Charles, the Earl Spencer, announced his book, Swan Song, last month. Swan Song is about his sister, Lady Diana Spencer/Princess Diana. It is the first time the Earl Spencer has ever addressed Diana’s life and death in writing. Swan Song is due for release next week. While the British papers have been 99% consumed by the Sussexes’ UK return, there’s been this low-level hum in the background, because everyone knows that Swan Song is going to drop like a bomb. So if you work for a British tabloid and you’re in desperate need of an advanced copy of Swan Song, what would you do? The same thing you did with Prince Harry’s Spare and Omid Scobie’s Endgame.

Copies of Earl Spencer’s sensational book about Princess Diana have been stolen from a lorry – just before its exclusive serialisation in the Daily Mail. The memoir – Swan Song: Diana, My Sister – includes revelations about Diana’s deeply unhappy marriage with the then Prince of Wales. It also describes the crisis that engulfed the Royal Family after her death in a car crash almost 30 years ago.

Last night a publishing insider said: ‘Earl Spencer has kept his silence for nearly 30 years and what he has to say about the King’s reaction when Diana died is utterly devastating.’

But, in an astonishing development, the Mail can reveal that a truck packed with thousands of copies of the book was broken into after it was parked overnight in a lay-by in the Netherlands earlier this week. Just four copies, which had been wrapped in black plastic to hide their contents, were stolen in what publishing sources believe could have been an audacious plot to steal the highly-anticipated book of the year before it hits the shelves.

Dutch police are investigating the mysterious break-in, with theories among industry insiders about who was responsible ranging from a gang of opportunistic thieves to a misguided, but highly informed, supporter of the Royal Family.

‘It’s extremely suspicious,’ one publishing source said last night. ‘Nothing like this has ever happened before. This is probably the biggest book of the year and the security surrounding it has been incredibly tight. Every possible precaution has been taken to prevent it from being leaked ahead of its serialisation. Therefore this unprecedented incident is being taken extremely seriously.’

Swan Song is due to be published worldwide next Tuesday, by Penguin Michael Joseph, a division of Penguin Random House, with the Mail publishing an exclusive serialisation before the memoir is available in bookshops. Described as an ‘historic’ and ‘extraordinarily moving’, the memoir is a deeply personal account of Earl Spencer’s relationship with his older sibling and of her failed marriage.

Buckingham Palace is understood to be braced for a string of shocking revelations that threaten to reopen the wounds of the former Prince and Princess of Wales’s highly acrimonious split and eventual divorce. Publication plans have, however, been thrown into chaos by the heist.

The Mail understands that a lorry left a printing plant in Central Europe on Monday on its way to a warehouse in the Netherlands before copies were distributed to Dutch bookshops. At some point that evening the driver parked in a lay-by deep in the Dutch countryside to sleep. At around 8am he found the lorry had been broken into but, mysteriously, only a handful of wrapped copies of Swan Song were missing.

Shocked Penguin bosses in London were only told about the break-in at 3.30pm yesterday.

[From The Daily Mail]

The Mail thinks they’re so slick, my god. “We just so happened to have people on the ground, with an exact description of how the books were stolen, how many books were stolen, how the books were packaged when they were stolen, it’s a real mystery!” It was also a huge mystery when Spanish bookstores magically sold copies of Spare several days before its release. The Endgame “mystery” was even wilder – the Dutch translation carried passages which Scobie had removed, and yet the British papers got advanced Dutch copies, and subsequently demanded that all of the Dutch copies get pulped. All of which to say, many British outlets will “mysteriously” have translated Swan Song excerpts to publish in a matter of days, if not hours. I feel bad for Charles Spencer, but he probably knew this was coming.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Cover Images.