The Ability to Kill Read Online Free PDF

behind London so we should make the afternoon editions of the evenings pretty easily. Court usually recesses around four. As long as we start sending your copy through around four-thirty, we’ll be in good shape. Timewise it’s only New York we have to worry about. Farther west there’ll be no problem. Of course we’ll have a private line run in from the Old Bailey press room to the office, and you could dictate your stuff over the phone, but I think it’ll be easier if you just walk across to the office when the court recesses. It’s only a couple of minutes. We’ll have a desk and a typewriter ready for you.’
    I nodded stupidly. I am a slow worker. The composition of five hundred words in a seven-hour day is, for me, a fair rate of progress. Moreover, I write in longhand. I have never learned to use a typewriter.
    On the way to his office I tried to explain these things, and said that I would not mind a bit if they decided to employ another writer.
    That, he said, was out of the question. I had made a deal. Besides, New York was already selling the coverage in advance for syndication abroad. It was going great. Naturally, I was nervous. He was always nervous, too, before a big story. It was really very simple. All you had to do every day was to find a lead. The piece would then write itself.
    My protestations of incompetence seemed to disturb him less than my inability to use a typewriter. How could a writer
not
type?
    We arrived at his offices. They were on one of the upper floors of an old building in Fleet Street and consisted of one large room, almost entirely filled with teletype machines, and two or three glass-partitioned hutches. The noise of the machines was overwhelming. I was introduced to several men whose names I could not hear for the din. Then, I was given a stack of files containing all the available information about the case, and sent home to start work on the preliminary pieces.
    Most fictional stories are constructed so that the climax is reached at or near the end. Newspaper stories, I now had to learn, must be written with the climax first. This, it is reasoned, puts the most interesting part of the story on the front page where it will sell papers. I was warned that it was no use my doing it any other way; sub-editors short of space would automatically cut from the end of the copy. To paraphrase an old precept; every news story should have an end, a beginning, and an expendable middle.
    In practice, it means that you try to buttonhole the reader with some odd-sounding tit-bit of news—‘In the Smith trial today the prisoner threw an egg at the judge,’ perhaps—and then delay the explanation—that the egg was really thrown at a board held by an usher standing by the judge, to demonstrate a point in the evidence—until you have unburdened yourself of the other dull parts of the story. The bit about the eggthrowing is your ‘lead.’
    The week before the trial with which I was to be concerned began, I obtained permission to sit in the press section of Court Number One while another murder trial was in progress, and made some experiments in reporting.
    The results were not discouraging, and my anxiety about the speed with which I would have to work was to some extent allayed. I had discovered something which should have been obvious; selecting and presenting material was not as laborious a process when the material did not have to be invented first. There is a quiet snack-bar in the basement of the Old Bailey. I decided that I would go down there and try to get the main body of the daily piece written during the luncheon breaks.
    It had been expected that this trial would be a long one, perhaps as long as two weeks. In the event, it was one of the longest murder trials in the Old Bailey’s history; it lasted over three weeks. By the end of the first week it had become fairly obvious that the prisoner was quite innocent of the murders of which he had been accused. It was thought that the