One night at the club, Old Man St. Matthews was holding forth on his latest theatrical adventures. We all tolerated them up to a point. The way he goes on you'd think he were treading the boards himself, when in actuality he was merely the syphon from which wilier gentlemen fund their productions. On this occasion, I was about to excuse myself to relieve the considerable strain his boastful meanderings had already put on my bladder when, to my astonishment, he said something interesting.
He had been talking about his latest play, naturally, which was an adaptation of one of Mr. Conan Doyle's popular detective romps. My ears pricked up a little at mention of his name, given Cuthers' recent blunders in his repertoire. Apparently, despite the popularity of Mr. Holmes, ticket sales had been sluggish, and St. Matthews was losing money as freely as my poor bladder longed to do at that moment. What kept my metaphorical knot firmly tied was his solution.
Typically, when trying to get punters into a theatre, there are three main avenues of exploration. Firstly, there are critical reviews. Favourable examples of these can usually be obtained by anyone with the appropriate status and connections, provided their production meets some basic standards. St. Matthews' Sherlock play unfortunately did not, and even the most alcoholic of the critical establishment looked upon it with disdain.
The second way of filling the house is to ignore the critics and advertise it everywhere possible. Typical avenues here are newspapers and magazines, which are often a dangerously expensive gamble, and fly-posting. The latter is fraught with legal and practical considerations. For starters, few establishments take kindly to having their walls papered with advertising material. However, they are already everywhere, and there lies the real problem. You will have to fly-post over someone else's advertisements, and they will like it even less. Often violently so.
What St. Matthews had discovered was a very enterprising operation which took care of the whole sordid business of posting the advertisements for a flat fee. The catch was that you had no say about where they would appear. However, this is the part that is interesting. The mysterious cove heading up this enterprise evidently had a system, assigning his men to post here and there, but nobody could quite fathom it. The results were similarly hard to anticipate, but his price was so low that he was becoming very popular. Based on the results it has had for St. Matthews' terrible Sherlock Holmes play, I listened to the details keenly. It was well within my means to use this service. Could its unpredictable means of execution turn my publishing fortunes around?
The next morning, my head a little giddy with ideas and my bladder mercifully long-relieved, I set about contacting the fly-posting company at the address St. Matthews had scribbled, barely legibly, on a club napkin.
As I waited for a reply, I went about my morning with a spring in my step. Just imagine, if I could offload my stock of Cuthers' appalling novel, what else could I achieve using this brilliant new method of advertisement placement? I was still giddy about the whole affair, and by mid-morning it became apparent that a good deal of the giddiness was in fact hunger. In my haste to set my wheels in motion I had neglected breakfast. I had also neglected the papers, so I nipped into the club, where Bernard had just finished ironing the noon edition.
As I lazily browsed the paper while chewing my way through a particularly doughy ham and mustard sandwich, I suddenly realised I was reading an article about the very advertising company I was waiting to hear from. Now there's a coincidence, I thought, and read on. My sandwich began to become more obstinate the more I read. It was positively sticking to my teeth by the time it had become apparent that I would not be hearing from said company any time soon. It seems their activities had aggravated some of the more governmentally connected landlords in the city. Consequently, the company had been closed down. The official reason given was that it is a matter of security. This seems solely based on an incident whereby a fly-poster had caught a glimpse of Lady Bight-Dance in the bath while flicking his paste across her windows.
I sighed and looked at the uneaten half of the sandwich in my hand. I rested it on its plate and closed the newspaper.
There is a third way to get punters into a theatre, and that's to physically hook them in with a shepherd's crook. I didn't imagine that could work for Cuthers' book.
