Kelly’s Directory for 1897 has Mrs. Fawcett as still owning the Teignmouth house in Barnpark Road, so it is not clear exactly which was her main abode.

At the same time, Douglas was living at Rutland Lodge in the Ilsham area of Torquay. He was listed as an author. In 1896, he married Miss M. B. V. Jackson.

At this time, he was working from home on his early science fiction novels. He published a book entitled Hartmann the Anarchist and subtitled The Doom of the Great City. (Edward Arnold 1893). Although today not deemed great literature by the standards of H. G. Wells or Jules Verne, it tells the story of an anarchist who bombs London in a series of great air raids – foretelling the Blitz of the2nd World War, and as such, predates Wells’s TheShape Of Things to Come by some forty years. He had foreseen and demonstrated the military importance of airpower a decade before the Wright brothers’ first faltering experiments. The illustrator, Fred Jane, found lasting fame as the founder of Jane’s Fighting Ships.

1st edition cover.

Shortly after, he published The Secret of the Desert, or How We Crossed Arabia in the “Antelope“, probably the first fictional account of an armoured fighting vehicle in the modern sense, 20 years before the first tanks appeared in the Great War.

His third adventure story, published by Arnold in 1894, was called Swallowed By An Earthquake, with notable illustrations by H. C. Seppings Wright. As the title suggests the characters find themselves in an underground world, an