The lost world genre was so prevalent for a time that it attracted great writers. I've already read and reviewed titles by Arthur Conan Doyle and H. Rider Haggard. Rex Stout, the author of 'Under the Andes', ranks with them in the pantheon of literature, as the creator of detective Nero Wolfe in 1934. This famous character starred in thirty-three novels and forty-one other stories and was frequently adapted to film radio and television. This novel predates the character, dating back to Stout's early days writing for the pulps.

His writing career began in 1912 when he sold a string of short stories to a bevy of magazines like 'The Black Cat', 'Short Stories' and 'Young's magazine'. He branched out into novels a year later, with his first four were published in 'The All-Story' or whatever else it happened to be called that week.  'Under the Andes' is the second of those, nestled in between a crime novel, 'Her Forbidden Knight', and a Balkan intrigue, 'A Prize for Princes'. The fourth, 'The Great Legend', was historical and set in Troy during the famous siege. Clearly Stout was testing a lot of waters.

It turns out to be an enjoyable pulp novel, even though the highbrow references it drops suggest that it aches to be seen as more serious literature. Desiree Le Mire retells a story by Balzac. Paul Lamar cites 'Tom Jones' and 'Don Quixote', as well as deeper cuts: Byron's epic 19th century poem 'Childe Harold's Pilgrimage'; the 'Amadis of Gaul', a chivalric romance likely to date as far back as the 14th century but not published in English until 1590; and Alain René Lesage's 'The Bachelor of Salamanca', obscure enough to not even have a Wikipedia page. It was published in French in 1736.

Paul comes from old money. His "dark old mansion on lower Fifth Avenue" belonged to his father before him and his grandfather before that and, when he finds his brother Harry ninety grand in the hole at the roulette wheel at Mercer, he promptly sits down and wins it all back. That's a heck of a lot of money for 1914 and a serious amount of courage, too. Well, he'll need that where they'll end up by the end of this story. Paul is thirty-two, Harry is a decade younger and their parents are seven years in the ground.

Initially, we seem to go everywhere but the Andes. Paul sails east to London, Munich and Madrid, where he first hears the name of Desiree Le Mire mentioned, having bewitched a duke. Then he's off to Cairo, Constantinople, Rome, Paris, before finally sailing back to the U.S., coincidentally on the same boat as Desiree Le Mire. They chat on board but move on. Of course, we know that we'll hear more about her and we fully expect it to be in the same breath as Harry Lamar. He's exactly the sort of character who would fall head over heels for a French dancer and legendary devourer of men.

Paul realises this quickly enough and follows the trail of the supposed Senor and Senora Ramal to Colorado Springs, where the latter is described as an "entrancing mixture of Cleopatra, Sappho, Helen of Troy, and the devil". Of course, it's Harry and Desiree, though they aren't married—she keeps saying no, but he keeps asking— and Paul joins them as they continue west. He's vastly rich, so leases a yacht in San Francisco for a year so they can travel south, working their way round the coastline until they reach Callao. Then it's inland to Lima, Cerrode Pasco and the Andes, because Desiree wants to climb them and her will is all that's ever needed for anything to happen.

It's here that things change and this ceases to be a tale of the beautiful people and becomes only a tale of survival. They find a cave and their guide retells an old story of the Incas of Huanuco who supposedly went into it and never came out again, the same fate that befalls anyone else foolish enough to follow suit. They were travelling north from Cuzco with eighty loads of gold to secure a release for their emperor Atahualpa, held captive by conquistador Francisco Pizarro. They found white men, guns and horses then ran for the hills. The rest is the stuff of legend until we discover the truth.

I'm sure you won't be shocked to find that the flighty Desiree immediately decides to explore the cave that nobody ever comes out of. I'm just as sure you won't be shocked to find that she doesn't either, because they take a big tumble into a flowing stream. Paul and Harry find each other, but are captured by four-foot-tall hairy creatures who Paul assumes must be cannibals. They're taken to a vast cavern with a lake in the middle and Desiree dancing the Dance of the Sun. Naked. Yeah, she sure does have a knack of winning over anyone she sets her sights on. She's now the darling of the king of these throwbacks.

That's your grounding and you won't be particularly surprised by most of what Stout constructs on top of it, as tense and action-packed as it often gets. Desiree is the driving force behind her entire life and she's achieved everything she's ever set her heart to, which makes it a little strange that she turn into a fainting damsel in distress frustratingly often. There's also plenty of the pulp era's equivalent of what we know from classic 'Doctor Who' as running down corridors, aimless flight in the faceless location du jour. Like 'Doctor Who', those corridors get reused often.

It only shocked me at one point, but I won't spoil that revelation, which arrives very late on. There are some interesting notes to make, though. One is that the sterotypical throwback tribe we tend to meet in lost world stories, with a dash of colonialist attitude like this one, would have lost their earlier skills but nonetheless jabber away in some savage heathen tongue. Stout flips that routine on its head. These hairy dwarfs maintain silence throughout, communicating only through quipos, but somehow have advanced metallurgy. Go figure. Oh, and the one plot convenience here is that Paul knows the basics of quipos, which are communication and historical record in knotwork. Well, that and the ending, but that's set up well in advance so not really a problem.

While these creatures are human beings, there are monsters here too, if not in the numbers that we might expect. As our trio attempt escape, they run into a giant boneless tentacled reptile and use its skin to help hold together a raft they've built from a framework of whalebone. Otherwise, there are lots of peccaries but they constitute food rather than showcase threat. This focuses us pretty closely on the former Incas as a combination of enemies and monsters. They're fair enough but they're too faceless to be particularly memorable, even if they have occasional highlights like heating pillars as a method of torture.

I enjoyed this but it's also easy to see why he continued to test different waters until he was able to find gold. This is capable enough that I'm intrigued by his psychological thrillers, which came as the twenties became the thirties, but it was detective stories that cemented his fame a few years after that. 'Fer-de-Lance', the first Nero Wolfe novel in 1934, defined his career from then on. Next month, another early novel from a bibliography that later took a different direction, this one Will N. Harben's 'The Land of the Changing Sun', from 1894. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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