Talk:The Mystery (Adams and White)

Reviews
The Outlook, 16 Feb 1907 No man in our generation has written of adventure in a wider and truer sense than Mr. Stewart Edward White; for, as distinctly and powerfully as any other writer, he has made readers feel the terror and mystery of the Far North. For his best work Mr. White needs a big background of forest or of open country. In his latest story," The Mystery" (McClure, Phillips & Co.,. New York, $1.50), written in collaboration with Mr. Samuel H. Adams, he takes to the sea and carries his readers through adventures which, for novelty, breathless suspense, and blood-curdling audacity, must be ranked with the most astonishing tales of the kind. The story of the professor who ships on a beautiful schooner from San Francisco in search of a far island where he can carry on experiments with the most powerful destructives is told from beginning to end without stopping for breath, so to speak. Adventure succeeds adventure; climax follows on the heels of climax; catastrophe overtops catastrophe. In a certain way it is very well done; but it is a tour-de-force, not a piece of real writing; much better than most books of its kind, but not so good by any means as Mr. White can do when he writes of the things he knows under the compulsion of genuine' and vital interest.

The Bookman, March 1907: Among the innumerable weird and baffling tales of the ocean which are the common property of professional seafaring men, and which of nights are passed about the brightly lighted smoking rooms of transatlantic liners when the cry of the siren, biting into the fogs of the Newfoundland Banks, brings the talk round to the tragedies and disappearance of the sea—to the puzzling fates of the City of Boston and the Great Queensland and the Naronic and the Huronian—the story out of which grew this novel has held its own individual place. In its original form it is a yarn for which no explanation is offered, for which there is no theory that seems to fit, and which is presented frankly as an enigma. It tells how a merchant ship on the Pacific sights a strange vessel moving along with its sails set, but apparently deserted by its crew. A careful investigation shows absolutely no cause for the abandonment, so a crew from the merchantman is placed in charge, and the two vessels proceed on their way. During the ensuing night a storm springs up and the ships are driven miles apart. A day or two later the stranger is again sighted, but signalling brings from her no response, and a second crew that is sent aboard finds the fires still burning and the same terrible and inexplicable absence of human life. A call for volunteers brings to the front a few resolute spirits, who are installed on the mysterious vessel as a third crew. Again there comes up a storm, in which the stranger vanishes and is never heard of more. Add to this the phenomenon of a nebulous light on the horizon and you have substantially the problem which confronts the officers of the United States cruiser Wolverine in the opening chapters of The Mystery. In the work of elaborating this enigma into a well-rounded romance of some 70,000 words the authors introduce an adventurous reporter, a German savant and his secretary, a tyrannical sea captain, a crew of as picturesque scoundrels as can be found in the fiction of the sea, a volcanic island in the Pacific, and the discovery of a new form of energy by the savant that is to revolutionise the activities of the world, and compared to which radium is a child's plaything. Important as this pseudo-scientific phase is as offering a motive and supplying an explanation, it is far and way the least successful feature of the book.

The beginning of the story finds the Wolverine in a desert part of the Pacific, three hundred miles north of the steamship route from Yokohama to Honolulu, engaged in the laudable work of destroying such derelicts as add to the perils of sea travel. Of a June night the officers on watch see a glow on the horizon, which seems not unlike the electric glow above a city seen from a distance, although the nearest electric lighted city is a good eight hundred miles away. Another complication is the extraordinary behaviour of the Wolverine's compass. A few days later a strange ship is sighted and there begins the sequence of mysterious and terrible events which are unexplained until the journalist, Ralph Slade, is picked up from a dory, half dead and burning with fever, and is nursed back to intelligence to tell the story of the quest of Dr. Karl Augustus Schermerhorn, the long cruise of the Laughing Lass, its captain, Ezra Selover, and of his fate, and of the wild deeds of Handy Solomon, Thrackles, Pulz, Perdosa and the Nigger.

If, for a solution, the authors of The Mystery have resorted to agencies that are too outré and too much in the realm of theory, this will be regarded, as a minor fault by those who read the book for what it should be read—the vigour and dash of the narrative, the direct, clear-cut English and the vivid characterisation.

For a sea scoundrel the like of Handy Solomon one must turn back to Stevenson's Treasure Island. The sinister steel hook that he wears in place of a hand dominates the whole story; and over the lash of the sea and the straining of tha rigging there rises like a motif his rollicking chantey:

Richard Hughes Remsen

The Nation, 17 Jan 1907: