The Missing Link

The Missing Link by Edward Dyson

Nicholas Crips, alias Nickie the Kid, is a blond, spare-built beggar and confidence man on the Melbourne streets who lives entirely by his wits, working sob stories about a weak heart on charitable housewives. After stealing a chemist's bag of small bottles, he fills them with a worthless mixture of gingernut and river water and tours the countryside as "Dr. Crips," selling it as a cure for every ailment; his fraud unravels when farmer Dickson and his neighbours compare bottles and find the same medicine sold as balm, hair restorer, and stock cure alike, and Nickie flees before he can be caught. At Banklands he takes a job breaking stone opposite a grand cemented mansion, then scandalises its wealthy owners by publicly claiming familiar acquaintance with "Billy" and "Jinny," hinting at a disreputable shared past involving a fish shop, until the humiliated husband pays him ten pounds to leave. He later gatecrashes a fancy-dress ball at the same house disguised as a tramp, wins the prize for best-sustained character, collects charity coins from guests under a string of invented hard-luck tales, gets uproariously drunk, and is thrown out. Posing as a clergyman, the "Rev. Andrew Rowbottom," he tries to con the Rev. James Nippit's mother, but the young clergyman recognises him as a repeat impostor and forces him into a reform scheme as a servant. Nickie feigns cooperation, steals church-plate money, and is later caught by Nippit impersonating a preacher for the Young Men's Mission, escaping with the collection in Nippit's own buggy. Still disguised as a clergyman collecting for a fictitious widow's fund, Nickie intrudes on a locked city office and witnesses a well-dressed woman, "Mary Stuart" (whom he had danced with at the ball), standing over the body of a man he recalls as "Henry VIII" from the same ball, a knife on the table. She admits she killed him, persuades Nickie not to report her by claiming he must be a thief, and tells him diamonds worth five thousand pounds are in the dead man's breast pocket—information Nickie greedily acts on before she slips away and locks him in. Fleeing the murder scene's aftermath, Nickie befriends Matty Cann ("Bonypart"), a professional Living Skeleton at Professor Thunder's travelling Museum of Marvels, and learns that the show's "Missing Link" performer is currently hospitalised from overeating. Nickie auditions his monkey-impersonation skills and is hired as Mahdi, the Missing Link, sewn into a hairy costume and displayed as a captured African man-monkey alongside Thunder's other freaks and trained animals. As Mahdi, Nickie has a long string of comic escapades across country towns: he gets uproariously drunk on smuggled Chinese brandy and battles the jealous gorilla Ammonia; he rescues a Chinese grocer's baby from Ammonia atop a roof and becomes a local hero; he disarms and captures the bushranger Dan Heeley when the outlaw tries to rob the camp at gunpoint, though Nickie frees him next morning rather than deal with police; he is nearly exposed by his own estranged wife, a lodging-house keeper, when she enters his cage on a dare; he escapes and terrifies a farm girl and a township after being tossed from a bolting horse; he is hocussed with drugged rum and stolen by larcenous shearers hoping for a reward, but escapes and gets them arrested instead; he is put on "trial" in a mock court after biting a drunk who provoked him, with a bribed magistrate presiding; he is captured and battered nearly senseless by armed bushmen who mistake his drunken midnight ramble for an escaped man-monkey; and he is exposed as an impostor by a suspicious newspaper editor, saved only by Thunder's claim of ventriloquism. Throughout, Nickie carries hidden next to his skin the small bag of "diamonds" taken from the murder scene, anticipating a life of ease. His downfall as the show's star performer comes when Professor Thunder catches him kissing/flirting with Madame Marve (Thunder's wife, the show's Egyptian Mystic fortune-teller) and beats and expels him from the show in his monkey costume in front of a gathering crowd, who then chase and stone him through the township until a constable arrests him for his own protection; he is fined and released, ending his show career. Returning to Melbourne prosperous-looking and clean-shaven, Nicholas Crips takes his "diamonds" to a jeweller, only to learn they are worthless paste. Piecing together newspaper accounts of the murder, he realises the dead diamond merchant habitually carried a decoy bag of paste stones to fool robbers—meaning "Mary Stuart" kept the real diamonds and fobbed off the paste ones on him. He visits his brother William and sister-in-law Jean at Whitecliff (the mansion from his earlier escapades) seeking information about the woman, and learns she was an adventuress and confidence-trickster who has since vanished, wanted by police for passing bad cheques. Accepting he has been thoroughly outwitted, Nickie throws the paste diamonds into the river and departs Australia by steamer, watching the coastline recede and half-imagining the horizon shaped like a gallows.

By Edward Dyson · First published 1922 · Genre: Adventure, Humor, Drama · 20 chapters · 51,030 words

First lines

HIS Christian name was Nicholas but his familiars called him Nickie the Kid. The title did not imply that Nicholas possessed the artless gaiety, the nimbleness, or any of the simple virtues of the young of the common goat. Kid was short for "kidder," a term that as gone out recently in favour of "smoodger," and which implies a quality of suave and ingratiating cunning backed by ulterior motives.

What this Textopian page supports

The Missing Link is listed on Textopian as a novel by Edward Dyson, dated 1922 CE.

This source record anchors work identity, reading entry points, and catalog context for checking claims about the work.

Good citation fit

Discussion starters

Similar titles

Genres

Tags

Australian Literature · Satire · Humor · Fiction · Novel · Social Commentary · Historical Fiction · Early 20th Century · Literary Criticism · Cultural Analysis · Societal Norms · Class Structure

Contents

More by Edward Dyson