The Diary Of A Curious Man by Patrick Black
Subtitle: Edited with a Foreword by Leo de Freyne
Publisher: Lulu
Published: 2006
Place of publication: USA
ISBN-13: 9781847284631
First sentence: When the painter Patrick Black was killed in a car accident in October 2005 at the age of fifty-three, he was on the verge of receiving the recognition which he felt his art deserved.
Description: When the painter Patrick Black was killed in a car accident in October 2005 at the age of fifty-three, he was on the verge of receiving the recognition which he felt his art deserved.  It is not my intention to comment upon his ability as a painter, nor enter into the details of his life which he himself recounts in his diary, but there is one point on which I feel I should come clean.
During the last year of his life he began to edit the many volumes of his diary into what he hoped would be, as he says in his entry for 18 Nov 2004, “a publishable manuscript”.  The first title he chose for the manuscript was The Diary of a Curious Man (see 19 May 2005).  However, he soon realised that he was faced with a fundamental problem regarding the manner in which he could bring his manuscript to the marketplace.  He writes:

16 June 2005.  Peace with M this morning.  She realises that life must go on.  But I’ve decided to change the title of the manuscript, to bring it closer to fiction.  Besides, I think you can only publish a diary if the author is alive and famous (and thus the public are already interested) or if the author (famous or not) is dead and has become part of history.  I’m going to call it The Diary of Joseph Renks (or some such name) and present it with a foreword by me purporting that Joseph Renks is dead.  (Maybe I should sign the foreword with a pseudonym also.)  

The Diary of Joseph Renks was rejected by a publisher in July 2005 and by a literary agency in September 2005.  At the time of his death, he was revising the manuscript and adding a seventh section.  No trace of the foreword he speaks of remains, so it is with a strange sense of destiny I find myself writing this.  How he proposed to conclude The Diary of Joseph Renks, we’ll never know.  With somewhat chilling irony, he does refer in one entry (19 Oct 1994) to a diary being “a novel that ends with the death of its author”.
When his widow courageously showed me the manuscript, it seemed to me that the diary now conformed to its author’s comments above and that it was no longer necessary to add the layer of disguise which he describes.  Thus, I am certain – and his widow agrees – that he would approve of my changing the name Joseph back to Patrick throughout, and of my presenting it to the public under its original title.
My only other alterations have been to occasionally add an italicised parenthesis at the beginning of an entry which clarifies the place to which he is referring, and to correct very rare spelling errors.

                                                                      Leo de Freyne,
                                                                      London, November 2006.
Notes: ISBN 978-1-84728-463-1
www.leodefreyne.com