Steven Brust’s Khaavren Romances are presented as historical works by one Paarfi of Roundwood and are written partly as an homage to Alexandre Dumas. I recommend them highly to any of you that haven’t come across them before, starting with The Phoenix Guards.
The second installment of the TV version of The Three Musketeers (filmed all at once, but broken in two because it was so darned long) has an older and slightly-more-deaf Porthos remembering the events that we see in The Four Musketeers – which Alexander Salkind was kind enough to film out of Porthos’ head.
–G!
William Hope Hodgsen’s Carnacki the Ghost Finder stories are told in this manner. They were clearly influenced by Watson’s style. I get a kick out of these scientific ghost finder stories from a time when science was still an amateur gentleman’s pursuit.
Sue Grafton’s ABC mysters (A is for Alibi, etc.) are written as if they were a report by her detective, Kinsey Milhone. They alway finish, “Repectfully submitted, Kinsey Milhone”. Who she’s submitting them to is unclear to me (I’m only up to H. Grafton chose the Alphabet thing for the titles of a series after being inspired by “The Gashlycrumb Tinies”.)
Rider Haggard’s novels often use this approach - King Solomon’s Mines and She, for example. I’m a huge a fan of his work.
Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu stories are not so much “found document” as first-person narratives, but you can tell their antecedents. The ghost stories of M. R. James also read rather like found documents, although less consciously so.
I’m a big fan of pre-War sensationalist fiction, in general. It’s a glimpse of what people found terrifying before they realized that “he is us”, as it were. Of course, many of the older stories are problematic by modern standards. I’ve made my peace with that but for some people the deplorable attitudes legitimately interfere with enjoyment. I just wanted to mention it.
Grr, you beat me to this.
I’ll add some detail - House of Leaves contains a book that’s an analysis of a family’s story and their films about their house. Various commentary, reviews, journal articles, etc. are included in snippets all over the book. There are extensive footnotes from the original author, the major editor (in the most amateur sense of the word there, and the notes often just kind of tangent off into tales about how he found the manuscript, his life, how this book is affecting him, etc.), and the publishing house editor. At least one of the major ‘voices’ in the book is revealed as an unreliable narrator (and you don’t know how often), and some of the referenced sources are cited as denying they’d ever made such statements, or claimed by an editor to not exist.
The Whalestoe Letters are correspondence from the amateur editor’s mother, to him, and sometimes contain coded messages that say something entirely different. Since the letters are from when she was staying in an insane asylum, their veracity is often in question and at least some of them can’t be true, at least when compared to each other.
Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is a brilliant example of a false document novel, used excellently.
In general, most of the early Hercule Poirot novels were written following the detective formula of a first person narrator character (usually his friend Captain Hastings) ‘writing’ an account of Poirot’s famous sleuthing.
“Ackroyd” is narrated by a one-off character called Dr. Sheppard, and the novel is his written account of the case. The novel is one of Christie’s most famous, and most controversial because…
The narrator Dr. Sheppard is revealed to be the killer. He ‘wrote’ the account in such a way as to lie, but not reveal his guilt in the arrogant assumption that he’d never be caught, and thus he could evilly flaunt his crime in the public eye. In the novel’s final chapter, Poirot confronts Dr. Sheppard with the solution, and realizing he’s been beaten, Sheppard confesses his guilt at the end of ‘his’ manuscript.
Another good one is Freddie’s Book by John Gardner. In it, a famous author gives a lecture at a mid-western college. One of the professors invites the author over to house the next day for tea, which turns out to be a mistake as the professor is clearly a drunk and has a dysfunctional relationship with his son Freddie. A winter storm forces the author to stay over night at the house, and the boy Freddie lets him read the novel he is writing - “Freddie’s Book.”
It’s been literal decades since I read it, so somebody help me remember - wasn’t the Name of the Rose written as if it were a ‘re-discovered’ Medieval manuscript?
