FORGOTTEN BOOK: RIPTIDE

Riptide by Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child  (1998)

Every time you think you've hit rock bottom, you find there's a bottom below.

That could be the basic theme of Riptide, a treasure hunting adventure thriller based on the legend of Oak Island.

Legend had it that notorious English pirate "Red Ned" Ockham had buried his vast hoard of treasure on Ragged Island, off the coast of Maine.  Red Ned was the deadliest, most feared, and most successful pirate of his day; his fleet consisted of nine ship laden down with booty -- gold, silver, jewels, artwork, fine clothes, and much more -- including the legendary St. Michael's Sword, which gave its bearer the power of life and death over his foes.  Red Ned had his treasured buried at the bottom of a huge pit -- the Water Pit (for some reason, I want to call it the Money Pit) -- designed to frustrate anyone other than Red Ned who tried to retrieve the treasure.  But before Red Ned could retrieve his fabulous wealth, his ship was found with all aboard mysteriously dead.

The first attempt to retrieve the treasure was in 1792; it ended in tragedy when a seal was  broken and sea water rushed in to claim the Water Pit's first victim.  Over the years, other unsuccessful attempt to get the treasure failed -- in 1800, in 1831, in 1840, in 1869, in 1883, then three more time between 1900 and 1907, and finally in 1940.  All attempts ended in failure, bankruptcy, and death...

The 1940 attempt was made by Alfred Westgate Hatch, Sr., who had gone so far as to purchase the island from a land speculator, and to move his family to the nearby, isolated village of Stormhaven.  As had happened every time ion the past, the island defeated the treasure hunter and Hatch soon found himself bankrupt.  Hatch turned to drink and soon died, leaving the island to his nineteen-year-old son.  the son, A. W. Hatch, Jr., destroyed all of his father's papers and refused to have anything to do with the island, which remained barren and unoccupied for more than two decades.

In 1971, young Malin Hatch was bored and, because his parents were not at home, convinced his older brother Johnny to go with him to explore the forbidden island as a great adventure.  The two boys rowed out to the island and were not impressed...a few scrawny trees, a lot of rocks, and not much else.  Then they discovered a fissure in the ground, which led to a cave or a tunnel.  Now, this was more like it; this was adventure!  They entered and slowly made their way through the tunnel until they came to a door.  By this time Maline was getting scared and wanted to leave, but Johnny called him a coward.  Johnny opened the door.  A blast pushed him into the darkness, water began to converge, and Johnny was swept away.  Malin had no real memory of what had happened.  The townspeople and the Coast Guard searched for Johnny's body,  but could find nothing.  The curse of the Water Pit had struck again, and Malin grew up with the guilt of his brother's death.

Fast forward some twenty years.  Malin's father drowned soon after, bereft, and possibly a suicide.  Malin and his mother stayed in Stormhaven for a few years, enduring the looks of the townspeople, and finally moved to Boston.  As if to make up for Johnny's death, Malin pushed himself through college and medical school, spent years working the world's most dangerous spots for Doctors Without Borders, and then began a practice and research at Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge.

Over the years, Malin had been approached by many people -- clairvoyants, dowsers, psychics, oil barons, engineers, and other, all with their own "foolproof" scheme -- seeking to recover the treasure, and had rejected them all; the treasure could be real, or could be a myth, but the search for it had cost many lives over the past three centuries, and Malin, still stricken by the death of his brother, refused to have any part of it.  Then Malin was approached by Captain Gerard Neidelman, an experienced "recovery specialist" and the head of a company called Thalassa Holdings, who also wanted to recover the treasure.  Neidelman -- and Thalassa -- had found and recovered many hidden  treasures in the past, many of them thought impossible to retrieve, using the very latest in scientific methods and equipment.  a group with deep pockets, Thalassa had raised 22 million dollars to fund such an expedition to Ragged Island.  Their researchers had estimated the Water Pit treasure to be worth, conservatively, two billion dollars.  He offered Malin half of the amount -- one billion -- for permission to search the island.   Malin rebuffed Neidelman at first, but then began thinking about the offer.  Here was a chance to put his demons at rest, perhaps find Johnny's body, and use the money to set up a foundation in his brother's name.  He decide to agree, but with several conditions:  first, that he join the team as their medical doctor, and also that he reserved the right to cancel the project at any time if he felt such a decision was neccessary.

