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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.