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.