The White Moll
A name that protects her. A name she has to become.
A thief snatches a woman’s purse in a dark New York street, sees her face, and hands it straight back.
He returns it because of a name. Not Rhoda Gray, the name she was born with, but the one the underworld gave her: the White Moll. The thieves trust her because she has kept their confidences. The desperate come to her because she helped them without first asking whether they deserved it.
Then a killing puts the police on her, the underworld turns, and the only way left to move through the city is to become someone the city has already decided not to look at. As “Gypsy Nan” – old, filthy, drunk, muttering – Rhoda can enter any room in the quarter and be seen by nobody in it. The disguise is brilliantly useful and steadily intolerable.
Frank L. Packard trained as an engineer before he was a novelist, and built his thrillers out of codes, concealed routes and moving parts that converge under pressure. His Jimmie Dale stories had already put secret identity and private justice into a single body. The White Moll, serialized in The Blue Book Magazine from August 1919, hands those powers – and those dangers – to a woman. Fox filmed it in 1920 with Pearl White, the Queen of the Serials. That picture is lost. The novel is not.
A carefully restored text. This Squire Press edition is set from the 1920 Toronto edition of The Copp, Clark Co. – every story page checked directly against a complete scan of the printed book, with Packard’s period spelling, slang and dialect kept as printed and one evident printing error corrected.
- A new introduction on Packard, disguise, and New York’s underworld
- Original endnotes on underworld slang, New York places, and period references – gathered at the back, out of the story’s way
- A Note on This Edition setting out the source text and the editorial approach
- About the Author, By the Same Author and Further Reading sections for readers who want to go on
Look Inside
It was like some shadowy pantomime: The dark mouth of an alleyway thrown into murky relief by the rays of a distant street lamp . . . the swift, forward leap of a skulking figure . . . a girl’s form swaying and struggling in the man’s embrace. Then, a pantomime no longer, there came a half threatening, half triumphant oath; and then the girl’s voice, quiet, strangely contained, almost imperious:
“Now, give me back that purse, please. Instantly!”
The girl turned her head so that the rays of the street lamp, faint as they were, fell full upon her, disclosing a sweet, oval face, out of which the dark eyes gazed steadily at the man.
And suddenly the man leaned forward, staring for an instant, and then his hand went awkwardly to touch his cap.
“De White Moll!” he mumbled deferentially. He pulled the peak of his cap down over his eyes in a sort of shame-faced way, as though to avoid recognition, and, stepping nearer, returned the purse.
