Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 43, No. 7 & 8, July/August 1998

“For heaven’s sake, look at this mess,” she groaned. “Words are crossed out, others scribbled in, the margins overrun with corrections. And the penmanship, the misspelling, the hideous punctuation, and it’s at least a hundred and twenty-five thousand words. Well, I’m simply not going to waste my time on this mess. Back it goes tomorrow.”

It didn’t go back. She made the mistake of reading the cover letter. Harpoons and Whalebones was the first work of what the author, Harry Baxter, intended to be “a four-book saga of a hideously rich Boston family, the personification of Brahmin ruthlessness and fakery.”

Baxter said that he had grown up the poorest of the poor in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Since New Bedford was once a thriving whaling town, “I heard amazing stories of the incredible riches gained from the slaughter of those defenseless creatures.”

He had gone to college on a football scholarship, had watched “arrogant Back Bay families, whose obscene fortunes were rooted in killing whales, outdo one another in dismantling the Ten Commandments.” He was twenty-nine, barely surviving in Greenwich Village, waiting on tables and all too often “despairing that I would ever finish this manuscript, for which I have endured the agonies of the damned. I too often succumb to the intoxicating lure of that devilish fiend Bacchus. And I plan to write three more. I must be crazy.”

A check for two hundred dollars was enclosed. He said he had recently made friends with a literary agent who was opening his own office. The completed manuscript was to be sent to the agent, and he would pay the balance. He’ll pay before I send it, Martha said to herself.

Baxter apologized for his handwriting, “the general messiness. I simply couldn’t rewrite it. I wouldn’t blame you for sending it back. I await your decision.”

Intrigued by the author’s confession that he had “endured the agonies of the damned,” Martha began to read the messy manuscript, for she was experiencing her own agonies in trying to get past the first chapter of her novel.

And she had another reason for reading the manuscript, for her own novel was about Boston Brahmins rich from textile manufacture, sending their smooth-talking representatives to West Virginia in the late 1890’s and early 1900’s to talk the poverty-stricken hillbillies into leasing their coal lands for as little as a dollar an acre, their timber for a stumpage of fifteen cents a tree. Ashford County bordered West Virginia, and Martha had heard many stories of the rape of the beautiful state’s natural resources by rich Bostonians.

Harpoons and Whalebones was the story of the Easterfields of Boston, an arrogant tribe whose wealth began with Caleb Easterfield who sailed from New Bedford in 1820, returned two years later with his ship loaded with blubber and whale oil.

The manuscript was tough going; the handwriting would have shamed a fourth grader. But Martha kept reading. She was hooked — fascinated by the unique way Baxter built up tension. And there were wonderful characters. Sally Boggs became one of Martha’s favorites.

An illegitimate, illiterate, six-teen-year-old spittoon cleaner in a vile waterfront saloon, with nothing going for her but her “unbathed nubile carnality,” Sally ended up the owner of the most luxurious brothel in Boston, became a patron of the arts, and was highly esteemed by the gentry.

Ethan Easterfield was another favorite. Ethan, the youngest of the four boys (the other three were ship captains like their hard-driving father) was an idealistic person. He graduated from Harvard Divinity at nineteen and sailed with a group of fellow missionaries for the South Seas, eager to bring Christianity to the benighted heathens.

Alas, somewhere south of the Sandwich Islands on a gorgeous morning the dear boy, rushing to the rail to look at a huge whale, tripped over the box of Bibles on deck and went flying into the ocean, where he was immediately swallowed by the mammoth whale, an ironic twist of fate since poor Ethan had surreptitiously joined the Save the Whales fanatics at Harvard. “Oh poor Ethan, how awful,” Martha murmured.

She spent three long evenings reading the manuscript. When she came to The End, she let loose with the highest of encomiums: “Wow, what a writer, what a writer.” In spite of the sloppiness, the inconsistencies, the overall messiness, the rough draft possessed a vital spark, a unique, indefinable something that had held her spellbound. And this from someone who had read hundreds of books.

I’ve learned a lot from Harry Baxter, she told herself. I had to keep turning the pages no matter how tired my eyes were, had to see what happened next. That’s what I’m going to try to do with my novel if I ever get past Chapter One.

But now, woe is me, I have to begin to put this brilliant, chaotic mess into readable shape. But it really is a masterpiece. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if it became a bestseller?

It became a bestseller, an enormous bestseller. Book critics were almost unanimous in praising it, one eminent critic calling it “a tour de force, a Moby-Dickian masterpiece. Let us hope we hear more from Harry Baxter.”