When Winter Comes to Main Street. Grant M. Overton
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. Nobody 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-assorted 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 appetite 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!
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