First, it has been called misogynistic, allegedly reflecting a seeming hatred or at least severe indifference toward women by its author. All four of the main protagonists are male, and the two female characters of any note in the novel are both native Africans from the lost Kakuna tribe. One is Gagool, the ancient, evil witch doctor/sorceress and head advisor to the equally evil usurping Kukuana king, Twala. The other is Foulata, the beautiful tribeswoman who engages in an ill-fated romance with Captain Good, one of the British protagonists. True, none of the protagonists is a female in the contemporary tradition of Lara Croft or even Hermione Granger from the Harry Potter series. Admittedly, our Western world has changed in its attitude toward women substantially since this novel was written almost 125 years ago, prior to when women had even been accorded the right to vote. But we need to bear in mind the group that Haggard had in mind for his adventure novel, dedicating it to “all the big and little boys who read it.”

  The other major criticism leveled against King Solomon’s Mines is its depiction of the African peoples and their relationships with the British Caucasians. To be sure, there is sufficient content that is directly nineteenth-century British colonialist in attitude and is, by definition, racist. After establishing the interracial romance between Foulata and Captain Good, Haggard has Quatermain attempt to discourage it, based upon the uproar that such a marriage would cause back in England, were Good to bring his African bride back there with him. Quatermain says this, even though he describes Foulata as both beautiful and noble, and has no objection to her otherwise. However, to Haggard’s credit, he does endow one of the book’s real heroes, a black African prince, with both intelligence and nobility far greater than many of the Caucasians encountered in the novel. Haggard reinforces this when Quatermain declares that he has found numerous Africans more worthy of the title “gentleman,” than the British and Europeans who have come to adventure within Africa. Haggard also has Quatermain emphatically declare that he refuses to utter or use the “N” word to refer to black Africans. Remember this is in 1885. In this regard, Haggard was far ahead of his time.

  King Solomon’s Mines remains a riveting and thrilling adventure yarn that makes for easy, entertaining reading. It has personal resonance in that it remains one of my earliest memories of my father. My paternal grandfather, born around 1880, was a huge fan of adventure stories. I well remember my grandfather almost always carrying a book with him, which invariably was a thriller or a mystery. He passed this love on to my father, who in turn introduced me at an early age to authors such as Haggard, Conan Doyle, Sayers, Christie, Eberhart, Hammett, and Chandler, among others. Even before I was able to enjoy these stories firsthand through reading them, my father would tell my brother and me bedtime stories set in far off lands and involving treasure maps, heroes, battles, and great mysteries. When I was older and reading for myself, I soon recognized many of these tales my father told as being bits and pieces from novels that he cobbled together for our enjoyment. His stories based upon King Solomon’s Mines were among our favorites. I hope that this novel, the action-packed progenitor of an entire genre of storytelling, will long continue to endure, entertain, and enchant readers of all ages.

  Norman L. Rubenstein, like H. Rider Haggard, followed his father into the family business and ran the litigation law firm founded by his father for over twenty years before being appointed a judge. After encountering health problems in his forties that precluded his continued practice of law, Norman, a member of both the Horror Writer’s Association and the International Thriller Writers, also like Rider Haggard turned to writing and is currently a columnist for Shroud Magazine and for Fear Zone as well as a reviewer for Cemetery Dance Magazine, Horror World, and Horror-Mall. He is also associate editor for Bloodletting Press (which received the 2009 Bram Stoker Specialty Press Award from the Horror Writer’s Association) and a part-time associate editor for Cargo Cult Press.

