The Isle of Forgotten People: Yellow flowers in the yellow sea

The Isle of Forgotten People by Thompson Cross

For almost a decade now, the publisher known as Armchair Fiction has been a godsend of sorts for all readers of lost world/lost race fare. The company released its first such book in 2015 – Pierre Benoit’s 1919 classic Atlantida – and as of today, its Lost World – Lost Race Classics series stands at a very impressive 58 volumes, with no end in sight. I have recently written here of two of those 58 books – James De Mille’s excellent A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder (1888) and Will N. Harben’s subpar offering The Land of the Changing Sun (1894) – and now would like to tell you of yet another in this ongoing Armchair series; namely, Thompson Cross’ The Isle of Forgotten People.

This book’s publishing history can be very easily set down. The Isle of Forgotten People was originally released as a hardcover volume in 1925 by the British publisher Cassell & Co. The book would then go OOPs (out of prints) for no fewer than 99 years, till Armchair opted to resurrect it in 2024 as the 49^th entry in their series … and a good thing, too, as this lost-world affair really is something of a doozy, well deserving of a reintroduction five generations later. As for the book’s author, Thompson Cross was a pen name used by the journalist and writer who was born Samuel Andrew Wood, in Lancashire, in 1887. Biographical information on Wood is scarce, apparently, and all I could dig up was courtesy of a brief entry in the Science Fiction Encyclopedia online. The author seems to have come out with two other lost-world novels, Winged Heels (1927) and The Aztec Temple (1955), as well as the curiously titled 1935 novel I’ll Blackmail the World. Wood passed away in 1966 at the age of 79.

In this, his first novel, Cross sets up the action with a rather complex back story. We are introduced to young Dick Grant, who is working on a newspaper in Hong Kong when we first encounter him. Grant is summoned to Shanghai by his Uncle Gilbert for some reason, but before the two men can meet there, Dick is lured into a pagoda and summarily knocked out and kidnapped, but not before he sees another man who could pass for his twin brother, as well as a hideous-looking Mongol with one eye completely burned out. Dick awakens on a junk on the high seas … a junk that is accidentally rammed by the steamer Gargantua in a dense fog and sunk. And coincidence of coincidences, who should Dick meet on that ship, after being fished out of the drink, than his own Uncle Gilbert, who relates his strange tale and proposes a course of action.

Seven years earlier, it seems, Gilbert and Dick’s father, Richard, had been involved in another shipwreck, and had washed up on an uncharted island – containing three linked volcanoes – somewhere in the Yellow Sea, between the Chinese mainland and the Korean peninsula. The island was a treasure trove of raw pitchblende, the ore from which uranium is derived, and the two Grant brothers had deemed themselves the prospective owners of a very great fortune. But that was not to be. Washed up on the island with them had been a third man, the half-caste Mongol Hogoyoshi, who had soon grown jealous of Richard’s godlike popularity with the simple but friendly natives, who dwelt in the crater of one of those slumbering volcanoes. Hogoyoshi had attempted murder, and had been punished by being shut up in one of the island’s radioactive caverns, resulting in one of his eyes being lost. But Hogoyoshi had unfortunately tried again, resulting in Richard’s death. Seven years had then elapsed, with Gilbert and his nemesis, currently a member of the Chinese secret society known as the Yellow Flower, not having laid eyes on each other since. Now, Gilbert wishes to raise an expedition to the island to lay hold of its riches, while Hogoyoshi, apparently, wishes to use Dick’s lookalike cousin Basil in an attempt to convince the natives there that their old god has returned.

To make a long story short, Dick and his uncle, accompanied by the Gargantua’s Scottish captain MacKellar, a U.S. Navy man named Roger Trelawne, and the steamer’s first, second and third mates, use the submarine that Trelawne was to deliver to the Chinese and make their way to the “forgotten island.” The sub is destroyed whilst navigating its way through a rugged underwater entrance to the island, and our septet – actually an octet, having found a mysteriously motivated stowaway, Wen Sing, on board – finds itself marooned thereon. Our heroes make their way through an underground passage and fetch up in the labyrinthine heart of the 300-foot-high Black Buddha that guards the entrance to the city of Shan An, where the “lost people” reside in their volcanic fastness. And almost as soon as Dick & Co. emerge into the innards of that Black Buddha, they are set upon by the Blind Angels – the deformed, sightless, wizened hermit-priests who reside therein; radioactively mutated “monkey-men” (as Wen Sing dubs them) with very nasty dispositions. What could possibly make things worse for our heroes? Well, howzabout the arrival of Hogoyoshi and a yacht full of his Yellow Flower cohorts, for starters?

