American nights entertainment
Mystery_, _Within an Inch of His Life_, which has the proper ring; _The
Widow Lerouge_; _Other People’s Money_, always an engrossing subject;
_The Mystery of Orcival_ (illustrated by Jules Guerin) and one or two
others besides (of course!) _Monsieur Lecoq_ and that famous _File No.
113_. It is desolating to reflect that there must be thousands, perhaps
millions, to whom the name of Monsieur Lecoq conveys nothing and who
are totally unacquainted with _File No. 113_, the most marvellous
genealogical mystery story ever written, a tale in which one does not
know which more to admire, the genealogy or the plot, until one grasps
that the genealogy _is_ the plot, and that what is desperately needed
is not a detective but an expert in the ascension of family trees.
However, that is not the worst. A yet more fearful thought concerns
the author himself. It is even possible that there exists a whole
generation, and perhaps races of men, to whom the name of Gaboriau
is nothing but part of a quatrain (though rather a famous jingle)
perpetrated first by Julian Street and James Montgomery Flagg under the
auspices (I think) of Franklin P. Adams (“F. P. A.”):
Said Opie Read to E. P. Roe,
“How do you like Gaboriau?”
“I like him very much indeed!”
Said E. P. Roe to Opie Read.
Too, too flippant! Recalling Monsieur Lecoq, one exclaims: “There
were detectives in those days!” And then again, such despondency is
excessive. There is, now and occasionally, a detective in these days
also. For proof, look at this fellow, Monsieur Jonquelle, in Melville
Davisson Post’s new book of that title. Ah! M. Davisson Post! It is but
to mention him to introduce a new and important subject, _n’est ce pas_?
Mr. Post is worth talking about, certainly; and assuming that you have
read him, you have probably discussed what you read afterward. His
reputation as a writer of detective-mystery stories was pretty well
abroad before the publication of _Uncle Abner, Master of Mysteries_,
but that book established the reputation solidly. My recollection
is that even before its appearance Mr. Post had written one or two
articles in which he explained his theory and practice of story
writing. I may simply remark that he went into the matter with as
much technical skill and artistic nicety as Poe or de Maupassant; the
man is an artist to his fingertips and his work shows it. One has
the feeling of construction and the sense of ornamentation springing
from fine tastes; his tales are like beautiful pieces of cabinet work
in which, at first sight, the effects of form, of shapeliness and of
beauty and power are felt; on a closer examination you fall to admiring
the sure hand and the cunning art; and at last your exploring fingers
touch a particular joint, disclosing an unsuspected drawer that flies
out and reveals the story’s secret ... though not Mr. Post’s secret,
which, like that of all genuine artists, remains with himself. If
this has a ring of exaggeration to your ear, I need only refer you to
such a perfect thing as the opening tale, “The Doomdorf Mystery,” in
_Uncle Abner_. Or you may make the test on _Monsieur Jonquelle_, where
likewise all the stories turn on a central character, the Prefect of
Police of Paris. _Monsieur Jonquelle_ exemplifies very well Mr. Post’s
method of developing the mystery and its solution side by side. The
gain in movement and surprise is the compensation for a technique
immensely more difficult than the usual formula, by which a mystery is
first built up and then, with inevitable repetition, dispelled. Those
who are interested in the mechanism of stories will also find it worth
while to consider why Mr. Post varies the narrative standpoint in his
new book, so that some of the tales of _Monsieur Jonquelle_ are related
by the chief character, some by a third person, some by the author....
Mr. Post is a native of West Virginia, where he lives (Lost Creek,
R. F. D. 2). A lawyer by training, he became particularly interested
in the possibilities that lie open for the use of the law to aid the
commission of crime; and this led to his first book, _The Strange
Schemes of Randolph Mason_, in which this perversion of the law to
criminal ends was the tissue of the stories.
A rural free delivery route at Lost Creek, West Virginia, has about it
something pleasing in connection with a writer of breathless fiction,
but the height of suitability in authors’ residences belongs to
Beatrice Grimshaw, whose mystery-adventure yarns of the South Pacific
begin to be as numerous as a group of Pacific Islands. Indeed, I feel
it would be no surprise some day, running before the southeasterly
trade wind in a longitude west of 135 degrees and a latitude exceeding
20 degrees south, to sight a succession of dark blue cloud shapes
lying on the horizon and be told: “Yonder’s the Beatrice Islands of
the Grimshaw group--big archipelago.” Beatrice Grimshaw lives at Port
Moseby, Papua, New Guinea, and is a planter as well as an author.
There is practically no place in the South Seas which she has not
visited, including the cannibal country of Papua. An old and possibly
untrue story recalled by Hector MacQuarrie tells of a time when, on a
schooner in mid-Pacific, “the captain, a gentle ancient, thinking that
the dark women were having it all their own way, offered to embrace
Miss Grimshaw, finding in return a gun pointing at his middle, filling
him with quaint surprise that anyone could possibly offer violence in
defence of a soul in so delightful a climate.” Anyway, the lady knows
her corner of the world and the people in it, as anyone may discover by
the exciting enterprise of reading such a book as _The Sands of Oro_,
with its strange group of five persons bound together by necessity
and ugly chance, and committed to each other’s fortunes for a term on
a lonely Pacific island. Here, as in the author’s _Nobody’s Island_,
the reader is at once let into the general secret with the result of a
deepening mystery as to why and how and what next.
