The incidents of “the Becker Case” were these:  Herman Rosenthal, a gambler of notorious reputation, one day went to District Attorney Whitman with the story that he was being hounded by the police—­at the command of a certain Police Lieutenant.  Rosenthal asserted that he had a story to tell which would shake up the New York Police Department.  He was about to be called to testify to his alleged story when he was shot to death in front of the Metropole Hotel on Forty-third Street and the murderer or murderers escaped in an automobile.  Several notorious underworld characters were arrested, charged with complicity in the murder, and some, in the hope, it has been said, of receiving immunity, confessed and implicated Police Lieutenant Becker, who was arrested on the charge of being the instigator of the crime. [1] These are the bare facts as every newspaper in New York City told them in glaring headlines at the time.  Merely as incidents of a striking story, Mr. Granville would, it is likely, have turned them over in his mind with these thoughts: 

[1] Becker’s subsequent trial, conviction, sentence to death and execution occurred many months later and could not have entered into the playwright’s material, therefore they are not recounted here.

“If I take these incidents as they stand, I’ll have a grewsome ending that’ll ‘go great’ for a while—­if the authorities let me play it—­and then the playlet will die with the waning interest.  There isn’t much that’s dramatic in a gambler shown in the District Attorney’s Office planning to ‘squeal,’ and then getting shot for it, even though the police in the playlet were made to instigate the murder.  It’d make a great ‘movie,’ perhaps, but there isn’t enough time in vaudeville to go through all the motions:  I’ve got to recast it into drama.

“I must ‘forget’ the bloody ending, too—­it may be great drama, but it isn’t good vaudeville.  The two-a-day wants the happy ending, if it can get it.

“And even if the Becker story’s true in every detail, Rosenthal isn’t a character with whom vaudeville can sympathize—­I’ll have to get a lesser offender, to win sympathy—­a ‘dip’s’ about right—­ ‘The Eel.’

“There isn’t any love-interest, either—­where’s the girl that sticks to him through thick and thin?  I’ll add his sweetheart, Goldie.  And I’ll give The Eel more sympathy by making Dugan’s motive the attempt to win her.

“Then there’s got to be the square Copper—­the public knows that the Police force is fundamentally honest—­so the Department has got to clean itself up, in my playlet; fine, there’s McCarthy, the honest Inspector.”

Here we have a little more, perhaps, than a bare germ idea, but it is probably the sort of thing that came into Mr. Granville’s mind with the very first thought of “The System.”  Even more might have come during the first consideration of his new playlet, and—­as we are dealing now not with a germ idea only but primarily with how a playwright’s mind works—­let us follow his supposititious reasoning further: