Disposable Lit Reviews

Peter Haddock Limited, 1916/no date
126 pp.
No ISBN
Buy it from
Amazon.com or
eBay

When I first picked up this book in a used bookstore many years ago, I knew nothing at all about it except that, from the style of the cover, it had been published by Peter Haddock Limited. I got to know that publisher by their three-volume paperback set of Robert E. Howard’s “Solomon Kane” stories, which, though out of print, were still the only source for that series that I could lay my hands on in high school. Anything published by Peter Haddock, I decided, was worth looking at.

The Treasure of Atlantis fits right into their “Time-Lost” series of forgotten adventure pulp novels. It first appeared in All Around magazine in 1916, a time at which the great pulp traditions were just getting started, and most fantastic adventure stories were drawing directly on the two godfathers of the genre, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Edgar Rice Burroughs, and this novel reads like a pleasant pastiche crossover between them.

Materially-endowed gentleman Stanley Morse has made it his well-funded endeavor to crisscross the globe in search of academically-fulfilling adventure, but his first interest in South America comes when he hears the tale of an orchid hunter dying of poisonous wounds gained on a trip up an Amazon tributary. There he heard legends of a fabled city of white men existing atop an inaccessable plateau, and even saw the city — or rather, saw the rare mirage of the city reflected perfectly in the cloud bank above it. He also brought back an artifact, handed down by the Indians of the area: a goblet of gold, inscribed with Greek.

Receiving the goblet on the orchid hunter’s death, Morse takes it to the museum and is put in touch with Dr. Laidlaw, a lionine man straight from the mold of Doyle’s Dr. Challenger. Laidlaw has long been of the opinion that the proto-Greek Minoan culture was the basis of the Atlantis myth, and that the massive cataclysm which tore South America from Africa and the Mediterranean may well have left the descendents of those Atlanteans in South America. (Remember that plate tectonics had only been proposed in 1912, and the now-obvious idea that the continents had once been contiguous was only really taken seriously in academia in the 1960’s.)

Morse and Laidlaw mount an expedition to the Amazon, find the inaccessable plateau, and naturally arrive just when internal political machinations open the doorway for them; they rescue one of the two rulers of this Atlantis, Kiron, who has just secretly been turned out of doors by the scheming high priest Ru, who works for the other half of the ruling duo, the fiery and ambitious Rana. Accepted into Atlantean society from the long-fabled outside world, Morse and Laidlaw explore this preserved Greek world and try to keep from becoming either parts or victims of Rana’s schemes to wrest the throne for herself alone.

Naturally, there’s romance; while Rana has set her eye upon Morse as a conquest/consort, Morse finds himself struck by love at first sight toward Rana’s sister, Leola, the high priestess of the man-disdaining Pasiphae. (Wow! Sex, politics, and religion in one relationship!) Obviously, a romance between them will go against just about every strand in the continuity of Atlantean culture, but when the heart calls, what can you do?

Oh, and did I mention that the plateau’s volcanic? Which pretty much tells you right there how Atlantis finally ends up.

Dunn has a comfortable prose style which manages to combine easy readability with the florid spectacle so much a part of the adventure-fiction genre. He was fairly successful, back in the day; he’s credited with at least six other sefl-contained novels, fifteen serials, and a whole slew of short stories and novelettes (that’s according to an admittedly-incomplete magazine fiction index which, for example, doesn’t list the original magazine publication of The Treasure of Atlantis.) It doesn’t look like any more than three of his novel-length works were ever republished in book form, which means that it’s unlikely that J. Allan Dunn will ever be rediscovered as a lot pulp master.

But hey, if Atlantis can be rediscovered thousands of years later, anything can happen…

Nathan Shumate