On board the
schooner EQUATOR, almost within sight of the
Johnstone Islands (if anybody knows where these are),
and on a moonlit night when it was a joy to be alive,
the authors were amused with several stories of the
sales of wrecks. The subject tempted them; and they
sat apart in the alleyway to discuss its possibilities.
"What a tangle it would make," suggested one, "if the
wrong crew were aboard. But how to get the wrong crew
there?"--"I have it!" cried the other; "the so-and-so
affair!" For not so many months before, and not so many
hundred miles from where we were then sailing, a
proposition almost tantamount to that of Captain Trent
had been made by a British skipper to some British
castaways.
Before we turned in, the scaffolding of the tale had
been put together. But the question of treatment was
as usual more obscure. We had long been at once
attracted and repelled by that very modern form of the
police novel or mystery story, which consists in
beginning your yarn anywhere but at the beginning, and
finishing it anywhere but at the end; attracted by its
peculiar interest when done, and the peculiar
difficulties that attend its execution; repelled by
that appearance of insincerity and shallowness of tone,
which seems its inevitable drawback.
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