GREAT NOVELISTS' HOWLERS.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIV, Issue 105, 24 October 1911, Page 7

GREAT NOVELISTS' HOWLERS.

Wills have often proved a stumblingblock to the novelist. One flagrant case may be mentioned. ' A popular writer causes an old aristocrat to have his ''last will and testament'' witnessed by his butler and his housekeeper, yet he makes them both benefit under it. By so doing he rendered the will invalid. But the author does not know it. Another writer, in describing one of the Queen's Drawing Rooms, makes his hero speak to one of the debutantes through her carriage window while it is standing outside Buckingham Palaae, and he represents the girl's father as being with her in full military pomp. Such an'occurrence would be impossible, because the'girl's father would not be there. IMPOSSIBLE POISONS. Daniel Defoe is generally thought to have been caught napping, although lie is proverbially accurate as a rule, when ho makes Robinson Crusoe fill his po»kets full of biscuits before lie swam to fhe wreck. Perhaps Crusoe liked his biscuits soft and salt, or perhaps they were dog biscuits, and could withstand a large quantity of moisture. Sailors would perhaps insinuate that a short swim to shore from a wreck would have no detrimental effect, but rather the opposite, upon the dainty with which they arc commonly regaled on board ship. Poisons are often employed by novelists in. the development of their plots, and their instantaneous, deadly effects are constantly insisted upon. Science recognises only one poison, commonly called prussic acid, possessing anything like the immediate effect si" dear to the romancer. The author of "Monte Carlo" constantly introduces into his romances poisons unknown to science, and he makes old Nortier, who is completely paralysed and unable to speak or move, maintain unimpaired . his intellectual faculties, and winlj. his. i»s in agreed fashion to "communicate his thoughts and desires to his family—a manifest impossibility. TKOriiLE WITH THE MOOX. The ]at,c Uuy lioothy, in his novel "Bride of the Sea." makes a curious blunder. The period of the story is the year 1070, and the scene is'laid in Devonshire. The novelist makes one of his characters grow quite, lyrical about the splendid race of men which the famous enmity has produced. He speaks very fittingly of Drake and Hawkins and Raleigh," and all the other Devonshire Worthies, but he comes a dreadful cropper when he makes his hero talk of Sir John Franklin, who did not appear on the glubo until more than a century had elapsed, and even then it was in the fens of Lincolnshire. Rider Haggard has a good deal of trouble with the moon. In one case he causes that satellite to be full at a time when it could not possibly have been more than a crescent, and in "King Solomon's .Mines" he introduces an eclipse of the same luminary, very convenient for his plot and for tlie impression of awe which bis heroes wish to produce upon the natives, but quite unknown to any astronomical text-hook.