Martin Boyd’s Missing Novels: A Partial Solution

Abstract

In 1925 Martin Boyd published his first novel, Love Gods. From then until the Second World War he produced a book almost every year, except for the period May 1928 to December 1933, during which no books by Martin Mills (the pseudonym under which Boyd was then writing) or Martin Boyd appeared. In his first autobiography, A Single Flame, Boyd wrote: 'I thought that my life during the years 1928-33 was not only a hell of boredom, but useless'. Although he was awarded the first Gold Medal of the Australian Literature Society for The Montforts in 1929, he said of that time: ' . . . there seemed no possibility of my ever having another novel published. Three in succession had now been rejected'. They were rejected '. . . not only because Constables had lost on the earlier novels, but becausethere was somethingwrong with the books themselves'. The fate of those three novels has not been known, but correspondence held in the Bobbs-Merrill MSS, Lilly Library, Indiana University, has now provided a partial solution.