Book review of
The Trail of the White Indian.
By A. Hyatt Verrill.
January 6, 1920,
The author who, under the pseudonym of Rodney Thayne has recently given
his boy readers the “blood and
thunder" tale of REDLEGS, THE PIRATE, has served up another dish of interesting and fascinating horrors—too
horrible, in fact, we are thankful to say, to have quite the
ring of truth. But then we must
understand beforehand that Mr. Verrill is not writing truth but fiction; and
one cannot but feel elated on closing the
daring author’s book with a gasp, that in this particular instance, the story is not “really true”.
Mr. Verrill in his youth must
have indulged in the lurid
literature which boys usually read behind parental backs, slipping the "penny dreadfuls" between their mattresses and saving candle stumps that they might read in bed long after household
"Taps" had sounded. Added to this melodramatic tendency, our author
is evidently a profound student of entomology
and archeology and has strung his very improbable story upon these purely scientific lines in the unexplored corners of Central and South America
and the West
Indies.
THE TRAIL OF THE WHITE INDIAN
is a sequel to a former book called THE TRAIL OF THE CLOVEN FOOT, but
sufficiently distinctive to allow the
reader to pick up the loose ends of the tale as he goes along. Fred Wilson and Rob McGregor
who have had innumerable hairbreadth adventures and escapes in previous pages
remind one too forcibly, perhaps of Knox's BOY TRAVELERS IN FOREIGN LANDS, but
in order to hide the extremely
instructive side of the narrative, the author has embellished his truly excellent
research work with the hair-raising
episodes which go to make up the
story part. A vivid imagination and an accurate knowledge of facts and
conditions have done fine team work and in spite of a suspicion of pedantry and
a thick "lay-on" of adventurous war-paint, the
book has a holding quality which cannot fail to attract the
boy reader.
To bring the story up to date, a "Hun base" is found
in the vicinity of our boys'
explorations and a U boat intent on its deadly work, is discovered just in time
by our heroes who do wonderful, unheard-of things and save the day generally. To quite follow Mr. Verrill’s
gigantic imagination, one must of necessity read, first: THE TRAIL OF THE
CLOVEN FOOT, next: THE TRAIL OF THE WHITE INDIAN, and lastly, another which the
author has hinted will soon fallow. Well, "boys will be boys" and Mr.
Verrill, a big boy himself, knows what they
like.
B.M.
Link to the story...The Trail of the White Indians
This review appeared in the correspondence of Dutton Books and A, Hyatt Verrill. The book, Redlegs, the Pirate, has never been located, and it is suspected that the sequel to these two books was submitted to Dutton, but never published./drf
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