Summer is an excellent time to travel, and I must say that I am particularly fond of train travel. But, sadly, I must also admit that it's not the same as it was a century ago, when most travelers in the United States found long-distance train travel the best (and usually the only) way to travel long distances around America. As you might expect from a blog specializing in classic mysteries, there are a fair number of train-related classic novels in the Classic Mysteries vault. This week, I offer you something of a nightmare of a train trip. In the hands of author Mary Roberts Rinehart, The Man in Lower Ten is frightening, exciting, and thoroughly enjoyable, although I might caution that it is probably a good idea to avoid this book if you are about to embark on a long train ride. You'll find out why if you read this transcript of my audio review for the Classic Mysteries podcast from about seven years ago. As usual, minor editing liberties have been taken:
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Traveling by train a century ago was a lot different from train travel today. For one thing, the sleeping cars were different, designed to sleep more travelers in bunk beds. Sometimes that could lead to problems – though rarely as drastic or deadly, perhaps, as the events involving The Man in Lower Ten, the title of the mystery by Mary Roberts Rinehart.
Mary Roberts Rinehart wrote her second thriller-mystery, The Man in Lower Ten, in 1909. And before we discuss it, perhaps I should take a moment and try to explain the significance of “lower ten” to a generation that probably never saw, let alone traveled in, a Pullman sleeping car.
Most sleeping cars – except the most luxurious – were laid out in such a way that daytime seats were convertible at night into bunk beds, all along the length of the car. Each bunk – they were arranged in rows of upper and lower bunks – opened into a public corridor along the center of the car. The only privacy was provided by a curtain that could be drawn lengthwise along the bunk. The bunks were usually identified only by a number and a designation of “upper” or “lower.” So, “lower ten,” would be the tenth bunk on the lower level.
In The Man in Lower Ten, Mary Roberts Rinehart gives us a lawyer named Lawrence Blakely as narrator and central character. Blakely sets out by train from Washington to Pittsburgh, where he is to take a deposition in a forgery case. He has some powerful evidence in the case along with him. After taking the deposition, he gets on a train to return home, and he is assigned to the berth numbered “lower ten” in the Pullman car.
Through a series of odd events, however, he does not sleep in that berth. Someone else is sleeping there when Blakely arrives to go to bed, and the lawyer – unhappily – moves to another berth. When he wakes up, however, he finds that he is in yet another wrong berth, all his papers including the evidence (and his clothes as well) have been stolen – and the man who had been sleeping in lower ten has been murdered. All the evidence appears to point to Blakely, as his story about stolen papers and clothing seems suspicious and contrived. But before much can happen to him – certainly before the police arrive – the train is wrecked in a disastrous crash which kills all but a handful of people – among whom, of course, is our narrator.
From there on, the book becomes a thriller, with Blakely staying a step or two ahead of what seems to be a curiously unhurried police investigation. He falls in love with the daughter of the man he had gone to depose – a woman who appears to have a number of secrets of her own. And there will be a healthy share of odd, dangerous and sometimes deadly adventures before everything gets sorted out at the end.
Mary Roberts Rinehart obviously had a good deal of fun with all this. She’s often thought of as a “woman’s writer,” but her hero/narrator here is a man who mirrors many of Rinehart’s female protagonists in other novels, when it comes to jumping to conclusions, wandering alone into places he shouldn’t, and so forth. The reader will cheer when one of Blakely’s friends, exasperated with the hero’s apparently slow mental processes, snaps,
“If you had had the sense of a mosquito in a snow-storm, you would have telephoned me.”
Rinehart has a reputation as the queen of the so-called “Had I But Known” school, and it is certainly very much in play in this book. At one point, for example, Blakely muses,
[A]ll the events of that strange morning were logically connected; they came from one cause, and tended unerringly to one end. But the cause was buried, the end not yet in view.
The Man in Lower Ten was Rinehart’s second book, after the more widely known and read The Circular Staircase, but it remains quite readable and a pretty good thriller and murder mystery, even after more than a century. There are nice light touches to offset a story that sometimes seems to move at a confusingly fast pace. While some of its attitudes – particularly towards women – will seem…well, "quaint" is probably the best word…to modern readers, the whole package makes for a pleasant evening’s entertainment.
The Man in Lower Ten is old enough to be in the public domain, and there are low-cost copies available for electronic book readers. I still think The Circular Staircase is perhaps the best introduction to Mary Roberts Rinehart – but you are very likely to enjoy The Man in Lower Ten as well.
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You can listen to the original podcast review by clicking here.
Next: The Mysterious Affair at Styles, by Agatha Christie.
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