There is immense gratification for a researcher when they retrieve from an archive box an item that has not been seen, or thought lost, for many years. Such was the emotion for me when, on the afternoon of Wednesday 17 May 2017, I removed a package marked ‘Because Salton Died’ from a box which was part of the Desmond Bagley archive, held at the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center in Boston, USA.

I, and others, had been aware of the existence of a typescript listed in the collection as a finished but unpublished novel written by Bagley, but no one knew the state of the novel and fate had deigned me the opportunity of actually opening the package. I found inside an original draft large post quarto typescript consisting of 243 pages, typed on a manual typewriter, together with a photocopy of the typescript. The typescript, of approximately 89,000 words, bore on its title page:

NEW NOVEL

BECAUSE SALTON DIED

(if you can think of a better, please do)

I realised that I was the first person to have opened the package since it was sent to the archive by Joan Bagley in late 1997.

Instituted in 1963 as Special Collections and renamed in 2003 to honour its founder, the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center is located in the Mugar Memorial Library at Boston University. It is a repository, with public access, archiving material for individuals in the fields of literature, criticism, journalism, drama, music, film, civil rights, diplomacy and national affairs. In those early days of the archive Howard Gotlieb kept a weather eye on individuals whom he might approach with a view to asking them to donate their papers to the archive in the future. Howard Gotlieb personally wrote to Desmond Bagley on 23 December 1964 requesting just that, which showed great foresight as Bagley had by then only published his first novel The Golden Keel.

Following the publication of the author’s second novel High Citadel, in 1965, a Bagley novel was published every year until The Freedom Trap (London: Collins, 1971). Bagley was in the habit of starting novels only to abandon them if he felt they were not progressing as he wished. He often returned to some of these projects, revising and redrafting them and occasionally borrowing sections for other novels as the years progressed. Although a prolific writer he suffered from brief bouts of writer’s block and 1971, as it happened, turned out to be a particularly bad year for the author.