Time was of the essence.  Neidelman had about a month before the start of hurricane season, which would halt all work on the project.  But Neidelman had done his preliminary work: he had already assembled a team of experts in everything from engineering and computing to archaeology and history, and had discover a lost dairy of the seventeenth century architect who had designed the Water Pit.  Sir William Macallan was acknowledge to be England's greatest architect next to Christopher Wren.  Macallan had been a passenger on a vessel sailing to America when it was taken by Red Ned, who slew everyone on board except for Macallan, forcing him to design a foolproof place to protect his treasure.  But Macallan had also been a government secret agent, and kept a detailed description of his plan and how to get around all the traps designed in it in his journal, using invisible ink and several highly sophisticated codes.  Neidelman's experts had already broken the code for the first part of the journal using the latest computer technology, and were working on breaking the second part, recorded in another highly complicated code.

So, Malin returned to Stormhaven for the first time since he had left as a teen.  His mother, for some reason, had kept the family home their, unoccupied, all this time, and since her death from cancer, Malin had done the same.  The small village of fishermen and lobstermen had not changed much in the intervening years, except perhaps with the addition of the Reverend Woody Clay, a dour and uncompromising fundamentalist minister who had married Malin's high school sweetheart.  Stormhaven was a poor town and its residents welcome the sudden influx of cash that Thalassa's crew brought, but they also feared the so-called curse of the fog-bound and normally unapproachable island.

Among the experts that Neidelman had brought on board were Isabel Bonterre, archaeologist and dive leader, Christopher St. John, the expedition's historian who was researching Macallan, Kerry Wopner, a rather unusual computer expert, Lyle Streeter, the stoic team foreman, Sandra Magnusen, the team's chief engineer and remote sensing specialist, and Roger Rankin, geologist.  Most appeared friendly, but Malin got bad vibes from Streeter, who had been working with Neidelman throughout the latter's career.  As for Neidelman, Malin soon learned that the competent, highly organized man was also a driven monomaniac determined to achieve his goal at any cost. 

The Water Pit itself was a maze of tunnels, some natural and some engineered, and traps; it descended hundreds of feet below the surface, shored up by buttresses and blocked off at several points.  The first tragedy soon took place: a worker had somehow triggered the collapse of a buttress which had him pinned to the ground, water began seeping into the area and would soon drown him.  Efforts to remove lift the heavy buttress from the victim failed and Malin was forced to amputate the man's legs on the spot in order to possibly save his life.  This helped to increase the talk of a curse among the townspeople.

Other problems kept cropping up.  Macallan's traps kept being sprung.  The computers kept giving conflicting data for no discernable reason.  Workmen began to appear at Malin's onsite clinic with varying complaints.  And Bonterre had discovered a large gravesite which held the skeletons of at least eighty men from Red Ned's crew -- the skeletons showed no sign of violence but had still been hastily placed in the grave; tests on the various bones showed that the men had died of disease, but each of a different disease, eliminating the theory that plague had struck the island.  Talk became frequent of the island's curse and of a possible supernatural explanation.

Injecting dye into the Water Pit revealed that five of the tunnels went directly to the sea, so Neidelman used explosives to block each of the tunnels at its entry point to the Atlantic.  Still the money pit flooded.  Eventually, Neidelman elected to build a wall around the island to keep the sea out, much as Macallan had Red Ned's men do while the Water Pit was being constructed.

