Telling people what I do is hard. Part of why it’s hard is the Trust Maghreb.
Careful observers of this site and blog might have noticed a fascination with author Harry Hardiner. That would be easy enough to understand for anyone, if they knew who Harry Hardiner was. The man was allergic to public attention and prone to the casual embellishment about his past, so yes, some of this is down to him. He printed his books in small runs through the original Pinkum Press, so he neither had nor sought the marketing power of big publishers. And… his books are hard, I guess. It’s hard to admit for a fan, but it’s easy to imagine a casual reader throwing Lights Low across the room after the third death of Assistant Principal Poighen.
But after Harry Hardiner disappeared, the Trust Maghreb materialized to manage affairs. Its first inconvenient act of protection took place a few months after the lights over Hardiner Hollow tipped off authorities to the baffling scene on the property. In March, police dredged the pond outside Hardiner’s home (which, at the time, was actually called The Maghreb—“Hardiner Hollow” came later when a group of Harry Hunters purchased the property and turned it into a small shrine to the author) and found a safe they couldn’t open.
Before they had the opportunity to dynamite the damn thing, a legal injunction swooped out of nowhere, handed down by an organization calling itself the Trust Maghreb. No one knows exactly who runs the trust—all of its communications are run by a professional named Lanata Greeve. She is a smooth operator. Dresses like a shark. A beautiful shark. Please don’t sue me.
The Trust released a manifest, of sorts, regarding the contents of this safe: papers (unreleased), personal photos (unreleased), computer (condition and contents undisclosed), watch and antique rifle (provenance unknown), bearer bonds (wtf). Plausible enough, but utterly devoid of meaning. And that, pretty much, sums up whatever the Trust Maghreb has left in its wake in subsequent injunctions and forced buys and maddeningly lawful seizures: something plausible enough, but utterly devoid of meaning.
And also, at this point, almost utterly devoid of Harry Hardiner’s books.
At my last check, there are precisely 0 Rosewire books up for auction on eBay. I did manage to find a copy of Jettison Jemison at As Time Goes By in Marion this spring, but before that, the last terrestrial bookseller to have a copy of any of Hardiner’s works (the novel Tsai, not Rosewire, but not bad) I came across in 2014. That copy had been mailed to the bookseller somewhere out near Anniston without a return address the week before I stumbled into his store winding my way towards Atlanta.
He’d had several copies of many Hardiner books before, he told me, before 2010. That was the year that Harry Hardiner was declared dead and the Trust Maghreb sent out agents to collect every copy of Hardiner’s work that was ever printed.
I suppose it must not have been that hard. Sales have dried up on the internet. As have many popular (ish) Hardiner blogs that have dared to post pdf files of the author’s work. Once in a while, I used to still see Green Stone Story circulating under the filename “wijohid”. Someone at the Trust must have wised up. …I don’t know what the dark net is, despite Jazra Jaban’s repeated urgings that I look into a TOR browser, which to me just sounds like touching a palandir, so I don’t know what the author’s presence out there looks like. Good luck to them, if they’re doing their thing. The Trust Maghreb hits hard.
Cue meadow music.
For the longest time, the Society of Algiers lived in harmony, more or less, with the Trust Maghreb. The Society was founded in 1996; the Trust didn’t rear its head until 2000, but for all we know it existed for a while before then. In the halcyon, minutes-less years when the Society was an informal congress of likeminded enthusiasts that met over food and drink, 96-99, Society membership stayed small and tight-knit, and all its writings and celebrations went unmolested. Harry Hardiner rarely if ever showed up (he gave a New Orleans “talk” in 1997 which from accounts sounds more like an unsober rant, but there are no records of him coming to other gatherings), but he was ever the topic of conversation.
Once in a while, there was a reading.
And it all used to be so casual.
Then Harry went and goned and things changed, of course, in tone. The Society tightened up and organized, crafted a mission statement, coined its leadership. Saw its purpose. Rex Patch ran things classy, as does Zachary Osgood now, and the other original members oversaw various parts of the operation. Back in those days, Maxence Lawrence was responsible for an initiative to digitize Hardiner’s work—an initiative, I might add, that met with mixed success. Zachary Osgood was first historian and then treasurer (leaving the historian position sadly bereft for posterity). Hi and Hattie Kerlin prepared limited special edition second runs of the Rosewire books in memorial, Jon Emery ran media relations, and Eleia Wosa was a sort of social chair called the Chef.
