It’s my belief that “The Ape-box Affair” was undertaken as a work of fiction, with certain recent incidents in the life of Langdon St. Ives being the inspiration. It’s apparently the work of a young writer. The Ebb Tide, however, which occurs at the time of the Phoenix Park murders (and so we can set the date absolutely — May 6, 1822, some seven years after the events chronicled in Homunculus) is something more like a history or a memoir. Owlesby is older now, not half so giddy. There are fewer apparent fabulations and shaggy-doggisms, and Owlesby has developed some admirable self-doubt and a penchant for philosophizing. That’s due, I’ll insist, to the increasing sobriety of age, and it’s altogether fitting that I was a young writer myself when I undertook to put “The Ape-box Affair” into publishable shape.
One interesting thing: there’s no indication anywhere concerning when, exactly, the stories were in fact written. I’ve merely been speculating. Owlesby might have written “The Ape-box Affair” in later years, perhaps when he was doddering into a second childhood, or — equally possibly — after he had taken to drink. I speculated when I first read the manuscript (speaking again of muses) that Owlesby had been heavily influenced by Stevenson, in particular by The Dynamiter and the stories in The New Arabian Nights, although when I checked copyright dates I discovered that those books weren’t published until the mid 1880s, and the events of “The Ape-box Affair” must have occurred prior to 1875, a decade earlier. All of my speculations, in other words, might be nonsense. Questions of origin are further muddled by the fact that in the original texts there are very few clues to reveal when the various events actually took place.
Truth (that slippery eel) exists, but time and tide have hidden it from us, and there’s no way to get at it now. If we’re to keep afloat, we’re left to balloons and an electric fan, and to the bubbles and cobweb of the imagination.
— Jim Blaylock