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 Liege, 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 t.i.tles 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_, _p.a.w.ned_, 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 _p.a.w.ned_ each character finds himself in p.a.w.n 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 a.s.sisted 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 Caesar's Clan_ is the good t.i.tle 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. n.o.body 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-a.s.sorted 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 appet.i.te 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 t.i.tle 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 surpa.s.s 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 Ta.s.sels_ 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 a.s.sistant, 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.

CHAPTER V

REBECCA WEST: AN ARTIST

=i=

Whether Rebecca West is writing reviews of books or dramatic criticism or novels she is an artist, above everything. I have been reading delightedly the pages of her new novel, _The Judge_. It is Miss West's second novel.

One is somewhat prepared for it by the excellence of her first, _The Return of the Soldier_, published in 1918. Somewhat, but not adequately.

Perhaps I am prejudiced. You see, I have been in Edinburgh, and though it was the worst season of the year--the period when, as Robert Louis Stevenson says, that Northern city has "the vilest climate under Heaven"--nevertheless, the charm and dignity of that old town captured me at the very moment when a penetrating Scotch winter rain was coming in direct contact with my bones. I was, I might as well confess, soaked and chilled as no New York winter snowstorm ever wetted and chilled me. It did not matter; here was the long sweep of Princes Street with its gay shops on one side and its deep valley on the other; across the valley the tenements of the Royal Mile lifted themselves up--the Royal Mile, which runs always uphill from the Palace that is Holyrood to the height that is the Castle. Talk about gestures! The whole city of Edinburgh is a matchless gesture.

[Ill.u.s.tration: REBECCA WEST]

And so, when I began the first page of _The Judge_, it was a grand delight to find myself back in the city of the East Wind:

"It was not because life was not good enough that Ellen Melville was crying as she sat by the window. The world, indeed, even so much of it as could be seen from her window, was extravagantly beautiful. The office of Mr. Mactavish James, Writer to the Signet, was in one of those decent grey streets that lie high on the Northward slope of Edinburgh New Town, and Ellen was looking up the sidestreet that opened just opposite and revealed, menacing as the rattle of spears, the black rock and bastions of the Castle against the white beamless glare of the southern sky. And it was the hour of the clear Edinburgh twilight, that strange time when the world seems to have forgotten the sun though it keeps its colour; it could still be seen that the moss between the cobblestones was a wet bright green, and that a red autumn had been busy with the wind-nipped trees, yet these things were not gay, but cold and remote as brightness might be on the bed of a deep stream, fathoms beneath the visitation of the sun. At this time all the town was ghostly, and she loved it so. She took her mind by the arm and marched it up and down among the sights of Edinburgh, telling it that to be weeping with discontent in such a place was a scandalous turning up of the nose at good mercies. Now the Castle Esplanade, that all day had proudly supported the harsh virile sounds and colours of the drilling regiments, would show to the slums its blank surface, bleached bonewhite by the winds that raced above the city smoke.

Now the Cowgate and the Canongate would be given over to the drama of the disorderly night, the slumdwellers would foregather about the rotting doors of dead men's mansions and brawl among the not less brawling ghosts of a past that here never speaks of peace, but only of blood and argument.

And Holyrood, under a black bank surmounted by a low bitten cliff, would lie like the camp of an invading and terrified army...."

=ii=

_The Judge_ is certainly autobiographical in some of the material employed. For instance, it is a fact that Miss West went to school in Edinburgh, attending an inst.i.tution not unlike John Thompson's Ladies College referred to in _The Judge_ (but only referred to). It is a fact, as everyone who knows anything about Miss West knows, that Miss West was an ardent suffragette in that time before suffragettes had ceased from troubling and Prime Ministers were at rest. An amazing legend got about some time ago that Rebecca West's real name was Regina Miriam Bloch. Then on the strength of the erring "Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature"