Cut Short

After finishing the Gormenhast trilogy I got to thinking about a few authors whose work also was left unfinished. So here's a short post on a few writers who had more plans and more stories left in them.

Mevyn Peake: Gormenghast

For Mervyn Peake there was a continuation, of sorts. In June 2011, 43 years after his death, Titus Awakes: The Lost book of Gormenghast was published. Written by Peake's widow, based on notes and fragments divulging what little was left of Peake's original vision. Unfortunately, she gave it her own spin, inserting the late writer into the narrative in a meta-like fashion (or so I've heard. I won't be reading this as the purist in me will not allow me to).

Terry Pratchett: The Discworld

My current Discworld's collector's library. Read up until Soul Music.

I'm a gardener. I still think about Reaper Man whenever I'm mowing grass with a mechanized trimmer, cutting up great swathes of it in sweeping side-to-side motions, like I was Death himself, wielding his scythe. Death's second outing is a good one, and the search for who he is makes for an awesome book. Very powerful, and very moving. Death always talks in all capitals, so he rarely needs an introduction in the many Discworld books he makes an appearance in, all he has to do is say a word or two. Despite any apprehensions you might have though, Death is generally a very warm and pleasant character, ushering souls into the hereafter of their choosing with a gentility that quite belies his fearsome skeletal appearance.

I finished my first Pratchett novel in 2015 about a day before he died of Alzheimer's disease. After he died his assistant Rob Wilkins wrote on the oficial Twitter account:

AT LAST, SIR TERRY, WE MUST WALK TOGETHER.

Terry took Death's arm and followed him through the doors and on to the black desert under the endless night.

The End.

Which still makes me tear up whenever I read it.

Apparently he left behind enough material to finish at least 10 more novels and while Pratchett's daughter is the current custodian of the Discworld franchise, and (I think) has Sir Terry's permission to continue the work, she at the time has no plans of doing so. Maybe time will soften that stance, or maybe it won't. Either way, these would be big shoes to fill and I wouldn't want to be the one possessing enough hubris to try them out for a walk.

Furthermore, Terry told his best friend Neil Gaiman, that anything that he had been working on at the time should be put in the middle of a road and then destroyed by a steamroller crushing it.

And of course; it was made to be so. On the 25th of August 2017 Rob Wilkins fulfilled his wish by destroying Terry Pratchett's working hard drive, by running over it with a steamroller. 

David Gemmell: Drenai and the Troy trilogy

The compleat Drenai Saga.

Yes, in my opinion that includes both The Knights of Dark Renown, which feels like it does belong here at any rate, and Morningstar, which has a different narrative style, but which has in-universe ties to the cultures of the Waylander trilogy and, as Morningstar is a sequel to Knights, that allows for both of them to be put in the Drenai saga.

Gemmell is another one who I just wish there was more of. I have read 10 books of his, all of the Drenai saga and I'm holding off on reading The Swords of Night and Day, because it'll be the last of the setting, and there'll be none after it.

Gemmell's road to writing is one that is remarkable enough on its own.

In 1976 He was diagnosed with cancer. Believing it to be terminal, he took a stab at something he had tried to do before, but with little success; writing a novel.

He then swiftly, in a mere 2 weeks, wrote what came to be his most famous novel in order to take his mind off the upcoming diagnosis. It was the story of the siege of a great castle, that resisted bravely against hordes of barbarian invaders, while each of the 6 walls fell one by one. He left the ending to the story open, deciding to let the castle fall or stand depending on his diagnosis. The story is a metaphor with each of the walls representing a stage of coming to terms with illness.

When he was informed that he'd been misdiagnosed he set the novel aside for a few years until a friend spurred him on to finish the novel and to get it published.

And so (one of) the best Heroic Fantasy writers of Britain got into writing.

As for how he went out of it:

"Gemmell preferring to go to bed late, with his wife favouring an early start, on 28 July 2006 she was surprised to wake up to discover the bed empty. "I thought, 'Oh good, he must be working', and went to take him a cup of tea in his study." Finding him slumped over his desk, she "hoped he was asleep but I knew, really, that he was dead."

David Gemmell wrote more than 30 books of heroic fiction and fantasy since he had had his misdiagnosis 30 years before. He died writing.

At the time he was finishing the final novel of his Troy trilogy. This was later completed by his wife. I will get round to this one, despite it not being written completely by the man himself. There's an aura of legend surrounding this one (hah, no pun intended).

