Samuel Hopkins Adams’s The Flying Death is a mystery novel set in September 1902 at Montauk Point, on the far eastern tip of Long Island, where a small group of summer guests at a hotel called Third House find themselves cut off from ordinary explanation by a series of killings. The book moves through nineteen chapters, from the arrival of a sleepless young physician to a final wreck on Graveyard Point, and it blends detective work, natural history, and a strain of the uncanny that the characters spend most of the story trying to reason away.
“In the soft glow stood a girl.”
At the center of the book stands a question the characters cannot leave alone: what kind of creature can strike a man dead in mid-air, on a breeches-buoy between a foundering schooner and the shore, and leave a wound too clean for wood and too broad for any blade a man could swing from a distance? Around that question Adams arranges a cast of amateur investigators — a reporter, a physician, and an elderly naturalist — whose competing habits of mind matter as much as the mystery itself.
From the Wreck to the Watchers on the Cliff
A Doctor Sent to the Sea
Stanley Richard Colton arrives at Montauk Point under protest, packed off by his family physician to fill his lungs with ocean air and forget medicine for a while. The career he is asked to forget was hard-won: he had insisted on medical school against his family’s wishes, worked a tenement dispensary, and became a power in the slums. During a brutal heat wave he fought for lives until a contractor’s dynamite shattered the dispensary; he restocked it himself and taught himself to live on four hours’ sleep. When rain finally cooled the city he resolved to sleep a week, but medicine bottles marched before his closed eyes. Rising at midnight in his hostess’s house, he hurls two perfume jars out the window, and a crash is followed by an exclamation.
The voice belongs to Professor Ravenden, formerly of the National Museum in Washington, who asks sharply whether the noise seemed on the ground or in mid-air, explaining his scientific interest. Lightning reveals a slight, neat man of fifty-odd in Norfolk jacket and knickerbockers, holding a broken lantern and a butterfly net; a loose rock had upset him. He asks Colton to join him, and they walk a third of a mile without light while Ravenden explains he was hunting a rare moth, Catocala. On a mound they hear a faint, harsh, metallic sound overhead and to the west; a lightning flash comes but Colton sees nothing, and Ravenden is evasive. Colton smells a sickish, acid odour, though Ravenden has catarrh and cannot. Colton suggests a broken telegraph wire grating in the gale; Ravenden notes no wire is within half a mile. Returning, Colton sees a girl in a doorway who says “Father”; he tells her her father is downstairs and she vanishes, frightened. He falls asleep thinking of her face.
The Wreck on Graveyard Point
A rocket signals a wreck. Ravenden goes to help and his daughter Dolly insists on accompanying him. The other guests include Haynes, searching for a sweater, and Helga, whose dreams come true; she says the ship is coming in on Graveyard Point and calls Haynes “Petit Père.” Colton collides with Haynes and joins the party; Johnston, a twenty-five-year veteran of the life-saving corps, struggles into his boots. Helga, a tawny-haired Viking-like girl, is Johnston’s daughter. In a gully Haynes and Helga hear the strange wailing, metallic yet animate sound; Helga says it chills her like a portent. On the cliff they watch the crews of the Bow Hill and Sand Spit stations attempt to save a schooner trapped on Graveyard Point reef, where three skeleton relics of earlier wrecks already lie.
The Rescue and the Man in the Buoy
Colton hears disjointed shouts about the ship breaking up and life-buoys. Miss Johnston tells Haynes to go to the beach, certain some survivors will come ashore alive. In the gully debouching onto sand, Johnston gathers driftwood for a fire and calls Helga and Haynes to help; Colton drags timber to a lantern-marked center. Johnston points seaward, and in the lightning Colton sees a breeches-buoy bearing its first burden shoreward. Seven of the crew are huddled on the cliff when the buoy goes out again for three remaining lives; then a monster surge sweeps the schooner up, timbers crash, a wild cry goes up, and the line falls slack. Johnston briefly kneels and bares his head, then sets the fuel burning. He, Helga, and Haynes run along the surf’s edge to their stations, the old man nearest the wreck, then Haynes, then the girl.
