The Adventures of Jimmie Dale by
Frank L. Packard
My rating:
4 of 5 stars
Another good recommendation from my wife, who listened to it on Librevox. She did warn me that the two sequels are pretty much the same, so reading them all in a row - as she did - isn't recommended. The first is the best, she says, because the premise is still fresh.
It's a good premise, too. Jimmie Dale is a wealthy young New Yorker, having sold his late father's burglar-proof safe company for a tidy sum. To his friends at the highly exclusive club he belongs to, he appears to be an idle man-about-town, but he has a secret identity as the wanted criminal the Grey Seal (not the animal; he leaves grey stickers at the scenes of his exploits).
Initially, he was doing this as a lark, a personal challenge. He didn't steal anything, just broke in and left his calling card. But a mysterious woman somehow discovered his double life, and blackmails him into doing jobs for her - jobs which also make use of mysteriously acquired and very detailed knowledge (it's never explained exactly how she gets this, and at one point she knows the name he has given his hideout, even though nobody else is in his confidence and he would presumably never have said its name aloud). But rather than harming the innocent, his "crimes" on her behalf protect them at the expense of the corrupt and greedy.
He has yet another identity as Larry the Bat, a nocturnal lowlife embedded in the criminal world of New York City, where he is known to one and all as a guy who is generally just around. (We're shown that he's a supposed drug addict living in squalor who hasn't ever been associated with a specific crime, but told that he's considered one of the "aristocracy" of the criminal classes. The grey seals are not the only decals in use in this book, in other words.) His role as Larry provides him with useful information, and he also has a bolthole with three separate entrances which he rents under the Larry persona, enabling him to change between his identities.
It's action-packed and gripping, along the lines of
The Black Star
. As well as the individual jobs Jimmie pulls, there's an overall story problem of his search for the mystery woman (Robyn Hood, as I nicknamed her, though, for reasons, he ends up calling her Tocsin), and, early on, his cat-and-mouse game with his old college friend, the editor of a major newspaper, who admires the Grey Seal but has no idea who he is. This thread slowly thins and is completely gone by the end - it's a long book.
The author does have a bad habit of using ALL CAPS rather than
italics for emphasis, and dangles a few modifiers, but I forgive this for the sake of the engaging story. He also makes the common mistake (more common in 1917, when this was published, because automatics were new) of referring to an automatic a few times as a "revolver." There's the odd typo or uncorrected scan error in the Project Gutenberg edition, and I'll pass these on to them - they usually fix such things quickly. Otherwise, it's a fast-moving, well-told adventure story in the "gentleman thief" genre, with the twist that the thief is actually committing his crimes in a good cause. As the book goes on, the danger to Jimmie escalates; not only the police, but the criminals are out to get him after he turns in some of their number for a brutal murder, and then he and the mystery woman go up against a hidden criminal conspiracy that she's been hiding out from for five years, and the screws really tighten. There are plenty of moments of suspense and thrilling action, and the role of coincidence is kept to a minimum. There is one Convenient Eavesdrop, but it doesn't end up making a big difference to the outcome, just raises the stakes for Jimmie. The increasingly flimsy secret of Jimmie's three identities does end up being preserved a couple of times by a fortunate chance, though.
I wouldn't be at all surprised if Bob Kane, originator of Batman, had read it. It even has the "Batman problem" of why the wealthy man doesn't do anything with his money to relieve poverty and suffering that he's well aware of (something that the mysterious woman, it turns out, does do, though not without benefit to herself), instead putting his efforts into sneaking around at night beating up criminals, but there we are; it's a thriller, not a novel of social consciousness, and as a thriller, it's well done. It did put some strain on my suspension of disbelief occasionally, but any thriller, and especially one from 1917, is going to do that; it's significantly more likely than, say, the Tom Cruise Mission Impossible movies, not that that's a high bar, and it comfortably earns four stars from me.
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The Borough Treasurer by J.S. Fletcher
