With a writing-free day ahead of me — a day I plan on spending reading Bradbury’s The Halloween Tree and doing little else — I’ve just popped along to the Times Online and I happened to read this piece on the publication of Alexandre Dumas’s final novel.
The Last Cavalier, lost for more than a hundred years, was rediscovered by French academic Claude Schopp — pieced together and edited from a serialised newspaper version. Schopp also wrote the final chapter, Dumas having died before the novel’s completion.
This (as you might guess, if you know me even a little) got my mind a-working. If I die before the novel I’m working on (not Children of the Resolution, some future novel!) is completed, would I want a French academic, or anyone else, for that matter, completing it? My immediate response was, Not bloody likely! Keep your grubby hands off. If it isn’t complete, that’s how it stays!
And then I thought about it some more and made a slight amendment. If have close family surviving me who might benefit from the money made from its completion and publication, then go ahead. Otherwise, the above stands. Keep your grubby hands off!