Meanwhile, the townspeople were getting restless.  Clay, the minister, had been fomenting opposition to the project and was organizing a large group of fishermen and lobstermen to go to the island to protest.  And then a fierce Northeaster struck...  And Lyle Streeter began hunting Malin and Isabel Bonterre with a high velocity weapon...  All this as Neidelman finally reached the treasure:  wealth and riches beyond imagining, as well as the legendary jewel-encrusted St. Michaels Sword...But the curse of the Water Pit was not finished, because there is always a bottom below...

A highly detailed and richly imagined novel that pulls the reader page by page to its exciting and inexorable ending, Riptide was an early standalone novel from the writing pair best known for their long-running thrillers about Special Agent A. X. L. Pendergast.  It was the fourth book from the pair and their second standalone.  Interestingly, it is the only one of the pair's four standalones in which they did not mine some of their characters and later insert them into their Prendergast, Nora Kelly, or Gideon Crew series; this, in itself, gives the novel a unique sense of completeness.

Riptide is a thrill ride that stands well with the best of modern adventure novels, a battle between modern science against an ancient -- and possibly supernatural -- foe.

NOTHING FAZES MARK

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MR. MOTO: A FORCE CALLED X07 (MAY 20, 1951)

Following the death of Charlie Chan creator Earl Der Biggers in 1933, the Saturday Evening Post was eager another Asiatic detective to replace Chan.  Novelist and short story writer J. P. Marquand, who was a familiar author to readers of SEP, was tasked to coming up with Chan's replacement.  The result was I. A. Moto,  a senior intelligence officer for a pro-Western Japanese government.  Marquand wrote six novels about the character, beginning with Your Turn, Mr. Moto in 1935.  Peter Lorre played the character in eight films from 1937 to 1939.  In 1965 the character returned to the screen in The Return of Mr. Moto, featuring Henry Silva.  Mr. Moto joined the radio airwaves in a 23-episode series beginning in 1951, starring James Monks, who had a 20-year radio career and played supporting roles on stage, before retiring to become a male fashion model.

Here, in the first episode of the radio series, Moto is faced with a dangerous new biological weapon and a murdered scientist.

Enjoy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4FH7Bd2GWM

SHORT STORY WEDNESDAY: THE PHANTOM DEATH

 "The Phantom Death" by W. Clark Russell (first published in The Idler, October 1893; republished as the title story in Russell's The Phantom Death and Other Stories, 1895; and in Waves of Terror, edited by Michael Parry, 1976)

In April 1840, having finished his business in South America, West booked passage out of Rio de Janiero to Bristol on the Lord of the Isles, a small barque with a company consisting of twelve men; West was happy to be the sole passenger for the Atlantic crossing for he had had a disagreeable crowded crossing earlier while traveling from England to Brazil.  On this voyage, both the crew and the captain were pleasant companions.

On the eighth day out, West shared drinks with the captain in the captain's cabin before retiring for the night.  The next morning he was awakened by the first mate, who was horrified at the state in which he had found the captain:  "Captain Joyce lay in his bunk dressed in a flannel snirt and a pair of white drill rousers.  All his throat and a considerable portion of his chest were exposed, and his feet were naked.  I looked at him scarcely crediting my sight:  I did not know him as the man I had parted with  but a few hours ago.  He was swelled from head to foot as though drowned:  the swelling contorted his countenance out of all resemblance to his familiar face; the flesh of him that was visible was of a pale blue, as if rubbed with a powder of he stuff called 'blue' which the laundresses use in getting up their linen.  His eyes were open, but were rolled out of sight, and the 'whites', as they are called, were covered with red blotches."  His hand was cold, his breathing thin, and he soon began convulsions.  Within a few hours he was dead.

What had killed him?  What could cause such a rapid transformation to death?  The first mate was convinced that only a poison could be the cause.  West, himself, wondered if it could have been some illness that had lingered, latent, within his body from before he had set sail -- but that did not seem likely.  And if it was poison, how had it been administered?  If accidently, certainly not in food, for the captain ate only the same food as the rest of the crew, who remained unaffected.  If it had been self-administered, where was the poison now?  No trace of it could be found in the cabin.  Or could he have been deliberately poisoned by someone on the ship?  But the captain was well-liked by all on board, no one had a reason to harm him.  This might have to remain one of the mysteries of the sea as the crew went about their duties and the first mate took over the captain's quarters.

