In 1897, Lamson, Wolfe and Company of Boston, New York, and London published a new adventure novel of darkest Africa, AT THE QUEEN’S MERCY, written by a nineteen-year-old bride, Mabel Fuller Blodgett. It inncluded five interior illustrations by Henry Sadham  Novels such as this were best known to be the providence of Sir Henry Rider Haggard, and truth be told, there are some similarities to SHE to be found in Mabel’s tale. As yet, American writers hadn’t jumped on the ‘African Adventure’ genre bandwagon. That was a charge that would be led by Edgar Rice Burroughs more than a decade later.

She was born on April 10, 1869, as Mabel Louise Fuller in Bangor, Maine, the daughter of Ransom Burritt Fuller and Louise White. Her father became the president of two insurance companies in Boston. She graduated from the Sacred Heart Convent at Elmhurst in Providence, Rhode Island. Her subsequent works include:

    She also published a non-fiction work, The Life and Letters of Richard Ashley Blodgett, First Lieutenant United States Air Service in 1919. Richard Blodgett was her son, and he was killed in action during World War I.

    Blodgett was living with her husband, attorney Edward E. Blodgett, in Brookline, Massachusetts by 1897, when Richard was born. She is buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

    There’s absolutely no evidence that Mabel read SHE or even a single ALLAN QUATERMAIN novel, but there are some similarities. There’s no evidence that Edgar Rice Burroughs read AT THE QUEEN’S MERCY, but there are some similarities. A PDF of her novel accompanies this brief article. Read it and make your own determination.

    In any event, Mabel finished school and was promptly married to Edward Blodgett, who worked diligently as an attorney. She could have stayed home and done chores, but her family had been very well off and her husband was quite successful, and she wasn’t born to be a housewife. Television and even radio weren’t even imagined, so that left books. Probably, not unlike Edgar Rice Burroughs a few years later, she read something and thought, I can write stuff this bad. So, she sat down, put pen to paper, or paper in a typewriter, and wrote, I am a plain man, and to do a plain man’s work was every more to my taste than to set down with a clerk’s skill such happenings as have befallen. It’s not Call me Ishmel or It was the best of times, it was the worst of times; but it’s not that bad. I've written worse myself.

About 46,000 words later, she wrote, Out of all the world we two stand apart. For life, for death; for good, for ill; for joy, for sorrow, thou and I, together and alone.” She smiled to herself, edited it a few times, and perhaps called on her husband to have a clerk at the law office retype. She bundled the manuscript and sent it to a publisher and they bought it. In those days, manuscripts, hard copies because that’s all there were, were mailed or couriered to publishers, one after another. It was customary to send them with postage prepaid for the return of the manuscript – because there was only one.

She sold the story immediately, not to a magazine but to the publisher, who was probably a fan of H. Rider Haggard and thought it was about time an American wrote "one of those stories." There’s no record of what she was paid.

Now for the story. It is frequently confused with “At the Mercy of the Queen” by Anne Clinard Barnhill, a tale of court intrigue during the reign of Henry VIII. This is a tale of adventure, of two men, John Dering and Gaston Lestrade.

    The story is told from the first-person perspective of John Dering. In the first chapter, we learn that Gaston is a handsome womanizer and that the two are in Africa. An injured man is chased into their camp. The Europeans repel his pursuers. He’s dying and requests that they bury him and promises to tell them of his city, his Queen named Lah, and of hidden treasure.

The dying man, Sagamoso, tells them that he fled the city because had fallen in love, forbidden love, with one of the Queen’s maidens. He begged for burial and the rescue of his love, and then he told them how to find the treasure. Gaston was never a man to quail in the pursuit of beauty and Dering was found of gold, so the die was cast.

I’m not going to tell you the story. It’s right here. Read it for yourself. https://www.ERBzine.com/mag80/at the queen's mercy.pdf

Suffice to say that the citizens of the ‘walled city’ find our adventurers and capture them. The two had killed a gorilla in the jungle and Agno, the high priest, demanded their death for killing the sacred ape. Lah, the queen, was smitten by Lestrade, but she couldn’t refuse to punish the men, but she demanded the right to determine the time and manner of their death, a death postponed, but not reprieved.

That’s all I’m going to tell you, but consider. A hidden city in the jungle, one with a beautiful white queen named Lah. She falls in love with Gaston Lestrade, a handsome outsider, and risks her throne for his love. The people, follow the priest, Agno, who desires the Queen for himself, and insists that the outsiders be executed. Meanwhile, our adventures both want the gold, and unlike Tarzan, in books to be written by another far better-known author years later, Gaston wouldn’t mind having the Queen, as well.

If you want a printed copy of the book and don’t want to spring for a first edition, it’s available in paperback for less that $10.00 from Lulu. Just enter “At the Queen’s Mercy,” in the search bar and pick the one with two men kneeling in front of a barbarian queen. If you don’t want to buy it, open the PDF attached.

A SAMPLE GALLERY OF THE BOOK'S ILLUSTRATIONS

Reference
https://www.ERBzine.com/mag80/at the queen's mercy.pdf

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