i
From his home on the shore of the St. Lawrence, Frank L. Packard sent word that the title was The Locked Book. No details. The Locked Book remained a locked book until the manuscript arrived. One had a vision of Mr. Packard going to his safe and turning the combination and swinging open the door and taking out the story, complete, released only in its entirety. Knowing his work, one has similar visions of the tales he has written unlocking themselves and stepping, full-statured, into his mind. Mr. Packard, one of the most disconcerting of men, would not be himself disconcerted by such apparitions. His is a personality full of outward contradictions and inward reconcilements. There is something gruff, even ferocious, in his speech and manner on many occasions; it melts every other moment into a really exquisite urbanity. He is alarmingly direct, dreadfully uncompromising—and he is the soul of hospitality and gentleness, a person of stainless honor. He assumes rudeness like a mask and his blue eyes and the look in them give him quite away with an utter transparency. His coat is rough, fuzzy, scratchy, yet his heart is on the sleeve of it. And his fiction? Full half of it moves in the “underworld” and is peopled with criminals; yet the thing that most markedly distinguishes Frank L. Packard from all other writers of mystery-adventure stories is his belief in a moral order. Immanuel Kant and Sherlock Holmes are commingled in him; and, though he may invent plots he really believes in miracles.
He is, as everyone must know, the author of The Miracle Man, a novel which George M. Cohan made into a successful play and which, as a motion picture, made millions of dollars for various persons not including the author.... A moral order has some advantages over a money order.
ii
Frank Lucius Packard was born of American parents at Montreal on 2 February 1877 and was graduated from McGill University in 1897. The following year he took a postgraduate course in engineering at L’Institut Montefiore, University of Liége, Belgium. He engaged in engineering work in the United States for a number of years and when, in 1906, he began writing for various magazines, his first tales were railroad stories. On the Iron at Big Cloud (1911), The Wire Devils (1918), which tells of the work of a band of expert telegraphers and masters of the art of cipher codes, and The Night Operator (1919) are best characterized in Mr. Packard’s own Foreword to The Night Operator:
“Summed up short, the Hill Division is a vicious piece of track; also, it is a classic in its profound contempt for the stereotyped equations and formulæ of engineering. And it is that way for the very simple reason that it could not be any other way. The mountains objected, and objected strenuously, to the process of manhandling. They were there first, the mountains, that was all, and their surrender was a bitter matter.
“So, from Big Cloud, the divisional point, at the eastern fringe of the Rockies, to where the foothills of the Sierras on the western side merge with the more open, rolling country, the right of way ... sweeps through the rifts in the range like a freed bird from the open door of its cage; clings to canyon edges where a hissing stream bubbles and boils eighteen hundred feet below; burrows its way into the heart of things in long tunnels and short ones; circles a projecting spur in a dizzy whirl, and swoops from the higher to the lower levels in grades whose percentages the passenger department does not deem it policy to specify in its advertising literature, but before which the men in the cabs and the cabooses shut their teeth and try hard to remember the prayers they learned at their mothers’ knees. Some parts of it are worse than others, naturally; but no part of it, to the last inch of its single-tracked mileage, is pretty—leaving out the scenery, which is grand. That is the Hill Division.”
So much for the setting.
“And the men who man the shops, who pull the throttles on the big, ten-wheel mountain racers, who swing the picks and shovels in the lurching cabs, who do the work about the yards, or from the cupola of a caboose stare out on a string of wriggling flats, boxes and gondolas, and, at night time, watch the high-flung sparks sail heavenward, as the full, deep-chested notes of the exhaust roar an accompaniment in their ears, are men ... whose hearts are big and right.”
