Looking at the publication date, 1915, it's clear that this novelization of a film scenario was greatly influenced by Pearl White's The Perils of Pauline and, perhaps, White's follow up, The Exploits of Elaine. Just call MacGrath's book, "The Foolishness of Florence." For like the White cliffhangers, Million Dollar Mystery reproduces a damsel in distress so stupid she seems to try to put herself in danger. And the stereotyped villains are there as well, a secret organization of Russian master criminals, the Black Hundred. Oh, and one of the heroes is actually tied to the train tracks with an approaching locomotive bearing down on them!

MacGrath has written better works. This one falls prey to its own mysteries and even confuses itself. All this is readily apparent at the end of the next to last chapter and the beginning of the last, where the author actually forgets the action he is carrying over from one chapter to the next.

All of that should have been expected. My copy of the novel had an additional "sketch" of MacGrath's career and his way of working. It appears that Harold was in the habit of completing his first chapter, then composing his ending, and filling in the rest of the book to connect to the two. It shows. In his haste to create a fast moving action piece, MacGrath often simply forgets to make sense in this mystery. As I say, he has done better--I'm thinking of The Yellow Typhoon.

By the way, at the end of the novel, the reader will discover that, yes, the butler did it. But just what he did precisely, I'll leave to readers to find out for themselves. ( )

At the first chapter, I had high hopes for this book. I thought it would be a ripping yarn in the style of old movie serials - plenty of melodrama and cliffhangers. Then things changed. The first big indicator of how bad it would get was Hargreave’s decision to pull Florence out of her hidden boarding school and install her in his house. At that point the Black Hundred had no idea he even had a daughter, much less where she was. So to bring her into the open as a known quantity was just stupid and purely a device for future emotional blackmail of the reader. I hate manipulation like that. If you’re going to manipulate me as a reader, do it with subtlety or an a way that is fun. Not like this. If the writer thought a bit creatively, he wouldn’t have needed Florence as the sole leverage for the bad guys. Alas, he went for the easy mark and it was a big let down. That action did give me a big clue about someone’s identity though and once I had that figured, the novel fell even flatter.

As I got deeper into the book, the overly positive tone took all the suspense and doubt out of the plot. Anytime the Black Hundred threatened Florence, she was saved (mostly by Norton) or she threw herself into a scheme to buy time to be saved. For a while there I had hope that Florence would be more than a feminine object to be rescued, and have a brain in her head, but alas, she wasn’t. The novel is a bit too early for that. There’s even a line in there that because men have this need to protect and defend, they can’t abide the suffragette movement because that might give women some control over their own lives. Mercy!

Anyway, there just isn’t any real suspense in this book at all, although there is some nice foreshadowing and implied menace, things just never materialize with any bite. Whenever the Black Hundred got an advantage, it was nullified or neutralized by an equal opposite advantage for the good guys. The bad guys are supposed to be all organized, sophisticated and smart, but mostly they’re a bunch of bumblers whose every scheme turns sour. The good guys have lots of suspicions and are subjected to a lot of attempts to snatch Florence, but they never get much wiser either. A simple code phrase could have eliminated a lot of back and forth possession of Florence, but that would have made the book a lot shorter and made sense, so of course McGrath didn’t use it. And naturally there are secret passages, a cave, spy holes, followers of followers, and a really great fake mustache emporium because, damn, everyone had a disguise at the ready for clandestine meetings.

Anyway...if you’re curious about the beginnings of the thriller genre, it’s worth checking out, but the story is incompetent; in execution, plot and characterization. ( )