A STROKE OF THE PEN

Reviewed by Steven H Silver

When Terry Pratchett died in 2015, he inadvertently left a mystery for his friends Colin Smythe and Rob Wilkins to solve, although neither the mystery nor its scope appeared until 2022. In that year, a Pratchett fan named Christopher Lawrence reached out to Smythe and asked about the ending of a story Pratchett serialized in newspapers several years ago, before he was a household name. Smythe was unaware of the story and research by Pat and Jan Harkin not only turned up the missing story, but also a previously unknown pseudonym Pratchett used, resulting in 20 lost stories, which have now been published in A Stroke of the Pen.

The collection opens, naturally enough, with the story "How It All Began..." and it would be satisfying if this were the earliest published story in the book, but alas, it isn't. What it is, is the story of a group of cavemen, including Og, an inventor, and Hal, the tribe's leader. The story's focus is on the tension between the conservative Hal and the innovations Og introduces to make the tribe's existence easier. Hal, however, is concerned about the safety behind inventions like fire or spears. The short piece offers a cautionary, if optimistic, point of view of progress.

Set (mostly) in a more modern time, "The Fossil Beach" also deals with the prehistoric past when Jane Throckmorton discovers a fossilized shell that allows her to hear the sounds of prehistoric Gritshire. A surprising sounds leads Jane and others to discover a pathway back to the prehistoric beach, where they discover a modern English pub operating. They discover what is going on, but the story doesn't really have a strong punch. However, this is the first story in this collection that introduces Pratchett's Gritshire and accompanying Blackbury, which features in several stories published here and in other recent collections, and provided the hints that allowed for these stories, mostly written pseudonymously, to be discovered.

"The Real Wild West" is exactly what it sounds like, the story of a western town taken over by lawless men until a new sheriff comes into town. What sets it apart is that Pratchett chose to set his story on the English/Welsh border. In fact, the setting doesn't matter overly much, and Pratchett gives every indication that the story's conclusion is temporary at best, but it is interesting to see the common tropes of the American West moved to the Welsh marches.

Pratchett already has a collection of Christmas stories written around this time in Father Christmas's Fake Beard, but the discovery of his Patrick Kearns pseudonym has added to those stories, the first of five is "How Scrooge Saw the Spectral Light (Ho! Ho! Ho!) and Went Happily Back to Humbug." A sequel to Charles Dickens' work, Pratchett presents a Scrooge who has gone all-in on Christmas and coming to the realization that he still hasn't quite captured the Christmas spirit.

Two of the Christmas stories, "Wanted: A Fat, Jolly Man with a Red Woolly Hat" and "The New Father Christmas," deal with Father Christmas deciding to quit his job, in one case due to centuries of ennui, the other in response to a strike by his elves, reindeer, and snowmen. The stories show how Pratchett can play with the same idea in different ways. Both stories are mildly humorous, with one a look at the job hunting process and the other an examination of management-employee relations.

"A Partridge in a Post Box" looks at the song "The Twelve Days of Christmas" and explores the impact it would have on the mailman, if it were actually carried out. The mailman quickly realizes what he is delivering and he actually looks forward to the deliveries until a package goes awry and he must try to figure out how to make things right. Although Pratchett notes the recipient's early delight in the gifts, for the most part, the gift giver and receiver are superfluous to the story.

"How Good King Wenceslas Went Pop for the DJ's Feast of Stephen" places the medieval Hungarian monarch into a modern milieu and intent on doing the right thing when he sees someone struggling through a snowy night. The humor of the piece comes from Wenceslas' misunderstanding of the actual situation and the readers perception of what it means to be a king and the type of life Wenceslas is actually living, ultimately resulting in a brief, feel-good story.

Perhaps the most interesting stories in the collection are "The Great Blackbury Pie," "Dragon Quest," and "From the Horse's Mouth" for the simple reason that Pratchett rewrote these stories and the later versions have already been published in his various YA collections. "The Great Blackbury Pie" showed up as "The Blackbury Pie" in Father Christmas's Fake Beard. When the order for 100 one-foot pies is misheard as a hundred foot pie, the piemaker works to figure out what is necessary to create such a monstrous confection. Pratchett looks at both the logistics of creating the pie, but also the ultimate repercussions of the misunderstanding, although once the pie is ordered, the customer never appears again, even when it would have to be obvious how badly his instructions had done awry.

"Dragon Quest" was also published, appearing as the title story of Dragons of Crumbling Castle, which allows the reader to compare the two versions of the story, which are quite similar, even if the setting and character names differ between the two versions. As the title indicates, the story is about a quest to find a dragon, although the dragon found is not quite what is expected, nor is the result of finding the dragon.

"From the Horse's Mouth" showed up as "Johnno, the Talking Horse" in The Time-Travelling Caveman. Ron Weasel is a ragman who is getting his horse, Johnno, ready for their daily rounds when Johnno begins talking to him, wishing him a good day, and telling him that he wants a bit of a vacation. While recounting their adventures, Pratchett offers a commentary on the way we treat people differently when we consider them as individuals.

