20 
Land & Water 
March 21, 1 9 1 8 
Life and Letters fiiJ.CSqum 
Shockers 
CAPTAIN HKETT- YOUNG'S last book was 
Marching on Tanoa, the finest piece of literature 
produced bv the war. He has now. with The 
Crescent Moon (Seeker, Os.), returned to fiction. 
But he is still under the spell of East Africa. 
"That morning," he savs in his dedicatory letter, "while we 
were riding in a forest -wa\- about dawn, a pair of soft-grey 
doves had fluttered up from our path, and set me thinking 
of the goddess Astarte and of her groves, of Sheba, and the 
fleets that sailed for Ophir." Those thoughts of the past 
— I shall return to this later— ma\- have been the starting 
point; but the w(7/i/plavs no great part. He imagined his 
ancient remains, great stone walls and a tall tower far inland 
above the forest of a degraded black tribe. He imagined 
the age-long perpetuation of the doves around the temple ; 
the continuance (or resurrection) of the rites ; drums beating 
under the young moon, wild dances, fires in the great kiln, 
fren/.v, human sacrifice. And he conceived the association 
of a white man with these ceremonies— Godovius, a strong, 
handsome, German- Jew planter, perverse and sensual. But 
the other characters and the other interest came in — at least, 
this is what one supposes— and de\il-worship became a mere 
element in the background of savagery against which his 
story of passion and tenderness is unfolded. 
*♦«*** 
I will not tell that story : one should only do that with a 
bad book. It opens obliquely, in the Conrad manner, 
when the narrator meets on the railway station of Nairobi 
a pathetic group of missionaries and their families released 
from the German prison at Nairobi, and notices a pale girl 
standing. apart from the others : 
I had noticed her from the first : principally, I imagine, because 
she seemed horribly out of it, standing, somehow, extraordinarily 
aloof from the atmosphere which bathed the assembly as in 
weak tea. She didn't look their sort. .\nd it wasn't only that 
her face showed a little tension — such a small thing — about the 
eyes, as though the whole business (very properly) gave her a 
headache. I think that if she hadn't been so dreadfully tired 
she would have smiled. As it was, nobody seemed to take any 
notice of her, and I could have sworn that she was thankful for it. 
This is the heroine. She was the sister of James Burwarton, 
a fanatical Nonconformist from Shropshire, in ^charge of a 
mission station in German East. Those two, Godovius, 
and McCrae, a bearded and one-armed hunter, are the char- 
acters in the tragedy : those and Africa, her sun, her moun- 
tains, her rivers, her forests, men and beasts, a land per- 
petually smiling and insatiably cruel. The landscape, in the 
broadest sense, permeates every page; "conveved-" never 
with painfully accumulated plirases, but in hundreds of 
little touches and unobtrusive repetitions. There are 'out- 
standing scenes : James's journey at night to the House of 
the Moon, the dance in the native village, the first encounter 
with McCrae, the escape at the close ; but they grow 
naturally, they are not "set." And at theclose the coming 
of the War in that remote outpost is wonderfully imagined : 
the sudden outburst of tom-toms, the bewilderment at the 
mission, where McCrae "did not know then any more than 
did Hamisi, sharpening his spear, that these angry drum- 
throbs were no more than the diminished echoes of the 
guns that were battering Liege." The book is short, and 
Eva and McCrae are lightly drawn ; but thev are not too 
little known to move one's sympathies profoundly, and to 
be remembered. 
In his preface, Mr. Brett-Young boldlv— or perhaps it is 
timidly— describes the book as a "shocker." It is not my 
idea of a shocker ; I should call it a rather realistic romance. 
It is less of a shocker than She ; no more of a shocker than 
Treasure Island ; scarcely- nearer a shocker than Lord Jim. 
It is true that there is a " sensational " element in the idea of 
the persistence of the rites of Ashtoreth and Moloch amongst 
the Waluguru ; and it may be (as I have suggested) that 
when he started he intended this to be the kernel of the 
book. As things are, it is subordinate, almost irrelevant. 
