Terry Pratchett - A Stroke of the Pen

This collection of early stories by Terry Pratchett as been tracked down by fans from his early, anonymised stories, published in local newspapers in the 1970s. Reviewers, and Neil Gaiman in his introduction, have enthused about the detective tale about how they were tracked down, and emphasised how they demonstrate the younger Pratchett's developing talent for comedy fantasy.

This is indeed true, but fans of Discworld and Pratchett's later writing will have to look hard for anything but hints to his later works. There are occasional references, but they are few and far between. Indeed, most of the stories are not that good at all. By anyone but Pratchett they would have sunk into obscurity. In fact, they actually did, as the pseudonyms hid the stories well.

There are, of course, nuggets. But most of the stories were very crude. One of the most entertaining was a time travel story set on the Jurassic Coast, where a couple find a loophole into the distant past and learn that this past is a destination of future time travelling tourists. Mr Brown's Holiday Accident is an amusing precursor of The Truman Show. Talking of such parallels, The Gnomes from Home, about a couple whose garden becomes infested with Gnomes, shares a resolution with John Wyndam's classic 1950s story Pawleys Peepholes.

Unfortunately most of these stories fell flat, and only the most dedicated and completest of Pratchett fans should bother. It's hard not to think that the publisher was keen to issue these stories simply because they knew the fans would buy it.

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