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2.7 It Might All Be Redrawn: To Love and To Honor by Octavus Roy Cohen (1925)

Things were always going to be different when they looked back. It was not always clear how but in the midst of twenty-five years, life had changed and the friendship built between George Potter but his attorney continued to grow. Though the attorney worried about George’s social life, he was excited to participate in the 25 th anniversary celebration of Mr. and Mrs. Potter. He’d been there for their wedding and he would be there for this fete. George had set everything up—the event would look exactly as the wedding had a quarter of a century ago. George was still a bit romantic and his longing for the past coincided with his eagerness for the future. That wedding is the central conceit of Octavus Roy Cohen’s 3 page story "To Love and to Honor." A clinic in the economy of storytelling, the romantic engagements of George Potter are relayed through his friend and attorney who fills in all the details we need to know, and some that we don’t (George had a "very excelle...
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1.4 The O. Henry Twist: Friends in San Rosario by O. Henry (1902)

There is a moment in the penultimate episode of the 2016 mini-series  The People v OJ Simpson  that re-framed how I understand narratives. While the whole show is about the importance of persuasive stories this episode examines what it means for a script to escape the control of the author. In “Manna from Heaven” Marcia Clark and Chris Darden discover something new in the audio tapes which feature officer Mark Fuhrman detailing, with pride, his racist practices in the LAPD.  While Fuhrman’s vicious quotidian account has already made the tapes controversial, Clark and Darden listen and hear the officer misogynistically insulting Margaret York, one of the highest ranking women in the LAPD. York is also Judge Lance Ito’s wife. This bit of information, combined with a form signed by York that acknowledges that she had no prior relation to Fuhrman, threatens to ruin the case and cause a mistrial. O. ...
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1.5 The Storing of Sweet Water: The Fourth Man by John Russell (1919)

The short stories described so far have all pivoted on a rupturing of expectations. From the plot twists that define O. Henry’s “Friends in San Rosario” and White’s “The Two-Gun Man” to the changing roles inhabited by Albert Gordon in Richard Harding Davis’ “The Reporter Who Made Himself King,” these tales have always taken a turn. John Russell’s “The Fourth Man” follows this trend, twisting faux-scientific expectations that have been predicated on political-social systems in the service of an anti-racist story. The question of honor among thieves also undergirds Russell’s narrative. Eventually adapted into a popular radio drama for CBS, “The Fourth Man” tracks the attempted escape of three white convicts from a prison in the Pacific island of New Caledonia. The award-winning Dr. Dubosc, the roguish Fenayrou and the many sobriquet’d killer “The Parrot” have broken out of the prison. The three men have taken a nameless black native of New...
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