The Book That Kills - a note on sources

 I have to acknowledge being ‘driven’, in a slightly mad way, by reading through a lot of, but certainly not all, of the Marquis de Sade’s incontinent and repetitive sexual sagas: it is said he was the most prolific French writer of his day. It’s impossible not to have for his compulsive energy some kind of grudging admiration, I suppose similar in a way to the feeling I have for Milton’s fallen angels in Paradise Lost— although Lucifer and Satan are more wholesome.

       I found inspiration in Rider Haggard’s She, and, as it must be evident in the format I have used, Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone. But my main inspiration, if it can be called that (or at least object of curious fascination) is Les Mémoires de Saturnin, an anonymous volume I found in my garage loft here on the border of Northamptonshire and Oxfordshire, when we moved into this fifteenth century courthouse in 1995. It could make a good publicity story, and it provides the start of The Book that Kills, by giving me the idea of a lost work with dangerous content, some of which, translated, I have included. 

      How this book got here I have no idea, it remains a mystery. I found a leading Dutch antiquarian bookseller has a later edition of the same work in his sale list for E 17,000. The British Library has only a mutilated edition. I sold it this year by auction at Christie’s. Some of the 24 illustrations (out of copyright) might be included in an edition of The Book That Kills. I have copies.

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