Still, in the first couple of years after Harry’s disappearance, the Trust Maghreb’s litigious presence rarely affected the Society directly. It kept the contents of the safe found in Treasure Pond a secret, true, and it prevented the publication of a “tell-all” memoir that Maxence Lawrence tried to publish under the name Never Hardiner than for Harry—no shit. Still, that eventually made it out of the gate in altered form bearing the title Lord Parker and the Lord of Lord Parker, and truth be told, if anything keeping the contents of that safe from the public could have helped the Society’s mission of Hardiner awareness if they’d played their cards differently. Hindsight.
The Society continued to publish literature on Harry Hardiner, mount annual Hardiner Festivals at Hardiner Hollow in the few days between Christmas and New Year’s, and even run between a circuit of Tennessee bookstores promoting the “discovered tenth book of the Rosewire series” (not that any part of that description ended up being true) when A Bed was released in 2001. We’ll come back to that.
There were some public readings of Hardiner’s plays, including the 8-part cycle Aristotle. A flurry of Hardiner articles and copies of books assailed the front desks of some major Hollywood studios for a while. Once, the Society hired a skywriter to write, “GO FLY JOHNNY KITE” over Nashville. I think its point was lost on a lot of people, but wow, that is downright ballsy compared to our efforts now.
And that’s because of what happened in 2007.
*
The Library Conflagration was neither a fire nor particularly tied to any one particular library, though its roots ostensibly lay in the Society’s 2006 efforts to “put a Hardiner book into every library”. I say “ostensibly”, because the Trust’s actions were uncharacteristically delayed if they were truly a reflex against our library initiative.
No, the more likely spark to the fuse was a series of Youtube videos made by Society member Maxence Lawrence in early 2007 under the titles “Don’t Trust Maghreb, Part I”, “Part II”, and so forth. Although the series did not concern itself with the Trust as such, it did draw a colorless analogy from it to an enormous ocean-crocodile called Maghreb. He told stories about the sea-croc to a webcam. Nineteen stories, all told.
On the date of the third Maghreb video’s release, 25 March 2007, the Trust released the following statement through Lanata Greeve:
“Pursuant to the wishes of the Hardiner estate, the duty of protecting and preserving the works of the beloved author has been exclusively assigned to the Trust Maghreb. To enact its duty, the Trust has determined that original copies of creative works by Harry Hardiner may be traded privately between individuals, and not owned by public institutions in order to preserve these originals from potential acts of vandalism. A special mass-print edition should supply the public need, but momentarily all first edition Hardiner novels, plays, and other works shall be removed from public libraries, museums, and other public holdings, with commensurate remuneration.”
Vandalism. No more library initiative. Every copy the Society had disseminated to the libraries of America was quietly bought up.
Cue discord.
After this, Maxence Lawrence’s videos disappeared from Youtube without fanfare, and the usually press-hungry author went suddenly quiet. He took a temporary teaching position at a state university in the fall, and when the spring semester began, he didn’t show up. There was a brief sensation among Harry Hunters, but that evaporated when Lawrence was found stuffed in a refrigerator out in the woods in West Alabama a few months later. Salacious, yes. Hardiner material? Not quite.
Of course, no one suggests the Trust Maghreb was behind Maxence’s death. But they say he took that teaching job for money (anyone who knew the man scoffs at the idea of him in the classroom), and it seems likely that the Trust Maghreb may have at least been responsible for what happened to his bank account.
Most of Max’s writing had been the kind you used to find in the grocery store. Not much of it touched on Harry, but he’d been a founding member of the Society and Harry’s sometime-editor. It was a loss for the original gang, and there wasn’t a peep from the Trust when he went. He was the first to go, the one with the biggest name… and there hadn’t been a splash, or even a ripple. It was sad confirmation: their mission was failing.
That isn’t me talking. That’s how Rex Patch described it.
After Max was found, there was a change in leadership at the Society of Algiers. From the way the others tell it, Rex Patch declared that an old head is a death sentence and announced that the presidency of the Society would be made available.
