Author sparks disaster in clear-out as bonfire consumes manuscripts

The bestselling children's author Graham Taylor had just finished lighting a bonfire in his garden for what was to be a merciless spring clean.

The bestselling children's author Graham Taylor had just finished lighting a bonfire in his garden for what was to be a merciless spring clean.

Days before he was due to move house, he gathered a one-foot-high heap of yellowing papers in his arms and flung the sheets into the flames. But as he warmed his hands by the pyre and studied the words on the scattering sheets of paper, he realised with great alarm that he had accidentally burnt the original manuscripts for his best-selling thrillers, Shadowmancer and Wormwood, as well as the only updated draft of his unpublished work, Tersias.

"I needed to offload some stuff and my wife, Cathy, said I needed to sort out my office. There was a pile of papers by my desk and looking at the first six pages, I decided it was all rubbish.

"It was only when the papers began to scatter that I saw the words of my new book. All the pages were flaring up by that stage. I managed to get some pages of Tersias out and put them on the grass where they caught fire again. I recovered five pages that have been completely singed except for the corners. To cap it all, I got a call from a plumber working in my new house who told me that it had just been flooded. It was a black day," he said.

Mr Taylor, who publishes as J P Taylor, is a practising priest but has retired from full-time clerical duties because of heart problems and will next week move out of a vicarage in Scarborough. He said he lost six months of writing as 100 pages of the latest novel had not been replicated. "I will have to cancel other projects to get the book out for its published date in September next year. I was supposed to be hosting my own chat-show in America but I will have to put that on hold," he said.

The manuscript for Shadowmancer, which was a number one bestseller in Britain and the US, selling one million copies in the UK alone, was the "editing" draft on which the author had made amendments in his own hand. It had been valued at £250,000 before it was published last June but an independent bookseller offered Mr Taylor a "six figure sum" for it, weeks after it hit the shelves.

"I didn't ever want to sell it. The manuscripts were very personal items for me and I had planned to give them to my children," he said. A lesser precious working manuscript of Shadowmancer still remains, and was last valued at £40,000.

Literary experts have called the lost manuscripts "invaluable" - the rights to Shadowmancer were sold to Universal Pictures in a multi-million dollar deal and Wormwood will also be made into a film. Last week it was announced that the second novel will be the subject of a West End opera in a deal worth more than £2m. The singed ends of Tersias that were salvaged will be auctioned on 11 December in London. Proceeds will be given to the children's leukaemia charity Shooting Stars.