Lives in Cricket No 26 - HV Hesketh-Prichard

25 Horsham to Haiti At the same time he was launching another career. In this year he appeared in print for the first time, having two pieces about shooting, ‘Shoreshooting’ and ‘Curlew Shooting by Moonlight’ published in The Field and one called ‘Sand Eeling’ in Chambers’ Journal . Shortly afterwards, he and Kate had their first story published. This was Tammer’s Duel , set in Jersey, originally written as a short story by Hex himself and sold to Pall Mall magazine for a guinea a page in September, but subsequently bought back and expanded to 35,000 words with Kate’s cooperation. Kate says Pearson’s made no sale of it. They were the worst publishers we could have chosen really, and for all the success it had we might as well have buried it in the sand of the bay. But in later times it was republished in cheaper forms and did very well. Pall Mall had been started in 1893 by William Waldorf Astor and was explicitly literary, and Kipling, Swinburne and Thomas Hardy were among the contributors. There was a substantial market at the time in writing for magazines, 13 and a lot of magazines to choose from, and Hex and Kate, working as a team, were to write hundreds of stories. Their early stories were written under the nom de plume of ‘E. and H.Heron’, and by the end of 1896 ‘E. and H.Heron’ had stories published in several magazines – Cornhill, Chambers’ and Badminton as well as Pall Mall . Badminton , connected with the Badminton Library , was a magazine of ‘sports and pastimes’ so that might have been an article about hunting rather than a story. The hint of an alternative career as a writer, and the prospect of income from it, helped to convince Hex he was not fitted for the law. He did think about applying to the Natural History Museum, but thereafter things proceeded very quickly. In August Kate and Hex went to Mont St Michel, cycling from St Malo where Mme Poulard, ‘the beautiful innkeeper’, took a fancy to Hex and made sure he got especially large portions. On their return Hex decided that writing was the way to go. ‘I haven’t age,’ he said, ‘so I must have experience.’ So he resolved to set off for Spain and Portugal in search of that experience, intending to land and wander about, and to work on plots and writing all the time. So in August 1896, not yet 20, he set off from London on the S.S.Lisbon to travel and write. He writes to Kate here about working on Flaxman Low , saying things like ‘I have another Flaxman Low, a very good and clever one I think, under weigh [sic]. I have written 2,500 words since breakfast. It deals with the subject of every man’s peculiar fear.’ The Flaxman Low series of stories supposedly fictionalised cases described by the Society for Psychical Research: Flaxman Low himself was a ‘psychic detective’. When they came to be published, there was an attempt to claim them as ‘true-life’ stories, with E. and H.Heron described as Low’s ‘agents’ in writing the stories down. Hex and Kate seem to have found this foolish and a little distasteful. Hex may have used some reports from the SPR as a starting point, but they were very much fiction. 13 Charles Dickens had started in magazines, as did H.G.Wells and many others.