The human values of these early stories of Packard’s are as sturdy today as when they were first written; whatever their shortcomings, a lack of vitality was not one of them. The man who was to become a chef of plots began by simply pitching the fat of human nature in the fire of dramatic incident. His first stories are like steaks; and if they are hastily and simply cooked, they are not cooked up. Thick, rich cuts from the flanks of actual life, burned a little at the edges, perhaps, they still are tender with juices and flavor. They nourish directly. Their protein is the example of courage, from the story of a train newsboy who averted a wreck to the tale of how Martin Bradley saved the Rat River Special.
iii
In 1910 Mr. Packard married Marguerite Pearl Macintyre, of Montreal, and the next year saw the publication of his first book, On the Iron at Big Cloud. In 1912 he wrote his first novel, Greater Love Hath No Man. The novel was written in Lachine, a city eight miles from Montreal, where Packard had settled and where his home is now. The outline of the story is as follows:
“Varge, the hero, was a foundling brought up by Dr. and Mrs. Merton as if he had been their own son. Their real son, Harold, kills his father in a quarrel, and begs Varge to disappear so that it will seem that he is the actual murderer. Varge goes further than that. He does not run away, but publicly shoulders the guilt for the sake, not of Harold, but of Mrs. Merton, whose heart would break if she knew that her son had killed his father. Varge believes he owes them this act of sacrifice in return for the life-long kindness of his benefactors. The story thereafter is the story of this sacrifice; his life in prison, where as a trusty he meets the warden’s daughter, Janet Rand; his love for Janet which both impels him to escape and to give himself up again—and finally his freedom as Harold Merton, dying, confesses the truth.”[95]
Here was a novel on the theme of sacrifice, a theme which had already been persistent and noticeable in Frank L. Packard’s short stories, and a theme which was to recur later, but interwoven with another idea of equal strength and beauty. The discovery of that other idea—its discovery, that is, in the necessary terms of a story—was to come in the same year in which Greater Love Hath No Man was published. If you journey directly north from Montreal, you will find yourself after a while in mountainous country with summits of less height than many on the North American continent. Nevertheless the Laurentian Mountains have a distinction more interesting than altitude; they are geologically the oldest formation—older than the Adirondacks, the Alleghanies, the Rockies; older than the plains. They are fundamental and as unchanging as the capacity to wonder and the will to believe in the heart of that higher insect, Man. In 1913 Packard was in the Laurentians and there and at Lachine he was engaged in writing a novel which he purposed calling “The Wrong Right Road.” When it was finished it appeared as a complete novel in Munsey’s Magazine for February, 1914. A set of advance proofs was sent to George M. Cohan, who bought the dramatic rights and changed the title. The book was arranged to appear immediately and Mr. Cohan at once set to work to fashion the play.
The scene of Packard’s story was the village of Needley, Maine. In Needley, says an outline,[96] “lives an old man—deaf, dumb and almost blind—known as the Patriarch. For many years, through the exercise of faith, he has cured the people in the neighborhood of their simple ailments. An article about him finds its way into a New York City newspaper which comes under the eye of the celebrated ‘Doc’ Madison, a quick-witted and ingenious confidence man, who at once evolves a scheme to make the Patriarch’s home a shrine to which Doc will entice all ailing humanity from far and near, and then pluck the golden hoard through his trickery.
“Among Doc’s disciples is a clever and beautiful girl named Helena Vail. Another is a dope fiend, Pale Face Harry, an artful dodger with a hacking cough. The faker that Doc Madison selects to take the star part in setting the procession of ailing ones in motion is called the Flopper. The Flopper has an uncanny control over his joints by which he can, with a single gesture, convert himself into a loathsome cripple, twisted and broken, begging in the streets, shattered in body and soul; truly a spectacle to soften the hardest heart. Doc Madison rounds up his little band of efficient scoundrels, takes them to Needley, Maine, and plants them on the sweet-souled Patriarch, whose faith in his own powers to heal is merely his faith in the influence upon man’s soul and body of love and goodness and belief in all that is worth while. Helena forces herself upon him as his grandniece, and becomes his trusted confidante. The Flopper crawls from the train through the dust of the street to the Patriarch’s threshold. Here the old man, practically blind, surrounded by a crowd of visitors and devotees from all over the country, stretches out his thin hands, and the Flopper rises from the earth a new man. At the same moment a crippled child, helpless from birth and staggering along on crutches, throws his artificial supports from him and cries aloud: ‘I can walk!’”
