The Strange Schemes of Randolph Mason

CONTENTS


THE teller of strange tales is not the least among benefactors of men. His cup of Lethe is welcome at times even to the strongest, when the tædium vito of the commonplace is in its meridian. To the aching victim of evil fortune, it is ofttimes the divine anaesthetic.
To-day a bitter critic calls down to the storyteller, bidding him turn out with the hewers of wood and the drawers of water, for the reason that there is no new thing, and the pieces with which he seeks to build are ancient and well worn. At best, he cries, the great one among you can produce but combinations of the old, some quaint, some monstrous, and all weary. But the writer does not turn out, and the world swings merrily on.
Perhaps the critic forgets that if things are old, men are new; that while the grain field stands fast, the waves passing over it are not one like the other. The new child is the best answer.
The reader is a clever tyrant. He demands something more than people of mist. There must be tendons in the ghost hand, and hard bones in the phantom, else he feels that he has been cheated.
Perhaps, of all things, the human mind loves best the problem. Not the problem of the abacus, but the problem of the chess-board when the pieces are living; the problem with passion and peril in it; with the fresh air of the hills and the salt breath of the sea. It propounds this riddle to the writer: Create mind-children, O Magician, with red blood in their faces, who, by power inherited from you, are enabled to secure the fruits of drudgery, without the drudgery. Nor must the genius of Circumstance help. Make them do what we cannot do, good Magician, but make them of clay as we are. We know all the old methods so well, and we are weary of them. Give us new ones.
Exacting is this taskmaster. It demands that the problem builder cunningly join together the Fancy and the Fact, and thereby enchant and bewilder, but not deceive. It demands all the mighty motives of life in the problem. Thus it happens that the toiler has tramped and retramped the field of crime. Poe and the French writers constructed masterpieces in the early day. Later came the flood of Detective Stories until the stomach of the reader failed. Yesterday, Mr. Conan Doyle created Sherlock Holmes, and the public pricked up its ears and listened with interest.