The woman in purple turns out to be Mrs. Scoville. She sees the Judge and tells him that his son, Oliver, has fallen in love with her daughter, Reuther. She also tells him of her conviction that her husband did not slay Etheridge. It is a conviction arrived at since his execution. Late as it is, she is determined to do what she can to uncover new evidence.
Chapter by chapter, piling sensation on sensation, Mrs. Green writes of Mrs. Scoville’s quest. There is the shadow of the man in the peaked cap seen advancing into Dark Hollow at the hour of the crime. There is the picture of Oliver Ostrander secreted in his father’s house with a band of black painted across the eyes. There is the point of a knife blade in the stick with which Etheridge was killed, and the blade from which it was broken lies folded in Oliver’s desk. A peaked cap hangs in Oliver’s closet! Just when every circumstance drives home the conviction of Oliver’s guilt Judge Ostrander shows Mrs. Scoville a written statement that establishes the fact of an earlier murder by her husband. She is taken all aback and for the moment she believes again that the right man was put to death for the murder of Etheridge. But the Judge allows her to look at the document a moment too long. It has been tampered with at the close; forgery has been done!
Oliver must be found, for an accusation against him has got abroad and the police are looking for him. There is a race between the agents of the district attorney and the messengers of the Judge. He is found in a remote spot in the Adirondacks and flees, but whether to return home at his father’s summons or to escape to Canada, who knows? By a desperate drop over the side of a cliff he has landed in a tree top. The train is not due for fifteen minutes. He’ll catch it.
“‘The train south?’
“‘Yes, and the train north. They pass here.’”
Is it a return or a flight to escape? Thus, in chapter after chapter, Mrs. Green creates new suspense, introduces new thrills. As each lesser uncertainty is resolved a fresh one takes its place and always the great major questions hang unanswered over her story—till the very close. Then the one closed avenue to a solution is unbarred, the stunning surprise is sprung and the curtain falls swiftly on a stupefying dénouement. Between the big revelation and the very end of the tale there is just time enough and just explanation enough to convince the reader of what he would least have believed before.
This faint outline of a capital story illustrates Mrs. Green’s talent. Now for the explanation. The whole art of it consists in a truly infinite capacity for taking pains. Before writing this story it was necessary to write, or get clearly in mind, the biographies of half a dozen people. Their lives had to be fully known to the author, even to innumerable incidents which would not be used in her story. Particularly was it necessary to know every aspect in the past of the relations of these people to each other.
It was next necessary to reconstruct the crime. A period of twenty minutes or half an hour at a given place was under consideration. Where was this place and where did it stand with respect to every other place in the story—Judge Ostrander’s house, the Claymore Inn, the ruin of Spencer’s Folly? A map had to be made. It is an illustration in the book. But much more than a map was necessary. The exact whereabouts of every one of half a dozen persons for the whole twenty minutes or half hour had to be settled. Etheridge, Scoville, Mrs. Scoville, Oliver and Judge Ostrander were all in or near Dark Hollow. Just where was each at every moment? Just what was each doing? Just what could, and did, each say and do and hear and see? The author must know all these things in order to spare the reader what is irrelevant. She must have every inch of the ground at her fingertips and every instant clear. You don’t believe this? Try writing a story like Dark Hollow, improvising as you go along, or working from a mere outline, and see what happens to you!
The only improvisation in such work as Mrs. Green’s is in respect of what might be called chapter climaxes—the brief thrills, one or more to a chapter, which arise, administer their shock to the reader’s nerves, and are cleared up some pages later. Many of these are planned in advance, a few suggest themselves as the writer goes along, others are real inspirations which have suggested themselves during the writing and are substituted for planned but less effective climaxes. Such is the incident cited above where two trains, one bound south and the other bound for Canada, meet and pass at the little mountain station.
It is frequently said that the whole art of a mystery story or detective story of the kind Mrs. Green writes is to direct suspicion at every person except the right one, until the end! This is clever and partly true, but it takes no account of the vast amount of construction which must go forward before a sentence of the story can be put on paper; it ignores the fact that the criminal, to be convincing, must have figured in the story from the start, for otherwise he will appear as a desperate invention to help the author out of an otherwise insoluble situation. Looking at Dark Hollow in retrospect it is quite easy to see why certain things had to be—so. Judge Ostrander had to be the murderer because he was the person least likely to kill his dearest friend. Oliver had to be under suspicion to make Judge Ostrander’s confession plausible. The Judge had to be the murderer, furthermore, that Reuther Scoville might not be an unfit person to become the wife of Oliver. Oliver had to be cleared that he might be fit to mate with Reuther! Yes, yes; but all this wisdom after the event gets nowhere. It does not penetrate to the heart of the action and throws no light on the author’s cunning. Do you suppose for a moment that she made her story out of such nice little expediencies as these? You can’t build a story that way. It won’t hold together for a moment.