Month: August 2022

Neglected to mention

Black Cypress (Frances Crane, 1948)
The Hollow Needle (George Harmon Coxe, 1948)
The Case of the Duplicate Daughter (Erle Stanlet Garnder, 1960)
The Greek Coffin Mystery (Ellery Queen, 1932)
Owls Don’t Blink (A.A. Fair, 1942)
The Patriot (Pearl S. Buck, 1939)

The Reckoning (Robert W. Chambers, 1907)

The Revolutionary War is winding down. Though there are still raiding parties here and there, New York is the only city still under British control. There, undercover of being a fop more interested in clothes than politics, Carus Renault plays spy for the rebels. He falls in love with Elsin Grey, lately arrived from Canada to visit Sir Peter, the man Renault is chiefly keeping tabs on. Elsin, to her displeasure and especially to Renault’s, is already married to Walter Butler in secret.

Butler discovers a page from Renault’s spy notebook and so Elsin flees with him across the frontier. Renault hopes to be able to serve openly, but no, he’s assigned spy duty once more as the Oneida delegate to the Iroquois congress, hoping to keep the confederacy together as the various tribes side either with the British or the Americans. This he succeeds in doing.

Spotted by Butler, his cover is blown again and he goes to assist in the Battle of Johnstown, where Butler’s death releases Elsin.

Inscription: On the front flyleaf, “L.M. Harnell, Dec. 1909”

North Star (Rufus King, 1925)

Dickie Robbins wants to marry Marcia Gale’s fortune and sends her brother Wilbur on a wild goose chase in Canada to find a man guilty of manslaughter. Wilbur gets lost in the woods and nearly dies, but Robbins finds and kidnaps him for reasons that don’t make the slightest sense. North Star, Wilbur’s German shepherds, tracks them down, Robbins is unmasked, and Wilbur is saved.

Inscriptions: On the front flyleaf, “Robert from Grandma / Dec. 25 1931”.

The Black Night Murders (Carolyn Wells, 1941)

In tiny Calneh, Connecticut, Bruce Osgood hopes to marry Anne Curran. It’s the night when he’s about to propose when Henry Barr, the family lawyer, delivers a letter from his late father, Everett Osgood, that reveals that Bruce is adopted and his biological father is Daniel Curran. Yes, he’s Anne’s half-brother.

Well, that puts a damper on things. To cure himself of his feelings for Anne, he marries Muriel Haines. It’s not a very happy marriage, but thankfully, it’s also a very short one. Muriel is killed late one night in the rose arbor.

Daniel Curran is also lately dead. Just before he died, a neighbor boy, excited with his new typewriter, comes over and Curran dictates a story for him to type that reveals a long-kept family secret, but the boy moves away and the story is lost. In his delirium while dying at the hospital, Curran raves something about digging under the White House to find his diction.

Meanwhile, a foreigner—Veltin—is visiting Calneh. He’s from Brittany or maybe Buckinghamshire. He isn’t entirely sure. He does give Anne a piece of Brittany’s own Quimper pottery that matches the piece Anne’s mother came back with from her honeymoon to France. Veltin is staying with lawyer Barr and, whoops, Barr turns up dead as well.

The secret, revealed when the “diction” is discovered in, not the White House, but the house once owned by the Whites, where the boy had his own “diggings” in the basement. The White house later became the Haines house and Muriel found the diction, which she was using to blackmail Veltin because it revealed that Anne wasn’t Daniel Curran’s biological daughter—she was adopted on the Currans’ honeymoon—, and further, she’s heir to a country manor in Buckinghamshire.

Veltin very much wants that manor and the way to get it is to marry Anne and then kill her, but Muriel has just put herself in the way, and so she has to go first, and then Barr figured out a little too much, and he had to die, too. After Fleming Stone uncovers Veltin’s nefarious plot, Bruce and Anne realize they’re not actually related after all and the two marry.

No inscriptions.

