Black erchief Dick

In The sense of requiring elucidation or apology, this novel needs no introduction. The young lady who wrote it about two years ago, when she was eighteen, has already abandoned this work to publishers and other grown-ups, and with admirable professional good sense, is working upon fresh enterprises.In this, indeed, she is a genuine artist. Nothing is more clear from her correspondence with the writer of this introduction, than that she is, without ever becoming conscious of the fact, a genuine artist. Speaking of the intellectuals who occasionally impinge upon the family circle she says: "They have a horrid habit of—— oh, I can't spell it, but it means pulling their minds to pieces and finding out how they are made, and they do that with their emotions, too."Nothing of the sort is to be found in this tale of eastern England during the Restoration. And yet, while we may accept the unusual spectacle of a modern schoolgirl writing a red-blooded adventure story and privately poking fun at psychoanalysts and their dupes, we are justified in a certain curiosity as to the genesis of such a book. That curiosity the introduction is designed to assuage.Margery Allingham, whom the writer first met at the early age of two, comes of literary stock. Her grandparents were publishers in the days before the big combinations made an independent weekly paper a hopeless hazard. Her parents are journalists and writers of fiction. The business aspects of literature, the philosophy of art, and the technical problems of serial fiction have been commonplaces of the domestic atmosphere which the future novelist breathed during her childhood. It was as natural for Margery to sit down and "write a story" as for a shopkeeper's child to play at keeping a shop. It was inevitable also that she should start a magazine. I remember it well. It was called The Wag-tail, and the founder was about eight years old. I was foreign correspondent, a rank imposed because of my being on a ship and so bringing news of distant shores. Margery herself, however, was mainly responsible for the publication. It was written in a penny exercise book, and editorial, short-story, serial, answers to correspondents and advertisements were entirely by the founder. Our collaboration on this long-defunct organ laid the foundation of an enduring friendship. When she was eleven, Margery was graciously pleased to accept the dedication of one of my novels, in the spirit in which it was offered. It was a gesture neither of condescension nor of derision, but rather a sincere and, let us hope, successful attempt on the part of a man a good way up the hill to give a friendly and affectionate signal to a child already breasting the lower reaches.And as the years followed one another in that peculiar progression which is neither arithmetical nor geometrical, but rather telescopic, whereby the young close up upon us and make us uneasily aware of our own slothful deficiencies, it became increasingly evident that in spite of the secret discouragement of wise parents, who did their best to hold themselves up as Awful Warnings, Margery Allingham would sooner or later express herself in one of the arts. Which art she would choose seemed equally certain until the family circle learned that she proposed to "go in" for elocution.The present writer, hearing of this in foreign parts, was at first nonplussed. With the lack of intelligence that seems to distinguish so many grown-up males, he feared there would be "dirty work at the cross-roads" when his lady friend discovered the real nature of a theatrical career. He might have saved himself the trouble. The lady friend, gleefully reporting progress, was evidently too preoccupied with the spectacle of grown-ups in action to bother about the future at all. She regarded elocution as a means rather than an end. It was perfectly natural for her, when she failed to find pieces suitable for recitation, to write them herself.