The Manuscript Found in Saragossa by Jan Potocki

Swapping spicy stories in Spain

Jan Potocki (1761–1815) was a Polish nobleman and world traveler who published several travel memoirs in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. He wrote all of his books in the French language. Potocki wrote one work of fiction, a unique and baffling picaresque novel entitled The Manuscript Found in Saragossa. Portions of the book were published as early as 1805, but I don’t believe the entire novel was published until 1847, more than three decades after the author’s death.

The Manuscript Found in Saragossa is similar in conception to The Canterbury Tales or The Decameron. The narrator, Alphonse van Worden, is an officer in the Walloon Guards, a unit of the Spanish Army composed of troops from Wallonia (the Southern, French-speaking, predominantly Catholic portion of Belgium). Van Worden is traveling across Spain to get to Madrid. Over the course of his trip, he accumulates a diverse group of traveling companions. Every night the party stops at an inn or a camp, where they exchange fantastic stories of their lives. The book is divided into sixty-six chapters documenting the sixty-six days of van Worden’s journey. That doesn’t mean, however, that the book is comprised of sixty-six stories. Some stories go on for dozens of chapters, and most of the stories veer off into extended digressions that amount to stories-within-stories. At one point, for example, you’re reading a gypsy chief tell the story of Don Busqueros telling the story of Señor Cornádez telling the story of a pilgrim named Blas Hervas telling the story of his father, Diego Hervas.

The tales told are not confined to Spain but take place all over Europe, the Middle East, and even Mexico. The characters represent multiple nationalities and ethnic groups. Presumably the author was a Christian, but many of the characters depicted here are Jews and Muslims. Potocki does not stoop to negative stereotypes or racism but does emphasize the exotic, mythical aspects of other races and cultures, like all Jews are mystics or all Muslims seem like they stepped out of The Arabian Nights. One recurring character is a “Wandering Jew” who is possibly immortal and relates events from the Bible as if he witnessed them firsthand. Through his characters, Potocki demonstrates an admirable breadth of knowledge. When a mathematician is telling a story, for example, Potocki discourses intelligently about geometry. When a cabalist is doing the talking, Potocki includes just enough details on the occult. Potocki even manages to work some Enlightenment philosophy and science into the narrative. The text is chock full of delightful details.

You’d never guess that this book was written in the early 19th century. Many aspects of the stories told resemble pulp fiction of a later era. One of the funny things about this novel is the number of threesomes that take place. Threesomes with cousins. Threesomes with (maybe) ghosts or demons. A foursome with mother and daughters. Potocki was certainly no prude, and the way he doubles down on shameless titillation indicates that he was no literary snob either.

This book is ingeniously constructed but unfortunately confusing as hell. The story is as complicated as The Count of Monte Cristo, but unlike Alexandre Dumas, Potocki doesn’t leave the reader enough bread crumbs to navigate what’s going on. The stories-within-stories structure is disorienting. Characters assume false identities, swap genders, or show up under different names. You have to keep track of everyone’s noble, clerical, or military titles. All of the stories are somehow connected, but how is not always clear until later in the book. In order to really make sense of this novel, one would have to take notes and draw charts, family trees, historical timelines, maps, etc. Who wants to go through all that just to read a work of fiction? I admire what Potocki has done, and I know there is more to this novel than what I got out of it, but it was an ordeal to get through. I might give this book another try someday when I’m prepared to do the work required, but for now I’m kind of glad I’m done with it.

The Best of 2025

Top ten reads of the year
‘Twas a great year for reading! I managed to crank out 120 reviews this year, and some of those books were long, difficult, but rewarding reads. In nonfiction, I’ve really been enjoying the books of Peter Watson, a British intellectual historian who writes about the history of ideas—in science, philosophy, the arts, sociology, economics, psychology and more. He’s a superb summarizer, a captivating storyteller, and I always come away from one of his books with a long list of books and subjects that I want to pursue further. In fiction, I have made three major discoveries in the past couple years, three great novelists whose books I’ve only begun to dive into: Spanish author Vicente Blasco Ibáñez (1867–1928), Dutch author Louis Couperus (1863–1923), and German-Mexican author B. Traven (birth and death dates unknown). Their books ought to keep me busy for years. Listed below are my ten favorite books read this year (one “book” is actually a four-novel series), arranged chronologically by date of publication. Click on the titles below to read the full reviews.

