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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.