Review: KARL GRIER: the strange story of a man with a sixth sense

KARL GRIER: the strange story of a man with a sixth sense by Louis Tracy
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The casual racism is strong with this one - against the Jewish and Armenian characters, mainly, but any foreigner who appears in it is, at best, an amusing lesser being, even when not being explicitly compared to an ape. This takes my rating down from what was already not going to be a particularly high level.

It's not a mystery. It is, for its day, science-fictional, though the science is utter bunk (as was the style at the time), and the Fortean stories told in support of its plausibility are deeply implausible. The title character has psychic powers, which develop in childhood and enable him to clairvoyantly predict an attack on a neighbour from his father's tea plantation in India. This neighbour's daughter Maggie becomes his love interest later in the book.

While still a child, on the way to England for his education, he saves the life of a young Armenian businessman (with the not particularly Armenian surname of Constantine) who falls off the ship as they are leaving India. Young Karl guides the searchers using his clairvoyant ability. This Armenian later becomes an antagonist when he becomes interested in Maggie, now an 18-year-old violinist, and recruits his associate Stendhal, who is half Polish Jew and half Mexican, to corrupt her and deliver her to Constantine.

Karl observes this plot from across the Atlantic and decides he must protect Maggie, from which point various complications ensue.

The narrator is a journalist, probably a largely unaltered version of the actual author, who meets Karl and becomes involved, as does a university friend of Karl's, an American also studying at Oxford.

There's quite a bit of melodrama, and (going along with the narrator's reflections on the stiff-upper-lip character of the British, which Karl joins in, even though he is half Scots and half German), at the moments of highest emotion the prose becomes as stiff as so much cardboard. The plot mostly consists of the relationships between the various characters, which is fine, but it's a bit overwrought and doesn't, for me, ever rise above being mildly entertaining.

Would have been a bottom-tier recommendation, if not for the prominence of the racism.

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