It’s the birthday of C.S. Forester (1899-1966), considered one of the greatest naval novelists and best known for his 11-book series about Horatio Hornblower, set during the Napoleonic Wars.

Forester was born in Cairo, Egypt, the youngest of five children, but moved back to London with his mother when he was three. He eventually studied medicine but quit in order to write stories and novels, and in 1926 found success with the crime novel Payment Deferred. After that he wrote many novels, including crime and naval/military novels; one of his best known before Hornblower was The African Queen, published in 1935 and made into a movie in 1951 that landed Humphrey Bogart his only Oscar. The Hornblower books began to come out in 1937 with The Happy Return (published in the U.S. as Beat to Quarters).

In 1942, Forester, by then living in the U.S. and working for the British Ministry of Information, met a young former RAF pilot named Roald Dahl and asked him to write down some of his war experiences for a piece Forester was working on. It was the first time Dahl had tried writing, and the resulting story that he handed over to Forester blew Forester away. Forester didn’t change a word of the story but gave it to his editors as-is at The Saturday Evening Post, who published it as “Shot Down Over Libya” (later changed to “A Piece of Cake”). This was the beginning of Dahl’s career. (Well done, Forester.)

Forester continued writing his entire life and was working on the last Hornblower novel, Hornblower and the Crisis (1967), when he died suddenly. In 2002, a lost crime thriller Forester had written in the 30s appeared at auction at Christie’s along with a number of other Forester items. The novel, The Pursued, was supposed to have been published in 1935 but publication had been delayed for the sake of publishing a couple of Hornblower books in quick succession. Forester then changed publishers, confusion ensued, and the book was lost. A couple of founding members of the C.S. Forester Society were ecstatic to buy the manuscript, and after several years’ negotiation with Forester’s estate saw the novel published by Penguin Modern Classics in 2011. The novel is said to be a “dark, twisted tale of murder, lust and retribution,” so how fun is that?

(Fun and absolutely unrelated fact: the Incas, in spite of being super advanced, never invented the wheel. And neither did anyone else in the New World. In fact, the wheel is thought to have been invented just once, by one person, and then the invention spread rapidly from there. Wow. Just think about it. How do I know this? Well, reading about Forester led me to read about another great naval novelist, Patrick O’Brian, considered by some to be vastly underappreciated; and the critic Peter Wishart wrote that his underappreciation is “as baffling as the Inca inability to invent the wheel…” And it turns out Wishart is correct: there were no wheels in the Inca empire.)

Have a brilliant Monday, go rifle through some papers just in case a lost manuscript of Melville’s turns up—and for gosh sakes if you happen to invent something brilliant like the wheel, sign your name to it—and stay scrupulously honest to the data.