This supreme moment of The Miracle Man—book, play and picture—leads to the wreck of Doc Madison’s scheme; the crooks are self-defeated by the advent of a power they cannot understand. A valley has been exalted, a mountain and hill have been made low, the crooked has been made straight....
And Mr. Packard had made the discovery of his second idea, the theme of regeneration which is so much the most powerful manifestation known to human lives. In finding it he had unlocked more than a book, or a striking play, or an extraordinary motion picture. The camera version of this simple tale did indeed make lasting reputations for Thomas F. Meighan, Betty Compson and Lon Chaney, as well as enhance the reputation of the late George Loan Tucker, whom Mr. Meighan prodded into directing the picture; money rolled in upon the picture’s backers in a tidal wave; the success of “The Birth of a Nation” was outdone, nor has any film since surpassed the record set by Packard’s story. These phenomena are picturesque—staggering, if you like. But they came afterward; they had little to do with the author, who, perhaps, could have used some of the money but to whose work these successes could have no true relevance. What Mr. Packard had unlocked was an inwardness in himself, the fullness of his own mind. He was, perhaps, never to write well in the sense of writing with literary distinction; he was to become a master of plot and of incident, and to do stories in which characterization was to suffer from the very rush of action and the galvanization of suspense. But he was never to write a book in which the emotion was cheap or the immanent morality less than uncompromising. And with his themes of sacrifice and regeneration, intertwined, he was to arrest, enthrall and convince the thousands.
iv
The next book was The Belovéd Traitor (1916. And please make three syllables of the adjective). Jean Laparde and Marie-Louise are fisher folk in a French village and are affianced. Jean, who is always modeling little figures in clay, is a genius. A wealthy American named Bliss discovers him. Jean is sent to Paris to study and his great gift ultimately causes a sensation. Bliss’s daughter makes him her conquest, for adulation has turned the sculptor’s head and he has forgotten Marie-Louise. Jean and Myrna Bliss sail for America where they are to be married at the Bliss home. Marie-Louise in her great loneliness decides to go to America. On shipboard, in the steerage one night, Jean sees Marie-Louise. His love for her returns, and with it repentance for the way he has used her. It is now a question of both sacrifice and regeneration. Regeneration comes first; and the apparent sacrifice is canceled by a far greater success; for on his return to France, Jean’s work reflects the new sincerity of his life and love.
Consider The Sin That Was His (1917). Here regeneration leads to sacrifice, or willingness to sacrifice, and the story develops with a power which makes Packard’s first novel, Greater Love Hath No Man, appear weak and insufficiently motivated. Raymond Chapelle, alias Three-Ace Artie, a gambler, is banished from the Yukon. Later, in a little village in French Canada, in order to save himself from the consequences of a murder which he has not done, but in which circumstantial evidence would insure his conviction, he masquerades as Father Aubert, a young priest who had been hurt. The story shows the conditions that force Raymond to continue the rôle of Father Aubert; tells how he loves Valerie; how he converts an old hag named Mother Blondin and becomes the idol of the parish; how, finally, the real Father Aubert becomes the victim of that same circumstantial evidence which Raymond has tried to escape. When the real priest is tried and sentenced to death Raymond’s assumed rôle has so wrought upon him that he confesses the false part he has played—which, in the situation, involves taking the death sentence upon himself. Mother Blondin, his convert, who is really guilty of the murder, in turn saves him.
Again: From Now On (1920) tells the story of Dave Henderson, who succumbs to temptation and steals $100,000. He succeeds in hiding the money before he is caught, convicted and sentenced to five years in the penitentiary. When he is released both the bookmaker who had employed him, and who is an inherent crook, and the police take up his trail. But it is a woman’s love and his love for her which finally bring Dave Henderson to the point of returning the money. Regeneration. A sacrifice.
