The Secret of Lonesome Cove is a detective novel by Samuel Hopkins Adams, published in the early twentieth century and set on the New England coast, chiefly in and around the fictional town of Annalaka and the cliffs above Lonesome Cove. Its twenty-one chapters run from “The Body on the Beach” to “Rewards,” following a scientific amateur detective, Professor Chester Kent, as he untangles the case of a woman found lashed to a grating and manacled beneath the Hawkill Cliffs.
“The only living being who possesses the secret of the strangely clad and manacled body found beneath the cliffs of Cornwall on April 30, 1909, this story, changed in the setting as he will understand, is blindly inscribed.”
The book opens with a corpse that should not be there. A woman in dark silk, expensively dressed, her skull crushed and one wrist locked in a rusted slave manacle, washes into a cove that no local man would swim and few strangers ever visit. Around her gather a sheriff with an eye for money, a garrulous town elder, an old sailor who reads knots the way other men read print, and Chester Kent, a government scientist on holiday who came to study currents and finds himself studying a murder instead. Kent’s friend Francis Sedgwick, an artist recovering a wasted talent, has his own connection to the dead woman: she visited his studio, laughed at him, and struck him down with a rock the night before she died.
From the Cove to the White Room
A Body in Lonesome Cove
The novel opens on a stretch of New England shore so forbidding that almost no one visits it. Lonesome Cove lies walled off from the land by the hundred-foot Hawkill Cliffs, and the sea approach is a gauntlet of rocks, reefs, and violent currents. No settlement stands nearby; the cove’s grim name keeps summer people away, and the only human traces on the uplands are the paths of shepherds whose sheep graze among ash and wild cherry. A steep ravine drops treacherously to the beach. At noon on the sixth of July a crowd gathers on that usually empty sand around a dark shape lying a few yards inside the flood-tide line. Some study the sand, others argue, pointing at the sea and up at the cliffs.
A lone man of a different stamp arrives by an arduous scramble around the cliff’s northern elbow and is plainly annoyed to find anyone there. Jarvis, a liveryman who once drove him, greets him as Professor Kent. Kent explains he has come for a holiday and to study the coast currents, with a plan to swim out to the eddy. Jarvis is appalled: no local man would risk Dead Man’s Eddy, and he calls the professor’s plan superstition only until he reveals that another body has come in through the eddy. Kent is skeptical—bodies come in at the other end of the cove on this tide, and the news spoils a phase of his current theory—until Jarvis corrects him: it is a dead woman.
Kent is led to the corpse. She wears dark silk, lashed with small rope to a wooden grating, expensively dressed down to her shoes and silk stockings. A frightful bruise crushes the right side of her head and extends behind the ear, with clotted blood in her short, close-curled hair; the left side is unmarked. Her eyes are closed, her mouth slightly open, and her face is distorted with deadly terror. Kent murmurs that it should be peaceful. Jarvis points to the hand: the left wrist is locked in a light, rusted handcuff, its chain ending in a companion cuff shattered by a powerful blow and half buried in the sand. The sheriff, a grizzled man named Schlager, declares them cast-iron cuffs unused for forty years. A white-whiskered sailor of fifty years at sea, Sailor Smith, asks what seaman would put such things on a lady. Kent has Smith judge the lashings; the knots are passable, but the rope is unusual for shipboard. When Kent suggests lifting the grating, the sheriff objects that the body must not be moved before a doctor sees it and resents amateur interference—then lifts the woodwork himself. No ship’s name is found. Kent extracts a small grayish object from a crevice and identifies it as the cocoon of a grain moth, Ephestia kuchniella, a destroyer of crops; Schlager mocks him as a bug collector. Kent pockets it, loses interest, paces and whistles, then scans the tide-heaped debris near the cliff.
