Programming note: Join Steyn tomorrow, Saturday, for another edition of his Serenade Radio show, On the Town. This week's broadcast celebrates St Andrew's Day, and the centenaries of two landmark Broadway shows. The fun starts at 5pm Greenwich Mean Time - which is 6pm in Western Europe/12 midday North American Eastern. You can listen from almost anywhere on the planet by clicking the button at top right here.
~Welcome to the sixty-seventh audio adventure in our series Tales for Our Time - and the first of this year's Yuletide capers - Mystery in White, a "Christmas crime story" from 1937 by Jefferson Farjeon, scion of an eminent family, as Mark notes in his introduction, that has given us, among other delights, the definitive Rip van Winkle, a ditty about the Royal Family, and a global pop hit.
We begin on Christmas Eve, on a snowbound train:
The elderly bore, however, who formed one of half a dozen inmates of a third-class compartment on the 11.37 from Euston, refused to be alarmed. In fact, although the train had come to an unofficial halt that appeared to be permanent, he pooh-poohed the whole thing as insignificant with the irritating superiority of a world-traveller.
"If you want to know what snow's really like," he remarked to the young lady next to him, "you ought to try the Yukon."
"Ought I?" murmured the young lady obediently.
She was a chorus girl, and her own globe-trotting had been limited to the provincial towns. Her present destination was Manchester, which in this weather seemed quite far enough off... "How much longer are we going to wait here, does anybody think? We must have stopped an hour."
"Thirty-four minutes," corrected the tall, pale youth opposite, with a glance at his wrist-watch. He did not have spots, but looked as though he ought to have had...
"Thank you," smiled the chorus girl. "I see one's got to be careful when you're around!"
To hear Mark read the first part of Mystery in White, Mark Steyn Club members should please click here and log-in.
~Thank you for all your appreciative comments about our last Tale for Our Time - The Unparalleled Invasion by Jack London. Keith Farrell, a Steyn Clubber from England, says:
Having listened to Part 1 this morning, I find hard to believe it was written when it was. Dying before the end of WW1 yet foreseeing China's position in the world order over a century later.
Illuminating, and frightening. Thank you for sharing.
Veronica, the doyenne of Kiwi Klubbers, writes:
So, unable to compete with the Chinese in terms of industry, fecundity or commerce (but weirdly still much stronger than them scientifically and in Naval terms - big mistake from the Chinese Emperor there) the Western nations, led by evil American scientist Jacobus Laningdale (whose first name means, appropriately enough, 'he who supplants'), opt for total biowarfare against the 'Yellow Peril' aka genocide.
Unparalleled indeed, at least for the time, and a very interesting and extremely chilling scenario for an American writer to conjure up.
I wonder who he was trying to warn in 1910 - his fellow Westerners or the Chinese?
Better for the Dragon to remain slumbering perhaps. For its own good if nothing else.
PS. The only false note struck in an otherwise intriguing story for me, in terms of its total implausibility, was the line at the end about the nations of the world agreeing to 'never use against one another the laboratory methods of warfare they had employed in the invasion of China'. Naive does not quite cover this methinks, although perhaps Jack London was intending to induce bleak laughter and extravagant eye-rolling in his readers. If so, he succeeded!
Josh Passell, a First Weekend Founding Member of The Mark Steyn Club, adds:
Wikipedia has a helpful history of germ warfare, from the Hittites through Homer and on down the ages. Jack London didn't have the internet, but anyone well read in history had no shortage of examples to choose from of contagious ordinance being dropped on a chosen enemy. Feces, infected clothing, natural and unnatural toxins, let fly and they die. His premonition that a genocide could be presaged by broken glass was a lucky shot, as it were, but full marks for calling events nearly 30 years yet to come...
