(detail from cover image of supposed "tenth book" Rosewire, 2010)

We said earlier that it's possible Rosewire was completed after all—and I'm not talking about the theory that the author's disappearance was actually the last entry in the system-series. No—in the years after Hardiner's vanishing, several supposed "tenth books" have been "discovered" or outright ghostwritten (including one by yours truly that is currently under contract with the Society of Algiers). 

The first, A Bed, was released 2001 as the final entry in Rosewire's vast sprawling network, but it doesn't quite make sense as a conclusion. This fable on the power of love traces two men as they share a bed (but not a room or a time period), and though it encounters characters from the Rosewire series, they only ever appear in dreams. After intense scrutiny (and a mathematical survey of the text and its construction), this book was more or less debunked as being wholly Hardiner's work in 2011: although many paragraphs and vignettes hold up, much of the text was found to be more consistent with the Lord Parker mysteries of Maxence Lawrence. The current prevailing theory is that Lawrence collected some of Hardiner's unpublished writings and reshaped them into a rough narrative—it's hard to know what he gained out of all that effort, as the proceeds from the book went straight to the inchoate Trust Maghreb, but computer algorithms don't lie.

In 2010, another book was released through the Trust Maghreb—this one was simply titled Rosewire, and it dealt with a small town in the Old West called Rosewire and its miniature civil war. The same study that determined A Bed was not entirely Hardiner's did not find the same to be true with Rosewire: in fact, the computer's results claimed that there is a 99% certainty of Hardiner's authorship, and of course, computer algorithms don't lie. Whether this book was meant to be the actual conclusion of the series is again under question, however, because regardless of the title and its titular setting, none of the characters from earlier Rosewire books appear—at least in recognizable form. 

Rex Patch, Zachary Osgood, Nory Lantham, Neil Gaiman, and Heather Pess contributed essays to The Rosewire Companion which suggest thematic crossovers between certain characters in the series, and lays out quite a convincing argument that Rosewire is the beginnings of a new cycle of events that will again lead to an unravalling of the world like the end of the black book and Conquest of Algiers. If that's the case, then the "Navel" mineshaft may serve the same purpose as Center Lake, and the Sheriff's posse may represent a new Board in the making, and Daniel Stone might be a new Johnny Kite (or Friend). 

Harry Hardiner loved his cycles, especially when the next rotation didn't quite match the last. I tend to buy into this argument, and I'm quite convinced at this point that Rosewire is actually the last book in the Rosewire system—but I also believe it is not presented to us the way that Harry Hardiner would have liked. Whether it would have undergone further revisions or restructuring, none of us can say for sure, but it's worth remembering as you read it that it's probably NOT the end of Rosewire, or we would have gotten it years prior to its actual release.

And, of course, there are many better minds who have come to that conclusion and other conclusions that more or less take any legitimacy away from this posthumous publication. That means that lots of Hardiner fans have taken it upon themselves, before and after Rosewire was published, to finish the system their own way, or as they think Hardiner intended. This lovely tradition has spawned the Society of Algier's Tenth Book Competition, which is given once every two years to a writer who writes the best conclusion to Hardiner's series. In the past, I've won (bitches!), and so has Jazra Jaban, Zachary Osgood, and, of course, Rupert Smythe-Pryce for the book that started it all: Harry Hunters.