yarn.
Mrs. Baillie Reynolds's latest novel is called _The Judgment of Charis_.
It is not a story to tell too much about in advance. I will say that
Charis had run away from an all-too-persistent lover and an
all-too-gorgeous family, and had been taken under the wing of a kindly,
middle-aged millionaire and invited to become his secretary. She expected
some complications and in her expectations she was not disappointed; and
the readers' expectations will not be disappointed either, though they may
find the ending unexpected. _The Vanishing of Betty Varian_ restored to
readers of Carolyn Wells a detective whose appearance in _The Room with
the Tassels_ made that story more than ordinarily worth while. I do not
know, though, whether Penny Wise would be interesting or even notable if
it were not for his curious assistant, Zizi. The merit of detective
stories is necessarily variable; _The Vanishing of Betty Varian_ is one of
the author's best; but Miss Wells (really Mrs. Hadwin Houghton) is, to me,
as extraordinary as her stories. All those books! She herself says that
"having mastered the psychology of detachment" she can write with more
concentration and less revision than any other professional writer of her
acquaintance. Yes, but how---- No doubt it is too much to expect her to
explain _how_ she is ingenious.
Mrs. Belloc Lowndes, sister of Hilaire Belloc, is ingenious in a different
direction. Her story of _What Timmy Did_ was one that attracted
especial attention from those periodicals and persons interested in
psychic matters. Here was a woman whose husband had died from
poison--self-administered, the coroner decided--and here was little
Timmy, who knew that something was wrong. Animals also knew it; and then
one day Timmy saw at her heels a shadow man, stiff and military, and
behind him a phantom dog. Mrs. Lowndes's gifts, different from her
distinguished brother's, are none the less gifts.