The sheriff has meanwhile departed, and the crowd speculates that he took something from the pocket—an envelope, a marked handkerchief—noting the money-gleam in his eye. Jarvis, appointed special deputy, keeps everyone from touching the corpse. Talk turns to Elder Iry Dennett, the town gossip of Martindale Center, who the previous evening, climbing the hill beyond the Nook, met a strange woman emerging from the shrubbery. She agreed to go to the Nook, and he watched her. The artist Francis Sedgwick came out to smoke on his stone wall, seemed surprised, and exchanged words with her; she laughed scornfully. He pointed at her necklace of queer fiery pink stones and tried to get something from her; she struck him down with a rock and ran toward Hawkill Cliffs. Someone notes the corpse has no pink necklace; Smith says bodies get robbed. Kent studies the cliff, then the neck, explaining small marks under the ear as indentations from a jewel setting forced violently against the flesh. The sheriff reappears on the cliff brow with Gansett Jim, an Indian from down Amagansett way who arrived while Kent was away, viewed the body, and only grunted. Kent sighs, takes his leave, and goes. The natives call him a harmless scientific crank from Washington; a thin piping man calls him loony; Smith defends him, noting he asked about the knots at once and may point as close to the wind as Len Schlager.
Sedgwick’s Confession and the Monotypes
Francis Sedgwick recounts his ten years since college. Within a year of graduation his only surviving relative died, leaving him a fortune whose income he used to study art in Paris. Paris was first a task-mistress, then a temptress, then a vampire; he developed a curious technique, followed by two years of dissipation, a year of travel to recuperate, and a return to Paris—where he found the power of application gone and his mind’s muscles flabby. Kent asks whether it is too late. Sedgwick says he can still fight, all by virtue of a woman’s laugh—the laugh of a woman without virtue—at the Moulin de la Galette. A dancer, the wreck of former beauty, thinking him too absinthe-soaked to hear, answered her companion’s question about “the drunken foreigner” by saying he was an artist the studios talked of five years ago: “That is what life does to us, mon ami. I’m the woman of it: that’s the man of it.” He staggered up, bowed, made her a promise, and left her laughing; last month he redeemed it, sending her the first thousand dollars he made by his own work.
Kent observes that the boot-strap formula fails in the spiritual world; Sedgwick agrees one can pull oneself out of the ditch, but afterward comes the long hillside. Kent suggests work. He gives his own history in ten words: postgraduate science, an Agricultural Department job, lectures, invention, Judiciary Department expert.
The Tonic Seller’s Tale
Simon P. Groot works the crowd in Annalaka with the practiced cadence of a man who has sold hope in bottles for years. He tells of a worn woman met by the roadside in a place of vast silences, how she tasted De Lorimer’s Life Giving Tonic and felt color return to her cheeks, and how she blessed him before vanishing on her mission. The bottles go at half a dollar apiece until the market flags; then Groot pivots smoothly to mortality itself, selling framed mottoes with mortuary verses at a dollar each. His shrill voice and quivering beard do the work his gaudy bottles did before.
Chester Kent hears something underneath the performance. He leaves with his chin on his chest and goes to Lawyer Adam Bain’s office, where he waits an hour with his feet on the desk. Bain admits he spoke too quick about putting “our two official friends” in a hole—they have crawled out. Had the body been buried as it lay, Bain says, it could have been exhumed and they would have seen what they would have seen. Kent asks whether Bain saw it as it was, and smiles. He asks for the fullest character sketch of the sheriff, and half an hour goes into that.
Buying the Truth at Ten Dollars
Kent finds Groot’s ornate wagon closed and its proprietor whistling over minor repairs, and invites him to ride in the car. Business first: Kent is a buyer, Groot a seller with information. Was any of the talk true? All of it, Groot says, “but the frills”—and for ten dollars he will trim the frills, citing his motto in gilt on the wagon’s back: Fair dealing for a fair price. He was sleeping in the wagon on Hawkill Cliffs when he met the wanderer. She spoke fair enough but queer, saying his children’s children might remember the day; he has no children, so he would have forgotten it but for the man inquiring after her not fifteen minutes later. On the strength of that romance he sold two dozen wedding-rings, and from his description the crowd took the man for a painter named Sedgwick. Less than an hour later he heard the woman cry out—though he would almost swear the yell was a man’s voice, going through him like a sharpened icicle. He drove to Marcus Corners to trade, heard of the murder there, and returned to make a little business out of it. He never tried to trace her. Now he worries he has talked too much and might be wanted as a witness, which is bad for business; Kent says he is safe. For five dollars more, Groot offers a relic of the murderer. Having followed her trail the next morning—he used to be a yarb-grubber—he found the string and paper of her bundle, a fight in a thicket, twigs broken and ground stamped down, and one object caught on a hazel bush. Kent takes it, whistling the long-meter “China,” and hands over the bill: an embroidered silver star with torn wisps of cloth clinging to it.
