George Burgess

George Burgess was a Swindon-based writer of indifferent ability whose primary claim to fame was as the putative biographer of Archimedes and Pythagoras Vavasor. However, he died before the project was complete and the current whereabouts of the unfinished manuscript are uncertain.

In actual fact, the manuscript was acquired by Tom Winscombe, along with the Vavasor Papers, when Winscombe picked up the briefcase left by Burgess on a train shortly before his death. Winscombe subsequently handed the manuscript over to Burgess's agent, Diana Cheeseman, in return for information about Burgess. The briefcase itself was destroyed, possibly along with the Vavasor Papers, in the explosion that concluded Tom Winscombe's successful bid to free Dorothy Chan from the Gretzky gang.

Early Career

Burgess first became known as the caption writer for Farm Girls Illustrated, possibly the only top shelf magazine that also offered in-depth advice as to what to do with a bent crankshaft on a Massey 35^{[citation needed]}. From there, he progressed to feature writing, following which he was given the job of providing a more contemporary translation of The Harmonious Bower of the Nawab of Ouenq, a legendary and deeply problematic work of early Victorian pornography.

The Wilderness Years

The sequence of lawsuits that followed publication of Burgess's translation ensured that he remained virtually unemployable for several years after this, although he was eventually saved by the intervention of "Chicken Jim" Feltch, a pig farmer from Westonzoyland in Somerset. It turned out that Feltch had fond memories of Burgess's work in Farm Girls Illustrated, and was looking for a vehicle in which to invest the funds from the sale of his lower field. As it happened, Burgess had been toying with a particular long-cherished project but had all but given up any hope of implementing it.

Shroud of Ecstasy

Burgess's breakthrough book was a work of non-fiction, Shroud of Ecstasy. In this heavily-researched yet highly controversial book, he explored the new and unusual theory that the Turin Shroud was in fact the sheet from a bed in which Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene had consummated their passion. The image of a man's face had subsequently appeared on the sheet via a mechanism that Burgess christened orgasmic imprinting.

Burgess's publishers, a small semi-religious press called Heaven Helpers, received multiple death threats as a result, as did Burgess himself, but to their credit they stood firm. In fact, they had to, precisely because of the state of their credit, given that they had pinned everything on Shroud of Ecstasy. In the end, this turned out to be a wise decision, as there is nothing more that the world of publishing loves than a controversy, and the book was ultimately a minor commercial success. Despite, this, however, Burgess was shaken by the experience and vowed never to have anything to do with the world of publishing ever again.

The Truth About the Vavasors

Burgess was persuaded out of retirement by the prospect of writing the official biography of the Vavasor twins, Archie and Pye. Terms were agreed with Isaac Vavasor, the twins' younger brother and a publisher was eventually found in the shape of the conspiracist imprint Head Wind, run by the formidable Hilary van Beek. Burgess was granted full access to the Vavasor papers, including the Marginalia, and set to work. However, it seems that after he delivered the finished manuscript to Isaac Vavasor for final approval, Vavasor got cold feet and pulled the plug on the whole enterprise^{[citation needed]}. This whole episode has raised many questions among the Vavasorologist community, such as why Burgess was hired in the first place, and what he found in the papers, and it is unlikely that the truth of what really happened will ever come out.

In fact, the reason why the Vavasor estate hired Burgess was somewhat complex. There had been a constant stream of books published on the Vavasor twins, by people such as Margot Evercreech and Dinsdale Mazloumian, based on limited access to the Vavasor papers. The resulting speculation had caused little damage to the twins' reputation, because none of them - so far - had succeeded in disclosing the real secret at the heart of the story. However, it was only a matter of time before someone eventually uncovered the truth, so Isaac Vavasor decided to find someone completely incompetent, give them full access to the twins' papers, and hope that the resulting officially-endorsed biography would put paid to all the speculation.

Burgess's name came into the frame because the expert that he had consulted on the Turin Shroud, Reverend Colin Fuchs, had a sister called Cressida, who was married to the financier Rufus Fairbanks, for whom Archie and Pye had both worked at one time, assisting him with complex schemes to launder money from his joint ventures with the Belarusian mafia. Cressida had incidentally had an affair with each of the twins in turn, which was how Archie had ended up killing Pye. Ironically, this mess was, of course, the very truth that the Vavasor Estate were trying to hide. It was also how a copy of Shroud of Ecstasy had ended up in Archie's - and hence Isaac's - possession.

In the event, Burgess did indeed misconstrue everything he had been given by Isaac Vavasor, but the particular tangent he chose to follow involved a completely wild and massively offensive theory of his own, that Archie and Pye had in fact been lovers. This was more than Isaac could stomach, and the project was abandoned.

Death

Burgess's demise was unusual in that he was stabbed through the neck with a mathematician's compass.

He was in fact murdered by Rufus Fairbanks during a botched attempt to steal the Vavasor papers.

List of Known Works

As translator

• The Harmonious Bower of the Nawab of Ouenq (Sharp/Practice, 2003)

As author

• Farm Girls Illustrated Annual Compendium, vols 116-119 (Rural Health Press, 1994-7)
• Shroud of Ecstasy (Heaven Helpers, 2015)
• The Truth About the Vavasors (Head Wind, unfinished)

Representation

The estate of George Burgess is - reluctantly - represented by Diana Cheeseman at the London agency Cheeseman, Hollyfoot and Finch.