 

The Cabin (La Barraca) by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez (1898)
Spanish author Blasco Ibáñez was not only respected in his native land but also enjoyed popularity and critical acclaim among English-language readers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With The Cabin, a.k.a. The Shack, he delivers a short but powerful novel in a naturalist style similar to Emile Zola’s fiction. In an insular farming community in Valencia, Spain, a conflict arises between the local community and a family of newcomers. Blasco Ibáñez renders with authenticity and pathos the tragic escalation of events.

The Small Souls series by Louis Couperus

Small Souls (1901)

The Later Life (1902)

The Twilight of the Souls (1902)

Dr. Adriaan (1903)
This four-novel saga by Dutch realist Couperus chronicles the lives and fortunes of the Van Lowes, an upper-class family living in The Hague. Their father, now deceased, was once the governor general of Java, Indonesia, and used to rub elbows with the king. His descendants, however, find themselves slipping down the ladder of status from the aristocracy to the bourgeoisie. This multi-generational story, with a large ensemble of characters, depicts realistic people facing life’s real problems. The reader can’t help but identify and get emotionally involved in the family’s affairs.

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez (1916)

Here’s Blasco Ibáñez again with an epic novel written, published, and set during World War I. The story follows the lives and fortunes of a French-Argentine family. The first half takes place in Argentina, chronicling the family history in a style reminiscent of Gabriel García Márquez. The second half, which takes place in Europe, is a gripping and often brutal exposé of the horrific realities of the First World War. This is a novel about the civilian experience of the war; for a novel of the military experience, see the next selection, below. 

Under Fire: The Story of a Squad by Henri Barbusse (1916)

Though not as well-known as Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, this French novel, published a dozen years earlier, also presents a vivid and visceral depiction of the soldier’s experience of the war. The story follows a French squadron of foot soldiers, made up of working-class men with limited education. Based on some of his own experiences of the war, Barbusse presents an unglamorous, unheroic vision of war filled with blood, mud, and at times even mind-numbing drudgery. One of history’s great anti-war novels.

The Bridge in the Jungle by B. Traven (1928)

Traven is a German author who lived for some years in Mexico, where most of his fiction is set. In this case, an American drifter visits a friend in a small Central American village, where he happens upon a party thrown by the locals. The festivities are interrupted, however, by an unexpected human tragedy. Traven’s storytelling is a vivid immersion into the reality of life among the rural poor in a developing country. He is a leftist realist who depicts Latin America with authenticity, sensitivity, and empathy.

War with the Newts by Karel Capek (1936)

Mankind discovers an intelligent race of amphibians living under the sea, so naturally, what do we do? Exploit them! This dystopian sci-fi novel is an ingenious work of social commentary that satirizes imperialism, colonialism, capitalism, militarism, nationalism, the Nazis, American racism, slavery, British pompousness, the League of Nations, animal cruelty, environmental degradation, religion, and more. This is an ingenious work of satire filled with intelligent humor and ugly truths.

Hombre by Elmore Leonard (1961)

These days, Leonard is better known for his crime novels, but he got his start in westerns, a genre in which he is a modern master. Hombre is the story of John Russell, a mixed-race man who travels across Arizona in a stagecoach full of White passengers who look down on him for his background. When the coach encounters trouble, however, to whom do they turn to save their bacon? This riveting western was adapted into the 1967 film starring Paul Newman.

Blindness by José Saramago (1995)

In this apocalyptic sci-fi/horror novel from Portuguese Nobel laureate Saramago, humanity is hit with an epidemic of blindness. Because of the highly contagious nature of this malady, the stricken are herded into quarantine camps. This novel isn’t so much about blindness as it is about what happens to people when they are subjected to such extreme circumstances. Somewhat like a Holocaust novel, the story is an examination in how low humanity can be degraded while still remaining human. This is not a pleasure read, but it is gripping.

Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, from Fire to Freud by Peter Watson (2006)

Peter Watson made it on my Top Ten list last year with his book The Modern Mind, an intellectual history of the 2oth century. His book Ideas is similar in approach but covers history from the dawn of mankind to the year 1900. This is a world history that’s not about wars or kings but rather about landmark ideas and developments in the arts, sciences, philosophy, and more. Watson demonstrates an encyclopedic knowledge in a variety of fields: history, science, literature, art, music, sociology, psychology, and archaeology, among other disciplines, making for an intellectually stimulating read.

