Joseph Crosby Lincoln (1870–1944)

A. Hall & Co. by Joseph C. Lincoln was one of the author's last books, from a career that spanned 42 years. While all of his books are loosely connected, A. Hall & Co. serves as a follow up to Mary-'Gusta.

The once powerful A. Hall & Company, fish wholesaler is struggling to stay afloat. The land that store sits on, as well as the family home is worth more than the buildings or the store's inventory combined. There's a real estate boom going on and the Hall family is facing losing everything show more due to gentrification.

Meanwhile, there's a romance between the son of the developer and a young woman who is related to the Halls. Because of the underhanded approach the developer has taken to force the Halls out, their romance has to stay secret, even though neither is directly involved and neither wants the Hall store to fail.

Having so far mostly read Lincoln's earlier books that take place in the heyday of shipping and sailing, when the lighthouse keepers were heroes, it was fascinating to read one of last books. His bit of Cape Cod has changed with the times and the heroine arrives via airplane. The old sailor dialect of the Cap'ns is nearly extinct and is even mocked among some of the oldest characters in the book (who themselves are too young to have genuinely spoken that way).

And that's what I love most about Lincoln's body of work. His fictional towns grown and change with the time. Characters live their lives. Things come and go. Fashions change. The language adapts. Basically it feels like a real place. show less

Blair's Attic by Joseph C. Lincoln is all about memory and unreliable narrators. It's also a reminder to me that my memory is as fallible as anyone else's. When I think of my first time reading this book, I can distinctly picture myself in the weird triangle shaped bedroom I had as a newly wed. I picture book as one of the many SRLF volumes I had checked out to give the storage books a chance at freedom. And while UCLA does have a copy in SRLF there is no record of me reading the book at show more that time or that place in my handwritten book diary (now in its third volume).

All I can think, then, is that my initial annoyance with the book, shares an emotional tie with other memories of annoying reads whilst a newly wed. Or maybe instead, it's a nostalgic feeling of getting back to reading old books. I don't know, but this false memory lingers.

The book itself is unusual for a Joseph C. Lincoln in that it's told in first person and from multiple points of view. Together these four narratives span the decades from the 1880s to the 1920s and are inspired by popular horror of the time — Dracula (1897) and the like.

The first narrator, the long-time housekeeper at the Blair house, is an avid reader and a fan of horror books. Her obsession with horror and Gothic romances sets the tone of Blair's Attic. Of course now as a modern-day reader, I can't help but also compare it to The Blair Witch Project, though witchcraft isn't exactly mentioned within the context of the story.

The gist of the plot is one of a curse following a shipwreck. Cap'n Blair's friend was at helm and all souls were lost. The salvage consisting of treasures from Japan and China is put into storage after Blair's death and there they remain until Blair's daughter decides to renovate the house before her marriage (the modern day part of the story in the 1920s). It is during these renovations that the curse manifests itself and a man ends up dead.

When I first read Blair's Attic in 2004, I was still relatively new to Lincoln's oeuvre. I mistakenly thought of him as a quaint writer of dialect pieces and nothing more. Yes — his characters do use dialect but it's done in terms of character building and not as a way to seem old-timey or some such. Coming back to this book with a decade's worth of reading, I'll warrant that Lincoln was as world savvy as Samuel Clemens / Mark Twain, and chose to use dialect for similar reasons.

Within the four narratives: the housekeeper, the fiancé, the daughter, and again the housekeeper, there is a mystery involving an old shipwreck, a missing treasure, a possible curse, and all the other things of a really good episode of Scooby Doo. It's not a finely crafted mystery (as mysteries weren't Lincoln's genre of choice) but it is still a satisfying one. show less

Mr. Pratt's Patients by Joseph C. Lincoln is a fish out of water story. Pratt is a man down on his luck and needing work. His life has been at sea and now he's forced to modernize with the rest of the town and takes a job at a local health spa.

There are basically three acts to this book: Pratt learning his new job, Pratt goofing off, and Pratt uncovering the truth behind the spa. At first glance, the spa while alien to a man used to working on a ship, appears to be doing good. The short term show more guests swear by the doctor's good works. Everyone is in white and it all looks very hygienic.

It also looks boring as all get out and Mr. Pratt has reached a point in his life where he doesn't just take someone's word on something. He decides years and years of living at sea have taught him that there are other ways of doing things too. He also comes across long time friends also washed ashore here, so to speak. It is here that Lincoln through Pratt explores the ways Massachusetts was being forced to find new industries as the traditional shipping and fishing industries changed due to steam and over fishing. These themes are revisited more effectively in A. Hall & Co.

Finally there's the tying up of lose ends. Pratt uncovers secrets, reunites long lost lovers, plays match maker for new pairs of lovers, and basically leaves his stamp on all parts of the town. These Lincoln books always end on a sentimental note and usually with a romance or two.

This one, though, with it's bizarre set up (ex-sailor becomes health spa orderly) and the vast number of reversals, romances, and scandals, made me imagine Adam Sandler as Mr. Pratt. That's not too far afield, since he did do a re-make of Mr. Deeds from Clarence B. Kelland's book. Frankly I'd love to see Sandler tackle one of Lincoln's books. show less

In it, a close knit community of lighthouse workers try to figure out what went wrong in a rescue mission of a stranded boat during a storm. The captain of the on duty crew's hesitation lost precious time and now the others need to figure out why he hesitated and if it was for criminal reasons.

Lincoln's books always take me a while to get into them, usually the first eighty to a hundred pages. I'm now just past the halfway point and the plot has really picked up. I'll probably be finished show more with the book by the weekend. show less