Stroke of the Pen (2023)

A Stroke of the Pen: The Lost Stories is a 2023 posthumous book containing a collection of rediscovered short stories written by Terry Pratchett for the Western Daily Press and Bucks Free Press newspapers under his own name as well as under his pseudonyms "Patrick Kearns" and "Uncle Jim". Seventeen of the twenty stories were initially published between 1970 and 1975; of the three remaining stories, one is from 1966, one from 1967, and the last story in the collection is from 1984.

In addition to the short stories, the book features a foreword by Neil Gaiman, an introduction by Pratchett's agent Colin Smythe, and an account by fans Pat and Jan Harkin of the research they did looking for the serialised story, "The Quest for the Keys" (1984), which led them to uncover many of the other stories.

A subset of the collection, including "The Quest for the Keys" and multiple stories taking place in the fictional city of Blackbury are especially notable for containing some of the earliest mentions of Discworld places and characters, which Pratchett would later develop into his best-known series spanning 41 books.

The book was universally well received by critics, as an unexpected and welcome discovery of "new" writings by the deceased Pratchett. Critics noted that the author's characteristic witty and imaginative style was present in those early works, with the stories being praised for being well written, but without reaching the high calibre of his later works.

Background

During his lifetime, Pratchett wrote 70 books (including the 41-book Discworld series) and had sales of more than 100 million copies in 43 languages, over 44 years of writing. He died in 2015 at the age of 66.

Upon his death he left three completed novels: the final Discworld book, The Shepherd's Crown, and the concluding two parts of The Long Earth series, a science-fiction project he had been working on with Stephen Baxter.

Pratchett was insistent that any incomplete works of his be destroyed after he died. He did not want people reviewing or publishing his notes and incomplete drafts. Following Pratchett's wishes, in 2017 his friend, business manager, and literary executor (and later biographer) Rob Wilkins drove an antique steamroller over a hard drive containing all unfinished Pratchett material (containing up to 10 incomplete novels).

Early in his career, Pratchett had been a journalist for multiple newspapers. Also, between the 1960s and 1980s Pratchett had published short fictional serialized stories in newspapers under his own name as well as under two pseudonyms: Patrick Kearns, and Uncle Jim.

In 2010 Bucks Free Press released an online anthology of 250 short stories by Pratchett originally published between 1965 and 1970. Also, collections of his adult short fiction (A Blink of the Screen) and non-fiction essays (A Slip of the Keyboard) emerged shortly before his death. A short story collection The Witch's Vacuum Cleaner was published in 2016. In 2020 what was thought to be the final volume of his children's stories, The Time-Travelling Caveman was published. It was believed that no additional works by Pratchett would posthumously emerge. However, at that point only the pseudonym of Uncle Jim was attributed to Pratchett, with Patrick Kearns remaining unknown.

Origins and rediscovery

Pratchett wrote many short stories for the Bristol-based newspaper Western Daily Press, some under his own name, and others under the pseudonym Patrick Kearns in the 1970s and 80s. Prior to 2022–2023, this pseudonym had not been attributed to him, Pratchett having kept its existence secret.

Pratchett's publisher and later agent, Colin Smythe said: "For all the years I was Terry's publisher and then agent, he never ever gave me any help in finding his shorter writings – but as he wrote in his dedication to me in Dragons at Crumbling Castle, '[there were short stories Pratchett had] carefully hidden away and very deliberately forgot all about'." Further, Smythe noted his suspicion that Pratchett used pseudonyms as otherwise the at-the-time "honorable practice" of only writing for one newspaper would have prevented him from publishing elsewhere, since Pratchett was employed at the Bath and West Evening Chronicle.

One of Pratchett's serialised short stories was "The Quest for the Keys." Chris Lawrence first read it when he was 15 years old. It especially resonated with him, and he collected each part and framed them. “I treasured and kept them safe for more than 35 years; (...) having survived numerous house moves, little did I know of their importance.” In 2022 Lawrence realized that it was written by Pratchett.

Upon this discovery, Lawrence contacted Smythe, who had not known of this story's existence.

The printed clippings Lawrence collected were trimmed in such a way that they did not include bibliographical details such as the name of the publication nor the dates. To find the original, unclipped, publications, Smythe turned to the couple Jan and Pat Harkin, retired doctors and fans of Pratchett. They became close to the writer in his later years, having met him at a fan convention. Pratchett would often call them up for anatomical advice when working on a book. The Harkins had honed their archival research skills in "fishing through medical records". On occasion they had helped Smythe track down some of Pratchett's earlier pieces from the near-by National Newspaper Collection in the British Newspaper Archive in Boston Spa, Yorkshire.

The Harkins set off to search for the original uncut version of "The Quest for the Keys". For months they delved into hundreds of back issues, in what i newspaper characterized as "an epic feat of literary sleuthing" by "a wife-and-husband team of amateur Pratchett-ologists", resulting in what The Guardian called the "rediscover[y of] the lost treasures".