Monsters by Barry Windsor-Smith (2022)

Barry Windsor-Smith, with his highly detailed, quasi-pre-Raphaelite style, has long been one of my favorite comic book artists. With Monsters, he proves that he is also a writer to be reckoned with. This dark and disturbing graphic novel involves a young man coerced into participating in an experimental military program. The story includes some genetic manipulation, so it’s not entirely removed from the sci-fi and superhero genres, but this graphic masterpiece rises above genre fiction and deserves to be regarded with the finest of contemporary literary fiction. 

  

Old Books by Dead Guys has been posting these year-end lists since 2013. To see the top tens from years past, click on the “Best-of lists” tag and scroll through the results. Happy reading in 2026! 

Black Caesars and Foxy Cleopatras: A History of Blaxploitation Cinema by Odie Henderson

From Harlem to Hollywood, and vice versa

Black Caesars and Foxy Cleopatras: A History of Blaxploitation Cinema was published in 2024. The author is Odie Henderson, film critic for the Boston Globe, who I think is probably right around my age. While I, however, grew up watching Burt Reynolds and Clint Eastwood movies in a small town in Wisconsin, Henderson grew up watching Pam Grier and Fred Williamson movies in Jersey City and Times Square. Henderson brings to this history a nostalgic enthusiasm for the genre but also an extensive knowledge of the film industry. For each movie he discusses, Henderson provides a wealth of behind-the-scenes stories about the making of the picture and the careers of those involved in its production.

In the first chapter, Henderson provides an overview of Black American cinema, pre-Blaxploitation. The bulk of the book then covers the years 1970 to 1978. Henderson considers Cotton Comes to Harlem to be the birth of the Blaxploitation genre (when Hollywood realized they could make money off of Black films) and The Wiz to be the nail in its coffin. In between, he highlights every major Blaxploitation film, as well as some lesser-known obscurities. Along the way, a number of subgenres are examined, such as horror films, westerns, rom-coms, high school dramas, women in prison, and of course, gangster/crime movies, like those starring the aforementioned Grier and Williamson.

I’ve seen at least half of the films discussed here, and after reading this book, I’d like to see the rest. Henderson provides plot summaries of all the movies he covers in the book. His synopses include spoilers, and they do often give away the endings of the films. By the time you get to the end of this information-rich genre survey, however, it’s unlikely you’re going to remember the difference between the conclusions of Uptown Saturday Night versus Let’s Do It Again or Hammer versus Bucktown. There is so much film criticism, film history, and film trivia crammed into this book. Throughout, Henderson’s prose is a joy to read, delivering a wealth of information in an addictively fun narrative, with just enough period slang to keep things cool while maintaining film-critic dignity and avoiding overly ostentatious cleverness. He intersperses the film-talk with a few stories of his youth, how he grew up watching these movies, but this is definitely not a memoir. It’s closer to an encyclopedia of the genre, although arranged chronologically. Henderson also includes a few brief interviews with a movie producer and a couple of fellow film critics.

My interest in Blaxploitation films springs mainly from their soundtracks, an important aspect of any film in this genre. Artists like Isaac Hayes (Shaft), Curtis Mayfield (Super Fly), Marvin Gaye (Trouble Man), James Brown (Black Caesar), Willie Hutch (The Mack), Bobby Womack and J. J. Johnson (Across 110th Street), Roy Ayers (Coffy), the Staples Singers (Let’s Do It Again), and The Impressions (Three the Hard Way) created some of the best soul music of the ‘70s in their scores and soundtracks. Although this is primarily a film book, Henderson does cover the music that accompanies the films he discusses. Perhaps as much as fifteen percent of the text might be concerned with music. There’s an entire chapter on Black concert films, and a sidebar on “The Top Ten Best Blaxploitation Songs.”

As a fan of 1970s cinema, I really enjoyed Black Caesars and Foxy Cleopatras. The only way to make this book better would be to make it bigger by adding more lesser-known films. Henderson has certainly got the biggest and best movies of the era well-covered. Inspired by this fun and fascinating study of the genre, I’ll be hunting down many of these movies on streaming services and YouTube.