We have a book dramatic, intense, hea\'y with African 
odours, and hot with the African sun. But it is not a 
shocker. Its tragedies are inevitable ; its characters— though 
we have to swallow a little in Godovius— are natural and 
consistent ; its main interest lies in its powerful and accurate 
pictures of that wild land, and in the truth and force of its 
emotion. Its most moving chapter, in fact, is that in which 
is described the flight of Eva and McCrae over the waterless 
uplands, their strange lov(?-making, and their parting. Where 
the authtir has an obvious opportunity of "laying it on 
thick," such as those given by the Moon festival and by 
James's end, he is restrained, or even shrinks back. If some 
incidents are unduly " sensational," all I can say is that he has 
not the courage of his unscrupulousness. He is an artist, 
and he cannot help it. 
That is not the way of the shocker. The genuine shocker 
—and I won't hear a word against it — would collapse if the 
author were fastidious about reality or bloodiness, or if the 
characters began acting like real people. And the kind of 
sincerity which enables an author to move powerfully the 
heart would shiver a slicx-ker to pieces. The true shocker 
does not aim at touching your heart, at purging you by 
pitv or fear, at leaving you brooding over the persistence of 
evil and the incomprehensibility of the Universe. Its pur- 
pose is to give you the shivers and a sinking in the stomach, 
to keep you on the jump, to make your flesh creep and your 
hair stand on end. It is to the tragic tale what knock-about 
farce is to the comedy of manners.. Its limits cannot be 
exactly circumscribed ; like Mr. Chesterton's elephant, one 
c-annot precisely define it, but one knows it when one sees it. 
It taxes one's credulity, and one makes the surrender volun- 
tarily for the sake of the game. One does not say (as one 
says once or twice when reading T/;c Crescent Moon) : "Oh, 
I am not sure that so-and-so would have done that " ; if one 
is told a thing one accepts it. If the man walking down the 
Strand (in the shocker) is accosted, during the space of 
five minutes, by six dumb men wearing green turbans, one 
does not say: "Tell that to the Marines"; one merely 
quakes and goes on to find out from what mysterious power 
these sinister strangers were emissaries. One delivers oneself 
over to the author, gagged and bound. 
I have just finished a good specimen of the real article. 
I like it. It is not on the plane of Dracttla or The Beetle, 
and it has no single chapter as thrilling as the chase b'v 
aeroplane in The Twenty-nine Steps, or the blind detective's 
nocturnal duel in Max Carrados. But I warm to it very' 
much. It is called The Yellou^ Claw, and its author's name 
is Sax Rohmer. Everything is there : underground passages, 
skinny arms (body unseen) throttling their victims in the 
moonlight, secret dooi^, veiled ladies in black arriving alone 
at railway stations, a cab-chase by three cabs, warehouses by 
the river, watchers outside flats, furtive servants who are 
always on the telephone, a "gang" with "wide international 
ramiiications, a portentous .Master- Villain whose face is 
never seen, Scotland Yard men, and our old and ever- 
welcome friend the suave, cultured, indomitable Chief of 
the Paris Police. Brilliant politicians resort to East End 
opium dens ; noises of dragging are heard, and women's 
voices shrieking "Oh, no! Not that, not that!"; motor 
boats chase each other on the foggy river ; baffled searchers 
find that "the birds have flown." If there was a ghost, I 
missed it ; but that is what I call a shocker. No space is 
wasted over "psychological analysis" ; there is at least one 
grue on every page ; and even the language assists in pro- 
ducing the cold shivers, the author being especially prone 
to the word "beetlesque." I will not say that a really 
serious author could not write a shocker. Mr. Arnold 
Bennett's The Grand Babylon Hotel and The Loot of Cities 
were shockers. The first" of these at least was fascinating ; 
for sheer ingenuity it beat the professional mystery-monger on 
his own ground. But they were not perfect shockers. There 
was a strong element of parody in them ; the characters 
continually came to life ; the author took his mysteries with 
too little seriousness, and constantly strayed into intelligent 
comment and mere interesting description. This must be 
the fate of every good reflective writer who attempts the 
kind. His reason would revolt against the production of a 
nightmare. He cannot bring himself to humbug people into 
the creeps. 
* * * * * * 
My ideal shocker is a book which I have never read. I 
saw it mentioned in an American paper ; but with all my 
international ramifications, I have not vet been able to 
run it down. It is called Three-Fingered Mike or A Bucket 
of Blood; and even the British Museum officials know 
nothing about it. . '. 
