First Sentence

"For over a decade, from the 1920s through the early 1930s, Lieutenant-Colonel Herman Cyril McNeile—‚Sapper‘ to his millions of readers—was the acknowledged master of the popular short story: a piece of fiction roughly four to seven thousand words in length, of no particular literary merit or significance (at least in academic terms), but told in a brisk and entertaining manner and containing a goodish helping of mystery, romance, adventure, horror or suspense (or a heady brew-up of all those ingredients) with a beginning, a middle and an ending with a sting in it—the sharper the better, and preferably in the last couple of lines."