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## Falling into Misfortune

william wallace cook

From Plotto: The Master Book of All Plots, published by Tin House Books in 2011. Originally published by Ellis Publishing Company in 1928. William Wallace Cook was the author of dozens of Westerns and science-fiction novels. He was nicknamed “the man who deforested Canada” for the volume of stories he fed into the old pulp-magazine mill.

A, after his marriage to B, discovers that B, who had professed to be single, was a married woman and neither divorced nor widowed.

A, married to B, has not been divorced from a former wife, B-3. A discovers that B has married another man, A-3.

A becomes the second husband of B, whose first husband, A-3, had mysteriously disappeared and was supposed to be dead. After A and B are married, B’s first husband, A-3, appears secretly to A.

A’s wife, B, dies. Tricky so-called spiritualists pretend to materialize the spirit of deceased B in order to influence A to give them money by advice of the supposed B.

A finds himself under a weird psychic spell because of a birthmark on the face of his wife, B. B craftily gives a birthmark a peculiar significance, and holds A under its power.

B, wife of A, is craftily persuaded by A-3, the “other man” in a “love triangle,” to elope with him.

B, wife of A, finds herself in the power of an old lover, A-3. A-3 threatens to reveal to B’s husband, A, a fateful secret unless B will agree to a certain proposition A-3 makes to her.

B, wife of A, persuades A-2, a friend of A’s, to elope with her.

B falsely accuses her husband, A, of transgression.

B suffers betrayal at the hands of A, her husband by a secret marriage. B is accidentally killed by a series of maneuvers set in motion by her husband, A.

B, wife of A, desperately ill, sends A for a doctor. A, sent for a doctor by B, who is seriously ill, does not return—and he does not send the doctor.