The Crimson Gardenia and Other Tales of Adventure

Eleven stories, most first run in magazines from 1906 to 1913, collected by Harper & Brothers in 1916. In the title piece, Roland Van Dam is blase at twenty-six, watching a Mardi Gras parade beside a fiancee who has just declared romance something the modern world has outgrown. He buys a flower-woman’s last gardenia and pins it to his domino. A masked girl reads it as a signal, mistakes him for another man, and leads him off Canal Street into the old quarter. He plays along. Most of the rest turn north to Nome and the Yukon: a gold stampede, the winter mail reaching a snowed-in camp, two trail partners whose debt of gratitude sours into a burden. Two go to Haiti. Beach prospected near Nome for five years before selling fiction, and it shows in what they take seriously.