The early death of Martí, followed by the military successes of Máximo Gómez and Antonio Maceo, and then by Maceo's own death in December 1896, galvanised US interest in events in Cuba. Melodramatic journalism fanned public awareness. The first piece of US fiction which could be considered a response to the events in Cuba in the 1890s was Richard Harding Davis's Soldiers of Fortune, an adventure story firmly grounded in the actual relationships between US industry and Cuba, even though the novel's setting is an invented South American country called Olancho. Soldiers of Fortune was mostly written over the summer of 1895, and was possibly therefore coloured by the renewed insurgency marked by Martí's landing at Playitas in April of that year, though the novel also drew on Davis's previous knowledge of Cuba. Completed right at the end of the year, Soldiers of Fortune was published serially during 1896, and then in book form at the beginning of 1897. It was perfectly timed to capture growing US interest in matters Cuban, set as it was around a fictional version of the city of Santiago de Cuba, close to the centres of insurgency and soon to be the focus of the US invasion of the island during the Spanish-American War of 1898.