The Secret Short Story Alan Turing Wrote About The Night That Ruined His Life

Unpublished Manuscript Sat in Cambridge Archive for 70 Years

Most people know Alan Turing as the mathematician who cracked Nazi codes and helped build modern computing. Far fewer know that in 1952 he was convicted under a law that criminalized homosexuality at the time, a conviction that upended his life. What almost nobody knows is that he responded by writing about the encounter behind it all, in a short story he never showed anyone.

A new paper by Sarah Dillon of the University of Cambridge, published in The Review of English Studies, gives that story its first real reading. Six handwritten pages survive in the King’s College Archive, known only as “Pryce’s Buoy.” Earlier biographers had quoted bits in passing; Dillon delivers the first full transcription and first attempt to read it as literature.

What emerges is a portrait of one of history’s sharpest minds doing something painfully human: turning lived experience into fiction. The story dramatizes Turing’s encounter with a young man in Manchester in late 1951, the meeting that led to his prosecution for a crime that no longer exists. The fragment stops well short of the arrest, breaking off mid-sentence as its characters sit down to lunch.

Turing Hinted at the Story in 1952 Letter

Turing hinted at the project before he wrote it. In an early 1952 letter to his friend Norman Routledge, he wrote: “I’ve now got myself into the kind of trouble that I have always considered quite a possibility for me, though I have usually rated it at about 10:1 against. I shall shortly be pleading guilty to a charge of sexual offences with a young man. The story of how it all came to be found out is a long and fascinating one, which I shall have to make into a short story one day, but haven’t time to tell you now.”

He kept his word. Turing cast himself as “Alec Pryce,” a homosexual scientist famous for a breakthrough called “Pryce’s buoy,” a stand-in for the real Turing machine that made him famous at 24. Opposite him is Ron Miller, a broke, unemployed young man who trades sex for money to get by.

Real signs of effort show up in the manuscript: crossed-out lines, edits, revisions. Running just over 1,000 words, it stops cold mid-sentence, which Dillon reads as a sign more pages once existed, not that Turing gave up. Nobody knows exactly when he wrote it; the likeliest window runs from mid-1952 to his 1954 death, and while Dillon guesses late 1952 or early 1953, she’s upfront it’s just a guess.

Two Men Sizing Each Other Up

One of the sharpest moves in the story, Dillon points out, is how Turing hops between his characters’ heads. Readers sit inside Alec’s mind as he works up the nerve to approach Ron, then a line drawn partway across the manuscript page cuts hard into Ron’s head, watching him size up this stranger and wonder if he’s worth the risk.

That’s a sophisticated trick for a manuscript nobody was meant to read. Dillon argues it wasn’t showing off: living inside both minds let Turing capture what each man stood to lose, since homosexuality and prostitution were illegal, and crossing class lines carried its own sting. One crossed-out line slipped into a voice that didn’t sound like Ron; Turing cut it for something truer.

The Angus Wilson Connection

Turing wasn’t working from nothing. Dillon traces the story to Angus Wilson’s 1952 novel “Hemlock and After,” by the most significant homosexual writer publishing in postwar Britain, a book remarkable for its candor about homosexuality, which Turing likely read soon after it came out. Here’s where it gets uncanny: a scene in the novel shows a working-class man named Ron sizing up a wealthier man on the street, clocking him walk past, sizing up his cheap clothes, offering a cigarette to break the ice. Turing’s story does the same thing, in the same order, down to the opening line: Wilson’s Ron asks, “Got a light?” Turing’s Ron asks, “Got a fag?” Dillon argues this goes well beyond inspiration. Turing lifted the sequence, the phrasing, even the trick of switching between two minds, using Wilson’s scene as a mold for his own, at a moment when almost nobody else wrote gay men as regular people instead of tragic stereotypes.

Turing wrote all this after his prosecution, during the hormone treatments forced on him as his only alternative to prison. Dillon sees it as an extension of an old habit: he’d long used books to make sense of himself, and after his arrest, extended that to writing. He started psychotherapy that fall, at a friend’s suggestion, not a court order, but the urge to fictionalize his ordeal predates therapy by months, tracing to the Routledge letter written before his trial.

Turing’s Fragmented Ending Leaves Questions Open

“Pryce’s Buoy” breaks off as Alec and Ron settle in at a restaurant, Ron savoring the novelty of somewhere respectable for once. Turing died in June 1954, at 41, and nobody knows if he ever finished it. A letter from the following year shows he was already sizing up another episode, involving a young Norwegian man, calling it something that “for sheer incident almost rivals the Arnold story.”

What’s left is a fragment. A short story by one of the century’s most brilliant men, written in private, as he tried to make sense of what had happened to him.

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Disclaimer: This article is based on a peer-reviewed academic paper and discusses the historical criminalization of homosexuality, along with sexual content described in a historical literary manuscript. It is intended for general audiences and does not constitute a comprehensive account of Alan Turing’s life or work.

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