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Sugbys
The legendary journalist Richard Carson Cake's investigation into the forensics of snow nearly cost him his life on Christmas Day 1996. His haunting 10,000 word article is now available in book form for the first time.
Since his mysterious disappearance on assignment in 2012, Richard Carson Cake's journalism and essays have received renewed attention from a readership that is agog at his achievement. Almost without exception, his articles reveal a world most of us did not know existed, and they continue to astonish readers as much as they did on first publication in some of the world's leading magazines and newspapers. Cake himself attracts almost as much interest as his writing: he was, or is, a figure in the shadows. More than one fellow journalist has asserted that his whereabouts or fate will never be discovered, because he never really existed in the first place! Perhaps this is because -- unlike many of his peers -- he did not like to write about himself. We do get glimpses of the man in his writings and the nature of his work means that he does occasionally become the reluctant star of his own investigations -- no more so than in Sugbys, the most famous of his articles, and the first to now appear in book format. It is on the face of it, the story of Professor Bill Gardner and his unnerving new science, but it is much more than that: it is the story of a five year investigation which, almost by accident, uncovered a monstrous and harrowing crime. The writer Christopher Hadley, who knew Cake better than anyone, has written that the key to understanding his journalism lies in his well-known inversion of the old saw about fact and fiction, "Contrary to popular opinion," insisted Richard Carson Cake, "fiction is always stranger than truth."
Since his mysterious disappearance on assignment in 2012, Richard Carson Cake's journalism and essays have received renewed attention from a readership that is agog at his achievement. Almost without exception, his articles reveal a world most of us did not know existed, and they continue to astonish readers as much as they did on first publication in some of the world's leading magazines and newspapers. Cake himself attracts almost as much interest as his writing: he was, or is, a figure in the shadows. More than one fellow journalist has asserted that his whereabouts or fate will never be discovered, because he never really existed in the first place! Perhaps this is because -- unlike many of his peers -- he did not like to write about himself. We do get glimpses of the man in his writings and the nature of his work means that he does occasionally become the reluctant star of his own investigations -- no more so than in Sugbys, the most famous of his articles, and the first to now appear in book format. It is on the face of it, the story of Professor Bill Gardner and his unnerving new science, but it is much more than that: it is the story of a five year investigation which, almost by accident, uncovered a monstrous and harrowing crime. The writer Christopher Hadley, who knew Cake better than anyone, has written that the key to understanding his journalism lies in his well-known inversion of the old saw about fact and fiction, "Contrary to popular opinion," insisted Richard Carson Cake, "fiction is always stranger than truth."
30 pages, Kindle Edition
First published December 16, 2015
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