My Dear Tommy,

You and I have long cherished an affection for that elemental type of tale which Americans call the “dime novel” and which we know as the “shocker”⁠—the romance where the incidents defy the probabilities, and march just inside the borders of the possible. During an illness last winter I exhausted my store of those aids to cheerfulness, and was driven to write one for myself. This little volume is the result, and I should like to put your name on it in memory of our long friendship, in the days when the wildest fictions are so much less improbable than the facts.