I blame my older brothers. But then, they in turn blame an old schoolteacher by the name of Paul Wickham. Either way, in my early teens I became an aficionado of the novels of Desmond Bagley. They’re a reassuring habit I’ve returned to throughout my life.
So how did I go from reading and loving his 16 published books to ‘curating’ a lost manuscript for publication as the seventeenth in the canon? And, even more extraordinarily, to then taking up the mantle of Bagley’s legacy with a new, original novel to be published by HarperCollins in honour of the centenary of his birth?
As so often with this kind of story, it involved a long and complicated chain of links that have taken the best part of 25 years to come to fruition, if you’ll pardon the mixed metaphor.
After Bagley’s death in April 1983, his widow Joan completed two further novels for posthumous publication. Then she stopped. Some years later, she made good on a promise her husband had made to bequeath his archive to a specialist library in Boston, Massachusetts. When I made contact with her in 1999, hoping to piece together a biography, she very generously gave me carte blanche to raid the archives.
In the end, another literary researcher beat me to it, discovering in the process that there was, in the files, one more incomplete manuscript, entitled by its author Because Salton Died. It was a first draft, bashed out on an old typewriter and accompanied by correspondence with his then editor about how he planned to revise it on a second pass. For reasons unknown, it was a job he never went back to, and the book remained unpublished and forgotten.
Within months of the discovery, HarperCollins’s dedicated estates publisher David Brawn managed to persuade the trustees of the novelist’s estate to unveil it to the world – subject to some revision and reconstruction. He asked me to undertake the work.
I’d been in touch with David originally about my putative biography and we had stayed in contact in the intervening years, sharing a love for Bagley and his work as well as hitting it off personally. The chance to implement Bagley’s annotated changes – including retitling the book – was too good to pass up. Domino Island, set on a fictional Caribbean island and featuring ‘everyman’ protagonist Bill Kemp, was published in 2019.
When a discussion arose about how to mark the centenary, I knew immediately that there was more mileage in Kemp. I pitched a narrative that placed him in one of the few dramatic locations Bagley hadn’t already deployed and David agreed it would be a great way to honour a man whom Alistair MacLean once acknowledged as a “master of the genre”. Outback, a sequel to Domino Island, doesn’t attempt to mimic Bagley; instead, it’s a celebration of his craft and, I hope, a fitting tribute to his legacy.
OUTBACK by Michael Davies (11th May, HarperCollins) is a sequel to DOMINO ISLAND
