When Winter Comes to Main Street. Grant M. Overton
of mine. I have tried to tell in plain words what an ordinary person would see there.
“Let me add,” he went on, “that I did not go for material. I never go anywhere for material; if I did I should not get it. That attitude of mind would give me merely externals, which are not worth writing about. I go places merely because, for one reason or another, they attract me. Then, if it happens that I get close enough to the life, I may later find that I have something to write about. A man rarely writes anything convincing unless he has lived the life; not with his critical faculty alert; but whole-heartedly and because, for the time being, it is his life.”
v
John Palmer Gavit tells how once, when hunting, White broke his leg and had to drag himself back long miles to camp alone:
“Adventure enough, you’d say. But along the way a partridge drummed and nothing would do but he must digress a hundred yards from the shorter and sufficiently painful way, brace himself for the shot and recoil, kill the bird and have his dog retrieve it, and bring his game along with him. Just to show himself that this impossible thing could be done.
“I am not imagining when I say that in this same spirit Stewart Edward White faces the deeper problems and speculations of life. He wants to know about things here and hereafter. With the same zest and simplicity of motive he faces the secret doors of existence; not to prove or disprove, but to see and find out. And when he comes to the Last Door he will go through without fear, with eyes open to see in the next undiscovered country what there is to be seen and to show that the heart of a brave and unshrinking man, truthful and open-handed and friendly, is at home there, as he may be anywhere under God’s jurisdiction.”
Books
by Stewart Edward White
THE WESTERNERS
THE CLAIM JUMPERS
THE BLAZED TRAIL
CONJUROR’S HOUSE
THE FOREST
THE MAGIC FOREST
THE SILENT PLACES
THE MOUNTAIN
BLAZED TRAIL STORIES
THE PASS
THE MYSTERY (With Samuel Hopkins Adams)
ARIZONA NIGHTS
CAMP AND TRAIL
THE RIVERMAN
THE RULES OF THE GAME
THE CABIN
THE ADVENTURES OF BOBBY ORDE
THE LAND OF FOOTPRINTS
AFRICAN CAMP FIRES
GOLD
THE REDISCOVERED COUNTRY
THE GREY DAWN
THE LEOPARD WOMAN
SIMBA
THE FORTY-NINERS (In The Chronicles of America Series)
THE ROSE DAWN
THE KILLER, AND OTHER STORIES
ON TIPTOE: A ROMANCE OF THE REDWOODS
Sources
on Stewart Edward White
The Men Who Make our Novels, by George Gordon. MOFFAT, YARD & COMPANY.
Who’s Who in America.
Stewart Edward White: Appendix to GOLD (published in 1913) by Eugene F. Saxton. DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY.
Stewart Edward White, by John Palmer Gavit. PHILADELPHIA PUBLIC LEDGER, May 20, 1922.
Chapter IV
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 Liége, 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 titles 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, Pawned, 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 Pawned each character finds himself in pawn 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 assisted 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 Cæsar’s Clan is the