21. Frank L. Packard Unlocks a Book
i
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.
ii
Frank Lucius Packard was born of American parents at Montreal on 2 February 1877 and was graduated from McGill University in 1897. The following year he took a postgraduate course in engineering at L’Institut Montefiore, University of Liége, Belgium. He engaged in engineering work in the United States for a number of years and when, in 1906, he began writing for various magazines, his first tales were railroad stories. On the Iron at Big Cloud (1911), The Wire Devils (1918), which tells of the work of a band of expert telegraphers and masters of the art of cipher codes, and The Night Operator (1919) are best characterized in Mr. Packard’s own Foreword to The Night Operator:
“Summed up short, the Hill Division is a vicious piece of track; also, it is a classic in its profound contempt for the stereotyped equations and formulæ of engineering. And it is that way for the very simple reason that it could not be any other way. The mountains objected, and objected strenuously, to the process of manhandling. They were there first, the mountains, that was all, and their surrender was a bitter matter.
“So, from Big Cloud, the divisional point, at the eastern fringe of the Rockies, to where the foothills of the Sierras on the western side merge with the more open, rolling country, the right of way ... sweeps through the rifts in the range like a freed bird from the open door of its cage; clings to canyon edges where a hissing stream bubbles and boils eighteen hundred feet below; burrows its way into the heart of things in long tunnels and short ones; circles a projecting spur in a dizzy whirl, and swoops from the higher to the lower levels in grades whose percentages the passenger department does not deem it policy to specify in its advertising literature, but before which the men in the cabs and the cabooses shut their teeth and try hard to remember the prayers they learned at their mothers’ knees. Some parts of it are worse than others, naturally; but no part of it, to the last inch of its single-tracked mileage, is pretty—leaving out the scenery, which is grand. That is the Hill Division.”
So much for the setting.