The Moon Pool by A. Merritt

Hackneyed lost-world lunacy

Abraham Merritt (1884–1943), who often published under the abbreviated name of A. Merritt, was an American writer of science fiction and fantasy fiction. For many years, he was also an editor for The American Weekly, a syndicated newspaper supplement. His sci-fi novel The Moon Pool was originally published as two short stories in the fiction magazine All-Story Weekly. Merritt then combined these stories into a novel, which was published in book form in 1919.

A brief forward to the novel explains that an anthropologist named Dr. Throckmartin has disappeared, along with his wife and two assistants, while on a research expedition. Suspicion has fallen on Dr. Walter T. Goodwin, a botanist, who saw Throckmartin shortly before he went missing. The narrative of this novel is Goodwin’s written account of what really happened. This report has been edited by A. Merritt and published by the fictional International Association of Science.

Throckmartin and Goodwin, former acquaintances, are both conducting research on different islands in the South Pacific. They meet each other on a passenger steamer traveling amongst the islands, headed for Melbourne, Australia. Throckmartin had been doing research at the archaeological site of Nan-Matal, the ruins of an ancient Micronesian civilization on the island of Ponape (Wikipedia spells the actual sites “Nan Madol” and “Pohnpei”). Throckmartin tells Goodwin a harrowing story of how his wife and the other members of his party vanished on the islands. He is traveling to Australia to gather more supplies and men for a return expedition. Not long after telling this story, Throckmartin himself vanishes from the boat on which the two scientists are traveling. Goodwin resolves to venture to the Nan-Matal to investigate the disappearances and rescue the Throckmartin party. In this effort, he is accompanied by a couple of new acquaintances, men with their own reasons for embarking on such an adventure. When they make it to the archaeological site, they discover a portal that leads to a lost civilization underground.

The Moon Pool is a horror novel for those who think colored lights are spooky. Over and over again, we get images of colored lights—“pulsing” (14 times), “throbbing” (17 times), “coruscating” (15 times)—in every color of the rainbow. Another oft-repeated motif is the characters experiencing simultaneous feelings of “ecstasy and terror”—many, many times and in many variations. The best portions of The Moon Pool are when Merritt offers scientific explanations of the mystic phenomena depicted—speculative hypotheses drawing from physics, chemistry, anthropology, etc.—but there is so little of that. The vast bulk of this book is just the familiar cult-in-a-cave clichés that one finds in any Tarzan or Mummy movie. The females of this lost race are conveniently gorgeous, scantily-clad humanoid beauties, while the males are brutal, ugly ogre types. They engage in bizarre rituals in which sacrifices are made to a vengeful god.

The Moon Pool might be a baby step above most pulp fiction of this era. There’s an actual sci-fi story going on here; it’s more than just boobs and bullets, though there’s some of that too. This premise and plot, however, only merit perhaps a novella, while Merritt tries to turn this into an extended epic. The result is a boring, drawn-out mess. There are so many overly protracted descriptions of architecture: yet another chamber with another pool or fountain, yet another light show or a curtain of colored mist. Who cares? Despite a couple of relatively exciting action scenes, the story is dominated by mystic mumbo jumbo and predictable romance. Merritt wrote a sequel to The Moon Pool, The Metal Monster, in which at least one of the characters returns, but I’m not likely to tune in for that encore performance.

The Enlightenment: The Pursuit of Happiness, 1680–1790 by Ritchie Robertson

An erudite, pan-European survey of the era

Ritchie Robertson is a British academic who has published several books on German literature. With his most recent book, however, Robertson has broadened his scope to encompass the pan-European movement known as the Age of Enlightenment. Published in 2021, Robertson’s book The Enlightenment is a sweeping synthesis that attempts to, and in my opinion succeeds in, providing a comprehensive summary of the era that encapsulates the intellectual and social landscape of the period.

Not surprisingly, Robertson focuses primarily on France, Britain, and Germany, but he does often reach farther afield into many other European nations, demonstrating that this was a truly continent-wide phenomenon. The United States doesn’t get a great deal of coverage. Jefferson and Franklin are occasionally discussed, and there’s a brief section on the American Revolution. Rather than examining specific nations or specific thinkers in turn, this book is organized thematically by issue or discipline. The result is much rapid jumping around among diverse locations and historical personages, but this approach helps in gaining an understanding of the overall zeitgeist and important debates in Enlightenment thought. Figures like Immanuel Kant, David Hume, or Voltaire are mentioned in almost every subchapter. If you wanted to get an overall picture of Kant’s thought, for example, you’d have to search around for two sentences here and three sentences there, but if you did so, you’d get a very good understanding of what Kant was all about.