Chef Wosa was apparently responsible for the clause in the Society charter that explained how the next president was chosen.
“Should the presidency vacate, it shall pass to the first willing member with the highest Hardiner-related wordcount.”
That was Zachary Osgood, hands-down.
Dr Patch never talked to me about that period of his life. And it looks like all of his writing from that period is… recipes. Serrano muscadine compote. A cocktail named a Hairy Larry (muddled hops and rye in soda). Something he called a Ruger Banh Mi, which was indeed a sandwich, but made with smoked salmon, smoked trout, figs, arugula, fish roe, a whisked egg yolk, and a double schmear of whipped bacon grease. There are no accompanying notes to the ingredients and instructions. I have yet to try it. You’re supposed to whip squid ink into the fat, and they don't have it at Whole Foods.
Looking back, this may help explain why, when I asked about Maxence Lawrence, Rex clammed up and made me pasta romanesca with peanuts and shrimp powder. I turned down the slivers of fresh ghost chili, so he hucked a jalapeño in there. I think this was the day he taught me to make chickpea tofu…
Now that I work at the Society of Algiers and have access to their files and their membership, I can understand why Rex always changed the subject when Max Larry came up. It was hard to tell a story about him from his final years that didn’t run up against the Trust. Not only were the “Maghreb” videos wholly in-character, but evidently there had been rumblings early in the Trust’s existence that Maxence was actually running the whole shebang. In 2011, after some financial records from the Lord Parker author surfaced in the press, we did learn that he received proceeds from the sale of supposed “10th book” A Bed, but that those proceeds went almost immediately into the Trust’s coffers.
It’s a piece of weirdness, to be sure.
Maxence Lawrence was Harry’s editor, for some books at least, and from the start, he had his fingers deep in Harry’s pie. There was title-switching (Hunt and Peck became Web of Lies), a good many quibbles about timing (Max thought Harry should space the books out more), and once, an entire character disappeared (this detail emerging in an interview with Rex Patch; the character may have reappeared in possible 10th book Rosewire as Rosemary Clavel). Some theorize that the violent sexual encounter between Johnny Kite and his friend in Lights Low was based on true events between the author and his editor—Jazra Jaban even based her movie Max Larry, Haunted Fairy around this theory.
In short, Max was not necessarily a model member of the Society. If the Trust needed a reason to notice the Society, and to take offense, Maxence Lawrence was the perfect doorway—and they walked right through him.
Shortly after the “Maghreb” videos were taken down, the Trust began to prosecute “digital distributors” of Hardiner literature. When Maxence began his program to digitize the Rosewire books and other Hardiner works, he, of course, neglected to look into the rights, and had been essentially pirating the books… glacially. In fact, the pace of the digitization effort was bafflingly slow—over 7 years, only the first four Rosewire books had been converted to pdf files. The pages appear to be scanned in these files, but even if Max was personally scanning one page a day… At any rate, it gave the Trust another target to aim for. Bullseye.
Before the Society even had the opportunity to withdraw its own online offerings, a flurry of lawsuits hit the organization and its individual members—piracy charges, of course. Society counsel Tanya Blazon fought back brilliantly, and most of these suits were dropped, and the rest settled for nominal sums.
And before Tanya even filed a countersuit, the Trust had released another statement.
Then another.
Then another.
All three were announcing new targeted sweeps of existing prints of first Hardiner theatre, citing unlicensed readings and performances; then the book of Hardiner stories Dogger Lagoon (which, I am ashamed to say, I never read, and may never have had the chance if I didn’t now have access to the Society library), claiming to be protecting the author’s reputation from a “damaging typo”. Lanata Greeve declines to elaborate.
It’s worth a mention that both of these actions summon Maxence Lawrence to mind. Max did his share of unlicensed readings, particularly of the play Burnt Lace, which was said to be his favorite. Maxence staged the premiere of Bhujarti, or a version of it, in the stands of a Birmingham high school’s football field. It wasn’t good. And you better believe it wasn’t licensed. As for Dogger Lagoon? Zachary Osgood would have it that Max edited some of the stories “so badly you couldn’t recognize them”. Hi and Hattie Kerlin, operators of the original Pinkum Press, confirmed that Harry Hardiner apparently agreed.