Moby Dick stands out in my mind. It’s an amalgam of different techniques, and I don’t know of any precursor that takes so many different approaches (from simple narration to virtual “scrap book” entries, including essays by the narrator.)
Another remarkable but odd book is “The Egyptologist”. When I read it, I wasn’t sure I really liked it, but it made a big impression on me, partly because it’s narrated by two different characters with very different points of view, and as it turns out,
… they’re both lying!
Damn it, Don Draper, you ninjaed me by 10 minutes on Roger Ackroyd!
Luckily I have a couple others:
The kids’ book **Bunnicula **uses this - it’s narrated by the dog, who is described in a note by the publisher as having delivered the manuscript to his office one dark and stormy night.
My all-time favorite novel framed as a diary is Dark Matter by Michelle Paver. The main character’s entries seem very natural, without reaching the way some journal-stories do (“and now the monster is coming at me, and I’m jumping out the window - AAAUUUUGHHHH!”).
Going back to Stephen King, How about Delores Claibourne? IIRC she was being recorded for a confession/interview.
Sorta counts? It definitely counts! 
On that note: have any other Doper Tolkien fans (apart from me) ever wondered how in-universe Tolkien even translated languages he knew nothing about?
Hello again, Don.
Yes, you’re right, Eco’s most famous novel is a false document, and, as I remember it, a bit of a Holmes and Watson deal.
Also, your mention of Poirot reminded me that the postscript to Christie’s Ten Little Indians was a message in a bottle, although I can’t remember who found it.
A work of fiction largely in this category would be the – published in fairly recent years – Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, by Susannah Clarke. Regrettably, its false-document traits proved to be a killer for me; although its theme (magical doings in a basically “mundane” setting, and the paradoxes thereof) is of a kind which I tend to enjoy.
Unfortunately as it turned out from my point of view, the book is set in Britain at the time of the Napoleonic Wars; the title characters being wizards who use their powers for the benefit of their country’s war effort. It is presented largely in the form of supposed contemporary official documents and memoirs. The author has – with much research and ingenuity – couched these in the English of two hundred years ago, with which I have problems. Despite repeated efforts, I have never been able to get anywhere with Jane Austen’s novels – they repel me totally, including the Georgian English (all those bloody two-word “some bodys” and “any bodys”, for a start). This facet of Austen, drives me mad; and that carries over into “other stuff written thus” (I know it’s shallow and un-admirable of me to let myself be put off by something so trivial; but this is how things are). My finding the decidedly long JS&MrN to be written mostly in “Jane-Austen-Speak”, caused me to abandon the book at an early stage.
I’ve heard mixed reports of the book: some people have loved it, others appear to have found it hugely long for what it essentially is; and – over other things besides language weirdness – got general vibes of the author’s being very aware of her own cleverness, and thrusting same somewhat, in the reader’s face…
I see where you’re coming from here: in terms of statistical likelihood and how life really works, Flashman’s first-hand involvement with all the major and a good many of the minor military and political events in British history from about 1840 to 1900 – plus a fair number of non-British ditto as well – (to say nothing of the nature of many of the guy’s exploits) would have been completely preposterous. The Flashman books give me this feeling occasionally; when they do, I remind myself that the series is, basically, satire and a spoof, and thus allowed certain liberties which would be denied to “fictionalised would-be serious history”.
This point brings to mind (going a little off-topic) another fiction series in the “historical” ballpark, though this one not using the “false document” device: Dennis Wheatley’s Roger Brook novels – Mr. Brook being a British secret agent in the French Revolution / Napoleonic Wars period, a sort of James Bond of that era (including busy and chequered sex-life – some of it with prominent genuine-historical-personage ladies of the time). This guy does indeed participate first-hand in virtually all significant land-based engagements in these events, between shortly prior to 1789, and 1815 (he hates the sea and ships, and has as little to do with them as possible – in my view rather endearingly, making him seem a bit less of a superman). Unlike with the abovementioned tongue-in-cheek aspect of Flashman, one has the feeling that Wheatley is deadly serious about his hero’s being “into everything / close to everyone, from first to last” – which can get severely belief-straining. IMHO the Roger Brook novels are definitely not great literature: but – the aforementioned difficulty, aside – are mostly quite good, absorbing yarns; save for a couple which I found, frankly, dire.