Facts and the Men Who Hide Them
Chapter VIII, “Reckonings,” opens on the porch of the Nook, where tobacco smoke from three pipes hangs over a late council of Kent, Sedgwick, and Bain. Kent pronounces his epigram—facts that contradict each other are not facts—and when Bain says the chore is to find enough of them, Kent answers that facts are as plentiful as blackberries but they have no pail. Bain dryly suggests borrowing Len Schlager’s. The newspapers, Kent observes, have sent no men on so sensational a case; Bain retorts that so much fake stuff has come out of Lonesome Cove that papers discount it. Kent counts that a blessing, since trained reporters’ shrewdness worries him more than detectives’ stupidity. Their opponents know more than they do: Schlager, Doctor Breed, and, Kent suspects, Gansett Jim. Asked the mainspring of the sheriff’s action, Bain says “Money,” and calls him as crooked as a snake with the colic.
The White Room and the Smashed Portrait
Walking alone afterward, Kent addresses the last fence post on the town’s outskirts as “Mr. Alexander Blair.” Blair’s mention of Helmund was a fatal slip—amateurs who dropped a subject years ago would not know publications issued only within three months—and their casual meeting was palpably manufactured. Why is Kent worth such trouble, and why would Blair leave a desperately ill son to arrange an errand for him now? Hedgerow House lies fourteen miles off, possessing just such an electric car as a woman would use. Getting no reply from the post, Kent returns to the Eyrie, calls up Hedgerow House, and declines Blair’s proposition.
That evening Sedgwick comes to the hotel in hardly repressed excitement. The clerk, at first negligent, grows interested at the name, for suspicion has spread swiftly; Kent, he explains, has taken a far corner room, turned out all the furniture, put on a special lock, and given strict orders against disturbance—perhaps scientific experiments. A discreet tap gets no answer; a louder one earns a savage growl. Sedgwick identifies himself, and Kent sighs and tells him to chase the bell-boy to the stairs. The room is bare: walls hung and floor carpeted with white sheets, a narrow mattress in one corner with a pad and pencil beside it. Kent calls it the retreat of his mind, where he thinks against blank walls. He recalls the college freshman Berwind, a mind-reader whose weak, singularly receptive mind later went insane—how they forced numbers and playing-cards upon his consciousness by merely thinking of them while he gazed at a blank wall. Kent’s notion is to keep the mind blank for impressions, throwing off the clutch of the brain so it works along its own lines; for years he has kept such a room in his Washington house.
He produces the silver star, remarks that the stars in their courses may have fought against Sisera but are not going out of their way to fight, then breaks off to ask what Sedgwick’s visitor said about Jupiter. She never named it.
