Almost a century ago, a teenage boy, suffering from hemophilia, was ordered to bed for an extended period of rest. To a bright, eager thirteen year-old, this was a devastating sentence of unutterable boredom. At this time, there were no game consoles, computers, the Internet, or even television. The radio had only recently become available to the public, but the sets were expensive and stations only broadcast a few hours each day. Most of the time, the air waves were silent. Oh, the tedium of it all!
Fortunately, this boy had an older sister who was very fond of him. Like him, she was an avid reader, especially of adventure stories by authors such as Baroness Orczy, Rafael Sabatini and H. Rider Haggard. The children’s father had always encouraged them to read, and there were many books in the house, but after a time, the teenage boy was running out of new stories. His sister decided to write a story for him in the form of a serial, producing multiple new installments for his amusement, which she usually read aloud to him as they were finished. This story was set in the mid-eighteenth century and was filled with much swashbuckling and derring-do. The boy’s name was Boris, and this special gift from his sister, Georgette, would be edited to become her very first published novel, The Black Moth.
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