The Far Cry

The Far Cry is a novel by Henry Milner Rideout, the American writer who lived from 1877 to 1927 and who produced a substantial body of adventure fiction set in the Pacific and in the Far East during the early decades of the twentieth century. Rideout had spent time in the Philippines and elsewhere in the Pacific region during his early adulthood and drew on that experience for many of his novels.

The novel belongs to the genre of romantic adventure fiction with Pacific or Asian settings that was popular among American readers in the early twentieth century. Writers like Joseph Conrad and Somerset Maugham had established the literary respectability of the Asian and Pacific adventure novel at a higher level, and Rideout’s work belongs to the more popular and commercial wing of the same general genre. His novels typically combine adventure plot with romantic interest and with substantial attention to the exotic settings that the Pacific and Asian locations provided for American readers who had limited direct knowledge of those regions.

The Far Cry uses the standard ingredients of the genre. There are journeys across long ocean distances, encounters with various Asian and Pacific cultures handled through the assumptions of early twentieth century American attitudes about race and culture, romantic complications among the European and American characters, and the kind of dramatic plot turns that the adventure novel required. The treatment of the various non Western characters is shaped by the racial attitudes of the period and would be uncomfortable for modern readers in various ways that the original audience would not have noticed.

Rideout was a competent professional writer who produced solid commercial fiction at a steady pace across his working life. His novels are not in the first rank of American adventure fiction but they are above the average level for the period and they have a certain interest now as documents of how the Pacific and Asian regions were being represented to American audiences during the years when American economic and political involvement in those regions was increasing substantially.

The novel runs to several hundred pages and reads as a brisk piece of period adventure fiction. For readers interested in early twentieth century American popular fiction about the Pacific, this is a representative example. It pairs naturally with Rideout’s other novels.