| Note: | Images of the original pages are available through Internet Archive. See https://archive.org/details/heartsofthreejack00londrich |
Transcriber's Note:
The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.
I hope the reader will forgive me for beginning this forewordwith a brag. In truth, this yarn is a celebration. By itscompletion I celebrate my fortieth birthday, my fiftieth book,my sixteenth year in the writing game, and a new departure.“Hearts of Three” is a new departure. I have certainlynever done anything like it before; I am pretty certainnever to do anything like it again. And I haven’t the leastbit of reticence in proclaiming my pride in having done it.And now, for the reader who likes action, I advise him toskip the rest of this brag and foreword, and plunge into thenarrative, and tell me if it just doesn’t read along.
For the more curious let me explain a bit further. Withthe rise of moving pictures into the overwhelmingly mostpopular form of amusement in the entire world, the stockof plots and stories in the world’s fiction fund began rapidlyto be exhausted. In a year a single producing company,with a score of directors, is capable of filming the entireliterary output of the entire lives of Shakespeare, Balzac,Dickens, Scott, Zola, Tolstoy, and of dozens of less voluminouswriters. And since there are hundreds of moving picturesproducing companies, it can be readily grasped how quicklythey found themselves face to face with a shortage of the rawmaterial of which moving pictures are fashioned.
The film rights in all novels, short stories, and plays thatwere still covered by copyright, were bought or contractedfor, while all similar raw material on which copyright hadexpired was being screened as swiftly as sailors on a placerbeach would pick up nuggets. Thousands of scenario writers—literallytens of thousands, for no man, nor woman, norchild was too mean not to write scenarios—tens ofthousands of scenario writers pirated through all literature(copyright or otherwise), and snatch