Best 1917 Adventures (4)
By:
December 29, 2016
One in a series of 10 posts identifying Josh Glenn’s favorite 1917 adventure novels. Happy 100th anniversary!
Wadsworth Camp’s supernatural murder mystery The Abandoned Room.
For generations, members of the Blackburn family have been found dead — with head injuries — in the same bedroom of The Cedars, a remote and crumbling country manse in upstate New York, which is why the room has long been shunned. Yet wealthy Silas Blackburn, who of late has seemed terrified out of his wits, is found dead in the abandoned room — with the doors locked from inside. How? And why? Are supernatural forces at work? (Strange cries are heard in the woods, and a mysterious woman in black flits about.) The chief suspect is Silas’s grandson, Bobby, who was about to be cut out Silas’s will… and who was visiting the Cedars at the time, had blacked out, and can’t remember anything that happened. His monogrammed hankie is discovered in the room. Does Bobby’s cousin, Katherine, who lives with Silas, have something to hide? Did the butler do it? Carlos Paredes, the Panamanian Sherlock Holmes, cracks the case.
Fun fact: Charles Wadsworth Camp, a writer and foreign correspondent whose lungs were damaged by mustard gas during WWI, was the father of the writer Madeleine L’Engle. The Abandoned Room was adapted as a silent movie, starring Ivo Dawson as Carlos Paredes, in 1920.
Let me know if I’ve missed any 1917 adventures that you particularly admire.