Dead Man’s Rock is divided into two books of eleven chapters each. Book I is very complex, Book II less so. Chapter I and the opening of Chapter II from Book I both tell of the misfortunes of Ezekiel Trenoweth at Lantrig and his departure for Bombay aboard the ‘Golden Wave’. The details of his departure, however, do not appear until the beginning of Chapter VIII. The rest of the chapter deals with Ezekiel’s return to Lantrig aboard the ‘Belle Fortune’ although we have to wait until the end of Chapter VI to learn the details of his death following the grounding of the ‘Belle Fortune’ below Dead Man’s Rock. Only then do we realise that the knifing of a seaman, described in Chapter IV, actually relates to Ezekiel.
Even more remarkably, the information given about Amos Trenoweth in Chapter I only becomes meaningful following information delivered in Book II, Chapter X, the penultimate chapter of the novel.
There is little doubt that Q was not a writer who let the plot unfold as he went along, using characters with a life of their own, but planned the whole work meticulously before commencing to write. This enabled him to put a novel down and take it up without difficulty.
Excluding ‘flashbacks’ and retrospective information, Book I relates material from February 1848 to October 1849, while Book II relates material from December 1862 to December 1863. However the root of the story lies in incidents which took place fifty years before. It hardly needs to be said, that this places an unusual demand on the reader.