Colton feels useless, reflecting on the average summer boarder. A dark form appears on a breaker; he seizes it, finding the set, still face of a man, and hauls him ashore with difficulty. Ravenden approaches offering medical skill; Colton finds the man’s skull crushed and says he is beyond all skill. A voice cries out for Helga; Colton sees the girl knee-deep in water clasping a body, and both disappear under a comber. Haynes launches himself head foremost into the swirl and catches Helga about the knees, but the undertow drags them out. Colton reasons he must meet them feet forward like a football player, get his heels into the sand, and anchor them against the back-drift. The wave brings the tangled figures into view, the girl still clasping her trove below the life-preserver; Haynes shouts to get Helga and never mind him. Colton plunges feet forward, catches Haynes above the knees, and holds against the receding surge in a tug-of-war until the strain slacks; he rolls the three over his own body up the beach. Johnston says he saved the lot. Colton staggers to the fire, where a woman—his vision of the hallway—praises him and presses something light and soft into his hand. He lies down to sleep. Dolly Ravenden muses over him, wondering if she has made a mistake, then dismisses it.
The Wound That Came from Mid-Air
Helga wakes Colton with brandy, saying they want his help. Haynes thanks him and offers the life-savers’ aid; Colton reveals he is a physician and asks to see Helga’s waif. Haynes asks him instead to examine a man on the cliff. Helga says the Ravendens have gone to the station; the captain and mate washed in dead. Colton finds something in his clutched left hand, hides it, and examines Helga’s castaway—a swart Southern European with a remarkable chest, conscious but hiding his head, shuddering. Johnston says the man begged to be moved out of the firelight. The man cries to be taken to a house, saying he hears and feels something swooping from above and that he jumped into the waves before the ship broke. He casts himself at Helga’s feet, saying she walked out on the wave to reach him. Johnston objects to “heathen goin’s-on.” Haynes warns Helga not to go alone; she says her father will accompany her and that the danger lies elsewhere. Haynes wishes she would not be influenced by her dreams; she calls him “Petit Père” and says those born of the sea dream the sea’s dreams.
On the cliff, guards Serdholm and Bruce stand over a dead man. Haynes rolls the body to show a deep, clean-driven wound through the back. Colton says a very large blade was sent home with tremendous force, not by himself and not like accident. Haynes says the man left the ship alive and sound in the breeches-buoy and arrived dead; the buoy carries only one at a time. A sailor says he and Darky John helped fasten Petersen in; the Old Man, Buckley the mate, and “that queer Dago feller” were present; there was no fight over precedence; Petersen left fifth. Hawkins the coloured man gives the same version. Haynes calls it the strangest case in his experience if murder was done in mid-air. Serdholm hostilely suggests a sharpened stake could do it in a surf; Bruce notes driftwood afloat. Colton says the incision is too clean for anything but steel, and wood leaves splinters. Bruce, whose hands are bloody from lifting the man out, says some men thought they heard a scream halfway in, after a lightning flash, and thought a bolt might have gone through him; Colton says lightning doesn’t wound that way. Haynes asks about a rasping, creaking sound; Bruce says nothing like that. At the Blue Hill station Helga reports her patient is a travelling juggler and magician called “The Wonderful Whalley,” real name something like Cardonaro, Portuguese, age forty-two, stranded in Maine by a hand injury, taking cheap passage to New York on the Willy Esham. She says he has two enormous knives in his possession.
Everard Colton’s Entrance
The party at Third House sends for Mr. and Mrs. Johnston, Helga, and Everard Colton—though Haynes has forgotten that Helga was never warned of the younger Colton’s arrival. Everard bursts in first and startles his brother by rushing at Miss Ravenden, hailing her as “Little Dot, the butterfly’s Nemesis” and greeting the Ravendens like old friends. He demands to know why “Dick” never mentioned they were there; Dick, bewildered, says he had no idea Everard knew them. Everard explains that he spent a week of his last vacation on their house-boat, jokes that the Lepidoptera of half the Southern States shriek when he and Miss Ravenden approach, and boasts of shooing off her swarming admirers—the “yglot” of Washington and the blue blood of Philadelphia—claiming to be the only man in America who can spend three consecutive days with Dorothy Ravenden without falling in love, escaping only because it is hopeless. Dolly retorts demurely that she has heard a more tangible reason for her bereavement, and tells “Vardy” the stories are true.
