Cardinal Rock, first published in 1940 (the book pictured here is the Harlequin edition from 1950), is Sale’s third book. It’s about an American doctor, Nick Adams by name (a nod to Hemingway?), who’s been traveling the world for three years treating all sorts of disease. He suddenly gets a bug up his butt to go home (New York) for Christmas, even though he has no family there.
On the way, he stops in Tahiti to visit an old friend - a famous novelist. There he hears of Cardinal Rock - a small island of red volcanic stone, owned by a reclusive Englishman who had a castle transported stone-by-stone from Scotland. The guy has a bunch of perpetually sad men working for him, and his employees have a unusually high death rate. The only contact they have with the outside world is to journey 500 miles south to Tahiti for supplies, and even then they never come ashore.
Though the novel is by no means a mystery, the mystery of the island is the major driving force for the first half of the book. Once we learn that Cardinal Rock is a leper colony, the mystery becomes Why was Adams summoned here?
Well, here’s a real SPOILER ALERT, because I’m going to reveal that, too. The rich Englishman is himself a leper, though he has the disease under remarkable control, and has been working on a possible cure. He wants Adams to take his findings back to civilization where other doctors can perform further tests.
In a minor romantic subplot, Adams meets an emotionally damaged woman in Tahiti who is later (quite conveniently) shipwrecked, rescued and brought to Cardinal Rock. Adams falls for her, but (another SPOILER ALERT), she falls for the head leper instead.
Adams accepts this with good grace, but when he finally gets to New York, he learns (final SPOILER ALERT) the island has most likely been destroyed by an earthquake.
Some fun, eh? Actually, I enjoyed reading it. Sale just can’t help being good. And it’s sort of a precursor to his most famous mystery novel, Lazarus #7, which also involves leprosy.
Eventually, I hope to review all fourteen of Richard Sale's novels.
For reviews of Not Too Narrow . . . Not Too Deep (1936) and Is a Ship Burning? (1937), plus a complete Daffy Dill story and a complete Candid Jones story (both from Detective Fiction Weekly), and more, click HERE.
For more of today's Forgotten Books, many of which have NOTHING to do with leprosy, please visit the blog of Mr. George Kelley.
6 comments:
Ah yes, the leprosy genre. Very underappreciated.
Did you celebrate World Leprosy Day on January 31? Actually, this is another book that would have a harder time being written today, since Hansen's disease can be cured -- although apparently there are still leper colonies around the world, to my shock.
Even the characters on the cover are depicted as if in a sad trance. Too bad no one told these people all they have to do is soak in high-alkaline hot springs and drink a couple of quarts of prune juice a day for a complete cure. Wait, that may be the cure for something else...
Psoriasis is one of those skin diseases that has been around since the time of man. Amazingly throughout the centuries it has been mistaken for leprosy, dandruff and every sort of fungal infection possible. Earliest recorded evidence goes back as far as 35 AD. But remarkably it is only in the last few decades that we have been able to understand it's cause and progress with treatments for it.
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When a person becomes infected with Mycobacterium leprae, it leads to leprosy. The leprosy-causing bacteria take a long time to multiply and that is why symptoms appear slowly. Usually leprosy symptoms appear five to seven years after a person is infected.
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