Albert M. Treynor
The documented author credit
Albert M. Treynor, expanded in library records as Albert McKune Treynor, wrote popular adventure fiction in the early twentieth century. The title page of Snow-Blind identifies him as the author of Hands Up, while contemporary magazine credits also connect his name with serial fiction. Snow-Blind appeared in book form in 1929. This publication history is better established here than the details of his personal life. The novel's opening radio message links a modern communications network with remote northern police posts, making distance, uncertain information and the difficulty of reaching another person useful points of attention throughout the adventure.
Radio brings distance into a room
Snow-Blind opens through a broadcast from Springfield, Massachusetts, addressed to remote mounted-police posts. The scene combines a modern communication system with places imagined as isolated. A message can cross a vast distance without its sender knowing who actually receives it. That uncertainty gives the novel a means of moving between a city interior and northern adventure.
An unintended listener
The announcer reads a cryptic letter for Sergeant Buck Tearl at Port-o’-Prayer. Kitchener Tearl, listening by chance in a New York apartment, hears it as well. Ordinary family greetings surround a message that has a startlingly personal significance for him. The contrast makes the broadcast both a public event and a private disruption, initiating action through an accident of reception.
Watch the route of information
Distinguish the person addressed, the person speaking, and the person who hears. They do not necessarily possess the same background knowledge. The opening also contrasts the city’s actual sounds with northern sounds imagined by its listener. Follow that interplay between experience and expectation, and treat the novel’s vocabulary for northern peoples as part of its historical perspective rather than as a neutral account of their lives.