Everard hastily remembers the package of books he dropped outside, costing Dick eight dollars eighty cents plus a drink; he had turned Dick’s telegram over to Towney. He opens it and reads “Summer reading for a young physician,” listing Harris’ Insects Injurious to Vegetation, Holland’s The Butterfly Book, a Special Report on the Spiders of Long Island, and “North American”—then exclaims. Dick sharply demands the books. Everard teases that “Little Everard, the Boy Wonder” has put a dainty foot in it again, chirping “Love me, love my bugs.” Dolly turns on him, but Helga’s singing from the hallway stops her—a quaint old ballad about the glow-worm, fly, and midge, ending “Love will find out the way.” Dick exclaims at the voice; Dolly, surprised, asks if he has never heard Helga sing. Everard rises, looking hungrily toward the door; Dolly sees in his face a look no woman but one had ever seen in Everard Colton’s eyes, and thinks, “It is true.” As the second verse ends, Everard says unsteadily that Dick ought to have told him. Dick ignores him and looks at Haynes, whose cold, hard-lined face shows a loving pride and yearning that transfigures it; Dick thinks he ought to be kicked for bringing Everard.
Helga enters, her gaze drawn magnetically to Everard; she stops. He says “Helga!” She catches her breath, her hand fluttering to her breast, colour fading, but masters herself, greets him quietly, and says it is wiser to write ahead for rooms. He stammers, asking if she lives there; she explains it is her father’s hotel and introduces him. Everard hoarsely says he has found his room; Miss Ravenden maliciously enjoys his discomfiture. Haynes sharply returns to business: the juggler is on the point, armed, and suspected murderous; the sailor’s death, the sheep killing, and Mr. Colton’s adventure show peril abroad. Until the man is captured, the ladies should not leave alone, and no one should go far alone or unarmed. Professor Ravenden agrees for himself and his daughter and lends an extra revolver; the weapon goes to Helga’s adopted father. Dick has a navy revolver, Everard his cavalry arm, and Haynes has written for a pistol. The professor suggests notifying the authorities; Haynes dismisses the average town constable and proposes a vigilance committee, adding that he wants the story exclusively for his paper.
Cross-Purposes
Chapter Nine, “Cross-Purposes,” opens with Dolly calling to Haynes about disobeying his own orders; he asks what she thought of the horse’s cry. She says it went through her like a knife, a death scream, and her horse thought so too. Haynes says he would have sworn to it, then reports searching the ground between where Mr. Colton was assailed and the beach without finding hide or hair of the horse; it must have escaped. She will not believe it until she sees it alive; Haynes agrees via “woman’s intuition.” The narrative describes late September weather and Dolly’s regret at leaving, and her realization that she is falling for a man she has seen barely half a dozen times. She turns her exasperation on Dick; he greets her casually and is bewildered by her coldness. He mentions sending for Ev; she cries “You sent for him?” and supposes it was to see Helga. He says it was to give Ev his fair chance. She accuses him of unfairness to Miss Johnston, invoking her responsibility for Helga, and recounts that the Coltons became panic-stricken at Everard marrying Helga before learning anything about her—insulting a woman they never saw—and that Helga would be an honour to the Ravendens, invoking her family’s Southern landed pride against Colton’s pick-and-shovel forebears and the Declaration of Independence. Dick quietly agrees but asks whether Helga told her; she says no, a meddlesome friend did. She raises Harris Haynes; Dick demands that again, his face turning savage. She says he was not fair to Haynes regarding his chance of marrying Helga, and that a beautiful affection exists between Helga and Haynes. Dick sternly says it is not a boy’s whim—it has made Everard a man—and thinks she loves him. Dolly recklessly says she would have Helga marry Haynes without love, inwardly calling herself a liar. Dick coldly says he thinks loveless marriages unfortunate; she calls him—
Dolly’s Confession
The girl tells Dick not to apologize too soon, admits she has been “a traitor to my sex,” says she likes him, and adds at the door that if he can sue as well for himself as for another, he might win any woman; Dick blesses her to the closing door.
