The Word of a Gentleman his wife Nora are the focus of many chapters (and the book opens with a quotation from Oscar Wilde's "The Ballad of Reading Gaol"); these reflect Niesewand's detention by Desmond Lardner-Burke under P. K. van der Byl and Smith, and his subsequent deportation, leaving behind his wife of three years, Nonie Niesewand (née Fogarty). The Word of a Gentleman The Word of a Gentleman (1981) (later retitled "Undercut") was the third of five novels written by Peter Niesewand, the South African journalist who spent 73 days in solitary confinement for his coverage of Ian Smith's government in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe).
The Ballad of Reading Gaol of a steady income which he did not outlive, as he died less than four years after the Ballad first appeared. It has been suggested that Wilde was, to some degree, inspired by poem IX in A. E. Housman's "A Shropshire Lad" (1896), which alludes to the hanging of condemned prisoners: <poem>They hang us now in Shrewsbury jail: And trains all night groan on the rail Although there is no specific documentation to show Wilde's active revising after the appearance of the first edition, there were some slight changes made in the second edition, which was printed only two weeks