Then, a few days later, the first mate knocked on West's cabin, saying, "I am in terrible pain -- I am horribly ill -- I am dying."  Indeed he was.  Soon he was evincing the same symptoms the captain had.  As the convulsions grew upon him, he screamed, "Oh, my God!  I have been poisoned -- I am dying!" Within five hours he was dead, his skin an even darker blue than West had noted in the captain.  Was it really poison, and if so, how?  Or could it be some form of the plague?  Was there some human explanation?  Or was the ship in the grip of some supernatural hand?

The second mate took over the running of the ship, moving into the late captain's quarters, where the navigating instruments were.  Sailors can be a superstitious lot, and within another two days, the second mate apologetically locked West into his cabin, saying the the crew suspected west had a hand in the two deaths and were afraid, if West were to remain free, he might then somehow kill him (the second mate) next.  For West's safety, and the ease of the crew's mind, he was to remain locked in his cabin for the rest of the cruise; a young steward would bring him his meals but he would otherwise have no contact with the rest of the ship.

A few days later, West was released by the boatswain with the deepest apologies of himself and the crew.  They knew now that West could have had nothing to do with the mysterious deaths because the second mate had just succumbed to the same horrid fate.

The Lord of the Isles had two problems.  How had three men died such a grisly death and will others meet the same fate?  And, without the captain and his officers, there was no one on board who knew how to navigate the ship, now in the middle of the Atlantic.  Things were starting to look bleak...

W. Clark Russell (1844-1911) although born in New York, was the son of a well-known English composer and his first wife.  Russell went to sea at age thirteen, joining the United Kingdom's Merchant Navy, spending eight years at sea, leaving after his health was permanently damaged.  His experience at sea gave him plenty of fodder for his career as a writer.  No one since Captain Marryat some forty years before had written so convincingly about the sea from actual knowledge.  In Masters of Victorian Literature, 1837-1897, Richard D. Graham wrote that Russell "is the true successor of Marryat, and may even be aid to excel the older writer in the power with which he has described the cruel mystery of the sea, its dangers, and the crimes and superstitions of the men who do business upon it."  The majority of the 57 novels he published were sea stories.  His novels included The Wreck of the Grosvenor, the Frozen Pirate, and The Death Ship.  Among his admirers were Herman Melville, Algernon Swinburne, and Arthur Conan Doyle (in "The Five Orange Pips," Doyle had Dr. Watson "deep within one of Clark Russell's fine sea stories").

Russell's wide popularity allowed him to advocate for merchant seaman, whose hardships had been unchanged since the repeal of the Navigation Acts in 1854.  Ships were being sent out to sea overladen and undermanned, and unscrupulous shipowners were proving deplorable rations for the seamen on their ships.  The naval reforms of 1880, 1883, 1889, and 1892 owed much to Russell's influence, as did the eventual inclusion of seamen and firemen being represented on the shipping commission.  The future King George V said that the great improvements in the conditions of the merchant service owed much to Clark Russell's writings.  His sympathy toward the brutal treatment captive natives of Tasmania faced at the time helped record and reveal the atrocities done by the British.

Many of W. Clark Russell's books are available to be read online.  The Phantom Death and Other Stories can be found on Project Gutenberg.

OVERLOOKED FILM: TEENAGE DEVIL DOLLS (1955)

How bad a movie can you make for $14,000, $4000 of which you borrow from your wife?  The answer is pretty bad, especially if you write, produce, direct, edit, and star in the movie yourself.  For some reason this is the only film that Bamlet Lawrence Price, Jr., a former Army Air Force pilot, ever produced, the only film he ever directed, the only film he ever edited, and the only film he ever starred in.  Perhaps it was because Price made this movie as his Master's thesis while he was a student at UCLA Film School.  Or, perhaps it was because he had no talent.  It was filmed in 1953 and released two years later.