The Professor’s Report
Chapter Ten, “The Terror by Night,” characterizes Professor Ravenden as methodical in every department of scientific inquiry: he sets the extraordinary aside for calm analysis, makes full notes at dark passages, relies on patience and reasoning, catalogues facts of ascertained relations, and in crises of doubt will ask counsel of those whose judgment he trusts—but first strives to make his own mind master of the problem. On the night of September 19, after an evening’s moth-hunt, he goes to his room to write, changes into pyjamas and dressing-gown because a sudden shower soaked his clothing, selects a costly cigar, and smokes with deep, long puffs—significant to his daughter or anyone who knew him, since the abstemious professor used tobacco sparingly; he needed it as a sedative, having undergone a severe shock. He writes more than three hours with long pauses, once pacing and communing aloud: he was undeniably terrified, else why flee; the object may have been harmless and scientifically interesting; perhaps repetition and the instinct of peril deceived him, fostered by previous inexplicable occurrences; yet even in fright he believes he preserved his powers of observation. He sleeps, leaving three closely written sheets.
Waking early, he summons Haynes and Dick Colton, bids them sit, and says formally he will not apologize except by mention of his room’s disorder; his practice in difficult cases is to reduce salient facts to writing, a method that once threw new light on the dimorphic female of Papilio turnus in the Blue Ridge chain. He will read a report on last night’s strange happenings and ask their opinion bearing on the mysterious recent events. He states he has never been afflicted with aberration of the senses, is in sound health, and tested temperature (98.5, normal for him) and pulse (a trifle irregular from nervous disturbance, not unusually rapid), asking Dr. Colton whether he shows external indications of nervous or functional disorder; Colton replies “Absolutely none, sir,” estimating his temperament unusually calm and rational.
Waiting, and Haynes’s Last Requests
Dick Colton tells Dolly he will wait for her happily, and the promise lands oddly: she feels a pang of disappointment beneath her admiration for such loyalty and self-repression. She says she will tell “her” what he said, and adds that it ought to have been Helga he cared for—though she is glad it is not. That evening the train, summoned by telegram, brings Eldon Smith, a grave young reporter from Haynes’s own paper, The New Era, and Archer Melbourne, an editorial writer of national reputation who had been the dead man’s only confidant and immediately takes charge. Melbourne tells Dick that within a week of writing, Haynes seemed to have a premonition of death. Haynes is to be buried in the hill behind Third House, and his considerable property, life insurance included, goes to Miss Helga Johnston in trust until her marriage, with Melbourne and Dick named trustees. Haynes also asked that Dick use all his influence to guard Miss Johnston against any marriage Dick could not approve for the woman he loved best; Dick solemnly agrees. Melbourne calls the stories of Haynes’s death too wild for credence; Dick answers that the facts are too. Smith, who will investigate, hears Dick recite those facts and leaves saying he has never met anything like it and will do his best.
Everard Colton then tells Dick he has given up hope of winning Helga, will stick by her until it is over, then go back; Dolly told him the same, he says, and he now knows what sort of fellow Haynes really was. Dick urges that Helga needs him and Miss Ravenden; Everard says he will stand by but will be glad to get away, since a fellow cannot fight the dead. Helga remains unchanged. Melbourne brings her old letters of Haynes, but she cannot be roused to read them, and she does not comprehend what Dolly tries to tell her about his illness. That evening Smith reports to Dick and Professor Ravenden that the case is extraordinary: so many people had trampled the place that only two trampled remains of the remarkable tracks were left in the sand. Dick and the professor affirm there were absolutely no footprints, and that Haynes had positively declared none led to the body of the man Serdholm. Smith calls the pteranodon theory out of the question; the professor replies that the creature’s existence is by no means impossible and the mysterious marks undeniably correspond to the fossil track, so he cannot lightly dismiss the theory that a reptile of the supposedly extinct species did the killing. Dick resolves to go down to the beach in the morning as Haynes would have; the professor, noting a revolver availed their friend little, offers to accompany him. They agree Dick will follow Haynes’s course along the beach while the professor comes across the knolls, both armed. After midnight Dick is sent for: Helga has emerged from her semi-stupor into violent grief that terrifies Dolly and Everard. Dick gives her an opiate, orders Everard to bed, and sits up until nearly dawn.