The Empty Coffin
At the exhumed casket, Blair tells the digger he might better have taken his offer and has dug the grave of his own career; the man answers that remains to be seen. Blair calls for Schlager, who reports a broken wrist and a stolen gun. Blair observes that Schlager is not much of a man-hunter and asks who “they” are; Francis Sedgwick names himself as the other. Blair is convulsed with rage—”You!”—and swears he would come on even if hell yawned. Kent steps between them, saying they cannot afford killing; Blair says he can. Kent argues that killing gains nothing: if one falls the other will finish the task. He states his purpose to open the coffin and then go. Blair refuses; Kent insists. Blair’s arm rises with mechanical steadiness; Kent warns that shooting will rouse the house and asks whether there is someone from whom Blair wishes to conceal the coffin. The muzzle rises into Kent’s face; Kent instead hands the sheriff’s revolver to Sedgwick, explaining that Blair’s pistol is a target arm with only one shot. Blair says he can score a hundred and twenty at a hundred yards. Kent instructs Sedgwick to wing Blair if he fires and, whatever happens, to get the casket open. Sedgwick warns Blair not to think with that trigger finger. Kent countermands killing, saying that in Blair’s place Sedgwick might do as he is doing. The sheriff begs Blair to take no chances, calling them desperate characters and citing what they did to him; Kent murmurs about a testimonial for one who worked on the side of law and order.
Kent pries the lid; it gives slightly; Blair’s pistol sinks and he says bitterly that he should have shot before warning, calling grave violation Kent’s idea of lawful proceeding. Kent lifts out a sacking-swathed object and drops it; relieved, he says he knew it must be, though one is never absolute, and that if wrong they could profitably have used the gun on themselves. Sedgwick, sensitive-nerved, shrinks; Kent insists he witness, produces a pocket-knife, and rips the cloth; sand trickles out. Kent says, “That is all.” Sedgwick laughs in choking spasms. Blair warns quiet, says they have found the secret, notes innocent people in the house and a stirring light, and runs off; returning masked, he asks if this is blackmail. Kent offers peace or truce and proposes exchanging full knowledge when Blair is ready, saying they mutually need each other. Blair wishes Kent at the pit’s bottom; Sedgwick threatens to break every bone in his body were he twenty years younger. Kent urges judging no man by his speech who has been through what Alexander Blair has been through tonight, renews the offer, and promises secrecy for himself and Sedgwick. They reinter the sack of clean sand bearing the name Wilfrid Blair, Blair helping “spell” them, while the sheriff watches the house. Kent proposes taking the sheriff to Sedgwick’s place and, about six o’clock, finding him unconscious below the cliffs where he fell in the darkness; the sheriff agrees it is “as good as the next lie” and says Kent fights fair. Asked why he was at Hedgerow House, the sheriff explains he saw Kent fishing, suspected he was casting for more than trout, did not think he would come so soon, and was asleep when the spade noise woke him; Kent calls it bad and clumsy work. Kent says his car carries three, Sedgwick can sit on the floor, and bids Blair good night; there is no answer—Sedgwick has disappeared. Kent calls softly; Blair asks him not to be too loud; a twig crackles.
The Woman in the Window
Stirred by the candlelight at Hedgerow House, Sedgwick lays his revolver by his spade and slips into the shadows, hearing Kent’s query and seeing him pick up and examine the weapon; he correctly judges Kent will not search for him. Kent guides the sheriff away; Blair returns heavily to the house; a second-story light shines and disappears. Sedgwick detours to the rear, skirts the north wing, and steps into moonlight. She sits at the window, bowered in roses, face turned slightly away, hands inert on the sill, her face dimmed with weariness and strain. Realizing he has no name for her, he calls her by Love’s own name; she does not change posture but her lips part and lids droop; she says “You!” with terror, welcome, and joy mingled. He kisses her hands; they tremble, are withdrawn, flutter briefly at his temples. She urges him to go at once for her happiness and good name, calling the house one “of dread”; asked what she does there, she says “Suffer,” then retracts, blaming unstrung weakness and promising tomorrow will be right. He says she shall go with him, quoting “‘See the gold air and the silver fade / And the last bird fly into the last light'”; she begs him not to, saying it brings back that week too poignantly. He proposes finding her a place tonight and marrying tomorrow; she shrinks, crying “Married! To-morrow!” and asks if he knows who she is. Kent’s analysis returning, Sedgwick says unsteadily that if she is married already it would be better Kent had let him be shot. She asks what danger he has been in; footsteps sound; Alexander Blair appears around the wing, pistol in hand, accuses him of spying, then sees the girl and cries out.
