Hollywood, 1935: The young C. S. Forester is offered a contract to write a film script. He had previously come across some late eighteenth-century volumes of the Naval Chronicle and after the Hollywood contract, these accompanied him on his sea-journey back to England via Central America. The result: the first Hornblower novel.
Forester missed England during his stay in California. Not foreseeing the pressure that would grow on him to write more Hornblowers, he now wrote a classic London thriller about murder, sex and revenge, The Pursued. In his personal notes, Forester refers to it as ‘the lost novel … It was written, sent to London and Boston, accepted and made the subject of signed agreements’.
But the Spanish Civil War intervened. Forester now went to Spain and the Peninsular War of 140 years previously stirred his interest. With a new sense of excitement he realized that this could be a second Hornblower novel.
Forester wrote ‘It would not be fitting for The Pursued to be published between these two [Hornblower] books’. After ‘a long and solemn telegram from Boston’, publication was delayed. ‘The lost novel was really lost. It is just possible that a typescript still exists, forgotten and gathering dust in a rarely used storeroom in Boston or Bloomsbury’.
Oxford, 1999: I assist Dr Colin Blogg in founding the C. S. Forester Society, in appreciation of the author’s narrative skill, his flawless English prose and his studies of ‘the Man Alone’, set against well-depicted contemporary backgrounds. I had been reading Forester since schoolboy days, went on to read English at Oxford and was confirmed in my estimation of this great writer. So when an unpublished Forester novel appeared in a small auction in London we were determined to acquire it. Colin and I are now owners of the script bearing the typist’s name.
London, 2011: Penguin Books (which now owns Forester’s old publishers, Michael Joseph) arrange publication of this little masterpiece of London life between the wars: The Pursued – so very nearly, the One that Got Away. An extraordinary find and a rare first view of one of the great English twentieth-century novelists at the peak of his powers.
Lawrence Brewer, Peopleton, 2011