Lost Alexander Dumas novel to be published!

[thewayne]

"Secret of who killed Nelson exposed in lost Dumas novel"

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=1541&u=/afp/20050322/en_afp/afplifestylebooks&printer=1


I loved Dumas' Three Musketeers books and own a lot of his books, including a travelogue into Czarist Russia. This ought to be pretty cool.

Comments

If it's true, that is.

[magic-rat.livejournal.com]

Whenever I hear of something like this, I remember back to the late Sixties when Life magazine published the supposedly last, unfinished novel by Mark Twain (which I believe was Tom Sawyer and the Indians or something similar). In the story, Becky was kidnapped by an Indian raiding party so Tom and Huck join the posse that is trailing them. The final part of the story had them finding a recently abandoned camp where they see four stakes in the ground as well as a bloody rag torn from Becky's dress. The report in Life magazine was that Clemens, due to his prudish nature, couldn't bring himself to write any further as he was leading toward the inevitable revelation that the Indians had raped Becky.

I felt that this was a hoax, since Clemens would have been working longhand and would have been able to see the direction his story was going long before he wrote that last scene. Had he decided that he didn't like the way the story was progressing, I believe that he would have stopped much sooner.

Besides, in all the years since then, I've never heard about this story from any other source.

So yeah, I tend to get somewhat cynical about the latest "recently discovered last manuscript from a famous dead author".