“He only asked for eighty copies,” Hattie told me.
And Hi: “We gave him eighty eight.”
No word from Mr Osgood or the others if original copies exist. If they did exist, I probably couldn’t tell you. Do you remember a few weeks back, me mentioning a confidentiality clause? Yeah: the Trust Maghreb is why we have a confidentiality clause.
The last statement announced by the Trust Maghreb in 2007, on December 31 as a matter of fact, was by far its deepest wound on the Society and the most damning indictment of Maxence Lawrence—not that the author would long be around to feel its smart.
“In order to fulfill the wishes of the author, all disseminated notes, unfinished drafts, handwritten correspondence, sketches, and audiovisual media generated by Harry Hardiner will be retained in a central repository. Individuals currently in possession of these aforementioned materials will be paid commensurately for their safe return; noncompliance will result in prosecution to the fullest extent of the law::”
It was this last punctuation that sent a chill up the Society’s spine. In Hunt and Peck, sometimes :: was used to denote actions, like ::shrugs::. But when it’s used at the end of a sentence:: It can be ellipses, yes::
And see? Right there, after the yes, it means “but more”, “and so forth”; so Society members saw that and read “to the fullest extent of the law and beyond”. …If you’re a reader, you get it.
Spines chilled for a reason. Entire collections were wiped out by judge-sanctioned raids—Eleia Wosa lost her letters from Harry, and Rupert Smythe-Pryce lost a bundle of manuscripts he said he found in “Bookbright” during the events of Harry Hunters. Here at the Society, I’ve never seen Hardiner notes, unfinished drafts, handwritten correspondence, sketches, or audiovisual media generated by Harry Hardiner. If any exists, no one has told me. Of course, we have a confidentiality agreement.
Maxence Lawrence heard of the Trust’s pronouncement. We have multiple witnesses—it was at a private party off Bourbon Street, and Maxence Lawrence threw his hurricane at the wall and started crying.
He drove east out of New Orleans and into a refrigerator in West Alabama. In between, no one really knows what happened. The most popular theory, and it’s one I subscribe to, is that Max drove off to sell or hide his Harry memorabilia. Being Harry’s sometimes-editor, sometimes-lover, always-frenemy had apparently given him quite the collection of newly-illicit items. Max probably ran into the wrong dealer of black market goods, or someone who was helping him stash the stash had an idea about its value, and he paid one last price for his relationship with Harry Hardiner.
No one knows what happened to all the papers and tapes Max was supposed to have gathered over the years. There were rumors of a lost book; maybe a couple of lost books. Wherever those books are, if they exist—I just hope the Trust doesn’t get its hands on them.
Because where the confiscated materials have gone under the trust of the Trust Maghreb is a matter of some mystery as well. Lanata Greeve, speaking for the Trust, has assured anyone curious that everything has been safely stored away “in a central repository”; but there is a serious possibility that repository is a furnace.
For all we know, countless pages of notes, hundreds of copies of books and plays, and perhaps even personal belongings related to the author have been consigned to the fire. A Harry Hunter named Morrison Veith claims to have witnessed a burning of Hardiner books when he followed a pair of bespoke repo men away from his bookstore. Morrison Veith, however, also claims to be visited periodically by the vanished author in the night. In his bed. So not many of us take his claims too seriously.
Zachary Osgood, however, does believe that while books have probably been stowed in a warehouse somewhere in the Midwest, there is a strong possibility that any unfinished drafts or handwritten notes by the author have been destroyed. He points to a section of two of the five interviews Harry Hardiner participated in during his career—not shockingly at all, the author did say twice that after his death, he would want any notes about future books “cast into the horseblind sea”. He was like that, I guess.
I shiver a little when I think about this possibility.
After all, we have a more visible example currently filtering through the news of what some lawyers call “dead hand control”: the estate of Edward Albee has declared it intends to follow the deceased playwright’s wishes and destroy exactly the same types of materials that the Trust Maghreb confiscated nearly ten years ago. Albee, who pressed against the forms of narrative and logic, who gave us enduring tropes which are recognizable even to those who don’t know his name, had a reputation to protect. Nothing unfinished come into the world. There is logic to it, for legacy’s sake. And a deep sorrowful howl for the loss that we could prevent if we weren’t beholden to the dead.