The Star Rover (Jack London, 1915)

Darrell Standing, once a professor of agriculture, is serving a life sentence in San Quentin. When another prisoner invents a plot to escape and confesses to it in a bid to get a pardon, he names Standing as his accomplice and claims he’s hidden a large quantity of dynamite somewhere in the prison. Nothing will convince the warden that no dynamite exists and so Standing is sent to the dungeon—solitary confinement—and kept tightly laced in a straitjacket until he confesses to its hiding place.

He learns from Ed Morrell, another prisoner who’s spent five years straitjacketed in solitary (that’s real, incidentally—Standing’s story is a fictionalized account of Ed Morrell), how to essentially will himself into a coma and divorce his mind from his body. It’s then that Standing unlocks the interstellar paths that lead him to his past lives.

He was once a nine year old boy murdered by Mormons in the Mountain Meadows Massacre, a fourth century zealot mortifying his flesh in the desert while eagerly expecting Armageddon any minute, a Parisian count killed in a duel, a sixteenth century English castaway who briefly finds himself a prince of Korea before spending forty years very slowly starving, another who finds himself shipwrecked alone on a rock living eight years on raw and rotting seals and rainwater, and an orphan Viking child who later becomes an officer in the Roman legions serving with Pontius Pilate as the Sanhedrin court calls for Jesus’s execution.

Eventually escaping solitary, Standing is blinded by the light after spending more than a decade in darkness and runs into a guard, which the court considers assault and so condemns Standing to death. He hurriedly writes his account of his past lives before being led to the scaffold, refusing to be sedated—not wanting to miss the start of his next life.

Inscriptions: Withdrawn from the Stratton Maine Public Library.

Fortune’s Fool (Rafael Sabatini, 1923)

Colonel Holles is a professional soldier. When Cromwell was in power, he fought for Cromwell. Now that the Stuarts are back in power, he wants to fight for them. He doesn’t make governments nor is interested in making them, he’s just a soldier, as he frequently says. Unfortunately Charles II doesn’t see it quite that way. His very presence in England is dangerous to him.

He does have two friends in high places, the Duke of Albemarle (George to his friends) and the Duke of Buckingham (Bucks). George finds a perfect, high-ranking position for Holles in India, where he’ll be out of Charles’s sight and mind. His decision is countermanded and the place given to a wastrel with no military experience who only wants it to escape his debts. Charles is not at all popular with George, or nearly anyone else, for his naked cronyism.

George promises to be on the look-out for something, but in the meantime, as his purse runs perilously low, Holles drifts towards Bucks. Bucks has fallen hard for Sylvia Farquharson, the celebrated actress, but to his consternation, she’s rejected all his advances. When all else has failed, he pays Holles to abduct her and deliver her to an isolated house. Such houses are not at all hard to find in London at this time since the plague is spreading and most sensible people have already fled the city.

It isn’t until they arrive at the house that Holles realizes Sylvia Farquharson is none other than Nancy Sylvester, Holles’s fiancée that for fifteen years he’s thought to be dead. Bucks appears and Holles draws his sword. The two are fairly evenly matched and the fight grows desperate. It isn’t until the lackeys break down the door and gang up on Holles that he’s knocked out. But before the ravishing can commence, it’s discovered that Nancy has symptoms of the plague. Bucks and party flee.

Nancy declines rapidly but Holles stays to nurse her. After five days, the crisis is past and Nancy begins to recover. Holles, deeply ashamed of himself and not wanting any pity, breaks quarantine and runs away. He would fly to France, but there are no ships entering or leaving the harbor. Indeed, London is almost wholly depopulated at this point. He, too, catches the plague and is taken to a pest house.

After days of delirium, he awakes to find Nancy is his nurse. He would flee again, if he were strong enough, but at last Nancy convinces him that it’s not pity that motivates her forgiveness. George at last comes through. The wastrel died of the plague, as did Charles’s second pick. With Charles fled to Salisbury, George is free to appoint who he wants and the Indian position is again Holles’s. Nancy accompanies the Colonel there as his wife.

Inscription: On the front end paper, “C.R. Deussy, 1923”.