  13

  Robert Louis Stevenson’s

  THE STRANGE CASE OF DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE (1886)

  Sarah Langan

  A prolific, masterful writer, defender of the subjugated, and globe-trotter, Stevenson (1850–1894) led a life that rivaled his fiction. Born in Scotland, he caught the travel bug early, while accompanying his father on sea trips to Shetland. Upon leaving the University of Edinburgh with a degree in law, he spent several years roaming through Europe, where he met the love of his life, Fanny Osbourne. In a storybook-like gesture of wild romanticism, he followed her to San Francisco by boat and then train, living on as little as forty cents per day. By the time he found her in California, the arduous trip had exhausted his health. She nursed and then married him, and together they returned to Europe in 1880, where they spent the next eight years searching for a climate that would heal the respiratory ailments he’d suffered since birth. They never found it, but he continued to write, often from a sickbed, and during this time, he produced the novels that would make him famous: Treasure Island (1883),The Black Arrow (1883),Prince Otto (1885),Kidnapped (1886), and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886). In 1888, the family traveled to the South Pacific and settled in Samoa, where Stevenson became a local hero and defender of indigenous peoples, adopting the native name Tusitala (writer). He died before the completion of his final novel, at the age of forty-four, most likely of a brain hemorrhage, and had already composed his epitaph, which read:

  Under the wide and starry sky,

  Dig the grave and let me lie.

  Glad did I live and gladly die,

  And I laid me down with a will.

  This be the verse you grave for me:

  Here he lies where he longed to be;

  Home is the sailor, home from the sea,

  And the hunter home from the hill.

  Within five years of its 1886 publication,The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde became a slow-build commercial success, with two hundred fifty thousand books sold. It remains one of the most translated novels and continues to be read worldwide today. The story inspired the modern trope of the dual personality, from comic book heroes like The Incredible Hulk to Stephen King’s The Dark Half, to perhaps even Thomas Harris’s Dr. Lector in The Silence of the Lambs. A recent British television miniseries adapted the story to a modern setting. Arguably, the novel inspired modern variations on the werewolf legend, since both stories concern the desire to break free from psychological and social constraints.

  Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde concerns a mad scientist who concocts a potion that cleaves the evil part of his nature from his respectable persona and frees it to commit heinous acts. Soon, however, the evil Hyde becomes stronger than respectable Jekyll, and the cleaving occurs without the potion. Hyde subsumes Jekyll, and both men become a single monster.

  The short book was written with astonishing intensity in three days, then burned in dismay about its contents, then rewritten in another three days. It was published during the Victorian Era, alongside novels like Dracula, Jude the Obscure, The Odd Women, and The Picture of Dorian Gray. At first, these seem unrelated. But in truth, they have much in common: repression. The characters in each of these novels, good or evil, are trapped in worlds whose rules they didn’t create, and whose appearance of rectitude is more important than its substance.

  Though often dismissed as a populist, Stevenson’s fiction has outlasted its critics, and rightly so. What distinguishes Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde from its peers, and makes it a stronger novel, is its indictment not just of the cast of characters who witness their good friend’s degeneration, but of an entire social order.

  Stevenson tended to view the world as an outsider. His health problems engendered in him a sympathy for those less fortunate, and his travels taught him about the world outside stiff, Victorian Britain. He was a furious advocate for reform, and while in Samoa, published a scathing account of the European officials appointed to rule the island,A Footnote to History, which resulted in the recall of two government officers. Before that, he visited a leper colony in Hawaii and wrote a letter of complaint to the remote minister overseeing the colony:

  You belong, sir, to a sect—I believe my sect, and that in which my ancestors laboured—which has enjoyed, and partly failed to utilise, an exceptional advantage in the islands of Hawaii. The first missionaries came; they found the land already self-purged of its old and bloody faith; they were embraced, almost on their arrival, with enthusiasm . . . This is not the place to enter into the degree or causes of their failure, such as it is. One element alone is pertinent, and must here be plainly dealt with. In the course of their evangelical calling, they — or too many of them — grew rich.

  Like the men he condemned, Stevenson considered himself one of the elite. Though his family made their living from engineering lighthouses, they also inherited a substantial sum, and like the rest of the landed aristocracy, not all of it was squarely won. The same can be said for every character in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, from the kindly scientist to his trusted lawyer Utterson, to Utterson’s cousin Enfield, to Dr. Lanyon. All attended school together and are friends of convenience. None has true affection for each other. There is no honesty between them, or even joy—only politeness, and convention. They’re trapped. No wonder Jekyll wants to break free and do a little mischief.