"The Gnome from Home" looks at a quintessential English hobby, gardening, when Mr. Cosy places three garden gnomes in his rockery, only to find that they have attracted an actual gnome, P.H. Gimlet, who has an entrepreneurial bent, turning Cosy's private garden into a tourist attraction, much to the annoyance of Cosy and his wife. Pratchett gives Gimlet some important dialogue that seems to get lost, but indicates that the story should have had Gimlet as the focus rather than the Cosys.

Although Blackbury has been mentioned in some stories, and even features in "The Great Blackbury Pie," the town really comes to life in "Blackbury Weather," which not only introduces some of the citizens of Blackbury, but also provides hints at its long history and method of governance. It becomes a place rather than a setting and as the events in the story depict, it is a place where anything can happen and be accepted by those who live there. In this case, the town is suddenly stricken with practically personalized weather...lighting storms over an individual, blizzards impacting a single block, and so on. The town's officials must figure out what is happening and how to stop it, or at least make sure it is controlled to the benefit of the whole town.

In "Blackbury Jungle," the sense of the town continues when the council instructs the park keeper to plant some additional flowers in their parks in the hopes of increasing tourism. The seeds he plants result in a massive and fast-growing jungle throughout the town. The town's spirit is shown by the way they embrace what could have been a disaster and find ways to turn it to the benefit of the town. With the previous story, it definitely establishes Blackbury as a place that deserves a lengthy exploration, beyond what Pratchett was able to provide.

Anthropomorphism comes to Blackbury in a big way in "The Haunted Steamroller," in which Bert, who drives steamroller J22 in Blackbury discovers that the town has decided to decommission the steamroller and force him into retirement. Although Bert has no desire to retire, events move beyond him when the steamroller comes to life and flees its fate, eventually carrying Bert along with him when the driver attempts to corral the steamroller. Published in 1973, the story has added poignancy since Pratchett declared that following his death, his computer hard drives, containing any unfinished works or alternate drafts, should be steamrollered, which Wilkins reported was done by a steamroller called Lord Jericho in August 2017.

Pratchett tackles the trope of people who get rich through no real effort of their own in "The Money Tree." Rupert Wrist has a dead-end job writing jokes for a matchbox company and his wife longs for a television. Responding to a make money ad, Wrist finds himself receiving a strange seed with instructions. Despite a warning from his wife about the sort of damage caused in "Blackbury Jungle", Wrist plants the seed and the couple finds themselves with a tree that provides them with money, which quickly turns into a story of greed when the couple attempts to increase the money tree's yield.

"The Blackbury Thing" is Pratchett's response to 1950d science fiction films. After something crashes into the woods near Blackbury, alien hysteria grips the town, with anything out of the ordinary being attributed to aliens. Pratchett clearly has fun coming up with (relatively) mundane explanations for the events occuring in Blakcbury, even if the ultimate denouement of the story is predictable.

When traffic is extremely bad, Mr. Brown decides to take local roads in "Mr Brown's Holiday Accident," only to discover that Shakespeare was more right than he could know when he wrote "All the world's a stage/And all the men and women merely players" in As You Like It. Although surprised by his discovery, Mr Brown is willing to accept the strangeness he finds "behind the scenes" and even comes up with a way to use his newfound knowledge to his advantage, or at least to boost his ego.

"Pilgarlic Towers" is an ancient ruin about to be demolished. What sets it apart from other ancient ruins about to be demolished is its lively population of ghosts who are intent on making sure that the house they've long haunted remains for them to haunt. The ghosts of Pilgarlic are willing to go to any length, or at least to London, to plead their case, although they must use their ghostly powers to bring about the change they want rather than more traditional means.

"The Quest for the Keys" is the story whose existence led to this collection, and it is the longest story in the collection. It is also the story that most lends itself to the episodic style of story telling that these stories were written for, offering the barbarian Kron the chance to go on a quest for five keys under the guidance of the wizard Grubble. A relatively simple sstory, following Kron as he is teleported to five different places to look for the missing keys, it also gives Pratchett the most latitude to experiment with tropes. Although the characters aren't quite Discworld characters, they could easily have been tweaked to fit into the series, which was just starting up when the story was written, as evidenced by the inclusion of the city of Morpork. Although it may be the last of Pratchett's work to each his broad audience, it doesn't have the sense of melancholy that came with The Shepherd's Crown, being an example of early Pratchett rather than a story that carried the emotional weight of his later works.

Anyone looking for deep satire along the lines of the later Discworld novels is likely to be disappointed by A Stroke of the Pen, which is more akin to the humor and writing of The Colour of Magic. Written for a young audience, the stories often lack depth and offer an amusing diversion, a final, unexpected gift from Pratchett to his fans.

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