The case for the missing …

Posted on 9 Dec 2018

The late Ken Duxbury was an exper­i­enced and resource­ful small boat sail­or and a very enga­ging writer about his exploits, but he did have one habit I hoped to per­suade him out of as I pre­pared his 1970s Lug­worm tri­logy for reis­su­ing a few years ago: he would all too fre­quently end a sen­tence, gen­er­ally at the end of a para­graph, with an ellip­sis (…) as if to sig­nal con­sequences of the fore­go­ing events. I felt that for the read­er (this one, any­way) this quickly became tire­some. For­get the dots and give us the cred­it for, and the sat­is­fac­tion of, work­ing it out for ourselves! Ken went along with this, and as a res­ult his writ­ing seemed crisper and more assured. His wife B told me ‘Thank good­ness, I’ve been telling him about that for years!’