Диана Гэблдон «Lord John and the Hand of Devils»

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Lord John and the Hand of Devils

by Diana Gabaldon

To Alex Krislov,

Janet McConnaughey, and

Margaret J. Campbell,

sysops of the Compuserve Books and Writers Community

the best perpetual electronic literary cocktail party in the world. Thanks!

Foreword

In which we find A PUBLISHING HISTORY, BIBLIOGRAPHIC INFORMATION, AN AUTHOR’S NOTE, and A WARNING TO THE READER

Dear Reader—

PRELIMINARY WARNINGS

1. The book you are holding is not a novel; it’s a collection of three separate novellas.

2. The novellas in this collection all feature Lord John Grey, not Jamie and Claire Fraser (though both are mentioned now and again), but

3. I did want to assure you all that there isanother Jamie and Claire book to follow A Breath of Snow and Ashes. I usually work on more than one book at a time, and have been working on that one, too. It’s just that this one is shorter, and therefore got finished first.

Awright. Now, for those of you still with me…

Lord John Grey has been largely accidental, since the day he rashly decided to try to kill a notorious Jacobite in the darkness of the Carryarrick Pass.

His association with Jamie and Claire Fraser (and with me) dates back to that passage in Dragonfly in Amber. While he did have small but important parts to play in subsequent books of the Outlander series, I really didn’t intend to write books about him on his own. (On the other hand, I never intended to show Outlander to anybody, either, and here we are. You never know, that’s all I can say. )

Lord John began his independent life apart from the Outlander books when a British editor and anthologist named Maxim Jakubowski invited me to write a short story for an anthology of historical crime that he was putting together in honor of the novelist Ellis Peters, who had recently died. Now, I had never written a short story—barring things required for English classes in school, which tended to be pretty lame—but I was fond of Ellis Peters’s Brother Cadfael mysteries, and I thought it would be an interesting technical challenge to see whether I could write something shorter than 300,000 words, so…“Why not?” I said.

It had to be the eighteenth century, because that’s the only period I know well, and I hadn’t time to research another time adequately, just for a short story. And it couldn’t involve the main characters from the Outlander series, because a good short story has high moral stakes, just as a novel does; thus, it would be difficult to write a short story involving the Frasers that would not include an event significant enough to have an impact on the plot of future novels involving them. Since I don’t think up plots in advance, I thought I’d just avoid the whole problem by using Lord John; he’s a very interesting character, he talks to me easily, and he appears only intermittently in the Outlander novels; no reason why he couldn’t be having interesting adventures offstage, on his own time.