There died recently a gentleman named Nat Gould, twenty
million copies of whose books had been sold.
They were hardly ever reviewed in the literary papers;
advertisements of them rarely appeared; no puffs nor
photographs of the author were thrust upon one, Unostentatiously
he wrote them—five in a year—and
his million public was assured to him. It is
perhaps too late now to begin to read them, but we
cannot help wondering whence came his enormous popularity.
Mr. Gould, as all the world knows, wrote racing novels.
They were called, Won by a Neck, or Lost
by a Head, or Odds On, or The Stable-lad’s
Dilemma. Every third man in the Army carried
one about with him. I was unlucky in this matter,
for all my men belonged to the other two-thirds; they
read detective stories about a certain Sexton Blake,
who kept bursting into rooms and finding finger-marks.
In your innocence you may think that Sherlock Holmes
is the supreme British detective, but he is a child
to Blake. If I learnt nothing else in the Army,
I learnt that. Possibly these detective stories
were a side-line of Mr. Gould’s, or possibly
my regiment was the one anti-Gould regiment in the
Army. At any rate, I was demobilized without any
acquaintance with the Won by a Neck stories.
There must be something about the followers of racing
which makes them different from the followers of any
other sport. I suppose that I am at least as
keen on the Lunch Scores as any other man can be on
the Two-thirty Winner; yet I have no desire whatever
to read a succession of stories entitled How’s
That, Umpire? or Run Out, or Lost by
a Wicket. I can waste my time and money with
as much pleasure on the golf-course as Mr. Gould’s
readers can on the race-course, but those great works,
Stymied and The Foozle on the Fifth Tee,
leave me cold. My lack of interest in racing
explains my lack of interest in racing novels, but
why is there no twenty million public for Off-side
and Fouled on the Touchline? It is a mystery.
Though I have never read a racing novel, I can imagine
it quite easily. Lord Newmarket’s old home
is mortgaged, mortgaged everywhere. His house
is mortgaged, his park is mortgaged, his stud is mortgaged,
his tie-pin is mortgaged; yet he wants to marry Lady
Angela. How can he restore his old home to its
earlier glories? There is only one chance.
He must put his shirt (the only thing that isn’t
mortgaged) on Fido for the Portland Vase. Fido
is a rank outsider—most of the bookmakers
thought that he was a fox-terrier, not a horse—and
he is starting at a thousand to one. When the
starting-gate goes up, Fido will carry not only Lord
Newmarket’s shirt, but Lady Angela’s happiness.
Was there ever such a race before in the history of
racing? Only in the five thousand other racing
novels. But Lord Newmarket is reckoning without
