Besides perhaps the gun, no other weapon has been as heavily romanticized as the sword. For millennia, we’ve been using the sword to settle debates, both personal quarrels in the form of duels, and national conflicts in the form of wars.
Last modified on Wed 12 May 2021 05.34 EDT
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mong the hoary lessons a debut writer must learn is that of Chekhov’s gun, the notion that anything introduced to a story must be there for a reason. “If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall,” Chekhov wrote, “then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don’t put it there.” It is good advice, serving the demands of brevity and precision, avoiding the deadly burden of inconsequential intrusion into the sparse landscape of narrative.
My novel, A Melancholy Event, features not one but two guns, hanging in a pair. These are guns with a purpose, for they are duelling pistols, and thereby – with apologies to Shakespeare and Jeffrey Archer – hangs a tale.