to Peter Keary to go to the front as a war correspondent with letters of introduction from Markino. He may have met Markino through Arthur Ransome who dedicated Bohemia in London (1907) to Shiel and used him as the model for the chapter on "The Novelist." Faced with declining sales of his books, Shiel tried to recapture the success of The Yellow Danger when China and Sun Yat-sen returned to the headlines during the Chinese Revolution of 1911–1912. Though a better novel in most respects, The Dragon (1913), serialised earlier that year as To Arms! and revised in 1929 as The Yellow Peril, failed to catch the public's interest. As the hero of the story had oddly predicted, Shiel turned away from novels for ten years. 1914 conviction for child molestation It was once popularly believed that Shiel had spent time in prison for fraud; however, it was discovered in 2008 that in 1914 Shiel had actually been convicted under the Criminal Law Amendment Act (1885) for "indecently assaulting and carnally knowing" his 12-year-old de facto stepdaughter. Unrepentant, Shiel served sixteen months hard labour in prison, complaining to the Home Secretary about the law, though he assured his publisher Grant Richards in a letter that he had been treated well. Shiel's discussion of his crime is disingenuous; he conceals from Richards the identity of his victim in addition to misleading him about her age, and instead refers to "love-toyings" with an older girl on the cusp of maturity. Nor does Shiel mention that he had known both the girl and her mother's sisters long before his conviction, perhaps intimately, as contemporary letters from one of the sisters to Shiel suggest. Court records described Shiel as a "clerk and metal worker"; one of the witnesses was a metal worker and the records may have transposed some information. He appealed the conviction unsuccessfully. The case was reported in The Vote, a weekly women's suffrage newspaper, on 4 December 1914 in its Protected Sex section. The article states that Shiel (misspelled as Sheil) denied the whole story and that the "case was remarkable for the philosophical discussions on sex" by Shiel who conducted his own defence. Shiel was described as having a "purient mind" [sic] by the presiding Judge, Mr Justice Coleridge. The article was rediscovered in 2019, 11 years after MacLeod's initial discovery. It is too early to assess whether this new