Yes, we might see behind the curtain of the public figure we have grown to respect, only to find a small man feverishly working levers. Or we might miss out on genius, insights, process, progress, and a comforting reminder that nothing comes finished into the world. It is worked and prodded and stretched. Even the legends sweated and wept.
Sometimes we need that to keep going. That reminder. Flannery’s prayers.
Dead hand control, though.
Harry Hardiner’s wishes may truly have been to collect and even destroy his unfinished works and notes. In fact, there is no reason to doubt this, even for someone who devoutly hopes it to be false. An author should have some control over how he’s presented to the world, even if the conversations surrounding him have… tangled somewhat since his departure.
The Trust Maghreb has still not, coming up on twenty years since its “debut”, uncovered its board or the identities of its operators. Lanata Greeve remains the only human face for the entity. But she does use “the estate of Harry Hardiner” a lot. It makes some of us angry. Some of us sad.
All of us ask questions.
*
If the Trust Maghreb is operating at the behest of “the estate of Harry Hardiner”, there are troubling matters any serious Hardiner fan wants addressed: who is this estate? Harry Hardiner, as we now know, is most likely a pseudonym, and no one has to date uncovered Hardiner’s true name, or even the name of the hometown he called Bookbright (unless Rupert Smythe-Pryce is to be believed in Harry Hunters). Are these the family members Harry alluded to in interviews? Or… are they Harry’s new family—the group that gathered together to form… the Society of Algiers?
Rumors circulated about Maxence Lawrence’s connection with the Trust. Those rumors didn’t stop with him.
Industrious internet sleuths would have us believe that the stakeholders in the Trust Maghreb include Frank Boswell (no longer with the Society, but in its first iteration), Dr Marshall Root (the fugitive physician to Harry in the 90s), and even original Harry Hunter Rupert Smythe-Pryce. No, there’s no proof to these theories that I believe (most of the evidence revolves around scans of documents that could very easily have been altered or manufactured), but once I joined the Society of Algiers, even discussion of its patron saints being involved with the Trust makes my skin crawl.
Consider our mission statement: “The Society of Algiers commits itself to developing and promulgating awareness of and appreciation for the literary works of Harry Hardiner among the peoples of his native South, across the country, and around the world.”
I don’t know if the Trust Maghreb has a mission statement, but if it does, it would look nothing like that. “The Trust Maghreb shall revoke all access to and circulation of all works associated with Harry Hardiner. To protect him. Dead hand control! WoooOOOoooOOOooo!” Hey, Lanata. Please, please don’t sue me.
It’s frustrating. I pray, day by day, that nothing happens to my personal Hardiner collection, because I know that as things stand it could never be replenished. I like to make notes in my books, so the Society’s library could only scratch that itch so far. Too many times, an introduction has stretched into a lecture or gestured vaguely to writing as my profession. Those who know me well don’t necessarily share my zeal, but they can’t be expected to get excited when they know they can’t learn more. We usually focus on television shows instead. It just gets exhausting telling the same life story over and over again. I wonder if that’s what being a priest is like?
Imagine your clenched jaw at every new superhero movie that rehashed an origin story that is common popular knowledge. Now imagine that every day is like that. And Lanata Greeve, I know this will piss you and your people off—but the reason that Hardiner fans like me, the Society, various Harry Hunters across the nation, the reason we all walk an existential razor, the singular reason that we can’t just send people to the bookstore or Amazon to learn about the stuff we spend our lives on is the Trust Maghreb.
And there’s nothing I or any of them can do about it.
*
My work at the Society of Algiers has, thus far, involved a lot of paperwork. There are materials held by the Society that are very exciting for someone like me, but I can’t talk about them here. Confidentiality clause.
I spend my days filing, digitizing, composing captions for old photographs and keys for maps, color-coding and cross-referencing minutes from official meetings. Recordings. Transcripts. About what? Confidentiality clause. Some would be fascinating to study for hours, but efficiency is the word of the day: get it in the system, and move on, move forward, wrap it up. There is a lot of material to move through. Books I’ve never heard of by Society members not on official rosters. I can’t namedrop (confidentiality clause and a sense of propriety), but there are some high-profile Harry Hunters out there that I just… never would have guessed at.