As you may have discerned, The Isle of Forgotten People is very much an action-packed thrill ride from the get-go, and one that hardly ever slackens its furious pace. The book is loaded with any number of outstanding set pieces, including the sinking of the Chinese junk; our heroes’ purloining of that submarine from under the very noses of the Yellow Flower fanatics, ensconced in a Ning-po fortress; the sub’s disastrous entry into the lost isle; the furious set-to with those mutated priests in the heart of the Black Buddha; first mate Sheard doing battle with an enormous Mongolian executioner; Dick’s attempt to rescue his cousin Basil, entering a Shan An pagoda via a revolving waterwheel; a devastating typhoon that batters the lost city; and an even more cataclysmic volcanic eruption, to top things off. But perhaps the novel’s most impressive sequence, faithfully captured on both editions’ front covers, is the one in which Dick tries to escape from that Black Buddha by climbing up its gullied surface, pursued by the Blind Angels all the way. It is a simply smashing piece of action that somehow put me in mind of another Grant, Cary, and (this month’s latest centenarian) Eva Marie Saint clambering across the surface of Mount Rushmore in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1959 classic North by Northwest. Cross’ book is made even better by dint of the fact that all the men in our intrepid band (there is not a single woman to be found anywhere in the entire story, incidentally) are likeable and nicely differentiated. And that Hogoyoshi really does make for an excellent, unprincipled, dirty-dog villain; one with absolutely no redeeming qualities.

The author manages to impress the reader with his capable control from the very start, and is more than up to the task of supplying us with a succinct and telling turn of phrase, as when he writes of the Blind Angels’ “cockroach adhesion” as they pursue Dick across the Black Buddha. His book is convincingly detailed (the sub that our heroes utilize to get to the island especially so) and, toward its finale, utilizes an alternating-story-line format to ratchet up the tension. Thus, we switch back and forth between Dick and Wen Sing’s adventures in one part of the lost city, and the other men’s travails in the depths of the Black Buddha. Practically every single one of the book’s 21 chapters ends in a cliff-hanging manner; no wonder this Armchair edition boasts “You’ll … lose your breath as you’re treated to some of the best action sequences ever put forth in the pages of a Lost World – Lost Race novel.”

The Isle of Forgotten People also showcases one of the most unusual locales to be found in this type of story: an island in the Yellow Sea, of all places, and one containing no fewer than three volcanoes, in addition to its radioactive resources. And the book, besides being a perfect exemplar of the lost world/lost race genre, also makes for a respectable addition to the “yellow menace” story. The Yellow Flower cult and Hogoyoshi fit well into this type of tale (the latter is not nearly as diabolical as Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu, however), although it should be added that the Japanese Navy is here shown in a very favorable light. Ultimately, the reader will wonder what kind of film this novel might have been turned into back in the 1930s or ‘40s; say, if it had been brought to the screen by the same team responsible for The Most Dangerous Game (1932) and King Kong (1933). The mind boggles. But you know what? Filmmakers even today could not hope to find better source material as the basis for some blockbuster summer fare!

Now, I don’t wish to give the impression that The Isle of Forgotten People is some kind of perfect masterpiece, and indeed, there are several problems to be encountered here. For one thing, Cross’ book is a bit too dependent on a triple coincidence to get its story moving: the coincidence of cousins Dick and Basil looking essentially alike, the coincidence of Dick just happening to walk down a Shanghai street where Hogoyoshi is all set to kidnap Basil, and the coincidence of Dick encountering his Uncle Gilbert on the high seas. The novel also features a few instances of fuzzy writing, and the descriptions of the underground passage beneath the three volcanoes, the mazelike interior of the Black Buddha, and the canal and sluice surrounding the waterwheel are all a bit difficult to envision. Also (and this might be an instance of nitpicking on a very personal level), this reader was really hoping for a more spectacular demise for that sleazeball Hogoyoshi than the one we are ultimately given. And oh … readers who dive into this admitted page-turner of a book should be prepared to run up against some unusual Scottish words (courtesy of Captain MacKellar) as well as British expressions; thus, “blue demons in the little Mary,” “a set o’ muckle gomerels,” “ye deceitful callant” and “turnip ghost.” You may need to make use of your Google machine to help glide over some of those challenging bits. But at bottom, The Isle of Forgotten People is a wholly winning affair, and one that has made me eager to explore some more of Samuel Andrew Wood’s work. Fortunately, his 1927 lost world/lost race novel Winged Heels is also available from Armchair Fiction (volume #51 in the series), and I do hope to be experiencing it one day soon…