"THALLERS."

Auckland Star, Volume LX, Issue 134, 8 June 1929, Page 1 (Supplement)

"THALLERS."

OLD SUCCESSES RECALLED.

MISS BRADDOIIr AND GABORIATJ

(By CHARLKS WILSON.)

When I was a young man—"heigho for the long ago-'—-I had a kindly relative who .gave me the run of a spare room wherein he kept the novels with which he solaced, the'tedium of the long railway journeys he so frequently made. ; In those days books were cheap. fChere we-re 2/ "yellow backs" by dozepe. The "new; novel" was, it is true, k)n its first appearance, only obtainable .at the libraries in a three-volume form, published at the— to the vast majbrity of us—perfectly imposible price of 31/6. Given about a year or so, and there would be a cheap edition, In\ yellow-backed stout boards —with a glaring outside design, represented nowadays by the wellknown "jacket" —published at 2/. In such a form I spent not a little time which I ought to devoted to my Valpy or Ahn, or iy worrying over the correct solutions ofi the "twisters" one used to find at the $nd of one's Colenso, to perusing the "thralers," as we should call them nowadays, \ of two writers, of: whom Andrew Lang dhanted the praises in his, I fear, long-f,orgotten "Ballade of Railway Novels." Lang had a special down on the over-psjrchological novels of the day. He frankly preferred the story of action.

These damsels of "Democracy's" How long they stop afj every stile! They smile, and we are told, I wis Ten subtle "reasons" why they smile. Give me your villains deeply vile, Give me Lecocq, Jottrat and Co., Great artists of the ruso and wile, Miss Braddon and Gaborjau! "Lady Audley's Secret." L. w souie years now since I last reivad 'Lady Audley'e Secret"—you would, l an) afraid, search long and in vain for a copy nowadays—and yet there was a, time when Mise Braddon's first "thriller" was among the best sellers of its day. Its author, though born in So'ho; Square, was the sister of a Prime Minister of Tasmania, the first representative/ of Tasmania in the Commonwealth Parliament. "Lady Audley'fi Secret" lae for its heroine and "villainess" a golden-haired young woman, the story of whose misdeedthere was, if I remember rightly, a body found at the bottom of; a well —was so popular a "thriller" that it ran into several editions', in three-volume form. After that, came another Braddon shocker, "Aurora Floyd," and a really capital yarn about a wicked, banker, "Henry Dunbar." Later on, when she had married her .publisher, John Maxwell, and made a , , small fortune, she wrote one of the beet stories of the French Second Empire I ever read. Thi3 is called "Ishmael," and, to my mind, is equal to. the best of Emile Zola's stories of Paris under the second Napoleon's rule. Mrs. Maxwell's son, W. B. Maxwell, is himself an. English novelist of considerable aibility. He still gives the world a novel from time to time.

It was some years later that I first "discovered" the charms of the other two novelists whose praises, as concooters of thrillers, are sung in the "Ballade of Railway Novels." Happening to be a fellow passenger on a specially long and stormy trip from Napier to Wellington (on the old Te Anau), I had the pleasure of lending the late Sir Julius Vogel a copy of the late Olive Schreiner's "Story of an African Farm." The. great man "dipped" into the book, and was kind enough to hand me an English translation of Gaboriau'6 "The Mystery bf Orcival," recommending all Gaboriau's stories as greatly readable. I didn't finish the story on the boat, and it was a couple of years before I got hold of a paper-bound copy published by poor Henry Vizetelly, who was most unjustly sentenced to a year in gaol for publishing English translations of some of the Zola novels. The charge was laid against Vizetelly, a very able but unlucky man, by the "Society for the Prevention of Vice." Curiously enough, before three years had passed by, a principal in the prosecution was

himself in disgrace over a very nasty sexual case, and Zola himself was accorded a great reception in London. The other day I saw the announcement of a reprint of this very novel, "The Mystery of Orcival." Gaboriau's chief successes were with the novels in which Lecocq, the famous Parisian detective, figured.

The Gaboriau Method; I shall always think that Conan Doyle took some of the Sherlock Holmes features from them. But Gaboriau had a trick of his own which no writer of "detectives" has ever equalled. He would begin by some Parisian sensation. In one, if I remember rightly, four or five fashionable people would be sitting witnessing an opera, when suddenly one of the company would fall from her chair in the box, dead from some' mysterious poisened .weapon. Well, once started, and Gaboriau would follow some purely Parjsian clue, and then another, land utterly bewilder you. Then, in the second volume of the story—long-wind-edness was always his chief fault, you mustn't be in a hurry with either Gaboriau or De , Boisgobey—he would take you down, say, to the south of France, and slowly, but surely, build up some complicated family history, the ramifications of which would spread gradually to Paris, and you would slowly find first one thread, and then another, which would lead you to the Opera House Crime and finally to the evil-doer and the real reasons for his deed. Gaboriau's special genius was in inventing disguises ■ and dodges with which his detectives —Lecocq at their head —would track down the villain. Every now and then you would seem to detect in Lecocq some grave error, but no, at the end of the story all the loose ends would be gathered together. As old Hoskins, the actor, once said to me, discussing the -case of his stage manager, "He always sees that his flats are jined." Gaboriau was, so the story goes, the favourite reading of Prince Bismarck. There are about twenty Gaboriau stories, and I hope they will be reprinted. The stories by De Boisgobey are, I think, more numerous. There are many of them clever enough but Gaboriau is still easily master. "The Coral Pin" is perhaps one of his best.

A "thriller" popular in my youth, and dug out the other day wherewith to dispel the ennui of a sick room, was found in an old and much-battered volume of "Chambers' Journal," in which was a story—like "Lady Audley's Secret," with a female and most terrible scoundrel as chief figure. This was James Payn's "Gwendoline's Harvest." In this "thriller," as it would be called to-day, the wicked lady slowly murdered her husband by feeding him minutely chopped-up horsehair. James Payn wrote another mystery story called "Lost Sir Massingberd." I can,just faintly remember the mysterious disappearance of the chief figure, whose body, I think, was found concealed in a hollow tree. But of the Victorian thrillers I can chiefly recall Wilkie Collins' "The Moonstone"—one of the first and best of "detectives," and his "Woman in White"—in which latter that cosmopolitan scoundrel, Count Fosco, appeared—and John Sheridan Le Fanu's "Uncle Silas," a story never surpassed for weirdness by any modern "thriller."

In later life, Wilkie Colling, who was a friend of Dickens—"The Tale of Two Cities" was greatly influenced by Collins —fell off terribly in invention. Perhaps this was due very largely to the opium habit, to which he, like Coleridge and De Quincey before him, became an addict But his earlier stories are still as readable as ever. "The Moonstone," with its ingeniously concocted plot, I re-read the other day, and found the three mysterious Indians, and better still, the good old family steward, Betteridge, with ; his mania for quoting "Robinson Crusoe " as intriguing as ever. Then "The Woman m White," which you can buy nowadays for eighteenpence, is as good as ever. In these later days there is such a ° f detec ttves and thrillers that it is clear readers who seek to be "taken out of themselves" consti* tute an enormously increasing public. Like Mr Jmgie on a memorahle occasion, iL , ?w Ot preSUme t0 dictat& '" but amusin g gentleman suggested to the Pickwickians, "Broiled fowl and mushrooms," I would specially recommend the detectives of Messrs. Freeman Wills, Croft, Agatha Christie, the toles and Mr. A. E. W. Mason. The subject, however, is too wide for me to venture upon detail.