Five Novels that Disappeared—Then Came Back

Mystery in White, by J. Jefferson Farjeon
This nifty mystery novel was originally published in the 1930s, when author Farjeon had a bit of a following (Dorothy L. Sayers was a vocal fan). Mystery in White has a great hook: Six passengers are stranded on a train in the middle of nowhere, and set out to find help. They find instead a home with a hot dinner on the table, a roaring fire, and no sign of anyone. They also find murder, and it makes for a really great mystery in the old style. Over the decades, Farjeon and Mystery in White faded from the public’s consciousness and his works went out of print, until the British Library chose to include it in a new series of Crime Classics in 2013—at which point it became a smashing success in England, selling 60,000 copies.

The Changeling, by Joy Williams
Williams’ first novel, State of Grace, was nominated for a National Book Award, and she seemed destined for similar success with her 1978 follow-up. But The Changeling failed to find much favor, with a review in the New York Times savagely calling it “startlingly bad.” It didn’t garner much attention and went out of print soon after. Then, in 2008, the improbably named Fairy Tale Review Press reissued the novel with a helpful introduction from author Rick Moody, and suddenly The Changeling was reassessed as before its time, and a worthy successor to State of Grace.

The King in Yellow, by Robert W. Chambers
Before HBO aired True Detective in 2014, The King in Yellow was a cult item, a collection that started off with a supremely creepy and connected quartet of stories then trailed off into more conventional and less-memorable works in the back end of the book. Then, the show referenced Chambers’ book, and suddenly a whole new generation became aware of the play-within-a-story that drives anyone who reads it insane, and The King in Yellow surged in Internet chat rooms chewing over the show—and flew off the shelves again.

The Third Policeman, by Flann O’Brien
Another example of pop culture rescuing a novel that had sunk into obscurity, The Third Policeman was originally written in 1939 and unpublished in O’Brien’s lifetime (he claimed at one point to have lost the manuscript). Published posthumously, this creepy, hallucinatory novel that may or may not be following a murderer as he makes his way through hell after death faded from the public eye until the TV show Lost used the novel as a prop and implied it tied into the show’s (eventually ludicrous) mythology—and 15,000 copies were sold the next week, equaling the previous six years worth of sales combined.

A Glass of Blessings, by Barbara Pym
This one’s a bit deceptive, as Barbara Pym’s entire career was arguably resurrected, not just one novel. A popular author in the 1950s, she published No Fond Return of Love in 1961…then could not interest her publisher in a new novel, because they felt her writing was “old-fashioned.” She didn’t publish another novel until 1977, when she was named the most underrated novelist of the 20th century in the Times Literary Supplement (she was nominated by Philip Larkin and Lord David Cecil). She published Quartet in Autumn that year, it was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and an entire literary career, silent for more than 16 years, came back into full-throated success.