In Pawned (1921)—a story of pawned people, not pawned things—the father of Claire sacrifices his rights and privileges as a father in the effort toward regeneration. Ultimately he sacrifices his life to free her from a man more dissolute, and far more evil, than himself. Regeneration fails, but redemption takes its place. It is John Bruce, to save whose life Claire has risked everything, who is regenerated. The novel is an extraordinary achievement in plot construction, the precursor of The Four Stragglers in that respect; for Doom of the Night (1022) was earlier in point of composition.
In order to trace connectedly through a succession of novels the dual themes of sacrifice and regeneration which are Packard’s forte, we have omitted mention of his best-known figure, Jimmie Dale. He was introduced with The Adventures of Jimmie Dale (1917), carried through The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale (1919) and not necessarily finished with Jimmie Dale and the Phantom Clue (1922). Mr. Packard began to write these tales of his gentleman burglar in 1914 and it is a tribute to his skill as a storyteller that, ten years afterward, people read The Adventures of Jimmie Dale with a conviction that he will never do better stories.
Jimmie Dale is a rich young man, the inheritor of a fortune made in manufacturing safes. “It had begun really through his connection with his father’s business—the business of manufacturing safes that should defy the cleverest criminals.... It had begun through that—but at the bottom of it was his own restless, adventurous spirit. He had meant to set the police by the ears.”[97] What he had been doing was to force safes as a burglar might force them. The police would find no theft, “in the last analysis they would find only an abortive attempt at crime.” Partly “as an added barb,” partly “that no innocent bystander of the underworld, innocent for once, might be involved,” he had made a habit of pasting conspicuously in sight (on the safe’s dial, generally) a diamond- or lozenge-shaped paper wafer, prepared with adhesive on one side and handled with tweezers to avoid leaving a finger print. The succession of crimes without theft became known as the work of the Gray Seal. Then, one night, he had been caught while at work in Maiden Lane, New York. He had wrapped a string of pearls around his wrist in a facetious moment and discovery had compelled him to a desperate dash without time to leave the jewelry behind. Not until the next day had he known that his detector was a woman. “The first letter from her had started by detailing his every move of the night before—and it had ended with an ultimatum: ‘The cleverness, the originality of the Gray Seal as a crook, lack but one thing,’ she had naïvely written, ‘and that one thing is a leading string to guide it into channels worthy of his genius.’ In a word, she would plan the coups, and he would act at her dictation and execute them—or else how did twenty years in Sing Sing for that little Maiden Lane affair appeal to him?”
Cold consideration convinced Jimmie Dale that not even his own father (then alive) would believe in his innocence. “And then had followed those years in which there had been no temporizing, in which every plan was carried out to the last detail, those years of curious, unaccountable, bewildering affairs ... until the Gray Seal had become a name to conjure with.” In all this time Jimmie Dale, though communicated with by letter and telephone, had never been able to trace or identify his directress. A year before the book opens she had written: “Things are a little too warm, aren’t they Jimmie? Let’s let them cool for a year.”
Mr. Packard opens, in masterly fashion, at this point; it is the technique of Conan Doyle in the case of Sherlock Holmes (to quote no other examples). One establishes one’s detective or criminal—or other exceptional character who tests plausibility—by raising the curtain on him in full career. The way to begin is—not to plunge, but just to slip casually into the middle of things. At first our interest is centered on Jimmie Dale’s successive adventures—extremely well-constructed—but as the book develops, the importance and interest of the woman back of Jimmie Dale asserts itself. Jimmie Dale is led into a series of adventures strictly on her behalf; and what has been in effect a chain of connected short stories becomes virtually a novel. But one characteristic stands out in every chapter. Other writers have shown, though only rarely, an equal ingenuity; no one that I can now recall has shown the same fundamental concerns, the same intense preoccupation under his melodramatic structure. For the exploits of Jimmie Dale, those bizarre and disconnected enterprises to which he is ordered, are Robin Hood exploits, rightings of wrongs, crimes of form and philanthropies of intention. So, later, are the struggles into which Jimmie Dale is precipitated on behalf of the woman whom, no longer mysterious, he deeply loves. Simply, Frank L. Packard is a man who cannot abide the spectacle of a world unless it is the philosopher’s world, erected about the steel framework of a moral order. He indulges in crime for morality’s sake.
