The Argosy — page 80: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

70 Latimer’s Novel. He had written a novel and had trudged round to the publishers with it, and it had been handed back, and handed back, and handed back—a little dirtier and more frayed at the edges each time. One of these potentates, more affable than his class in general, had condescended to tell poor Latimer: ‘If you want to please the public of to-day, be realistic. Write of people as they are, not as they ought to be. Or, if you err at all, let it be in making them worse, not Jefter than they are. Lay bare the human heart by all means, but lay bare its ugly side! Let your hero soliloquise if you wish, but don’t let him look at the stars as he does so—let him look at the cavth and give utterance to the thoughts that are leading him on to crime !” And Fred, with his novel in his hand, trudged back to his lodgings and mused much upon the words the publisher had let fall. ‘€ Oh, to be famous! Oh, to be famous!” moaned Fred, as he sat in his room, looking mournfully at his rejected novel. But I do not ask pity for him. The plain girl pining for admiration, the mediocre scribbler pining for fame—for these the world has only contemptuous laughter. “I must have fame! I wid? have fame! Horror and crime are the only necessary ingredients of a popular novel, and surely I can supply them !” Four or five months later than this the newspaper critics began to busy themselves over a new book. ‘The libraries could not supply this book fast enough to their patrons ; the travelling public bent over it in express trains, in omnibuses, in tram-cars: fresh, young faces, stern, middle-aged faces, dim, old faces, all seemed to hang over the charmed pages with equal enthralment. The work was issued by an enterprising firm of publishers in a natty, portable, attractive form, bearing on the title-page, “ Wilful Murder: A Realistic Novel. By Frederick Latimer.” It was spicily got up, I promise you, the cover being black splashed with blood- red drops, and the initial letter of the opening chapter representing a tiny gallows. The first edition was all sold out within a week; a second was called for and disposed of even faster. Within a month from publication twelve editions were gone, and still the demand increased. ‘The libraries and the booksellers sent their messengers round to the publishers’ with the order, “A hundred ‘ Wilful Murders’ at once, please,” oftener and yet oftener. The clamour and praise of delight swelled and swelled till the town rang with it. One critique, which appeared in a leading review, will suffice to give as an outline of the work and an idea of its success :— The new realistic novel by Mr. F. Latimer, which has literally taken the town by storm, shows, by its enormous success, the direction that the taste of the reading public takes and has taken now for some little time. The readers of to-day do not make great demands on COMIC OOOKS.CO