  When the men learn that Jekyll is involved in bad business, each swears himself to silence. It is this fraternity that Stevenson loathed even more deeply than the evil Mr. Hyde, who consumes his willing victim, proving that once man’s darker nature is released, it does not set the good half free, but only corrupts it more deeply, for being a silent participant. It isn’t just Jekyll who loses his soul in this story, but every member of Jekyll’s class. He condemns the Victorian establishment itself, which, in its silence, commits harm.

  In the end, Hyde and Jekyll are not revealed to the world as the same man. Instead, the morally upstanding Utterson reads Jekyll’s confessional letters and presumably never looks at them again. Out of loyalty or cowardice, he protects Jekyll’s reputation.

  Hyde’s monstrosity is generic. He threatens to step on a child, canes a man to death, and presumably sleeps with a lot of women, men, or goats—who knows? Such behavior does not disgust Jekyll, but thrills him, which begs the question: was he ever a good man? Or does the culture in which he lives foster and aid him, simply because he’s one of the boys?

  What’s delightful about this story is its lack of guilt. Jekyll feels pretty bad about getting caught, but not all that bad about the way his alter ego bashed an old guy’s head in or maybe knocked a few girls up. In the end, the reader might wonder if committing those small harms is different from being part of a class that ignores all things odious, such as its servants, the families whom the laws it passes condemns to debtor’s prison, poorhouses, indentured servitude, winters outdoors, high-priced coal, and rags instead of riches, while all the while these respectable good old boys sniff their brandy at night, and discuss only polite, respectable topics, like the weather.

  Sarah Langan’s first novel,The Keeper (2006), was a New York Times editor’s pick. Her second novel,The Missing (2007), won the Bram Stoker Award for outstanding novel, was a Publishers Weekly favorite book of the year, an International Horror Guild outstanding novel nominee, and made several other best-of-the-year lists. She has published several essays and a dozen short stories, one of which, “The Lost,” received a Stoker Award. Her young adult series is entitled Kids. Her third novel,Audrey’s Door, received the Horror Writers Association best novel award.

  14

  Anthony Hope’s

  THE PRISONER OF ZENDA (1894)

  Michael Palmer

  Sir Anthony Hope Hawkins (1863–1933) was one of the most beloved and widely read novelists of his era. Writing all his fiction under the name Anthony Hope, Hawkins kept a journal throughout his professional life, which helped readers and literary historians to appreciate his remarkable talent and the breadth of his work, as well as his often painful lack of self-esteem. The man revealed in that journal was a scholar of language and politics, an athlete (rugby), a barrister, a knighted war hero, a devoted father of three, and the first cousin of Kenneth Grahame, author of The Wind in the Willows. He was also chronically insecure about money and driven by the need for increasing fame, as well as by a sense of failure for not achieving what he considered true greatness. Although critics considered his thirty-two volumes of novels and short stories to be somewhat uneven, few, if any, failed to acknowledge that his 1894 romantic adventure, The Prisoner of Zenda, was a timeless tale, if not a masterpiece. One critic called Hawkins the “new Dumas of the nineteenth century.”

  Inclusion of this little (50,000 words) gem in a book about the 100 greatest thrillers might be a surprise to some. But having read and reread the story as a suspense writer, many years after my father first brought it home for me from the library, I have no doubt that it belongs. Deathless themes, remorseless villains, intrigue, selfless heroes, a beautiful heroine, relentless pacing, adventure, true love, and an unforgettable, bittersweet ending— what more could any fan of the genre ask for?

  Oh yes, memorable use of language.

  The more I read, the more impressed I was with the lean, spare prose. I can’t remember an adventure story where the author accomplished so much with so little. To write simply, W. Somerset Maugham is quoted as having said, is as difficult as to be good. There are short passages on almost every page of this masterpiece—scalpel-sharp testimonies to the joys and genius of writing simply.

  . . . The fellow’s story was rudely told. But our questions supplemented his narrative.

  . . . “The red rose for the Elphbergs, marshal,” said I gayly, and he nodded.

