Many years ago when I was a boy at school, we had over our class an ancient and spectacled schoolmaster who was as kind at heart as he was ferocious in appearance, and whose memory has suggested to me the title of this book.
It was his practice, on any outburst of gaiety in the class-room, to chase us to our seats with a bamboo cane and to shout at us in defiance:
Now, then, any further foolishness?
I find by experience that there are quite a number of indulgent readers who are good enough to adopt the same expectant attitude towards me now.
STEPHEN LEACOCK
McGILL UNIVERSITY
MONTREAL
November 1, 1916
FOLLIES IN FICTION
I. Stories Shorter Still
II. The Snoopopaths; or Fifty Stories in One
III. Foreign Fiction in Imported Instalments. Serge the Superman: A Russian Novel. (Translated, with a hand pump, out of the original Russian)
MOVIES AND MOTORS, MEN AND WOMEN
IV. Madeline of the Movies: A Photoplay done back into Words
V. The Call of the Carburettor; or, Mr. Blinks and his Friends
VI. The Two Sexes, in Fives or Sixes
A Dinner-party Study
VII. The Grass Bachelor's Guide With Sincere Apologies to the Ladies' Periodicals
VIII. Every Man and his friends. Mr. Crunch's Portrait
Gallery (as Edited from his Private Thoughts)
IX. More than Twice-told Tales; or, Every Man his Own
Hero
X. A Study in Still Life--My Tailor
PEACE, WAR, AND POLITICS
XI. Germany from Within Out
XII. Abdul Aziz has His: An Adventure in the Yildiz
Kiosk
XIII. In Merry Mexico
XIV. Over the Grape Juice; or, The Peacemakers
XV. The White House from Without In
TIMID THOUGHTS ON TIMELY TOPICS
XVI. Are the Rich Happy?
XVII. Humour as I See It
Follies in Fiction
I. Stories Shorter Still
Among the latest follies in fiction is the perpetual demand for stories shorter and shorter still. The only thing to do is to meet this demand at the source and check it. Any of the stories below, if left to soak overnight in a barrel of rainwater, will swell to the dimensions of a dollar-fifty novel.
(I) AN IRREDUCIBLE DETECTIVE STORY
HANGED BY A HAIR
OR A MURDER MYSTERY MINIMISED
The mystery had now reached its climax. First, the man had been undoubtedly murdered. Secondly, it was absolutely certain that no conceivable person had done it.
It was therefore time to call in the great detective.
He gave one searching glance at the corpse. In a moment he whipped out a microscope.
"Ha! ha!" he said, as he picked a hair off the lapel of the dead man's coat. "The mystery is now solved."
He held up the hair.
"Listen," he said, "we have only to find the man who lost this hair and the criminal is in our hands."
The inexorable chain of logic was complete.
The detective set himself to the search.
For four days and nights he moved, unobserved, through the streets of New York scanning closely every face he passed, looking for a man who had lost a hair.
On the fifth day he discovered a man, disguised as a tourist, his head enveloped in a steamer cap that reached below his ears. The man was about to go on board the Gloritania.
The detective followed him on board.
"Arrest him!" he said, and then drawing himself to his full height, he brandished aloft the hair.
"This is his," said the great detective. "It proves his guilt."
"Remove his hat," said the ship's captain sternly.
They did so.
The man was entirely bald.
"Ha!" said the great detective without a moment of hesitation. "He has committed not one murder but about a million."
