Review: Desmond Bagley's 'missing' novel, Domino Island

Twenty-first century cover, seventies story

[Note - this review will be spoiler free, as the book has only just been released (16 May)]

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.

Bag a Bit of Bagley ...

Sorry for the slow posting recently on this blog ... usual reasons of work etc.

However, I thought I should do a quick shout out to the sterling work of fellow Blogger and spy thriller fan Phil Eastwood who runs the Desmond Bagley Running Blind website.

Checking on it recently I also took the opportunity to read his new(ish) blog covering the works of UK-thriller writer Bagley more extensively, beyond the single book covered in his main website.

It's definitely worth checking out that he's added a series of podcasts by his friend and fellow Bagley-ite Nigel Alefounder, who runs a Bagley fansite. They're pretty interesting - I finished a couple of months ago my copy of Running Blind, having not read it before, and it's a great story.

The podcasts look in some detail at all aspects of Bagley's life; others look at the research techniques employed (like Deighton famously did) by Bagley to provide real verisimilitude to his stories; and a look at the silver screen adaptations of Bagley's works. Worth checking them out; they're on iTunes on or the site linked to above.