The Scholar’s Confession
The old Harvard professor, Marjorie’s uncle, tells Chester Kent there is an obvious connection between the unknown body on the beach and the Blair tragedy. He blames himself for Marjorie Dorrance’s marriage: when she was left an orphan, he was her nearest relative of suitable age and position to claim guardianship; she visited at eighteen, a beautiful, vivid girl and mind, and he should have warded her against an “advantageous” marriage.
Confronting Marjorie’s Suspicion
Sedgwick opens the final movement by demanding why Marjorie Blair ever believed he might have killed her husband. She flushes and admits the shape of her fear: she thought Wilfrid had learned of their acquaintance, misread it, attacked Sedgwick, and that Sedgwick struck him down in self-defense. Sedgwick thanks her bitterly for the qualification, then apologizes when she winces; Kent’s frown stops him short. Asked who discovered the burial was false, Blair credits Professor Kent, who exhumed the coffin with Sedgwick. Marjorie remembers that this was the night Sedgwick found her at Hedgerow House and her father-in-law charged him with murder. Kent reminds her that Alexander Blair believed he had justification, and she concedes she does not mean to be unjust.
The Claim of a Wife’s Honor
Whatever Wilfrid was, Marjorie declares, he was her husband and she bears his name; leaving him in a nameless grave dishonors them both. She proposes claiming the body. Alexander Blair protests that this would bring the publicity they escaped at bitter cost, asking whether the scandal of Wilfrid’s life is not enough without the scandal of his death. The sheriff, Sedgwick, Preston Jax, Lawyer Bain, and the half-breed all advise against it. Marjorie appeals to Kent, who answers “No” three times—refusing to think her wrong, refusing to drag the name through the mud, and finally with such flat finality that the others fall silent.
Jax Sent Back to Irene
Preston Jax asks what will become of him. Kent, with his half smile, sentences him to return to Irene, if Mrs. Blair approves. Forgetting her own trouble, Marjorie rises and gives him a ring for Irene, wishing them happiness. Jax stutters his thanks, promises to follow the straight and narrow, and rushes out; Kent observes gravely that the lesson will last. Alexander Blair tactfully draws the sheriff and lawyer aside, leaving Marjorie and Sedgwick a moment. She asks his forgiveness for having believed he was the murderer; he says it is all past, and declares he will think of her with every heartbeat. She answers that it would be better for both to forget for a time, as she is going away. He quotes poetry about unforgotten pain and about her seeing wingless skies far from him, holds her gaze, and leaves.
Winter at the Nook
Summer wanes and local interest in the Lonesome Cove victim fades; Elder Dennett’s tongue nearly ceases by the first snow. Other interests supervene: a schooner yacht wrecked off Dead Men’s Eddy, a new Presbyterian minister at Martindale Center with a suffragette wife, a mysterious benefaction sending old Mrs. Orcutt south for her asthma, and a rumor that Hedgerow House is to be sold. Elder Dennett remarks malevolently that young Blair’s body will be sold with it. The Blairs have not been seen since mid-July; Gansett Jim keeps Hedgerow House. Kent left about the same time. Sedgwick stayed at the Nook, painting winter scenes with October’s enthusiasm, growing pale—locals think his conscience aches, but he has only a heartache.
Kent’s Commission and the Empty Grave
In a mid-March gale Chester Kent arrives on foot, fifteen miles from Austin with a light valise. Alexander Blair is upstairs, having come to Hedgerow House to look after books and papers and make his amende honorable. Blair breaks his rule against rehiring a declined employee, offering Kent a bona fide commission: Gansett Jim has reported signs of recent digging at the son’s grave—ghouls seeking the body for ransom. Blair notes they would have found no body, only a punctured sand-bag, and asks whether Kent sees the blackmail potential. Kent says no, then takes the case, setting his own terms, which Blair accepts.