The one thread that tied the myriad endeavors of the Enlightenment together was a striving for an improvement in the happiness of the human race, whether it be through technology, philosophy, politics, law, or some other means. That may seem like an obvious and simplistic answer. Hasn’t mankind always striven for happiness? Well, no, not really. For much of the past two thousand years the prevailing view (at least in the Western world) was that life is an ordeal to be endured so that one could be rewarded with happiness in the afterlife. The Enlightenment is often thought of as a period of extreme secularization and rising atheism, and there definitely was some turning away from prior superstitions and religious dogma, but Robertson asserts that the religious landscape of the Enlightenment was far more complex and heterogenous than widely assumed. The trend of the age was not necessarily antireligious but rather an effort to reconcile religion with reason, to question religion and theology in order to clarify them, so that religion is the product of active thought rather than passive acceptance.

Robertson’s study is not only through but also well-balanced. This isn’t just a book about how great certain Enlightenment thinkers were and what important political and scientific advances were made. Robertson also pays attention to the prejudices, superstitions, and ignorances active during this period. He presents the progress of Enlightenment thought as a series of debates, or exercises in trial and error, and gives as much consideration to those in the wrong as those in the right.

I takes a very skilled writer and researcher to encapsulate an era in one volume like this. Robertson’s book is comprehensive enough to serve as a textbook for an undergraduate course, but it doesn’t read like a textbook. The prose is accessible to general readers, and history buffs will find much food for fascination here. Robertson’s breadth of knowledge is impressive. He seems to have read just about everything published between the two dates in the subtitle, as well as the scholarly literature of recent years. For anyone interested in this period, the notes and bibliography are a treasure trove of further readings. Though I thought I had a good idea of what the Enlightenment was all about, Robertson really broadened my understanding and heightened my interest in this pivotal age in history.

Cosmos, Volume I by Alexander von Humboldt

All of the things that go to make Heaven and Earth

If you’re old enough, you may remember the classic 1980s television series Cosmos, created and hosted by the astronomer Carl Sagan. Or, you might recall the 2014 series Cosmos, a tribute to Sagan’s work, hosted by Neil de Grasse Tyson. Both, however, stole the idea of Cosmos from Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859). Just as Sagan and Tyson were likely the most famous scientists in America at the time their TV shows were broadcast, Humboldt was probably the most famous scientist in the world when he published his late-career magnum opus Cosmos. This landmark work of science literature was published in five volumes, the first of which, the subject of this review, came out in 1849. Humboldt’s Cosmos is an attempt to synthesize all knowledge of the natural sciences up to the mid-nineteenth century. It reads as if Humboldt wrote it for his scientific peers, but Cosmos also enjoyed an immense popular readership in its day..

Humboldt unfurls his scientific overview in a systematic fashion, beginning with the large and moving to the small. He starts by discussing “nebulae” that we now know to be other galaxies. He then examines the various components of our solar system before moving on to the Earth’s seismic and volcanic activities and its rocks and minerals. Then it’s on to oceanography and climatology before finally arriving at life in the form of plants, animals, and humans. Although Humboldt proceeds with systematic rigor, he was also notoriously prone to digressions on whatever topics interested him. The book gets off to a slow start with about a hundred pages of introductory material in which he outlines how scientists should write about nature, how he’s going to write about it, and what exactly he’s going to tell you, before he ever gets around to telling it. As an example of Humboldt’s wandering mind, even in this “general” introduction, there is a three-page footnote about the elevation of the snow line on various mountains of the world. When he finally gets to his “General Review of Natural Phenomena,” delivers it in typical nineteenth-century fashion: all in one long chapter with no breaks or subheads. Humboldt gives special extended attention to some of his “pet” interests, such as the zodiacal light (sunlight reflecting off cosmic dust). The English edition that I read from 1868 (translation by E. C. Otté) has only one appendix; it’s about prehistoric birds in New Zealand.

It’s really interesting to learn about the state of science in 1849, and how scientists and explorers of that era went about obtaining knowledge of our universe. This was before the discovery of continental drift or Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, but such revelations are certainly foreshadowed in this work. I’ve always admired Humboldt as an explorer and a naturalist, but when reading Cosmos one can’t help but admire him as a researcher. He seems to have read everything that had been published in four or five languages, no small feat when you consider how difficult it must have been just to get one’s hands on a specific book in those days, or how much time, effort, and patience was required for correspondence with one’s scientific colleagues.

