Three Sevens: A Detective Story by Perley Poore SheehanMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
This book sets out to be serious and profound. Because it fails so badly at being profound, it's also just absurd enough that the serious part doesn't quite come off either. Despite the subtitle, it's really not a detective story except by an extremely generous definition that involves almost no on-screen detective work, by someone who is almost as far as it's possible to be from being any kind of official detective. (I picked it up out of the Project Gutenberg new books feed, even though I knew nothing about the author and there was almost no information, and no reviews, on Goodreads, because it said it was a detective story and I was prepared to give it a chance.)
It is an original premise, at least. The title doesn't, as I suspected, refer to a hand of cards, but to the prison number of the protagonist, 3777, real name Daniel Craig (no, not that one). He has allowed himself to be imprisoned under another name for a crime he didn't commit, because he felt sorry for the young man who did commit it and sympathetic to his reason, and also because he was in some despair after being expelled from college because of a moment of poor judgement. The book opens with him unjustly in solitary confinement because of a vengeful prison guard who he had annoyed in some way I've forgotten, probably by standing up to his injustice.
He receives (via trained cat) a smuggled saw, originally intended for the previous inhabitant of his cell, who has died. He saws his way out and masterminds a prison takeover, but what he didn't realize was that on that same day, the corrupt and cruel prison governor was being replaced by a reformer, who would have fixed up the issues that are driving his revolt. The new governor's daughter arrives in advance of her father, and is caught up in a riot that breaks out among the newly freed prisoners. Craig's intention is to let out the people he believes to be innocent, or who he thinks have served a long enough sentence and are harmless, and keep the bad ones, but this doesn't go as he'd hoped, and several dangerous criminals get loose. Meanwhile, he saves the young woman (she's about 18, but very competent and brave), and of course they fall for each other. They meet a total of four times in the course of the book, mostly briefly, but this constitutes a romance for purposes of subplot and Craig's inspiration, hence my "thin-romance" tag.
Craig himself goes on the lam, with a red notebook filled with details of the escaped convicts he swears to bring back, since it's his fault they're on the loose. He has a number of adventures in doing so, many of them pretty unlikely, especially the ones near the end, where he gets high-level assistance in the climactic capture of the last few crooks. Along the way, the narrator makes various generalizations about black people, Americans, men, and women, mostly complimentary, but generalizations nonetheless. There's a good twist at the end that ties a few things together, and although it's reliant on coincidence, I think the author pulls it off.
At its best, it's suspenseful and action-packed. At its worst, it's just silly, and there's more of that than there is of the good stuff. But there is some good stuff, and the premise is (as far as I know) original; there are worse century-old books you could be reading.
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