Friday's "Forgotten" Books - The Abandoned Room

Not a lot is known about Charles Wadsworth Camp (1879-1936). His most famous claim to fame may be as the father of author Madeline L'Engle, and most of the details of his life come from biographies about her. Camp moved to New York soon after his marriage to L'Engle's mother, where he worked as a newspaper reporter and wrote reviews of plays, concerts and operas. He also wrote plays of his own as well as at least eight novels of mystery and suspense, and his first novel, The Gray Mask was first published as a serial in Collier's magazine in 1915.

L'Engle described her father as a man who dressed elegantly every evening, whether he was eating dinner at home or taking the horse-drawn trolley a theater or concert hall to support many of his musician-friends. His niece recalled her uncle as a big, handsome man in a white linen suit smoking cigarettes on the porch and drinking whiskey. He served in World War I, and that is the source of some controversy about the author's cause of death. He died of pneumonia at age 57, and a common story was that Camp's lungs were weakened by mustard gas during the war that left him vulnerable to respiratory disease. However, one family member disputes that and attributes the pneumonia more to the smoking and drinking.

There's also not a lot about how successful his plays and novels were during his day, although The Gray Mask was made into a black and white silent film in 1915, with four more of his works adapted as silent films and two as black and white talkies. One of the silent films, from 1920, was released with the title Love Without Question, although it was based on Camp's novel The Abandoned Room: A Mystery Story, first seralized in Every Week and The Sunday Post magazine in 1917.

The Abandoned Room features "The Panamanian Sherlock Holmes," Carlos Paredes, who is confronted with a locked-room mystery. The murder of Silas Blackburn occurs in a room of The Cedars, a lonely, dilapidated country house—the same room with a history of people dying from head injuries, a room with both doors locked on the inside and the windows too high for anyone to have climbed up.

The main suspect is the victim's grandson, Bobby Blackburn, whose wastrel ways had angered his wealthy grandfather to the point he was threatening to cut him out of his Will and a rather princely amount (for 1917) of a million dollars. Making matters worse, Bobby was in New York the night of the murder but woke up in a daze in an even-more dilapidated house near The Cedars without any memory of the evening. Finding one of his monogrammed handkerchiefs under the victim's bed and a footprint under the window that fits his shoes doesn't help his case.

Despite Bobby's growing fears he may have somehow entered the locked room and murdered his grandfather in a drugged fog, there is more to meet the eye with strange happenings in the house—haunting cries; hints of ghosts; a woman in black wandering through the nearby woods; and secrets held by Bobby's cousin Katherine Perrine and the servants, allegedly the only ones with the victim the night of the murder, as well as the victim himself. Bobby's friend Carlos Paredes (tall and graceful, with jet-black hair parted in the middle and a carefully trimmed Van Dyke beard), invites himself to stay in The Cedars and eventually solves the crime, with a little twist at the end.
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The Abandoned Room isn't available in a regular print edition (except possibly in libraries), and since it's in the public domain, there are several versions on the Web from content-farm companies trying to make a buck. You can download a free copy via Project Gutenberg and Google Books, and Many Books also has four other Camp works.

Comments

[John]

Assiduous book hunters can usually find Wadsworth Camp's Gothic inspired thrillers in used bookshops for under $10. I have a number of them (including the book reviewed here) but have only read THE COMMUNICATING DOOR which has much in common with the early work of Mary Roberts Rinehart.