Lincoln Lee. A name that involves confusion, Pride, disgrace, civil discourse and Power.
A man named after both leaders of the American Civil War that took up so much of the mid-nineteenth century. The man who by his own will shall break up America, demolishing it from inside and build up a glorious new future. That future is some form of fascism. He doesn't State what type of fascism or even that it is fascism. But when you have an organisation known as the Grey Shirts and you make reference to how Hitler was doing things over in Germany it's pretty easy to see what his goal is.
and with all that build-up you'd expect him to be a big plot point in your story. And he's not. Lincoln Lee is just kind of there, he's what I refer to as a side antagonist.
You see the real antagonist of the book is a small Committee of men made up of capitalists who focus in the steel sector, food manufacturing and any industry that can be profited from massive war expansion. One might argue there are kind of Prelude to the military industrial complex that I'll strangle America from the 1950s up to the current day.
Or at least they're supposed to be the antagonist. As time goes on they lose a lot of influence to only having one character who interacts with the secretary who works for the president and a strange affair in which he wants to acquire a journal from her. But otherwise it's just a massive investigation in which a committee of Representatives at the top of the US White House staff try to discover the whereabouts of their president.
It's a fairly entertaining story and I'm slightly confused as to why. The story doesn't focus on the environment. There's no major protagonists outside of Chick Moffat a Secret Service man who's previ too much of the investigation.
And for the life of me I'm not sure what supposed to hook you into the story. Outside of the basic premise of what would happen to the United States and more properly to Washington DC if the Commander in Chief of the United States just up and vanished.
The book goes into Minor Details about the people's reaction to learning of their presidents fate and the disturbing retribution that's given out too various people, places and sadly ethnic* groups who are accused of having some involvement in the crime.
A lot of the book becomes an allegory for the possible War that's going to consume the United States in the coming years. A lot of discussion in on how the American should approach the problem, if they should approach the problem and what they're willing to sacrifice if they do get involved.
And maybe a scary Prospect to us but who side will the US join? It wasn't written in stone who they were supporting back in the day. Overall they tended to view the French and the British as their proper allies as opposed to Germany because of their ideological problems and simply just because of the alignment of the war previously. But that didn't mean the US was just going to jump on board with the allies.
and then there becomes the debate of time has the u.s. sits idly by and the rest of the world advances in Warfare as the world becomes more unstable at America loses influence Ends by inch until they're eventually unable to defend themselves. These were all serious questions people were concerned with back in the day. And some ways still are.
Of course now it doesn't seem like that big a problem. It doesn't matter how much the world advances the US still holds the biggest military their techniques are the years Beyond pretty much everyone else and their Naval force is so huge that it would take the next five countries combined just to fight them on an even playing field.
As you can see from the original photo there is no cover for this book. At least not originally, as time would go on and the story would be reprinted later on it was given various covers to reflect the author and the times that it was in. It starting to resemble Nero Wolfe stories.
Which creates a very false image of what the story is. Nero Wolfe is a story about two very particular characters and their constant involvement in different crimes. One could argue that their character dramas constantly revolving around the small and minuscule. Whereas The President Vanishes has mainly undefined characters. Instead focusing more on the Grandeur aspect of what an entire nation would do with their head of state was suddenly gone.
There's also the problem with technology that showing on some covers. If you look up any 1960s cover for this book it's all dial tone telephones and recording equipment it creates an image of a far more Advanced America. The story takes place in the 1930s. Surveillance technology practically doesn't exist in any electric form and the President is in the way is kind of vulnerable if you could get him at the right point.
It's very much a book of its time and to have it shoehorned in with modern political Thrillers or Nero Wolfe stories is to remove what the story actually is. And it may skew your perception of the book before you even read it.
The anonymous author was quite the gimmick for the time. Rex Stout put the book out anonymously to increase sales. His idea was that people would see it as some sort of document possibly created by a higher up who was working in the White House. This gave the book a venir of intrigue and it worked quite well for Book Sales.
He also had this strange tendency to write the accents over the letters of certain words what are the English Standard vocabulary doesn't apply. I'm quite a fan of this. As somebody who grew up illiterate until 14 years of age it was very nice to see a novel that would tell you the exact accent to use over a word. Too often English words are spelled in such a way as to not resemble what they really are. Of course this also becomes more problematic when Americanised English simplifies words or uses other words as a substitute. Like check versus cheque.
*One of these ethnic groups happens to be the Japanese Americans who lived in California. There's a brief section of the book where they describe a mob of people attacking said group accusing them of being the instigators of the kidnapping of the president because of the peoples fears of Japanese involvement in a depending World War. And unfortunately that Rings a little too true to what actually happened upon the bombings of Pearl Harbour. Just like in real life you have to feel sorry for the people who were victimised and in some cases killed simply because of country they once shared ancestry with may at some point be at war with your own Nation. It becomes increasingly annoying when you consider that most German-Americans or even Russian** Americans were never harassed for their ancestry despite their former countries having far more involvement in the possible overthrow the United States.
This also brings up a point about how people in the past perceived what would happen in the future and how we perceive people in the past given our current information.
On the one hand a lot of people like to say; Well yes they imprisoned the Japanese, but it's not like they were planning to do that from the start. It was a spur-of-the-moment kind of thing.''
But then you read a book like this that came out 8 years before the Americans involvement in the war and you see that they're already discussing the possible ''Japanese problem''. This was something people knew about back then and many were willing to support in the name of fear or unfortunately bigotry.
**Okay so there was a little harassment but it was nothing compared to the scale of the Americans Japanese imprisonment. And even then most the people who did get harassed had it coming because of ideological leanings as opposed to any ethnic problem. It's still not right and it still unconstitutional but there is a difference.
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