The Case of Summerfield

The Case of Summerfield

The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Case of Summerfield, by William Henry Rhodes
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Title: The Case of Summerfield
Author: William Henry Rhodes
Release Date: February, 2004 [EBook #5191] [Yes, we are more than one year ahead of
schedule] [This file was first posted on June 1, 2002]
Edition: 10
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, THE CASE OF
SUMMERFIELD ***

This eBook was produced by David A. Schwan .
The Case of Summerfield
By William Henry Rhodes

With an Introduction by Geraldine Bonner

The Introduction

The greatest master of the short story our country has known found his inspiration and
produced his best work in California. It is now nearly forty years since "The Luck of
Roaring Camp" appeared, and a line of successors, more or less worthy, have been
following along the trail blazed by Bret Harte. They have given us matter of many kinds,
realistic, romantic, tragic, humorous, weird. In this mass of material much that was good
has been lost. The columns of newspapers swallowed some; weeklies, that lived for a
brief day, carried others to the grave with them. Now and then chance or design
interposed, and some fragment of value was not allowed to perish. It is matter for
congratulation that the story in this volume was one of those saved from oblivion.
In 1871 a San Francisco paper published a tale entitled The Case of Summerfield. The
author concealed himself under the name of "Caxton," a pseudonym unknown at the time.
The story made an immediate impression, and the remote little world by the Golden Gate
was shaken into startled and enquiring astonishment. Wherever people met, The Case of
Summerfield was on men's tongues. Was Caxton's contention possible? Was it true that,
by the use of potassium, water could be set on fire, and that any one possessing this
baneful secret could destroy the world? The plausibility with which the idea was
presented, the bare directness of the style, added to its convincing power. It sounded too
real to be invention, was told with too frank a simplicity to be all imagination. People
could not decide where truth and fiction blended, and the name of Caxton leaped into
local fame.
The author of the tale was a lawyer, W. H. Rhodes, a man of standing and ability,
interested in scientific research. He had written little; what time he had been able to spare
from his work, had been given to studies in chemistry whence he had drawn the
inspiration for such stories as The Case of Summerfield. With him the writing of fiction
was a pastime, not a profession. He wrote because he wanted to, from the urgence of an
idea pressing for utterance, not from the more imperious necessity of keeping the pot
boiling and of there being a roof against the rain. Literary creation was to him a rest, a
matter of holiday in the daily round of a man's labor to provide for his own.
His output was small. One slender volume contains all he wrote: a few poems, half a
dozen stories. In all of these we can feel the spell exercised over him by the uncanny, the
terrible, the weirdly grotesque. His imagination played round those subjects of fantastic
horror which had so potent an attraction for Fitz James O'Brien, the writer whom he most
resembles. There was something of Poe's cold pleasure in dissecting the abnormally
horrible in "The Story of John Pollexfen," the photographer, who, in order to discover a
certain kind of lens, experimented with living eyes. His cat and dog each lost an eye, and
finally a young girl was found willing to sell one of hers that she might have money to
help her lover. But none of the other stories shows the originality and impressively
realistic tone which distinguish The Case of Summerfield. In this he