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| Twenty-first century cover, seventies story |
An almost complete, undiscovered thriller novel by an acknowledge "master of the genre", hidden away for decades and discovered by chance.
How often does that happen in the literary world. Rarely, I imagine. But it's the case with Domino Island - newly published by Harper Collins - and for fans of Desmond Bagley, it's largely speaking been worth the wait.
First, a bit about the provenance of the book. It's discovery is down to Bagley know-it-all (literally) Phil Eastwood - operator of the Bagley Brief, now the pre-eminent source for all things Bagley online. Researching his new biography of Bagley, he discovered the manuscript among a pile of Bagley's papers in Massachussets.
Writer Michael Davies acts as 'curator' for this novel, which I'm guessing means that he filled in any minor gaps, edited it, and polished the text - this was, after all, not a final text of a novel, but one which contained hand-written annotations by the author and his editor.