The Red Lamp

IN The Red Lamp Mrs. Rinehart has returned to the field of her early successes, The Circular Staircase, The Man in Lower Ten, The After House, and other mystery stories, but she has added some interesting machinery in the form of séances, supernatural visitants, and experimentation in the occult, that not only keep the reader in doubt whether he is reading an elaborate ghost-story, but also provide him with a variety of complex shivers, due both to the presence of deep, dark crime and to the constant hovering about of ‘things that go bump in the night.’ Indeed, it would be hard to find a tale containing more of the materials of mystery, for, in addition to ghosts and criminals, there are ciphers, automatic writings, telepathy, second sight, private diaries, sheep-killing at night, old houses, fearsome woods, and dangerous marshes. It is a good book, or a bad one, according as one looks at it, to read all alone by candlelight in a lonely house in the woods at one o’clock in the morning.

As is her custom, the author introduces a group of interesting people, whom she portrays naturally. Perhaps never before has the hero of a mystery story been a college professor of English, but so it is here, Professor William A. Porter, A.B., M.A., Ph.D., Litt.D., and so forth, who has been teaching Milton, Dryden, and Pope for thirty years, being the centre of psychic disturbance — a somewhat forlorn creature, who wall perhaps cause any college professor more real qualms than will any of the ghosts that surround him.

The mystery story is a modern and, some think, perverted way of answering the classical question, ‘Who killed Cock Robin?’ In Mother Goose, however, the villain is named in the second line and confesses brazenly in the third, while in the mystery story the naming and the confession are recorded somewhere between page 300 and page 500, according to the length of the book. Perhaps it is an evidence of the march of mind or at least of the progress of patience during the centuries that the modern author can insert four or five hundred pages of reading-matter between the question, ‘Who killed Cock Robin?’ and the answer, ‘“I,” said the Sparrow,’ without arousing in his readers a desire to kill him. The fact is, of course, that the author is playing the ancient game of cat-and-mouse, with the difference that his mouse, or reader, usually likes it. There are readers who say that they ‘can’t endure’ mystery stories: they want to know who killed whom, without delay, and resent being played with. But such a story as The Red Lamp is really a kind of guessing-game, and only those readers who like such games like such books. Mrs. Rinehart herself has said that, ‘reduced to its fundamentals, the detective story almost invariably consists of two stories running concurrently, the one which the reader follows, and the other story, submerged in the author’s mind and rising to the surface here and there to form those baffling clues and inexplicable mysteries which keep the reader sitting up all night, to solve.’ The game consists, therefore, in separating the superficial story from the submerged. It is a little like poker, the author’s success consisting in preserving a ‘poker face’ and the reader’s in ‘calling his bluff.’

In playing the game of cat-and-mouse, Mrs. Rinehart has few equals. Her book kept one reader sitting up almost all night, and that she would probably consider an excellent test of its quality. R. M. GAY