Best 1918 Adventures (5)
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January 19, 2018
One in a series of 10 posts identifying Josh Glenn’s favorite 1918 adventure novels. Happy 100th anniversary!
H. de Vere Stacpoole’s artful dodger adventure The Man Who Lost Himself.
A fun identity-switching yarn in which Vincent Jones, a down-on-his luck but honest and enterprising Australian man wakes up after getting drunk in London and discovers that everyone believes he’s the Earl of Rochester. Rochester, it seems, is a cad who’s run up a mountain of debts and driven his lovely wife out of their home; he’s also Jones’s exact double. At first, Jones plays along with what he assumes is a practical joke… but then he learns that Vincent Jones, or someone who looks exactly like him, has been killed! Jones’s quick wit and decisiveness help him make the best of a ticklish situation: “He had a great deal of the terrier in his composition, the honesty, the rooting out instinct, and the fury before vermin.” But when he’s thrown into an insane asylum, how will he escape? PS: This plot may remind you of the Alec Guinness movie The Scapegoat (or the 2012 remake), but those are based on Daphne du Maurier’s (less amusing) 1957 novel of that title.
Fun fact: De Vere Stacpoole was an Irish-born doctor and prolific author best known for his 1908 romance novel The Blue Lagoon. HiLoBooks will serialize The Man Who Lost Himself here at HILOBROW during 2018.
Let me know if I’ve missed any 1918 adventures that you particularly admire.