It would seem that even well known authors like to read the books of
other men and Joe Lincoln confessed to an interviewer one day in 1929
that he was fond of mystery stories.
“It seems to me,” he said, “that the vogue of psychological novels is
just about done. Men especially like to read mystery stories because
they read for the story itself. There are some darned good mysteries
right here on Cape Cod.” At this point Joe Lincoln was off on the
telling of another one of his famous yarns.
“There was Captain Sam Harding,” he said, “a man about ninety-four
years old, I should say. He was the skipper, and his brother the mate
of a ship. One night Cap’n Sam dreamed that he and his brother had dug
up a chest of treasure beside a lily pond. When they came to port the
two of them dug in the spot and did find something--it was a big iron
kettle full of chains.”
“What sort of chains?” Lincoln was asked.
“Well, I don’t know. You see, Cap’n Sam said all this happened more
than seventy years ago, and he said they threw the kettle and chains
away, they were so mad that it wasn’t treasure.” Lincoln puffed on his
pipe for a moment chuckling.
“The Old Cape that I used to write about,” he went on, “is pretty well
gone by now, with a good many other things. The automobile and the
summer visitor have done it, I suppose. When I want one of my stories
now I have to dig up stuff that goes back ten or twelve years. There
aren’t any more deep water men. A few fishermen go out day by day and
one or two who go out on longer cruises, but the Cape is different now.
“In the old days a man would go out on a long voyage and sometimes he’d
never come back. Then his family was faced with all the possibilities
of what might happen to him--drawing lots in a small boat and all that
sort of business. Then there’d be a stone in the cemetery with ‘Lost at
Sea’ and the name of another good Cape Codder carved on it, and another
mystery.
“There was Cap’n Nathan Foster’s ship, lost at sea. One boat was picked
up, and two were lost. What happened nobody knows. You can only guess
at all sorts of unpleasant possibilities.
“And then there was Cap’n Josiah Knowles, a Brewster man and a second
cousin of mine. He was cast away with others on a deserted island and
they had to build themselves a boat from pieces of wood they found
using cocoanut fibre for sails. Cap’n Knowles said he’s never sailed
a boat that didn’t fly the American flag and he wouldn’t now, so they
made a flag from a sailor’s old blue shirt, a white altar cloth and
something red on Pitcairn’s Island, which they finally reached. And
they sailed two thousand miles in that little boat.
“I’ve always written about Cape Cod,” Lincoln told the reporter. “If I
wrote anything else people would feel they were getting ‘gypped’ when
they bought one of my books.”
“I don’t do any work in summer,” Lincoln told the interviewer in 1929.
“I’ve written one short story and I’m going to start a novel next
month--maybe. My son and I had a lot of fun writing a mystery yarn,
too. He wrote about his crowd, the younger set, and I wrote about my
Cape Codders and we worked the two crowds into one book.
“In 1913,” Lincoln went on, “I went over to England because I
wanted to put a Cape Codder in a foreign atmosphere and of course
I had to have something first hand. Well, we stopped at a place in
Buckinghamshire--oh, a delightful place. And then I wrote to my
publishers and said, ‘you needn’t expect any work out of me, I’m having
too good a time’.”
“Did you ever do newspaper work?” the reporter asked Lincoln.
“No, I never did, and that’s why you didn’t hear me say when I met
you, ‘well, well, I’m an old newspaper man myself.’ Most of my friends
have done newspaper work, but I never did. I just wrote about Cape Cod
all my life.”