Life sometimes overtakes art, and so it is here. Manacles was "published" in 1995 in a Small Press edition. The original publisher pulled out of the deal during the production, so the author (Robert Whyte himself with the help of friends) picked up the tab for the typesetting and printing. The cost of around $4.00 per book was easily recovered with the sale of about 500 of the edition of 600 sold at $6.00 each. The remainder were lodged at libraries or given to family, except for about 20 copies which remain wrapped in plastic.
Other projects included a 400 page manuscript "The Laundered Meadow" which was lost. The project was interesting, but not well handled. It used the short stories from "A Boy and the World" and was an attempt to show a child's distorted, surrealistic view of the world as though the child's phobias were based on realities.
A few attempts at the detective novel followed, including several modernisations of Cervantes' Don Quixote, all rather too ludicrous to have any lasting value. These culminated in a much better effort "Born Again Dead", co-written with Anne Jones. "Born Again Dead" still holds promise and has had some excellent feedback from our readers, including Steve Stockwell and Tim Low. If we can act on the feedback and come up with a credible ending, it might have legs.
An ambitious trilogy of novels loosely based on Dante's trilogy (The Divine Comedy) stalled at Paradise. I have always been very fond of the Purgatorio section, based on a Franco Nero spaghetti western, which works better as an audio book than it does on the page.
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