Dear Mr Cornwell,

I’m a keen reader of your books (Sharpe particularly) and also of C S Forester’s Hornblower novels. Since reading your introduction to recent editions of ‘Hornblower and the Atropos’ it has been a recurring idea of mine that the missing pages of ‘Hornblower and the crisis’ as written by your good self would be well worth reading. I can think of no other author who is so qualified to complete Forester’s last work and I hope that you might consider it for a possible future project.

With best wishes and thanks for a great many happy hours following Richard Sharpe on his adventures,

David Roskelly