Fancy Man (novel)

Fancy Man was a once-lost novel by Paul Magrs, which he eventually had published in 2018 by Lethe Press after Magrs had found the original manuscript in his shed. More information about this is below.

It was the fourth novel in the Phoenix Court series, though it only was set in the same world as the other stories; it was largly disconnected from the titular Phoenix Court setting, instead being set in Scotland, which, according to this novel, was independent from the United Kingdom.

The short stories Glittering Fag and Baubles were also included at the back of the book.

Publisher's summary
Meet: Wendy, who grows up the youngest of three brash sisters in Blackpool and who leaves home when her mother dies. She moves to Edinburgh under the wing of her vulgar Aunty Anne – whose sights are set on the millions her ex-husband has recently won on the lottery. Wendy spends a happy summer finding herself amongst her new family – Uncle Pat, frail cousin Colin, Captain Simon and Belinda, who believes herself to be an alien abductee. Wendy is intent on finding her elusive fancy man but gets drawn into a series of adventures involving amputees and death cults, Marlene Dietrich and doppelgangers in a city where everybody seems to be writing novels about everybody else… in this queer relocating of ’ ‘’ to the apparently Cool Britannia of the 1990s…

Plot
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Characters

 * Wendy
 * Aunty Anne
 * Uncle Pat
 * Colin
 * Captain Colin
 * Belinda
 * Marlene Dietrich
 * Timon

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Referenced only
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Lost media
Magrs changed to a new publisher, Faber and Faber, after his first three novels and one anthology. He began work on Fancy Man in his spare time when he wasn't teaching the MA course at the University of East Anglia, in 1999. The novel was slatd to be an upcoming release from Magrs, in the Doctor Who: Short Trips anthology More Short Trips, published on 1 March 1999. Things began to go wrong when he sent it to his editor. Magrs' editor had previously expressed that he was a fan of Magrs' works, but upon reading the early drafts of the manuscript, had hated it. The editor sent back the manuscript with the majority of the text crossed out, as the editor completely disliked how every character in the novel was a "freak"; this disheartened Magrs, causing him to doubt himself.

The situation wasn't helped by Magrs' agent at the time, who expressed that his works should be more normal. Eventually, Fancy Man was cancelled, and Magrs stored the manuscripts of the novel in the attic in his home in Norwich. With lots of these manuscripts, Magrs had edited out many of the parts he had liked, but despite this, none of them had been satisfactory to the editor. Eventually, Magrs moved house with his partner, and eventually threw away what he thought was every copy of the manuscript. He regarded the experience of the novel's cancellation to be dreadful, and after he found a runied copy of one of the manuscripts, that was only half complete and ruined during a rewrite, he regarded the novel as cursed.

Eventually, in Magrs' new home in Manchester, among boxes of paperwork, he found a copy of the manuscript which miraculously hadn't had parts trimmed out. Magrs finished it, and it was subsequently published by Lethe Press just in time for their reprints of the first three novels.

Continuity
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Connections
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