There is a copy of a signed but apparently never-enacted executive order regarding our vanished author. Signed by a President. A POTUS President. I cannot begin to hint at Which one.
Work at the Society can be taxing—and I mean that physically as much as anything. There is some heavy lifting that was not in the job description, and no part of me is in good shape. Lots of hunching over, and enough typing to tax the wrists. There is correspondence to return and old filing cabinets to haul. Not a lot of bodies here at the office on a normal day, so there’s trash to haul when your number comes up, and a lot of self-service. Most days, we’ll all cycle through the front desk for an hour or two.
I love it here. It’s good hard work. What’s my favorite thing about being Archivist? All the people I’ve met and the things I’ve learned, like—sorry. Can’t. Confidentiality clause.
It can be painful to do something you love and keep it a secret.
The habit of writing for myself has fallen off, somewhat. There is something in me of the chef who pops a can of soup at the end of the shift, yes, but more: the chill from the clause could shake a White Walker. There are times I’ve sat down to write… and stopped myself in fear of what could be divulged, even between the lines, even in fiction. It’s a solid clause. Tanya Blazon does a good job. Of course she does: she’s doing something that she loves. She’s working for a cause she can believe in, just like me. No one could claim the Society doesn’t have good reason: the Trust has steadily moved against it, ever forward but never predictable in angle or timing.
We’ve got to watch our backs.
Harry Hardiner never gave us the truth about his birthplace, his family, or even his name. It could be his father and mother and brothers are out there, pulling the strings of the Trust Maghreb. It could be Frank Boswell, Dr Root, Rupert Smythe-Pryce. Maybe Maxence Lawrence was once a holder of some stakes. No telling who the estate of Harry Hardiner may be, or how they benefit from the actions of the Trust. They allowed a small run of the supposed tenth Rosewire book Rosewire in 2010 (which they mostly snatched back up, and apparently paid handsomely for, in the great sweeps of 2012), and evidently the proceeds from the debunked Rosewire finale A Bed also went to the Trust… but they’ve shelled out dough for manpower and reimbursement and legal fees (Lanata can’t come cheap) that even those modest gains can’t be still rolling around in their Scrooge-McDuckian vaults.
You have a right to know some reasons for my absence: no excuses, I’ve been rewatching Game of Thrones when I could have been finishing The Crocodile or finalizing the new edits on The Furnace or writing on this blog. I even met a nice girl in Greensboro who says someone in her family is looking for a publisher—I could be working to bring a new writer to Pinkum Press for the first time since we went digital… It’s just, we hit it off while talking about Harry, and writing about Harry, and what if the Trust takes it as a Maxence-level offense?
You have a right to know I haven’t gone up in lights or retired my pen. But the chill is real.
Knowing that punishment looms for arbitrary offense is effective self-censorship. In thought, word, and deed. I do my job, not a jot more. That’s not who I am. It’s not who I was. Fear can change you.
I wonder what changed Harry into Harry.
The Trust Maghreb is scary. It was scary to restart Pinkum Press—like I was entering the real world of liability for the first time. But legal ramifications didn’t enter into my philosophies until the Society of Algiers came knocking. It’s easy to be paralyzed by the possibility you’ll make waves.
But the first Pinkum Press was built to make waves; from the first printed pamphlet “The Energy of Significance” in 1976 to its final reprintings of the Rosewire series, whenever they had the means, founders Hi and Hattie Kerlin gave new voices the page and a devoted circle of book dealers. The original Pinkum Press shut down in 2011.
Hi told me, “We couldn’t afford it.” Hattie agreed, but added, “And the Trust let us know that our work with Harry was done.” The Trust Maghreb declared Harry Hardiner dead in 2011, and began to purge his work from the world in earnest—and with the books, the plays, the notes and letters, and the poems that the Trust pulled down, down came Hi and Hattie’s reason for printing. They’d been fired, by the new boss.
It’s do or die time. Tighten up. Firm grip, no slipping. Mouths wait below. Everything up is work. I can try to set a good example, go beyond, do more, and watch my waves and try to make them count.
Won’t be easy. Obstacles ahead.
They’re confidential.