  I have written “gayly,” and a strange word it must seem. But the truth is I was drunk with excitement. At that moment I believed—I almost believed—that I was in very truth the king. . . .

  According to the author,The Prisoner of Zenda began taking form in the autumn of 1883 when Hawkins, an attorney returning home from court, passed two men who bore a striking resemblance to one another. Within a short time of encountering the two men near the Westminster County Court, Hawkins, for no specific reason that he could recall, began obsessing on a single word—Ruritania. By the next day, the word had become a country—a monarchy situated roughly between Austria and Germany. Later that day, Hawkins began writing, and a little over a month afterward, the first draft of The Prisoner of Zenda was completed (the final version was published eleven years later).

  The story features a young Englishman, Rudolph Rassendyll, the cheerful, capable, but totally unmotivated brother of a British lord. Rassendyll, distinguished by striking red hair, has heard that through an ancestral indiscretion, the soon-to-be-crowned King Rudolph the Third of Ruritania, probably a distant cousin of his, features hair the color of his own. Motivated by nothing more than that fact, young Rassendyll decides to attend the coronation. Soon after his arrival in Ruritania, Black Michael, the half-brother to the king, arranges to have Rudolph the Third drugged, kidnapped, and imprisoned in the castle at Zenda. The perpetrator of the crime is the dashing, traitorous, womanizing swashbuckler, Rupert of Hentzau.

  While hatching plans for the king’s rescue, men loyal to him persuade Rassendyll to impersonate the monarch at the coronation in order to keep Black Michael from seizing the throne. There is, however, a major problem. Rassendyll falls in love with rapturous Princess Flavia who is scheduled to marry the new king and thereby strengthen the fraying bonds between their two countries. The princess, startled by the wit and kindness of the king (Rassendyll) falls in love with him as well. The complications mount as a daring rescue of the prisoner of Zenda is planned and attempted, with Rassendyll leading the way, and Rupert poised to stop him.

  The conclusion? Ah, that knowledge awaits your reading—a day or two at the most. To appreciate the impact of this tale, beyond the sudden fame and fortune heaped on Anthony Hawkins, one need only look to the success of the sequel,Rupert of Hentzau, and to the multiple adaptations of the novel including a Broadway musical, the operetta Princess Flavia, written by Sigmund Romberg, radio and television presentations, and a number of motion pictures starring such screen icons as James Mason, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Stewart Granger, Ronald Coleman, and even Peter Sellers in a 1979 comic version.

  Nearly all of the political doubles adventures that followed Zenda (Dave,Moon over Parador, and others) are homages to Hawkins’s work, along with a whole genre of what came to be known as Ruritanian romances—not bad for a romantic thriller that in length is virtually a novella.

  Earlier, I promised not to reveal the conclusion of the book. Well, after reading my favorite passage, I have, at least in part, changed my mind. So stop here if you wish to keep the secret until you reach the end of your own reading. Anthony Hawkins’s elegantly simple writing was just too wonderful for me not to share it with you.

  . . . One break comes every year in my quiet life. Then I go to Dresden and there I am met by my dear friend and companion Fritz von Tarlenheim. . . . In the evenings as we walk and smoke together, we talk of Sapt, and of the king, and often of young Rupert; and as the hours grow small, at last we speak of Flavia. For every year Fritz carries with him to Dresden a little box; in it lies a red rose and round the stalk of the rose is a slip of paper with the words written:

  “Rudolph—Flavia—always.” And the like I send back by him.

  Michael Palmer, M.D., board certified in internal medicine and emergency medicine, is the author of fifteen novels of medical suspense, all New York Times best sellers, including The Society, The Fifth Vial, and The First Patient. His fourth book, Extreme Measures, was made into the motion picture of the same name, starring Hugh Grant, Gene Hackman, and Sarah Jessica Parker. Currently, Palmer is an associate director of Physician Health Services, a Massachusetts agency helping physicians recover from mental illness, physical illness, and chemical dependency, including alcoholism. He is the father of three sons and the pet of two cats. In what spare time he has, Palmer lifts weights, plays bridge, and rides a Harley.