The Crimson Gardenia and Other Tales of Adventure

About the book

Roland Van Dam arrives at Mardi Gras with fashionable companions who consider genuine romance and danger things that happen chiefly in books. Separated from their complacent company, he meets a masked woman who reads unexpected significance into the gardenia he is wearing. The resulting adventure gives the title story its challenge to comfortable assumptions about modern life. Ten further tales, including Rope's End, The Stampede, and When the Mail Came In, extend the collection's interest in sudden tests of courage, attachment, and obligation. Beach favors decisive situations in which a person's established identity proves less important than what that person does under pressure. The volume offers varied episodes rather than a continuous novel, with the opening carnival providing a vivid emblem of unstable appearances.

• Unexpected adventure
• Appearances and character
• Courage and obligation

Why read it

The title story makes its skeptical discussion of romance immediately vulnerable to the unpredictable freedom of a masked carnival.

English Harper and Brothers collection published April 1916, containing eleven stories