Blowing my own trumpet

On a recent visit to Amsterdam for a reading event, I had cause to do a search for myself on Google Netherlands. (It was for a purely pragmatic reason – honest! I needed to check the cover price of my latest book, Prosperity Drive, just out in paperback). Imagine my surprise when I discovered that, according to Dutch Google, I had written – and published! – six, rather than five books.

Along with my two collections of short stories, and three novels, this search revealed that I’d also written a novel entitled The Trumpet Has Sounded, published on April 1, 1996. I know, I know, an April Fools Day joke, you say – but no, I did the search on March 16 and checked it several times since, in case I was suffering from writerly delusions or someone was playing a seasonal prank on me!

Apart from the title and publication date, however, there was no other information about my phantom book, and no accompanying cover image.

When I chased the title down on Amazon, I found only one, authored by a John Masters and published in October 2001. Its subject matter is listed as World History, Religion and Spirituality, but there’s no further clue as to what this Trumpet is about. Under Product Details, came the following health warning: “If you dare read this book, you might just consider the path you tread, and find yourself a different destiny!”

But there was no sign on Amazon of “my” Trumpet Has Sounded.

One of the biggest threats for the modern writer is piracy – the widescale reproduction of authors’ work on the web in downloadable form by rogue elements who gain nothing from it, but ride roughshod over copyright law. But here I was facing the exact opposite problem – finding evidence on the web of a novel attributed to me that I’m pretty certain I didn’t write.

The act of writing is often allied with the art of forgetting. Most writers will have had the sensation of discovering fragments of writing from the distant past that they have no recollection of writing. As someone with a terrible memory, I’ve often seen my slavish devotion to list-making as an antidote to forgetting. But recording on paper may not necessarily strengthen your memory.

Montaigne, who admitted to having a terrible memory himself, suggested that a perfect memory was the death of a good story.

“In my country, when they want to say that a man has no sense, they say that he has no memory; and when I complain of the shortcomings of my own, people correct me and refuse to believe me, as if I were accusing myself of being a fool. They can see no difference between memory and intellect,” he  wrote in On Liars.

Plato had a marked distrust of writing, arguing that the written word was the enemy of memory.  It would lead, he warned, to individuals relying on external letters and losing the ability to recollect what was within.

Given that I can’t remember, I have taken to imagining what my phantom novel might be about. The trumpets sounding refers to the  seven trumpets that herald apocalyptic events in the vision of St John of Patmos. They are blown by seven angels when the seventh seal is broken and the events that follow are described in detail in the Book of Revelations, Chapters 8 to 11.

So perhaps my Trumpets is a toga and sandals epic. A kind of Ben Her? Or maybe it’s an apocalyptic science fiction saga? A satire on the American President? Or a Jazz Age novel?

Whatever it’s about, the memory of it has completely escaped me. So here’s my plea – if anyone comes across a copy of The Trumpet Has Sounded by Mary Morrissy, can you buy it on my behalf, and help me to retrieve my forgotten  – by me, that is – mistress-piece!