Flann O'Brian

"The Third Policeman" er en roman av den irske forfatteren Brian O'Nolan, som blant annet skrev under psevdonymet Flann O'Brien. Den ble skrevet i 1939-40, men han fikk ikke gitt den ut, så han sa i stedet at han hadde mistet manuskriptet. Boka kom første gang ut i 1967.
"The Third Policeman has a peculiar, and unfortunate, publication history. In January 1940, Brian O'Nolan (Flann O'Brien) submitted the manuscript to the publishers of his first novel, At Swim-Two-Birds (1939). At Swim was a critical success, but had failed commercially and Longman's were unhappy with the new novel, advising that: “he should become less fantastic and in this new novel he is more so”. More rejections followed. O'Nolan wrote despondently to William Saroyan in September 1940 that: “I got so sick looking at a ragged […] copy of that story I wrote about the policeman that I flew into a frenzy (the Sweeny kind), put it into a box with 2 short stories and sent the whole lot across the sea to Matson & Duggan”. His American agents subsequently misplaced their copy of the manuscript, and O'Nolan began to spread the story that it had been lost entirely. (One version of this tale had the sheets blowing out of the back of his car on a drive through Donegal.) Following his failure to publish The Third Policeman, only his second novel, O'Nolan did not attempt to publish another novel in English for twenty-one years. He pillaged the unpublished manuscript for comic episodes for his fifth novel, The Dalkey Archive (1964), but he never again attempted to have The Third Policeman published. The novel appeared posthumously in 1967 to instant critical acclaim.
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