Bruce Spurdle’s novel is inspired by his grandfather’s disappearance, <em>A Cheat and a Liar.</em>
There’s plenty of true-life scandal mixed into an historical novel Te Kūiti real estate agent and identity Bruce Spurdle launched at an event in Whanganui on Monday.
The inspiration for Bruce’s first book, A Cheat and a Liar came along following a DNA test which solved a dark family mystery dating to just before the outbreak of World War I.
That’s when his paternal grandfather, George Spurdle, apparently disappeared from the face of the earth on a business trip to the King Country.
Bruce was given a DNA test as a gift in 2018, but it was not till 2020 that an American woman who had also investigated her DNA contacted him to say she was his previously-unknown first cousin.
It transpired grandfather George, whom the family had assumed had died on a business trip to the King Country, had been, as the book title said, “a cheat and a liar,” who ran out on his wife and four children.
George, a good-looking and talented young Whanganui builder, had certainly been facing a rough patch before he disappeared.
“George built several houses that he hadn’t been paid for, so to save himself extra expense at the local timber yard, he planned to come up to the King Country to buy timber, take it home and then, as war was about to break out in 1914, he would continue to build houses without incurring extra expense with his creditors that he was struggling to pay.
“My grandmother evidently, according to my dad, wasn’t keen on him doing it but they all went to the railway station and saw him off and away he went.
“And they never saw him again. So that’s all I knew about my grandfather.
“My grandmother was a teacher so to support their children aged 13, 12, 11, and six, she went back to work.”
At the time of the disappearance, Bruce’s grandparents had not long lost their youngest child, a two-year-old daughter, in an epileptic fit.
“So, with the pressure of all that and the fact that New Zealand wasn’t in a happy time, I suppose George just decided to disappear.”
And then he went missing.
Police twice came to his grandmother’s home to report that bones had been discovered in the King Country, which could be George’s remains.
But both times they turned out to be pre-European, and Bruce suspects they were excavated while constructing the main trunk line.
In fact, shipping records showed that George had secretly taken a ship from Auckland to Vancouver in the company of an unknown New Zealand woman.
And then, apparently after parting company with this companion in Canada, he made a new life for himself in America’s Pacific Northwest.
Records showed that George eventually met and married another woman after arriving in Washington State, then after she died, he married again.
“So, George was a bigamist. His third wife had a son and a daughter with him, and the daughter from that marriage turned out to be my cousin’s mother,” Bruce said.
Armed with these facts, Bruce decided to entertain his readers by inventing the rest of the story from his imagination, thus filling in the motivations, thoughts and experiences of people he would never meet.
With the help of publisher Xlibris NZ, he funded the production of a 600-page novel of 33 chapters.
The publisher was very helpful during editing, encouraging him to pare down much of his original manuscript.
For example, he had written extensively to construct from girlhood the background of the New Zealand woman George shipped out with from Auckland to Canada.
“But they just removed all that detail pointing out that it wasn’t part of the main story,” Buce said.
Bruce turns out to be an unlikely author, for though he reads the King Country News from front to back each week, he claims to have never read a book from cover-to-cover in his life.
Over the years he started reading 10 or 12 books but always lacked the patience to read more than a few chapters, or at most about 10.
As to the future, Bruce said at this time he does not plan to write another novel.
“I expect this one to be my first and last.”
