Convicted Read Online Free Page B

they had no hope of moving to another publishing house. SDM owned Lord Harold. Wendall urged her to be open-minded.
    Harriet loved Lord Wiggins too much to forsake him, and so she had tried to follow Wendall’s advice. Tried, that is, until she received her first editorial letter from Kitty Craig. A long list of changes were demanded, each demand phrased in abusive language. The one that bothered Harriet the most was the demand to change the ending:
    â€œHow absolutely boring! Monroe dies when he swallows lemonade laced with strychnine. Strychnine! That old saw? Is your imagination so limited? Formula writer though you are, I would hope you could come up with something a tad more original.”
    Old saw indeed! Strychnine was a classic poison, she lamented, famous throughout detective fiction. But Kitty would hear none of it.
    Harriet decided to be big about it; after all, she didn’t want a reputation as the sort of writer who simply couldn’t let go of a word she’d written. She was no rank amateur. She could bear the burden of criticism; being showered with the unwanted opinions of others was inevitable in her profession. And so she set herself to the painful task of revising the ending of Pearls Before Swine . That in turn meant that she had to revise a number of passages in the story, but she did not complain.
    In fact, by the time she mailed off her new version, she was quite pleased with it. This time, Lord Wiggins offered Monroe a piece of chocolate cake chock-full of Catapres. It had been a bit tricky for dear Harry to obtain the drug, but she had managed it. Monroe had suffered heart failure thirty minutes after eating his dessert, allowing Lord Harold all the time in the world to leave the scene. It was certainly not as popular in fiction as strychnine, so Harriet thought Kitty might be contented.
    Kitty hated it.
    â€œYou are going to have to do better than this. Catapres? Could you possibly devise anything more obscure? No reader is going to recognize this as a poison. Crimeny, it sounds like a resort that would appeal to people from the Bronx.”
    Not being from New York, Harriet couldn’t guess what Kitty meant by her last remark. She steamed and stewed for a while and then went back to work. Now it was a challenge.
    In version three, Lord Harold arranged for Monroe to be bitten repeatedly by a Gila monster.
    â€œWhat utter nonsense!” Kitty wrote. “How the heck does an English lord happen to have a twenty-inch Arizona desert lizard hanging about?”
    Even Harriet had to admit that the Gila monster wasn’t her best effort. She spent a little more time on version four. There might not be many Gila monsters roaming about the English countryside, but she knew that rhododendrons weren’t so rare. And so it was that Lord Harold made tea from the deadly leaves, and served it with scones to the unsuspecting Monroe.
    â€œHarriet, please. You are trying my patience. This is so unimaginative. If you want this to sell anywhere outside of the East Lansing Lawn and Garden Club, rewrite.”
    Harriet wasn’t even sure how she found the nerve to try a fifth time. She needed to publish annually to maintain the lifestyle to which she had become accustomed, and Kitty’s demands were delaying the publication date of Pearls Before Swine . She had arranged to attend the annual Mystery World Awards Banquet, the Whodundunits. Her flight from Los Angeles to New York was booked, the hotel arrangements made. But now she wasn’t sure she could face the inquires of her fellow authors; they were bound to notice that the next Lord Harold Wiggins book had not arrived on schedule.
    She had grown more bitter about this trial by rewrite as each day passed. But once more she devised an ending, this time with antimony, arranging elaborate plot devices to allow Lord Harold Wiggins access to an industrial poison. And still Kitty wasn’t satisfied.
    As she held Kitty’s fifth