I have no idea what happened to "Bam" (as he was known) after this, other than a string of broken marriages -- four of them, the first was to actress Anne Francis (Forbidden Planet, Bad Day at Black Rock, The Blackboard Jungle, television's Honey West); she was the one who loaned him the four grand.  Bam's marriage toll was as follows: Anne Francis (1952-1956), Diane J. Coldwell (1958-1966), Margaret E. Richardson, (1973-1976), and Diana Joy Dubois (1981-1988).  No, I have never heard of the last three either.  The only other reference I could find about Bam was that famed songwriter Robert Sherman once confused him with Hollywood choreographer Marc Breaux in a photo because they looked somewhat similar.

About the film, also known as One Way Ticket to Hell, here's Steven Puchalski's take, from his book Slimetime:  A Guide to Sleazy, Mindless Movies:  "This is an obscure, anti-drug, anti-juvenile delinquent, anti-rebellion morality story, all told in not-so-glamorous Dragnet style narration...it's overwrought, paranoid, fear-mongering, and totally idiotic...basically, this is drug-paranoid propaganda at its bleakest and least entertaining, with grainy black and white photography, static direction...it just drones on for sixty or so minutes, and though the plot tries to be controversial and hard-hitting, the flick is actually so unsleazy that it never gets off the ground."  Compared to this, Reefer Madness comes off as a big-budget, Oscar-worthy film.

Pretty Cassandra Leigh (Barbara Marx, no other credits on IMDb) gets mixed up with the wrong group in high school.  They are delinquent bikers, and soon she is doing drugs, failing classes, and losing out on any chance of college.  She marries Johnny Adams (Robert Norman, one role in an episode of Fireside Theatre in 1951, one episode of I Love Lucy in 1956 as an uncredited trumpet player in a band, and an unnamed character in the 1957 television movie Aladdin), her clueless high school sweetheart, but soon slides back into her old destructive habits.  Bam plays Miguel "Cholo" Matinez, the biker who leads Cassandra astray.  The film is narrated by Kurt Martell as police lieutenant David Jason; Martell was in four episodes of Dragnet (1953-1955), played himself in one episode of You Asked for It, and had uncredited roles in two films in 1952.  Although Martell narrated the film as David Jason, he did not get to play the character on-screen -- that job fell to Robert A. Sherry, whose only other credit was an uncredited role in the previous year's The Bridges at Toko-Ri.  In fact, none of the actors on-screen had any lines, none, nada, zip.  This adds to the phony documentary feel of the film while also cutting down on expenses.

So, is a film this bad worth watching?  You bet your exploitative boots it is!  How can you pass up a gem like this?

Please note that the link brings you to a slightly shortened version of the film, but to make up for it, it includes the movie's trailer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WI7twb_8xVA

FROM THE OTHER SIDE

Well, Isaiah came and went and we survived.

Despite a few branches hitting the roof, no damage was done to the house.  We lost at least six big trees in the backyard, the backyard fence is now toast, and a portion of the back porch was taken out  -- all in all, not a big deal.  Everyone is fine, including animals.  We lost power at 7:05 Friday evening and it just cane back at 8:00 tonight (Sunday), although it is flickering a bit.  We are under a boil water watch.  At least one gas station and a couple of stores are open so we can get food (much of the stuff in the refrigerator may have to be tossed).  Roads are clear; the one tree that fell a cross our street was cleared up by Saturday afternoon.

Jessie lost a couple of trees and part of her back yard fence.  The shingles were blown off the roof of an old she on her property, but her roof is in good condition.  She got power back late on Saturday.

Erin got her power back about three hours ago.

Kaylee and Amy are still without power.  They lost a couple of trees and one window shutter.

Mark, who had to face the storm the the Gulfarium, which is directedly on the Gulf, is doing okay.  Mark is very laidback and nothing bothers him, so the storm could have done absolutely no damage or could have destroyed buildings and exhibits, freeing various alligators and reptiles and sharks and manatees and other wildlife, and Mark would still say it's no big deal and handle it, so who knows?