v
In algebra, as you may remember, one equation suffices if you are solving to find a single unknown quantity; two are necessary if two unknown quantities are to be ascertained; and so on. Given three unknown quantities and only two equations, the affair is hopeless. In a perfectly constructed mystery story, the reader is solving for several unknown quantities—for x and for y and possibly for z—but always with one too few equations.
When he came to write The Four Stragglers (1923) Mr. Packard had had a considerable experience in handling plots. The first eight pages of the book show three men huddled together under a bombardment in France. Their talk reveals them as former confederates in crime in London. There is a fourth man lying very still on the ground, apparently dead or dying. To make sure, one of the three shoots him. The group is in pitch darkness except for occasional flares. One of these, coming shortly, lights the scene fully. All three look at the spot where a murdered man should be lying. No man is there.
The story opens three years later, in London. We see the three confederates, a varied, effectively contrasted three, reassembled and active. We follow them in a thrilling operation. The main thread now begins to spin. Just as the three have planned to cease operations and take a vacation they come to know of the existence of a treasure hid and watched over by a madman on one of the islands or keys off the Florida coast. The knowledge comes to each one separately, except that B and C each knows that A knows it. And the fourth man, D?
One of the excellences of The Four Stragglers is the economy of means; there is not a character in the book who is not indispensable to the action. There is, too, an effect of a Monte Cristo tale, due probably to the treasure quest, the island, and the hiding-place devised by the madman’s cunning. The suspense is not only sustained but is steadily intensified; and the book has some scenes very exceptional in their bizarre character. Take this, which is imaginative and not merely inventive. The setting is an aquarium at night, brilliantly lighted, but with the window shades tightly drawn down:
“Locke blinked a little in the light as he stepped forward. It reflected bewilderingly from the glass faces of the tanks that were everywhere about. He joined the old man in the center of the aquarium. Here there was an open space from which the tanks radiated off much after the manner of the spokes of a wheel. A heavy oriental rug was on the tiled floor, and ranged around the table were a number of big easy chairs.
“From under his dressing gown now the old man took a package that was wrapped in oiled silk, and laid it on the table.
“‘Money!’ he cried out abruptly. He suddenly commenced to titter again. ‘Did I not tell you I was being followed, always being followed? Well, last night they followed a wrong scent.... They were there—they are always there—watching—eyes are always watching.’ He broke into his insane titter again....
“Subconsciously Locke was aware that the old maniac was still talking, the crazed words rising in shrieks of passionate intensity—but he was no longer paying any attention to the other. He was staring again at the glass tank, behind and a little to one side of the old madman, that contained the sea-horse. It was only a small and diminutive thing, but, unless he were the victim of an hallucination, it had taken on an extraordinary appearance. It seemed to possess human eyes; to assume almost the shape of a face—only there was a shadow across it. The water rippled a little. The sea-horse moved to the opposite corner of the tank—but the eyes remained in exactly the same spot.”
