REVIEWED BY WALTER ALBERT:         


RAYBURN CROWLEY – The Valley of Creeping Men. Harper & Brothers, hardcover, 1930. Hardcover reprint: Grosset & Dunlap, no date.

   This is a book that any lover of high adventure, goofy science, and lost-race novels won’t be able to put down.

RAYBURN CRAWLEY Valley of Sleeping Men

   Somewhere in Africa, protected from the outside world by a forbidding mountain lies a valley in which — legend has it — dwells a race of golden gorillas, somewhere on the evolutionary scale between ape and man:

    “I’ve heard it is not an ordinary gorilla, but yellow like a collie; that it’s very close to human, sometimes has a vile temper, and sometimes is disgustingly affectionate.”

   The murder in London of the brilliant but loony scientist Marakoff — the discoverer of the gorilla — sets off an international pursuit that includes more murders, treachery and relentless peril.

There’s some colorful writing here, the kind that always sets my pulse to pounding:

    “At a point near the West Coast of Africa there lies a valley; no white man has ever gone into it. The natives have a great dread of it,. It lies far up a sluggish tropical river-the Sanaga. The river is impassible to big canoes except after the rains. The mountains of the Kameroons hem it in on both sides. The entrance to it lies through a narrow defile. Even this is cut off by a giant cataract. What lies behind that wall of water no one knows, except — perhaps — Marakoff.”

   And away we go. The women are seductively beautiful, the men strong and intense, and the landscapes are painted with a skill that’s a cut above some of the plotting:

    “The smokey haze of London had already clouded the short November afternoon to dusk. As he contrasted the London greyness with the rich tropical world that awaited him, he felt alien and estranged. In Africa, now, the sun would be blazing on fantastically brilliant colors. Or when the quick night had come, there would be the moon, yellow and ripe, hanging like a melon in the liana-hung tangle of the forest. Africa was in his senses, in his heart.”

   Edgar Rice Burroughs, eat your heart out!

   In an appendix at the end of Chattering Gods, the sequel to Valley, published by Harper in 1931, the publisher poses the question “Who IS Rayburn Crawley?”

   In an accompanying letter, Crawley defends his anonymity by claiming that: “Any author worth reading can be known, and very fully known, by his books.”

   The publisher calls this a challenge and, listing several questions that might be asked about the reclusive author, offers autographed copies of the two books to “the persons who answer these questions correctly.”

   Laura Spencer Portor Hope and Dorothy Giles are identified in the current version of Hubin as the authors hiding behind the Crawley pseudonym, and Victor Berch has added that their identity was known as early as July 7, 1958, when the copyright on the book was renewed.

   Now if only somebody could find out the names of the winners of the Harper contest. It’s intriguing, to say the least, that autographed copies, in dust jacket, of the two books may be in some collector’s private library.

Editorial Comments:   Walter sent me this review after he spotted this book in Victor Berch’s “Checklist of Harper’s Sealed Mysteries,” announced on this blog not too long ago. This is a revised version of a review he wrote some 20 odd years ago, and he admits that he’s been wondering about the author’s identity ever since.

   As good as Walter says this book is, why it should have been published as a Sealed Mystery, along with the John Dickson Carr’s, Hulbert Footner’s and others is another mystery that’s lost in the mists of time.