Christina, a local police dispatcher, was on twelve-hour shifts for the duration.  During the storm, the police station lost its power, its generator, its water (thus no working toilet, yuck!), and all communication devices and had to resort to using pen and paper, while her partner passed the messages on to the police on duty via text.  Several police cars were in accidents and one firefighter broke his arm when a branch landed on him.  Everything was back to what passes for normal on Saturday, and Christina was able to shower at the police station earlier this evening.

Saturday morning, Walt Senior was in extreme discomfort, so Walt took him to the hospital where he was finally released early Saturday evening; on his way back home Walt Senior bought me a cup of coffee (with the power out, he wasn't able to make his morning two pots of coffee).  Saturday, Erin, Trey, and Jack began clearing some of the mess in the back yard and on the roof; we're now able to walk a good portion of the yard; a professional tree service will have to deal with the rest of it.  It's also heartwarming to see many of our neighbors out helping each other.

So, in short, all is fine.  It could have been much worse.

Being without power and locked out of the internet, I don't know how much damage Isaiah (and, yes, I learned how to pronounce the name) has done since making landfall.  It will be interesting, and most likely saddening, to find out.

ISAIAH

We are battening down the hatches in preparation for Hurricane Isaiah to land here tomorrow.  Everything has been moved indoors; I have all the potted plants from the front yard in my bedroom; Christina and Walt have the front porch swing in theirs.  Plywood has been placed over all the windows.  Cars have full tanks of gas.  Gallons and gallons of water have been set aside and we have plenty of pet food.  We are ready, and praying that the storm will be a big nothing burger.

It's at a Cat 2 now and, depending on which news source you go to, may increase to a Cat 3 or shrink to a Cat 1.  [UPDATE:  As of 7:45 Friday morning it is now a Cat 3.]  Thank you, Donald Trump, for slashing the budget of NOAA.  Also, it appears that the center of the storm will be in the middle of out driveway.  A three- to five- to seven- to nine-foot storm surge, again depending on who you listen to.  Winds from 85 to over 110 mph, who knows?  The Three-Mile Bridge over Pensacola Bay will be closed once winds hit 35 mph.  [UPDATE:  the bridge was closed early Friday afternoon.]  School has been cancelled for the past two days.  Christina will be working at the police station on 12-hour shifts through the weekend (there appears there will be a problem in getting overtime for the storm); she packed a cot and sleeping bag in her car on the way in today.  Local police shifts are teaming up, but once the storm hits a certain size, they will not be responding immediately to emergencies; anyone kin trouble will have wo wait until it is safe for the police to respond.  The rumors at the police station are that ALL Waffle Houses in the area will be closed, so you know it's going to be bad.  [UPDATE:  1:37 pm Friday:  they have officially closed the local Waffle House.]  Amy, who works in the County traffic department. is expected to work from 7 to 7 over the next three days, doing technician and admin work not in her job description.  Kaylee and Ivory, who work at the County jail are expected to report in early so a shift can leave early; whether they will be able to leave when their shift is over is up in the air.  Okaloosa County has declared a mandatory evacuation, but Mark, who works at the Gulfarium on Okaloosa Island directly on the shore of the Gulf, can't evacuate because he is one of the few guys tagged to remain at the Gulfarium during the hurricane to keep an eye on the animals -- so we are concerned about his safety.  Casey's, a local chain gas station, has had several of its location run out of gasoline.  Walmart is out of both bottled water and Chef Boyardee.

Evacuation orders for many parts of Escambia County (Pensacola) and Santa Rosa County (us) went into effect this noontime.  [UPDATE:  The evacuation order for Santa Rosa County has been expanded to include "Zone C."  Christina checked the map before heading into work three hours early and "Zone C" literally ends JUST ONE HOUSE before ours.]

And Jim Cantore is having a jolly fine time reporting from Pensacola Beach.

It's going to be an interesting time.

See you on the other side.