In truth, the tale which attempts breathlessness simply by the device
of withheld explanations takes our breath away no longer. We have
come to demand of the author that he proceed with direct and forward
action, producing genuine interest instead of merely artificial
suspense. He must hew to the line of his story, must _move_, letting
the explanations, chips of his tough puzzle, fall where they may. Thus
it has come about that the mystery story which is not also an adventure
story fails to capture our interest or stir our curiosity. Of living
writers, one of the earliest to grasp this was A. E. W. Mason. With
others, I feared a half dozen years ago that he might have forgotten
the vital principle; for his story of _The Summons_ was quite unlike
the Mason who had given us _The Four Feathers_, _The Witness for the
Defense_, and other superb novels. But the fear may be dissipated,
for in his new book, _The Winding Stair_, Mr. Mason has written a
story comparable with his best work. Like _The Four Feathers_, it is
a tale of cowardice becoming ultimate bravery; and I do not recall a
heroine so pitifully appealing, so desperately lovable, so admirably
brave as Marguerite Lambert since Joseph Conrad gave us the girl Lena
in _Victory_. Possibly the title of Mr. Mason’s newest work may,
offhand, convey the wrong flavor to the incipient reader; it is not a
yarn of mysterious goings-on in some old mansion but the history of
a soldier and the son of a soldier, moving principally in Northern
Africa; the very appropriate phrase that christens the book is quoted
from no less person than Bacon, “All rising to Great Place is by a
winding stair.” Seldom does one come upon a novel of adventure which
is also so profoundly a novel of character or which has so direct and
free an appeal to the emotions, or makes that appeal so successfully.
_The Winding Stair_ is the work of a masterly storyteller, and such
scenes as those of Paul Ravenel’s discovery of who he is, his rescue
of Marguerite Lambert, and Marguerite’s discovery of his self-betrayal
sprung from his love for her are something more than exciting drama.
There is a breathlessness here that comes from a slowing-down rather
than a quickening, from a pause, from a moment of perilous silence in
which the only sound or sensation is the painful throbbing of the human
heart.
ii
The other way of breathlessness is laughter.
“Laughter, holding both his sides,” sang Milton; and, in fact, I once
knew a man who sat at a dinner or some place between Don Marquis and
Pelham Grenville (P. G.) Wodehouse. It is not necessary to recall what
happened to him. Let us draw a veil, and proceed. Don (perhaps you
recall it) was under the necessity of conducting a guessing contest in
a New York newspaper. The purpose was to guess his real name. People
refused to believe that he could be Don Marquis. The Supreme Court, in
a case brought as a test, has since decided that such incredulity is
not a sign of moral turpitude. Even Donald Robert Perry Marquis, held
the Court (seven to two; Holmes, J., and Brandeis, J., dissenting),
does not sound sufficiently possible, especially when the evidence
shows that he was born in Walnut, Bureau County, Illinois. The
Court ruled that Don was conceivably a literary hoax, but that his
play, _The Old Soak_, was the real thing and within the Amendment.
Popular rather than judicial cognisance has extended to the other and
uncollected works of Don Marquis, such as _Prefaces_, his stories in
_Carter and Other People_, his truth-telling about a young woman called
_Hermione_, his newly rededicated record of _The Cruise of the Jasper
B._, his iliad of _Noah an’ Jonah an’ Captain John Smith_, his poetry
in _Sonnets to a Red-Haired Lady and Famous Love Affairs_, etc., etc.
You have read Anatole France’s _The Revolt of the Angels_, but are you
familiar with Don’s _The Revolt of the Oyster_, I ask you? Or _Pandora
Lifts the Lid_, by Christopher Morley, writing under the auspices
of Don Marquis? Or _The Almost Perfect State_, a vision vouchsafed
exclusively to Mr. Marquis?
The truth is, there is a good deal of Mark Twain in Don Marquis. Don
is usually as good as ever Mark was and in some cases a good deal
superior--and throughout, more genuine. When I make the comparison I
am thinking of the best Mark Twain, the satirist and not too easily
satisfied thinker; neither the embittered and savage pessimist of
those final years nor the facile (too facile) humourist. Marquis, who
can sustain the severer comparison with Twain, can also well sustain
the comparison on the lighter side; for Don is a humourist, too. The
point is in the “too.” And the exemplification may be sought in (let
us say) _The Almost Perfect State_. “No matter how nearly perfect an
Almost Perfect State may be, it is not nearly perfect enough unless
the individuals who compose it can, somewhere between death and birth,
have a perfectly corking time for a few years.... In the Almost Perfect
State every person shall have at least ten years before he dies of
easy, carefree, happy living.” A place of pay-as-you-enter wars; a
heaven where everyone is an aristocrat and there are no professional
reformers--in short, a Marquisate. Where Don differs from Mark Twain
is in being a poet who sometimes uses poetry as the medium of his
expression--see _Dreams and Dust_ and his _Poems and Portraits_.
Christopher Morley (whose essay on Don Marquis, in _Shandygaff_,
deserves to be read) has coaxed Don into a Frank R. Stocktonish
enterprise in _Pandora Lifts the Lid_, with its narrative of seven
young women snatched from the shades of a young ladies’ seminary and--.
But as I write, Pandora has lifted the lid on a crack only.
P. G. Wodehouse is another matter, a chap over whose books thousands of