Here is a very clever novel from 1937 by V.A. Van Sickle ~ a pseudonym of Arthur Hawthorne Carhart. At the time, The Saturday Review called it "Fantastic, feverishly emotional, garishly garnished with pseudo science, and political dogfights".
I say - If you are in the mood, it's a fun dose of mystery, fantasy, and even romance all tied up in a satisfying ending.
Mike Mascarenas is a local underworld leader who has been wrongly convicted of murder. Facing a death sentence, he agrees to be in Dr. Boxton's strange experiment to cure carbon monoxide poisoning. He'll be put to death with the gas, then woken up again and hour later through a blood cleaning process, walking away a free man. Dr. Boxton has no belief in a life beyond biochemistry - Man is nothing more than fluids and charges. As they prepare, the oppositional Governor is alerted and races to stop it, knowing Mike will soon find out it was political corruption that sent him to the chair. On the way to the hospital, he gets carbon monoxide poisoning from the car heater and arrives dead! Dr. Boxton must now successfully perform a double operation - no one knowing that when the men wake up - they are trapped in each others bodies!
And this is just the beginning of the story. Mike now appears to everyone to be the Governor, with added knowledge of the financial scams his office was about to do, and proceeds to clean the city - firing corrupt politicians, cancelling fraudulent bond schemes, etc. - as well as falling in love with the Governor's finance Beth. Trapped inside Mike's body is the Governor, whom everyone thinks had a breakdown during the operation, and has been locked away.
At first, Mike wants to exact revenge for his wrongful conviction by collecting as much money as he can before skipping town. Then he begins to do as much good as he can for the city, and amend his ways - and finally - realizes he is so deeply in love with Beth (and she with the Governor, not him) that he must work to right the whole situation and give him back to her. But how?
It's a fantasy with romance, comedy, mystery, politics, gangsters, showgirls, fights and escapes, orphan babies, newspaper scoops, science, music, kidnapping, blackmail, and even a rest in the middle to contemplate the meaning of spirit, souls, the hereafter and mortality. Tipping the scales of power and money the Fat Cats held while so many had so little must have been an appealing theme in the late 1930's. I was impressed how the whole package came together towards a hair-raising finale, with police breaking down the door and newsmen screaming stop-the-press front page headlines over the phone. A real page turner.
I found a beat up copy at my local charity shop, and not much online about this or other novels by Van Sickle/Carhart. I'd certainly seek more out. While the set-up seemed a little light, and perhaps cheesy, I found it became quite complex and successfully entertaining.
Happy to have read it.
1937 / Hardcover / 273 pages
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