The reader of The Four Stragglers will say, with entire truth: “There is no principal motif of either regeneration or sacrifice here.” No, but there is another motif which Frank L. Packard has reiterated with an equal persistence—punishment for evildoing. The story has, furthermore, a distinctly more ironical quality than Mr. Packard, in his warm indignation at moral disorder, in his determined institution of a moral order, has generally been able to fall back upon. If the wages of sin is death, as his story reminds us, the reward of greed is defeat and the possession of money as money is a grim futility. It is a sharp lesson from one who has learned it—how? I think of the fortunes made by The Miracle Man and feel a Jimmie Dale smile on my lips (“his lips thinned”; “a mirthless smile was on his lips”) as it occurs to me that Mr. Packard could easily have learned it from simply watching others learn it at his expense. The bill for the lesson, so presented, does not seem unreasonable.
vi
Frank L. Packard and his wife and boys live in a particularly pleasant, and rather a roomy, house set back from the avenue which winds along the north bank of the St. Lawrence at Lachine. In the summer Mrs. Packard and the children may go to Kennebunkport in Maine or some other spot on the seashore. Then will the husband and father spend all the hours of daylight at the Royal Montreal Golf Club, the oldest golf club on this continent, with a clubhouse whose very wide veranda is 300 feet long and whose two eighteen-hole courses are a test of good playing. In the evening he likes to get in three friends, including M. Henri B——, a notary of an old Quebec family, for bridge. Monsieur B—— and his friend, the writer, are likely to have exchanges in French, even though Packard insists that his French is somewhere short of perfection and less good, even, than in his youth when he was a student at Liége. If Robert H. Davis, editor of Munsey’s Magazine, or some other old friend from New York is a house guest he will be golfed by day and admitted to the bridge game by night. There are, also, occasions for talk ... and there are superlative meals, whether at the Royal Montreal, the University Club in Montreal, or at the Packard house. Not only these meals, but the hours between the meals, are made more grateful to many a visitor by the fact that the Province of Quebec is not dry. In fact, the Province is in the liquor business, to the exclusion of all private selling. By establishing government shops where liquor is sold in bottles only, the Province has abolished the saloon and made unnecessary a Provincial income tax.
A few years ago Robert H. Davis used to be able to lure Packard up North on camping and hunting expeditions in which a truly incredible degree of hardship was endured in the name of recreation and healthful exercise. But lately Packard has refused to go. He is content to take his healthful exercise at the Royal Montreal and have a little physical comfort with it.
He is not tall. He has a weathered face, blue eyes, and a grim-looking mouth that is never through smiling. He has been pretty much around the world. Back in 1912 (I think) he sailed from Montreal to Cape Town and then went on to Melbourne and Sydney in Australia. From there he stepped over to Auckland, New Zealand, and investigated Maoriland. He continued through the Pacific, visiting Tonga, Samoa, Fiji and Hawaii. At Samoa he went from Apia to one of the smaller islands, where he lived for a couple of weeks in a chief’s hut in native fashion.
Again, in 1923, he went to South America.
Twelve years Mr. Packard waited while an idea that he came upon in the course of his round the world trip took shape. The Locked Book is in characteristics somewhat like The Four Stragglers. It begins with a yacht drifting, disabled, in Malay waters and proceeds without hesitation to the moment when Kenneth Wayne finds on a barbaric altar a book bound in leather, very old, clasped by the design of a dragon in thick brass, and locked in a strange fashion. The dragon’s tail and mouth meet over the edges and the tail is solidly brazed into the mouth. One cannot move the covers by the fraction of an inch. It seems probable that the book holds the secret of a Rajah’s treasure in gold and jewels.... The reader, after the first flush of enjoyment has passed, will be distinctly interested in analyzing Mr. Packard’s methods in the plot and his use of the plot as a vehicle for effects more important.
He believes in having a story. If you ask him to write something about fiction he will emphasize two things: the story and the character of the story, the moral character, that is, and the “moral responsibility” of those who write.[98] And once, certainly, his sense of drama and his sense of the ideal fused in a story of such simplicity and force and elevation as to be intrinsically a work of art. No faults of execution can take away that core of beauty from Frank L. Packard’s legend of The Miracle Man.
BOOKS BY FRANK L. PACKARD.
SOURCES ON FRANK L. PACKARD
In addition to those cited in the text of the chapter: Robert H. Davis, 280 Broadway, New York, N. Y.