Though he had an encyclopedic mind and a voracious appetite for specifics, as evidenced by some of the trivial rabbit holes he ventures down in this book, Humboldt was science’s master generalist. He was well-versed in a multitude of scientific disciplines, and his writings emphasize how all natural phenomena are intricately connected into a cohesive and interdependent whole. In this regard, Humboldt was the founder of ecology as we know it. In the introduction to Cosmos, he explains that he wants to write a work that assembles precise empirical data but never loses sight of the essential beauty and wonder of nature, the emotional effect so important to the Romantic movement. As far as imparting the beauty and sublimity of nature is concerned, Humboldt was more successful with his earlier work Views of Nature. Cosmos, on the other hand, reads more like a relentless torrent of data, but it’s a fascinating torrent to mentally bathe oneself in. Reading Cosmos is like living vicariously through a golden age of natural science, as if you were one of Humboldt’s associates. It’s a difficult read, not for everybody, but if you enjoy science history, a trek through Volume I of Cosmos is an inspiring and enlightening experience.  

Godfrey Morgan: A Californian Mystery by Jules Verne

Robinson Crusoe fantasy camp

Not too long ago, in reviewing The Swiss Family Robinson by John David Wyss, I briefly touched upon the profound influence that Daniel Defoe’s novel Robinson Crusoe has had on world literature. That novel clearly had an affect on Jules Verne, who wrote at least a handful of “robinsonades” and included Crusoe-like plot elements in many of his novels of travel and exploration. Verne’s adventure novel L’école des Robinsons was published in 1882. The French title literally translates into The School for Robinsons, and the book has been published in English as School for Crusoes and An American Robinson Crusoe. The 1883 London translation of the novel, however, was entitled Godfrey Morgan, after its protagonist.

Godfrey, an orphan, was raised by his uncle, the billionaire William W. Kolderup of San Francisco. Kolderup also has an adopted daughter, Phina, with whom Godfrey is conveniently betrothed. (Almost every Verne novel features a pair of young lovers engaged to be married.) Before he ties the knot, however, young Godfrey wants to travel the world. Having never ventured far outside of the gilded cage in which he was brought up, Godfrey now has a spell of wanderlust. His future father-in-law grants Godfrey his consent to embark on a round-the-world voyage, provided he is chaperoned by his tutor, Prof. Artelett, a dandy who teaches dancing and deportment. The two head west across the Pacific Ocean towards New Zealand but never make it there. Their ship is wrecked in a storm, and the crew is lost. The two gentlemen from San Francisco find themselves marooned alone on a deserted island.

Much like the original Crusoe and the Swiss Family Robinson, these two castaways enjoy a number of fortunate boons. All of the livestock from their ship miraculously makes it to shore, a box washes up on the beach containing many implements necessary for survival, and a hollow sequoia presents itself as a makeshift townhouse. This is not the most arduous of survival stories. Godfrey and Artelett spend most of their time gathering roots and occasionally shooting a deer. These fellows are far less industrious than the Swiss Family. In order to add some excitement to the proceedings, Verne brings in perils that belong on an entirely different continent. Eventually all is explained, though the explanation is ridiculous.

Though Verne is famous for his science fiction, little science is employed in the survival of these two gentlemen. Typical of Verne, however, this novel is largely a secular, rationalist take on the Crusoe genre. Although obligatory mention is made of the almighty every now and then, this wilderness sojourn is not a meditation on divinity like the pious contemplations of Crusoe and the Swiss. Unfortunately, there are a couple racist comments about dark-skinned islanders here. In general, I’ve found Verne to be more enlightened than many of his contemporaries, but he was still guilty of the ignorance and prejudices of his era.

There isn’t much mystery to this “Californian Mystery.” Verne sets up the plot so that every event is telegraphed well ahead of time. You’d have to be ten years old or less not to see where this story is going. Everything is so obvious that it must have been intentional by Verne to let the audience in on secrets to which Godfrey and Artelett are not privy. Does that strategy pay off? Well, so-so. This isn’t one of Verne’s more intelligent or exciting novels, but it is moderately fun, and the characters are likable. If you’ve read any of Verne beyond his two or three more famous books, then you probably know what to expect, and Godfrey Morgan neither disappoints nor exceeds those expectations.