The Marks at Graveyard Point
He creeps out early, takes a brief plunge in the sea, reaches Graveyard Point and climbs the cliff. A mist is moving east to west. He finds the spot where Haynes’s body lay, checks his revolver, and studies the remains of the five-taloned marks despite rain and trampling. A sliding of gravel startles him; satisfied it is a miniature avalanche, he crouches over the plainest vestigium, wondering whether Haynes solved the secret and died at the moment of success. Rising and facing the sea, he cries, “By the heavens! I’ve got it!” and starts toward the next mark. Something sings in the air behind him; he realizes the doom of Haynes and Serdholm is upon him, tries to turn, and falls into darkness after a grinding shock.
The Professor’s Butterfly and the Juggler
Professor Ravenden, leaving Third House, absentmindedly takes his poison-jar and butterfly net but forgets his revolver. A delicate blue butterfly lures him from the rendezvous; he pursues it in a semicircular course hundreds of yards inland, rests, nets it, and realizes he has wasted ten minutes and is a quarter-mile off track. Fog drifts in. From the cliff brink he sees Dick Colton’s outstretched body on the sand out from the ravine’s mouth. The body twitches; the professor runs along the heights, descends, and as fog closes in sees a monstrous apparition on the sand, which contracts, inverts, and rises as a man—the juggler—moving toward Colton. The professor shouts; the man whirls with squinted eyes and gnashing teeth. The professor leaps over the cliff, lands on soft sand, and charges, seeing a huge broad-bladed knife stuck upright near Colton. They close, and the professor realizes he faces the strength of fury; the juggler bites his shoulder to the shoulder-blade, rousing in him a baresark thirst for murder. He tears the face from his shoulder, swings his heavy poison-bottle by its cord, and beats the juggler down; the glass shatters and a blue butterfly spot is trampled. Cyanide fumes overcome him; he flings the jar away, drops over the juggler’s feet, and is about to strangle him when Dick Colton—seemingly risen—stops him: “In God’s name, Professor, don’t strangle the poor devil!” The professor asks plaintively where his pseudargiolus is. Colton explains that the juggler killed by knife-play, hiding in the gully mouth.
Henkle’s Terror
Johnston, noting it is growing dark, offers to accompany the professor, who declines impatiently, saying he will be gone only a few moments; should he find further imprints, he means to bring the rocks back in the wheelbarrow for careful inspection. Johnston tells him to get his revolver and says he will have Henkle run the barrow up. Henkle is a young Swedish boy with no English and suspected of little wit; with difficulty he is made to understand, the barrow handles are placed in his palms, the professor is pointed out, and he trudges after the savant across the hollows. The professor soon finds indications on half a dozen rocks, loads them glowing with enthusiasm, and sets a homeward pace that makes the sturdy little Swede gasp before half the distance is covered. McDale, reporter for a yellow paper, sees them from his window and runs down to accost the professor, thinking it a chance to get something. Henkle hangs about open-mouthed; McDale dismisses him with a sweeping gesture toward the field whence they came, so the tired boy picks up the barrow and trudges away unnoticed by the professor, now deep in study of the first rock. The professor excitedly tells McDale the print is unquestionably that of a smaller specimen than theirs—a young pteranodon doubtless, or perhaps a lesser sub-species. The reporter pretends absorbed interest and draws out the simple-hearted professor, who elaborates his theory rock after rock. McDale, afraid to pull a pencil lest he check the flow of ideas, hurries upstairs and runs into Eldon Smith, who asks, “Get anything?” McDale calls it Sunday stuff and a corker, hot stuff with a scare-devil double-page drawing of the Pteranodaceus Dingbattius and the professor’s photograph as large as possible. Smith says it is pretty tough on the professor, rather a square old party; McDale protests he won’t fake or guy him, that would put a crimp in the story. Smith notes the professor’s scientific reputation will suffer; McDale agrees he’ll be down and out, but that ain’t his business, and the cream is that the professor believes in the gilly-loo bird as if he’d seen it.
Smith jumps to the window, throws it up with a bang, and asks if McDale heard that. They stand rigid as a faint, woeful, high-pitched scream of abject terror quivers in the still air.
