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Packard, Frank

Page history last edited by PBworks 18 years ago

Frank Lucius Packard (1877-1942) was a Canadian-born writer who lived in the US. He worked as a civil engineer and married Marguerite Pearl Macintyre in 1910. He is remembered for his stories about Jimmie Dale (alias The Gray Seal), a reformed cracksman who is blackmailed into opening safes on the side of good. Some of Packard's work is now available from Project Gutenberg.

Mike Grost on Frank L Packard

Frank L. Packard

"The Gray Seal" is the first story in Packard's The Adventures of Jimmie Dale (1914-1915). It sets up the background of his popular gentleman thief. It is a very entertaining piece that shows great ingenuity in its plotting. The respectable hero with his thief secret identity of the Gray Seal seems close to several later pulp magazine characters. These are the Rogue tales that seems closest to Erle Stanley Gardner's Lester Leith and Ed Jenkins, who like the Gray Seal, use their "criminal" activities to aid the innocent, and interfere in evil schemes. And the hero's adventures in his secret identity remind one of Frederick Davis' The Moon Man. In later stories, Dale will adopt other underworld identities, as well. These multiple secret identities anticipate Walter Gibson's The Shadow. Herman Landon's Gray Phantom seems to be a straightforward imitation of Packard's The Gray Seal.

The Adventures of Jimmie Dale seem like a complete blueprint of the way in which secret identities will be used in later fiction. Such stories in the collection as "By Proxy", "The Affair of the Pushcart Man", and "Devil's Work" ring ingenious changes on the secret identity theme that have been used countless times in later pulps, in superhero comic books, and in TV shows derived from them. The ideas in these stories will seem very familiar to today's readers, who are used to them - they are still being used as plots of superhero TV shows in the 1990's - but they must have wowed readers back in 1914. Not only his hero uses secret identities, but later in the book his heroine and villains will use them as well.

Packard's Jimmie Dale maintains a half way house where he can change from one identity to another. Hornung's Raffles maintained a similar apartment. However, Packard's hideout seems to have some new overtones. It is called Sanctuary by Jimmie Dale, and seems to have the feeling of a refuge for him - and a place where he can be "himself". It anticipates in tone such places as Superman's Fortress of Solitude, a secret place known only to the hero. Such lairs were also used by the 1930's pulp heroes who preceded Superman, such as Lester Dent's Doc Savage.

Robert Sampson, in his history of pulp fiction Yesterday's Heroes, thought that The Adventures of Jimmie Dale was the first American book to show the sort of tough adventure in the underworld that would later dominate Black Mask and other hard-boiled pulp fiction. I certainly agree that there is a resemblance.

Some elements of Packard's characterizations anticipate later writers who are non pulp, as well. Jimmie Dale's other secret identity as "Larry the Bat", an underworld character who gets his name from living largely by night, might have inspired the name of Mary Roberts Rinehart and Avery Hopwood's super criminal The Bat (1916 - 1920). And the aristocratic Jimmie Dale's drawling and pose of indifference in his dialogue seem like a prototype of the character of S.S. Van Dine's Philo Vance. Dale is a gifted artist, and lives in a luxuriously furnished house, complete with a rosewood desk.

Although the Dale stories unquestionably come out of the Rogue tradition, their villains seem to derive more from contemporary authors in the American Scientific School, such as Reeve and Rinehart. The villains tend to be crooked businessmen. There are also looks at police corruption. These are themes that dominate the writings of Packard's scientifically oriented contemporaries. In general, like the Scientific School writers, Packard deals with the public realm of theft, industry and civic corruption, not with the family and romantic motives that dominated Golden Age writers like Agatha Christie.

Packard started his literary career by writing railroad fiction. "The Man Who Confessed" is a Bret Harte like tale of special friendship amid Western railroad adventure. It is very emotionally involving. This tale has some crime elements, but basically it is an adventure story, with an emphasis on character. Packard does not use the technical aspects of the train background of his story to construct an intricate, science based plot, unlike Victor L. Whitechurch. Instead, the railroading is mainly used for descriptive passages, that give color to the adventure story. While Packard focuses on his principal characters, there is also a communal portrait of the lives of the railroaders as a whole, reminiscent of such Harte tales as "The Luck of Roaring Camp" - my favorite among Harte's works. The crime elements in the tale, which mainly emerge toward the end of the story, concern the ambiguous roles his characters played in a crime; this theme was pursued more elaborately in the complex plot of "The Gray Seal".