A while ago, I wrote a post about a rumoured long-lost manuscript that my Father may or may not have been writing shortly before his death in 1973.
The end of that post was also the end of the trail. Though several people had vague recollections of its existence, there was no sign of it anywhere and it was destined to remain an unanswered quest(ion).
Well, it turned up!
An email arrived from a distant relative, whose daughter had come across some old papers in a drawer in a clear-out of stuff in their house in London and who had come across parts of a manuscript of a novel by Desmond Dalton, entitled “The Brandenburg Contingency”. Did I want it? You bet! I fidgeted for a few days waiting for it to be delivered and was almost too nervous to open the package when it was. Nearly forty years old, would it amount to anything?
What I received was really not what I was expecting. It’s a novel – a sort of crime thriller. There are three completed chapters and a synopsis outlining the rest of the story. It takes place during and after World War Two and is quite a caper – one could easily imagine it being both a best-seller and a movie.
But it is not complete. His legacy was the germ of an idea, not its fruit. It feels oddly as though there is something else going on here – to have started something like this, but not complete it (he was not a Completer Finisher!), to discover its possible existence, but lose trace and then to regain the scent – and now it has re-surfaced, it is crying out for completion. So, one day, I will. And that is why, dear reader, I really can’t give the story away just yet. I’d love to – it’s a humdinger – but you’d only feel it necessary to go away and finish it yourselves.
Suffice it to say, for now, that the plot twists and turns its way from the Nazi High Command to corrupt US Politics, via a devilishly clever scheme to heist some jewels…. but I say too much already. Watch this space.
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