In the thriller Lock Every Door by Riley Sager, there’s reference to the Eighties YA romance Heart of A Dreamer by Greta Manville, about an orphaned young woman who “through a twist of fate and the benevolence of a grandmother she never knew, finds herself living at the Bartholomew,” a storied old luxury apartment building in Manhattan. Lock Every Door is itself set in the Bartholomew, where Manville lives.
In Pat Conroy’s Vietnam War coming-of-age novel The Lords of Discipline, we meet Col. Edward T. Reynolds, an imperious member of the history faculty of a military academy obviously inspired by The Citadel, who wrote The History of the Carolina Military Institute.
Masterman, the bad guy’s valet in Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express (1934), mentions that, while off-duty, he’s been enjoying Arabella Richardson’s Love’s Captive, presumably a romance. Wiki and Google suggest Richardson, and the book, do not actually exist.
I just finished Susanna Clarke’s fantasy novel Piranesi, which I really enjoyed. It refers in passing to the disgraced British academic Laurence Arne-Sayles’s occultist books The Curlew’s Cry (1969), What the Wind Has Taken (1976), The Half-Seen Door (1979) and The Labyrinth (2000), and to Angharad Scott’s biography, A Long Spoon: Laurence Arne-Sayles and His Circle (publication year unmentioned).
Robert Harris’s The Second Sleep is a novel set some 800 years from now, after the collapse of our technological society in late 2025 has returned the world to a quasi-medieval state. Two books are mentioned: Antiquis Anglia, an archeological study of pre-Apocalypse England, written by Dr. Nicholas Shadwell and illustrated by Oliver Quycke, and Corpus Inscriptionum Angliarum by Thomas Howe, a record of messages left behind on the walls of churches by those looking for family, friends and loved ones, as the starving population of London fled the city.
The Jug by Abraham Cady. A novel based on the author’s experiences in WWII.
(As an aside; It is sometimes astonishing the things your brain will decide to remember. I read QBVII over forty years ago. Yet somehow, I was able to immediately recall the title of a book written by one of the characters. Now ask me what I had for breakfast.)
I recently finished Hernan Diaz’s pretty good novel Trust, which is about Andrew Bevel, an aloof, even antisocial billionaire, and his ailing wife Mildred in Thirties NYC. It includes, as different long chapters, excerpts from a Gatsby-esque novel about Bevel (Bonds by Harold Vanner), the draft of Bevel’s own ghostwritten autobiography (My Life), a memoir by his ghostwriter (A Memoir, Remembered by Ida Partenza), and Mrs. Bevel’s journal (Futures).
Partenza became a novelist after working with Bevel. Her other works are also mentioned in passing, including Seven Stories, Before Words and Arrow in the Gale.
“Gotho’s Folly” from Steven Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen, which is described as a “multiple-tomed suicide note” and quoted several times throughout the books. It contains such gems as “He was not a modest man. Contemplating suicide, he summoned a dragon.”
I think I can provide the first half of Snoopy’s It was a Dark and Stormy Night.
Paraphrase from memory
It was a dark and stormy night. A door slammed. A maid screamed. Suddenly a pirate ship appeared on the horizon. While millions of people starved, the king lived in luxury. Meanwhile a small boy in Kansas was growing up.