PBA Galleries

New York, May 22 [1895] 1 pg. To John Kendrick Bangs.

“I am returning your Proposal under Difficulties for the reason that we have so much ‘long fiction’ on hand that our cry is for good Short Stories. Two or three such long stories in a number dislocates the whole make up.”

Even as Cosmo rejected this romantic play (soon published by Harper’s, of which Bangs was an editor) the author was about to become famous for  his 1896 satirical novel, House-Boat On the Styx, in which a group of famous dead people, from Noah, Caesar, Confucius and Socrates to Queen Elizabeth, Shakespeare and George Washington, are together are on a boat sailing down the river boundary of the Underworld. This was so popular that, in 1897, Bangs wrote a sequel in which he introduced another famous “Shade” – Sherlock Holmes, still presumed dead after Conan Doyle (to whom the book is dedicated) killed off his famous detective in 1893. The late Holmes appears in several Bangs books before his literary “return” in 1903, when he was lampooned by Bangs as “Shylock Homes”. Hardy, the editor and diplomat (future US ambassador to Persia, Greece, Switzerland and Spain)  later wrote two detective novels of his own, featuring French police Inspector Joly, who more seriously "rivaled" Sherlock.