A human trafficking romantic thriller from 1905.
Little Bonny Colville was sent by her mother to New York City to search for and bring back her father who mysteriously disappeared. Soon after arriving at the railway station an attentive, well dressed man makes her acquaintance. The adoring stranger offers to take her to a safe hotel for young girls alone in New York. He instead leads her hand in hand to The House Of Mystery to be groomed into a "companion" for a much older millionaire.
Faith Worthing a ribbon department counter girl is blackmailed at work by someone she emphatically refused advances. He gives two quick choices: either spend her young life in prison for a rigged theft or come with him to The House Of Mystery.
Will these innocent young women's lives take a turn for the worse??
The Authors - The House of Mystery novel was based on the play by Langdon McCormick and expanded on by Grace Miller White in the novelization. Here is some information on both authors.
Langdon McCormick was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan. In 1873 he began working in a theatre where he discovered a talent for stage writing and acting. By eighteen he studied to enter the trade of the new scientific wonder of electricity and became an electrician. These two skills and his inventiveness were a combination that helped him become a wildly successful playwright and stage special effects designer at the turn of the century. At least ten of his scripts appeared on Broadway.
McCormick’s melodramas were in demand and toured all around the United States. So many that the press called him King of the Melodramas.
Here is an article from the October 19, 1919 Boston Daily Eagle. It has most of the information available on his lucrative career.
Outside of this, very little about him is readily found, a reminder that success, fame and fortune is fleeting.
His spectacular special stage effects can be visualized in The House of Mystery novel. It ends with fire, huge explosions and a glowing, occult-like dragon figure within a hidden room where the heinous Black Five Order ceremonied and schemed in secrecy.
Grace Miller White was born in Ithaca, New York in 1868 and began her writing career writing for American Commerce and Industry which supported the election of William McKinley, president of the United States from 1897 to 1901. She also wrote and gave political speeches.
Not long after, she was hired by the J. S. Ogilvie Publishing Company of New York to novelize popular stage plays that had been touring the country. The House of Mystery (1905) and The Great Express Robbery from 1907 (also available on this site) are among them!
One of her best known novels is Tess Of Storm County. It was made into a feature film starring Mary Pickford in 1914, who produced and starred in this second version in 1922.
Today she is most known for writing the classic Storm County books. A number of them were made into some of the most lucrative and popular movies of the silent era, the beginning of a long line of screen adaptions of her works.