The Hairy Arm (Edgar Wallace, 1924)

Mike Brixan of Scotland Yard or maybe not of Scotland Yard but associated with them—I never could quite understand—is searching for a notorious serial killer, The Head-Hunter. The messages he leaves were all typed on the same antiquated typewriter, and it just so happens a scenario typed on that very same typewriter has turned up at Knebworth Studios.

Jack Knebworth is an American slumming it directing films in England. Grown tired of his prima donna star, he appoints erstwhile extra Adele Leamington as the lead of his current picture. They shoot the location shots first, at Sampson Longvale’s derelict of a house and Sir Gregory Penne’s Griff Towers.

Penne is a rapist and possibly a murderer, could it be him? He’s got a trained ape or monkey or orangutan (the book absolutely does not know the difference) who knows how to handle a sword, could it be him? Or what about Longvale, with his penchant for old and dilapidated things, and his hero worship of his ancestor, the royal executioner of France?

Yeah, it was Longvale. Brixan knew all along but had no evidence to convict him. Doesn’t matter. Longvale captures Penne (along with Brixan and Leamington) and takes them to his hidden guillotine in the caves under his house. Penne is first up when Bhag, the… primate of some kind, busts in and rescues him, tying Longvale to the table and cutting off his head.

No inscriptions.

Christie’s Old Organ (Mrs. Walton, 1874)

Christie’s mother dies, telling him that she’s going to “home, sweet home”. He goes to live in a boarding house where an old organ grinder lives. One of the three or four tunes the antiquated organ plays is “Home, Sweet Home”. Christie and Treffy both wonder where that is.

Treffy grows ill. The doctor say he hasn’t a month to live. Christie takes the organ out, grinding it for pennies, and makes the acquaintance of a suburban family. Christie also chances to learn there’s a new mission house in the slums. He attends services and relays them back to Treffy, telling him that home, sweet home is Heaven and he’ll make it there if only he believes in Jesus.

Treffy dies and Christie grows feverish. When he recovers, we find out from the suburban family’s father that his wife has died and, as he knew what an interest she took in Christie, he wants to fund his education as a Scripture-reader. I don’t know what that is — someone who reads the bible to the illiterate? Anyway, he does.

Fifteen years later, Christie meets the preacher from the old mission. He’s invited to his country parish to recover his health and there marries somebody and thus finds his own home, sweet home.

Inscription: On the front flyleaf: “Miss Abbie Bowley, Gardiner, Me.”

The Ball of Snow (Alexandre Dumas, 1893)

Derbend has been suffering from a heatwave and drought for many weeks. Famine is imminent. Prayers to Allah have failed, prayers to the native rain god have failed, so now the people resort to the ball of snow. The cleanest young man, both of body and mind, must ascend to the summit of Schach Dagh, collect a ball of snow in a chalice, and then take it down and pour it into the Caspian Sea. But, well, there just aren’t any — clean young men, I mean. But what about Iskander?

Well, Iskander’s father insulted Hadji Festahli and Festahli is carrying out his vengeance on the son. Iskander and Festahli’s niece Kassime are in love, but Festahli has forbade their marriage. Iskander will agree to get the ball of snow only if Festahli consents to his marriage to Kassime.

On the way up Schach Dagh, Iskander runs into Mullah Nour, the bandit chieftain, on an ice bridge. When neither will back down, a fight ensues and the ice bridge collapses. Mullah Nour falls 500 feet down the mountain. Iskander, unwilling to let so brave a fighter be left for carrion, climbs down to either bury his body or render aid if he’s still alive. Mullah Nour is alive and, miraculously, not badly hurt. He swears a brotherhood with Iskander and promises safe passage to the summit.

Iskander returns with the snow and, after pouring it into the Caspian, it at once begins to rain. Festahli, however, has reneged on his promise and wants to marry Kassime to the Persian relative of a rich passing cleric, Mullah Sedek. Nour captures Sedek and forces him to write to Festahli that the deal is off and he should consent to Iskander’s bid, which he does.

Inscriptions. A plate pasted insider the cover reads “Shelf No. D89.8 / Free Public Library / Skowhegan, Me. / Accession No. 10322”.