Cameron Strange was a writer. That much is certain. What else can be said with confidence is harder to establish — which is, in some respects, how he would have wanted it.
The papers were recovered from his London address in 1995. Among them were several completed novels, correspondence, and fragments of work in various states of incompletion. The correspondence has not been published. The novels are being prepared, one by one, for the widest possible readership.
The website takes its name from the novel he carried round the publishers for years — the one he believed in longest, the one that was always nearly there. Shredded Time was his favourite. It is also, in a way, a description of the man: someone perpetually displaced in time, never quite in the right decade for what he was trying to do.
His best novel is something else.
In the early days of this project, before the site had a name or the novel had a published title, two post-graduate students were brought in to assist with the work. They had come from a university in Shandong. They were diligent, capable, and — as it turned out — simply unable to pronounce a particular consonant in the actual writer's name.
The consonant in question was an L.
This is not unusual. The lateral approximant sits awkwardly between certain phonological systems, and no amount of goodwill on either side resolved the difficulty. The writer's name, as spoken by the two post-graduates, came out as something else entirely — something that rhymed, approximately, with Cameron Strange.
"We just started using it. It seemed rude to correct them. And then it seemed too late."
The name stuck. The mythology followed, as mythologies tend to do — the recovered manuscripts, the London address, the boxes in the attic. All of it is true in the ways that matter. The bones of the story are solid. Only the name required a certain amount of creative reinterpretation.
Cameron Strange did not exist until two young researchers from Shandong made him necessary. He has existed ever since.
Three novels are available to read here in full, free of charge. One more is in preparation.