本书摘录:
Chapter 1
_ CHAPTER I
Which is Not a Chapter at All
It was Asaph Tidditt who told me how to begin this history. Perhaps I should be very much obliged to Asaph; perhaps I shouldn‘t. He has gotten me out of a difficulty--or into one; I am far from certain which.
Ordinarily--I am speaking now of the writing of swashbuckling romances, which is, or was, my trade--I swear I never have called it a profession--the beginning of a story is the least of the troubles connected with its manufacture. Given a character or two and a situation, the beginning of one of those romances is, or was, pretty likely to be something like this:
"It was a black night. Heavy clouds had obscured the setting sun and now, as the clock in the great stone tower boomed twelve, the darkness was pitchy."
That is a good safe beginning. Midnight, a stone tower, a booming clock, and darkness make an appeal to the imagination. On a night like that almost anything may happen. A reader of one of my romances--a
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