During the flush times in Cripple Creek, I was invited one evening by a writer on a Denver newspaper to visit with him some of the gambling halls in which it was his habit to spend an hour or two in search of the latest news of "strikes," "sales," and "leases," and in one of the largest of the many saloons we stood for some time studying the men engaged in games of chance. Who was he? What was he dreaming about? The answer to these questions I put into a story which I called "Mart Haney's Mate" and which was (in part) serialized under that title. Later, when the time came to publish in book form, I submitted six other titles to my editors. Out of this list they voted for Money Magic.
The detective or mystery tale, in which this last book is an experiment, involves in itself a problem for the artist, as odd as any of the problems which it puts to the policeman. A detective story might well be in a special sense a spiritual tragedy; since it is a story in which even the moral sympathies may be in doubt
The Thousand and One Nights is one of the great story-books of the world. It was introduced to European readers by the French scholar Galland, who discovered the Arabic original and translated it into French in the first decade of the eighteenth century; but its earlier history is still involved in obscurity.
Dream Days | by Kenneth Grahame
