The review highlights Morley Roberts' prolific career as a short story writer, noting his ability to navigate the late-Victorian and Edwardian publication markets. It praises the variety of genres he explored and his skill in creating thrilling and engaging narratives, though his later life was marked by a decline in popularity.
Morley Roberts was a prolific writer who produced a vast array of works, including short stories, novels, articles, and travel books. His career spanned the late-Victorian and Edwardian eras, during which he successfully navigated the changing landscape of publication markets. Roberts was known for his ability to negotiate contracts and promote his work, earning a profitable income through rapid output and syndication rights. His stories, which include cowboy tales, sea adventures, and crime mysteries, were praised for their thrilling depictions of psychological disease and plot twists. However, despite his early success, Roberts' later life was marked by a decline in popularity, and he died in relative obscurity. The review notes that his work remains of interest to scholars and readers interested in the history of the late-Victorian short story and popular culture.
Quick quotes
Roberts’s skill to negotiate his own contracts and promote his own work that illustrated his ability to steer a growing consumer culture in his favor.
During the peak of his writing career, roughly 1890 — 1920, Roberts earned £3 — £6.6 per 1,000 words, publishing regularly in leading periodicals such as the Strand Magazine, a print outlet estimated to have a reading circulation of at least 400,000.
The selection of thirty short stories collected by Neacey represents Roberts’s experiments with a variety of entertaining genres published at the apex of his career: cowboy and frontier tales, sea adventures, occult romances, horror mysteries, comedies, crime dramas, and imperial adventures.