[Ads-l] cliffhanger (UNCLASSIFIED)

[Peter Reitan]

Something like the cliff-hanging plot element was apparently a staple in dime novels before there was a movie industry.

Alexandria Gazette (Virginia), November 19, 1909, page 4 (crediting The New York Sun):

"A writer of cheap fiction relates a trick played on him by a collaborator in the days when dime novels were longer than they are now, and the compensation made it worth while for two men to write one story between them.  After his partner had finished the first chapter of their initial collaboration it was handed over with the following announcement:
'There, I've just thrown the hero over a thousand foot cliff and told the reader that nothing could prevent the lad from falling to death on the rocks below.  It is up to you to save the boy.'"

The joke of the anecdote was that the second writer wrote a completely unrelated story, with different characters for the second chapter; leaving the first writer to save the hero in the third chapter.

Also, a writer who thought that popular tastes had matured said:

"I think the world is tired of her fetid, strained, highly colored hectic fiction - the story of adventure and mystery.  We no longer sit up of nights reading with bated breath the tale which leaves the heroine hanging over the cliff by her fair hair entangled in the bough of the ancient cedar, or turn to the last page in fever excitement to find out whether the hero's villainous twin brother, who looks just like him, married the girl or got the inheritance."

The Tacoma Times, February 25, 1914, page 4.


 		 	   		  
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