The Nameless Grave Restored
Kent asks whether Blair knows old Mrs. Orcutt of Annalaka, who owns the house next to the churchyard where his son was buried as Jane Doe. Her windows overlook that churchyard, so interested persons subscribed to send her south to a sanatorium; Kent wants Blair to assume the whole expense and reimburse the subscribers. Blair agrees and asks how much; Kent directs him to Sheriff Schlager, who keeps the accounts. Once she was safely away, Kent explains, Schlager, Adam Bain, and Kent visited the churchyard—technically grave robbery—but covered their tracks. What lay nameless in Annalaka churchyard now rests in its own place at Hedgerow House; the marks Gansett Jim found were their own, so Blair’s alarm is groundless. Kent praises the prayer simple country lawyer Adam Bain made over the son’s grave, calling him a through-and-through good man. Schlager, Kent says, had done dirty work for Blair and wanted to even accounts with his conscience; Bain was a trusted third man who took no small risk.
The Detective of Men and Motives
Kent is the book’s engine, and Adams makes him a particular kind of detective: not a policeman but a scientist borrowed by the Department of Justice, a botanist and entomologist who reads a grain-moth’s cocoon in a dead woman’s lashings and a jewel’s impress in the flesh of her neck. His method is announced in his own epigram—”Facts that contradict each other are not facts”—and his temperament is captured in the strange white room he rents, hung and carpeted in sheets, where he sits against blank walls to let his mind work free of its own control. He is vain enough to enjoy his reputation and honest enough to stake it on a theory, telling Sedgwick that the case is his and the artist only “an incident in it.”
Sedgwick supplies the novel’s heart. A man of fortune who squandered his gift in Paris, he was pulled back to work by the scorn of a dancer at the Moulin de la Galette, and the woman he loves—the face in his sketches, the “lady of mystery”—turns out to be Marjorie Dorrance, unhappily married to Wilfrid Blair of Hedgerow House. Adams uses him to test what a man will risk for a woman he cannot even name, and the answer is everything: reputation, safety, and nearly his life.
The Blairs give the mystery its weight. Alexander Blair, the dead man’s father, is no mere villain but a proud, suffering man burying a sack of sand under his son’s name to hide a scandal, and the novel treats him with a sympathy Kent insists on: “judge no man by his speech who has been through what Alexander Blair has been through tonight.” Around him cluster Gansett Jim, the half-breed servant whose bulldog persistence on a hopeless trail makes him an ally; Sheriff Len Schlager, “as crooked as a snake with the colic”; Doctor Breed, more horse trader than physician; and the itinerant Simon P. Groot, whose patent tonic and framed mottoes are a small comic masterpiece of American hucksterism.
A Case Built on Misread Signs
What makes the book more than a puzzle is how thoroughly everyone in it misreads everyone else. Alexander Blair believes Sedgwick killed his son. Marjorie believes it too. The town believes it. Sedgwick half believes the worst of himself. The truth, when Kent assembles it, turns on a case of mistaken identity: the astrologer Preston Jax, summoned to a midnight tryst on Hawkill Heights by a woman who called him “Hermann,” was taken for a man he was not, and the letter signed “Astraea” was written in a hand Marjorie Blair recognizes with horror. Adams builds his plot out of exactly the materials that mislead us in life—coincidence, resemblance, circumstantial detail, and the human hunger to believe the worst—and lets his scientist pick them apart one contradiction at a time.
A Scientist Among the Superstitious
Adams wrote as a muckraking journalist before he wrote fiction, and the novel carries that inheritance lightly. Kent’s war on the “deodorized meat” scheme and his thwarting of a plot to corner cotton with the boll weevil are glancing references to real Progressive-era scandals, and his contempt for superstition—the cove’s ill-omened name, the town’s pride in its own bad luck—sets scientific reason against small-town folklore. Yet the book is fair to its cranks and its gossips: Elder Dennett’s clatter and Sailor Smith’s shrewdness both matter, and the astrologer Jax, for all his roguery, is allowed a signed statement and a measure of fair play. The result is a detective story of its period that wears its period lightly, and a portrait of a coastal New England town in which the strangest thing is not the body on the beach but how readily everyone agrees on what it means.