Given more time Gemmell could've finished his Troy trilogy himself, and who knows, maybe he could have explored that future setting of the Drenai saga, already touched in The Swords of Night and Day, some more. Maybe even some more original stuff.

Robert E Howard's Conan and others

Illustration from Providence, Chapter 11.

There was a more apt picture in Providence that I could've used for the post here, and though it's a powerful one, I ended up not using it out of a sense of respect. It's okay in context and if you know the history, but it requires some delicacy, to my mind. Suicide is a thing of nakedness, and using the picture out of context would have smacked of sensationalism.

The above is Robert E Howard, who on the 11th of June in 1936 committed suicide. He had begun making plans for his death when his mother finally began losing her years-long battle with tuberculosis, and he killed himself when he was told that she would never wake up from the coma she had slipped into at the time. She outlived her son by mere hours and died on the 12th of June.
There were of course more factors at work here, but the impending death of his mother was the prime motivator for Robert's taking of his own life.

Robert E Howard is the father of Sword and Sorcery and creator of Conan, Solomon Kane, Kull of Atlantis, El Borak, Bran Mak Morn and others. His influence on the genre and fantasy as a whole is at this time incalculable. But, as always, this recognition did not come during the writer's lifetime
who in fact struggled with receiving regular payments from the magazines he sold his stories to.

We can only guess what Howard would have ended up writing if he had had more years in him. At the time of his death, inspired by his Texas surroundings, he was focused on writing westerns, but given time he would doubtless have returned to Conan and the sword and sorcery genre he helped create, probably even conceiving of new iconic characters and settings.

Karl Edward Wagner: Dark Eden trilogy

Here's yet another series cut short by the death of its author: Karl Edward Wagner's tales of the red-haired Swordsman Kane. Inspired by the biblical Kane, and conceived of as a thinking man's Conan, able to reason and use guile to get out of a tough spot rather than just having to resort to using his brawn, Kane is an amoral and ruthless character who can easily fulfill both role of hero and anti-hero.

A world fantasy award winner for his horror novella Beyond any Measure, Wagner was a fierce proponent of horror fiction and edited numerous horror and fantasy anthologies. His stories are rather more brutal than most and have more than a touch of horror about them.
Karl Edward Wagner died in his home in 1994 due to the consequences of long-term alcoholism.

Though I have read only one of the existing 5 Kane books you can see below, Centipede Press editions, it's the one series whose discontinuation I am most struck by.

Don't ask me now where I got the information from, because for the life of me I can't find it anywhere anymore, but as this is a series of standalone books and stories concerning a Biblical Kane, who nurses a personal grievance towards the God who cursed him to an unending life of strife and warfare, and when I heard of Wagner's plans to continue the overarching story line with a trilogy that was to be both a sequel and prequel to the rest of the series, dealing with the time where Kane finally gets his vengeance on God, I got excited, before realizing that the matter had been long done and dusted with before I ever even heard of the Biblical Cain.

And the name of this trilogy that will now never be: Dark Eden.

*Deep groaning sigh*
Those would and should have been some words to read.

Sue Grafton: Kinsey Millhone's Alphabet series

I've never read any of the books, but a series of novels where every title is based on a different letter in the alphabet is quite a clever concept.
The books are detective novels with a single female protagonist where the stories are framed as ongoing reports until the novel's end.
The books were popular and from G is for Gumshoe Grafton was able to quit her screenwriting job to focus solely on her writing.
But alas, the series ended prematurely with Sue Grafton's death in 2017 from cancer with the final novel unwritten. from A is for Alibi to Y is for Yesterday, Grafton's family has stated that they won't allow a ghost writer to finish the series, and that as far as they are concerned, the alphabet ends with Y.

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And in general I agree, it just wouldn't be the same would it? An artist's vision is sacred. No meddling allowed. It's just... what a waste...  If I could make just one wish for a continuation for any of the authors in this post, despite personal preferences, it would be that Z would be the one to be finished.

Pratchett didn't have an end in sight for his series, and he would have continued for as long as possible, stoked by his engine of anger.
Peake's continuing vision was changed by his illness, and Wagner and Howard made their choices, though I'm not going to bring issues of mental health and self-control into this. This also isn't about making your bed and laying in it, this is about a single closed vision, beginning to end, and having the dedication to get to that ending taken from you.

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These were the writers I could think of off the top of my head. Doubtless, there are others. Mankind's ambition at its best stretches far, and it enables much. The mortal coil is the only thing holding us back. It is also the only thing to make us look forward, to make us keep straining. It is goad and spur. And without the fear of death, nothing would get done.

Take it as a lesson.