And how could the Klondike Kronicler, wise in the ways of life and death in the frozen north, ever concoct a calamity so enormous as the mass purges and devastating famines under Mao's regime? Tens of millions of his own people (the wrong sort of his own people) perished from starvation or torture—while he smiled. (The rictus on the faces of his victims was something else.) The massed armies of the world didn't need to massacre as many as a billion people, as events turned out. Communism, a one-child policy, forced abortions and sterilizations, environmental catastrophes, even an epidemic of coal mine accidents saw to the deaths of upwards of 100 million. Who is ze baddie, again?
Very flatteringly, Gary Alexander compares Jack London with, er, Mark Steyn:
Well, the Steyn inversion of this tale, ala your masterpiece "Prisoner of Windsor," might concern itself with a laboratory in Wuhan, China, where Xi (who must be obeyed) enlists his own lab rats to bring low an equally stubborn and swaggering global leader, that orange-haired U.S. President who had suddenly threatened a crippling trade war, so Xi cleverly let loose a super-bug on direct airline flights to Seattle, Milan and New York, so that the orange man of America and all those pink pretenders in Europe would kowtow not only to the Middle Kingdom but also to their own control freaks and thereby resurrect the slide toward socialist central control via some "reset," to which Klaus Schwab and his fellow Schwabians had been previously pressing global leaders to adopt.
You could call it "Prisoners of Wuhan"?
And one more, from Nicola Timmerman, a Steyn Clubber in francophone Ontario:
A chilling reminder of how China stopped flights within their country at the start of Covid but allowed flights overseas.
Indeed, Nicola. We have all kinds of tales in our archives, from the leisurely comedy of Jerome K Jerome's Three Men in a Boat to P G Wodehouse with a social conscience in Psmith, Journalist - oh, and some fusty notions of honor and duty in a certain other fellow's The Prisoner of Windsor. Tales for Our Time in all its variety is both highly relevant and a welcome detox from the madness of the hour: over seven years' worth of Steyn's audio adaptations of classic fiction starting with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's cracking tale of an early conflict between jihadists and westerners in The Tragedy of the Korosko. To access them all, please see our easy-to-navigate Netflix-style Tales for Our Time home page. We've introduced a similar tile format for Mark's Sunday Poems and also for our Hundred Years Ago Show.
We launched The Mark Steyn Club over seven years ago, and we're overwhelmed by all those members across the globe who've signed up to be a part of it - from Fargo to Fiji, Vancouver to Vanuatu, Cook County to the Cook Islands, West Virginia to the West Midlands. As Mark said at the time, membership isn't for everyone, but it is a way of ensuring that the bulk of our content remains available for everyone.
That said, we are offering our Club members a few extras, including our monthly audio adventures by Dickens, Conrad, Kafka, Gogol, Jane Austen, H G Wells, Louisa May Alcott, George Orwell, Baroness Orczy, Scott Fitzgerald, Robert Louis Stevenson - plus a handful of pieces of non-classic fiction by Steyn himself. You can find them all here. We're very pleased by the response to our Tales - and we even do them live occasionally, and sometimes with special guests on The Mark Steyn Cruise.
We are truly thrilled that one of the most popular of our Steyn Club extras these last seven-and-a-half years has been our nightly audio serials. If you've enjoyed them and you're looking for a present for a fellow fan of classic fiction, we hope you'll consider our special Club Gift Membership. Aside from Tales for Our Time, The Mark Steyn Club does come with other benefits:
~Exclusive Steyn Store member pricing on over 40 books, mugs, T-shirts, and other products;
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~Transcript and audio versions of The Mark Steyn Show and our other video content;
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To become a member of The Mark Steyn Club, please click here - and don't forget that special Gift Membership. As soon as you join, you'll get access not only to Mystery in White but to all the other yarns gathered together at the Tales for Our Time home page.
One other benefit to membership is our Comment Club privileges. So, if you think Mystery in White is a bust, feel free to have at it.
And do join us tomorrow evening for Part Two of Jefferson Farjeon's Christmas caper.