Susan Paxton's Reviews > The Hornblower companion;: An atlas and personal commentary on the writing of the Hornblower saga,

Well worth having for two audiences - Hornblower fans who will find the included maps very useful, and writers who are curious about how other writers go about the business of creating their work. Forester focuses almost entirely on his Hornblower novels, although at one point he mentions a missing manuscript, turned in to his publisher but forgotten when he followed it almost immediately with a Hornblower book. This is almost certainly the noir crime novel The Pursued, which was discovered and finally published by Penguin in 2011. Forester's description of the creation of his famous series is endlessly interesting as he probes the influences that came to bear on each book, but in the end agonizing - as he was finishing The Hornblower Companion he realized he had another Hornblower novel in him. Forester, who had been ill for years, died only about a third of the way through Hornblower During the Crisis.