Lives in Cricket No 26 - HV Hesketh-Prichard

32 Chapter Three Living by the Pen By the beginning of 1899 the plan for Kate and Hex to make a living from the pen was beginning to work, and ‘E. and H.Heron’ had stories being published everywhere – Pall Mall, Strand, Cornhill, Windsor, and Pearson’s . A Modern Mercenary , a ‘more literary’ work and now bearing their own names, had been published in April by Smith, Elder. The reviews were good, the Spectator saying ‘The plot is fresh, the intrigue ingenious, the portraiture vivid, and the treatment unhackneyed. Altogether this is a fierce and vivid romance’ while the Saturday Review called it ‘A very good story, full of thrilling adventure, and containing some smart dialogue,’ but sales were apparently disappointing. Mind you, the Daily Graphic was less impressed: John Rallywood, the ‘Modern Mercenary’ of the title, by K. and Hesketh Prichard, was a fine young Englishman who, finding himself without a career at home entered the military service of the Grand Duchy of Maäsau, which appears to possess a small portion of the shore of the Baltic. The affairs of the little state turned out to be of the most modern complexity partially simplified by mediaeval ferocity. Its sovereign was a fainéant rendered almost senile by debauchery, with a would-be successor in the person of a sort of brigand cousin; its Chancellor was the European ‘Man of the Hour’; and each of the Great Powers was intriguing for a supremacy of influence over its affairs. Thus arrived the moment when John had to find his patriotism as an Englishman incompatible with his duty as a soldier of Maäsau. That dilemma, with his treatment of its horns, is the point to which the whole of the machinery leads, and which has compelled its author to evolve an imaginary history for an imaginary realm. Nothing, indeed, is from first to last made to seem real – unless it be a certain Major Counsellor, as a recognisable representative of an ultra-British Briton with a taste for secret international diplomacy, and a talent for getting it accepted at his own value. The plot is well put together, and is as interesting as any story can be which imposes no conviction and excites no sympathy. The book is set in a small European state menaced by the Germans – there is some suggestion of the influence of Prisoner of Zenda , which had been published in 1893. Anthony Hope, though no cricketer, was a friend of Hex’s. The book offers almost a cold-war scenario with Germany standing in for the Soviet Union – not at all an unusual approach for popular novelists in the years before the Great War. The hero, a tall English gentleman with fair hair and (of course) an expert shot seems not unlike Hex. One hopes