The Three Men Who Try to Explain It
Adams builds his story around three distinct temperaments, and the mystery is filtered through the friction between them. Stanley Richard Colton, M.D., arrives at Montauk exhausted and half-resentful, sent to fill his lungs with ocean air after years of tenement practice; he is a man of the body, trained to read wounds and pulses, and he becomes the story’s medical witness, the one who can say with authority that a wound was made by steel and not by lightning. Harris Haynes of The New Era is the professional observer, a reporter on vacation who cannot stop working, and his method is the detective’s: he measures footprints, maps the sand, tests theories against evidence, and refuses to accept a conclusion merely because it is strange. Professor Willis Ravenden, formerly of the National Museum, is the naturalist, a man who reduces his own terror to a written report with temperature and pulse recorded, and who is willing to defend the survival of an supposedly extinct reptile as an interesting possibility rather than an absurdity.
The book’s drama comes from the way these three men fail and succeed at different moments. Haynes is the one who finds the enormous five-taloned tracks in the sand and immediately doubts his own senses; Ravenden is the one who identifies the print and calls it the verge of the most important modern discovery; Colton is the one who keeps insisting on the physical facts of the wounds. None of them can solve the case alone, and the story is careful to show that each man’s expertise is both a tool and a blind spot.
Helga, Dolly, and the Life Behind the Mystery
The women in the book carry its emotional weight, and Adams gives them more than the roles of threatened heroine and love interest. Helga Johnston, the hotel-keeper’s daughter, is a figure of almost supernatural sensitivity: she dreams true, she hears the strange sound on the cliff and calls it a portent, and she is the one who warns Haynes not to go out alone. Her attachment to Haynes — whom she calls “Petit Père” — is one of the book’s quiet tragedies, and her grief after his death is the emotional center of the later chapters. Dorothy Ravenden, the professor’s daughter, is sharper and more worldly; her exchanges with Dick Colton, from the twenty-dollar bill she gives him in the dark to her teasing about winged spiders, supply the book’s comedy and its romance.
The subplot of Everard Colton and the family’s resistance to Helga gives the mystery a social dimension. The Coltons’ panic at the idea of Everard marrying a hotel-keeper’s daughter, and the letter from the Colton mother that arrives late, let Adams examine class prejudice and family pride alongside the murders. Haynes’s secret support of Helga’s education, kept hidden until she learned of it in college, is the book’s model of quiet decency, and his bequest to her — with Dick named trustee and charged to guard her against any marriage he could not approve for the woman he loved best — ties the romantic plot to the detective one.
What the Book Is Really About
Read as a whole, The Flying Death is less a monster story than a study of how people respond to something that does not fit their categories. The pteranodon theory, which Ravenden defends and Haynes resists, is the book’s central intellectual provocation: a creature assumed extinct, a track that matches a fossil, a killer that strikes from above and leaves no footprints leading to its victim. Adams uses the mystery to test his characters’ faith in science, in evidence, and in each other. The reporter who trusts only what he can measure, the naturalist who trusts the fossil record, and the physician who trusts the wound all have to revise their assumptions.
The book also has a strong current of the gothic beneath its rational surface. The strange metallic sound overhead, the sickish acid odor, the terror that seizes the Swedish boy Henkle so completely that he flees without explanation, the premonitory dreams — these are the materials of a ghost story, and Adams lets them stand without fully dispelling them. The resolution, when it comes, is human and criminal rather than supernatural, but the atmosphere of dread the book builds is not entirely explained away.
A Mystery of Its Moment
The Flying Death belongs to the early twentieth century’s fascination with the detective story and with the popularization of science, and its pleasure lies in watching a small community of intelligent people reason their way toward a truth that keeps slipping out of their grasp. Adams, a journalist himself, gives the book a reporter’s eye for detail and a reporter’s skepticism, and the figure of Haynes — a man who works his vacation, keeps his illness secret, and dies at the moment of discovery — is the book’s most affecting creation. The novel’s final movement, in which the juggler Whalley is hunted across the broken ground of Montauk and the wreck party gathers on the cliff, brings the story back to the sea where it began, and leaves the reader with the sense that the strange sound overhead was never quite the whole story.
