Stripped to the Hide

(no dust jacket) [minor wear to extremties, gilt spine lettering dulled to near-unreadability]. (photo frontispiece port. of author) An exceedingly melodramatic novel (with dialogue so awful it wouldn't even make the cut for the lousiest silent movie potboiler) of a good man -- Frederick Herbert, successful real-estate entrepreneur in the fictional town of Slough City, California -- whose life is bedeviled and nearly destroyed by the greedy machinations of his wife Maude, a Spouse from Hell if there ever was one. She cheats on him brazenly, eventually tries to kill him but then manages to turn the tables and railroad him into prison, appropriates his fortune, and colludes with political bosses and his rivals to keep him in the slammer -- just basically does everything possible to make his life a misery. Thankfully, however, he perseveres with the love and support of a good woman, Juanita, whom he had known in his youth and had re-encountered while in the throes of his marital misery. One gets the strong sense that this novel may have had an autobiographical basis -- and sure enough, a little old-newspaper sleuthing turns up various articles that suggest strong parallels between the author and his protagonist, including this, from April 1920: "Herman E. Mootz Taken to San Quentin Saturday," a brief news item reporting that Mootz, "former realty broker, convicted several weeks ago with threatening the life of his divorced wife, Mrs. Maude E. Mootz, was taken to San Quentin Saturday to begin serving his sentence of from one to ten years." Eureka -- it's all true! (Or, at least, represents Mootz's version of events. And he didn't even change Maude's name!) Mootz seems to have been quite the operator: paroled in 1922, he soon began trying to secure publication of the story of a San Quentin lifer, James "Bluebeard" Watson, which he claimed to have been told by Watson himself while they were fellow inmates, although Watson himself later disputed this, and it was alleged at one time that Mootz may have actually stolen Watson's manuscript, with the collusion of the prison chaplain (who was fired over the matter). Meanwhile, Mootz moved on to additional literary enterprises, including somehow getting himself set up as the authorized biographer of "Pawnee Bill" (Gordon William Lillie) whose as-told-to story of his Western adventures was widely syndicated under Mootz's by-line in 1927. This book, by the way, is dedicated "To my wife Grace Vivian Mootz, in loving gratitude for the inspiration which made this book possible"; I think we can resonably assume that she was the fictionalized "Juanita," who stood by Our Hero through thick and thin. …