The Wiki plot description says it was a fishing boat crew that found it and turned it in to the police.
Gerald Durrell, of all people, wrote a short story called ‘The Entrance’ that may be the scariest thing I’ve ever read. It’s not what happens that’s so scary, exactly - it’s the sense of the barrier between real and unreal fracturing horribly. It’s framed by Durrell explaining how he got hold of this manuscript by a guy snowed in on his own in a Gothic-style mansion. It works especially well because it’s in a collection of short stories that are much more in his usual vein - funny stuff about his family - so those act as a part of the framing device, lending weight to the idea that this story is basically true as well.
I’m pretty sure M.R. James uses the device a couple of times (and now I think about it, that Durrell story definitely has an M.R. James feel), but I can’t remember in which stories.
I think several of Jorge Luis Borges’ short fiction would qualify. In Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, the narrator comes across an extra entry in a set of the Encyclopedia Brittanica, describing part of a fictional world. It turns out it was inserted by members of a secret society; I think Borges mixes real historical and contemporary figures with invented ones.
I’m a big fan, mostly, of Gerald Durrell; but it’s only in the past few days that I’ve heard of his The Entrance (I happened recently, to do a search for items about Durrell on TSD, and in the course of that, found several references to it). As alluded-to above, horror is the very opposite of the kind of material usually associated with this writer !
I feel moved to look out this story. It had eluded me to date, maybe because while loving his essentially factual writings, I’ve found his fiction, a turn-off. Rosie Is My Relative, and stuff in similar vein – for my tastes, twee, heavy-handedly over-the-top slapstick, which I suspect he himself considered to be crap, but churned it out because it sold, and made money to keep his zoological and conservation work going. His taking pleasure can be envisaged, in making a total “change of pace” by tackling a very scary short story.
Two of Jane Austen’s early works played with the epistolary novel format and poked fun at its limitations. Her juvenile work “Love and Freindship [sic]” opens with a letter from Isabel to Laura asking Laura to tell her story to Isabel’s daughter, Marianne. The rest of the story is a series of letters from Laura to Marianne. Neither Isabel nor Marianne ever reply, but Laura just keeps writing.
The novella Lady Susan is a more typical epistolary novel, with the various characters writing to each other. But near the end an unnamed first-person narrator cuts in and says basically “At this point all the characters were finally in the same place, leading to a drop post office revenues, so I’ll just have to tell you what happened next.”
I don’t think this is right. It was easy enough to publish under a pseudonym, and while there are plenty of naive people out there, I doubt it would have been widely believed that all those epistolary novels were the actual published letters of real people. I think presenting novels in the form of a diary or collection of letters was just a device intended to make the story seem more realistic, sort of like the documentary format of The Office.
Since all the books I knew about have already been mentioned, I’ll just throw out “Modern Family” the TV show, because of those little interviews they do in each episodes with the “characters”, it is presented as if these are real people we are following who are giving their opinions of day-to-day life and other people and such, even though we all know they are just actors. Would that count as a false document?
How about any mockumentary, like This Is Spinal Tap, Best In Show, etc?
It’s in The Picnic and Suchlike Pandemonium. It may not be as terrifying as I’m making it out to be, because I haven’t read it in a long time (I might go get myself a copy, too!), but I still remember the spike of sheer horror when reality starts to break down. What happens is such a small, almost innocuous thing in itself, but AAAIEEEEE.
As well as journal entries (in particular Professor Van Helsing’s) and wax recordings from Doctor Seward’s clinical notes.