Smugglers, Ahoy!

MOON FLEET (247 pp.)--J. Meade Falkner--Little, Brown ($3).

"I do desire a book of adventure," Robert Louis Stevenson once complained, "a romance--and no man will get or write me one ... A book, I guess, like Treasure Island, alas! which I have never read, and cannot though I live to ninety. I would God that someone else had written it!"

Stevenson died four years too soon. In 1898, a London publisher brought out just the book he was asking for. Moonfleet was its title, and it was the second novel of a tutor-turned-private-secretary named John Meade Falkner. British readers have been buying it ever since at a rate that has never fallen below 10,000 copies a year. Now, thanks to the belated good sense of a U.S. publisher, Americans can lay their hands on a U.S. edition of Moonfleet, only 53 years late.

Once Aboard the Brig. Like Treasure Island, Moonfleet is the story of a half-grown boy, John Trenchard, who gets caught up among desperadoes--smugglers, in this case, on England's Dorsetshire coast. Like Stevenson's Jim Hawkins, young Johnnie first learns the true measure of the lawlessness in his vicinity while lying in concealment--not in a sweet-smelling apple barrel, but in the fust of an old crypt, with a corpse grinning at his elbow.

When the smugglers have gone, Johnnie starts to skedaddle home, and accidentally tweaks off the corpse's beard, whereupon he notices a locket slung around the fleshless neck. Inside the locket is a ciphered message that leads, after two murders and a mort of escapes and chases, to a diamond "as big as a pigeon's egg" that lies hidden in the wall of an ancient well in Caris-brooke Castle. Thence away to a fence for such merchandise in The Hague, who cheats poor Johnnie out of his diamond and lands him aboard a brig bound for Java--until Author Falkner manages a nick-of-time escape for him.

The Villainous Squire. Falkner has a style as proper to 18th Century adventure as anybody could ask for. His description of the villain, Squire Maskew, is characteristic: "He had a thin face with a sharp nose that looked as if it would peck you, and grey eyes that could pierce a millstone if there was a guinea on the far side of it."

At heart, Falkner was an antiquarian. He delighted in local history and prized his job as honorary reader in paleography at the University of Durham. Five years after Moonfleet, he wrote another adventure story, The Nebuly Coat, which the critics liked even better, but which did not sell nearly so well as the story of Johnnie Trenchard. It was Falkner's last fling as a novelist. Increasingly, like a sensible Englishman, he turned his attention to business. By 1915, he was chairman of the munitions firm of Armstrong, Whitworth & Co. But by 1932, when he died, it was clear that it was Moonfleet, not munitions, that had won him a place in history.

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