7: The Theme of The Great Detective at the Crucible of Life

This seventh post addresses the writing of Book 2 of the “Holmes Behind the Veil” series from MX—The Great Detective at The Dawn of Time—which will be available September 19. Book 1, Sherlock Holmes on the Roof of the World, is already available, and Book 3, The Sussex Beekeeper at the Dawn of Time, will be available on November 20 from online bookstores and marketplaces everywhere, including Amazon USA, Barnes and Noble, and Amazon UK. 

As far back as I can remember, I’ve always been enchanted by lost cities, giant secret projects and the like.   

Though it may seem preposterous to lose a city, if you were to measure time in millennia or centuries rather than in mere years, the loss of whole cities, you would notice, becomes almost commonplace. The list of those eventually found is long and illustrious—Troy, Ubar, Palenque, Angkor, Ur, Pompeii, on every continent except Antarctica, and even that last holdout began making headlines in 2016.

My interest in the idea of lost cities originates in a comic book, Dell’s Walt Disney’s Uncle Scrooge # 7 (1954), which is a tale by Walt Disney storyteller and illustrator Carl Barks describing Uncle Scrooge McDuck and his nephews, Donald Duck and Huey, Dewey, and Louie, discovering the Seven Cities of Cibola in the American Southwest. Many more lost cities and civilizations, both real and legendary, were serendipitously unearthed by Mr. Barks  through the 1950s and 60s. Two decades later, I encountered H. Rider Haggard (see Post No. 1), whose oeuvre boasts a dozen or so important examples of this genre (with three of four considered its progenitors). From these fonts eventually emerged my own "lost race" pastiche novel, Book 2 of “Holmes Behind the Veil,” The Great Detective at the Crucible of Life, at the center of which Allan Quatermain stumbles upon a lost city in the middle of one of the three or four most God forsaken spots on Earth—Ethiopia’s hellish Afar Desert.

It was in 1988 when I started writing the novel. I sent the completed manuscript to the original publisher in 2002. Doing the math; 14 years. It was actually published in 2005. I never took a hiatus from it. The book was written slowly because I have a one-track mind and my career and my family came first. But whenever I had both the time and the energy at the same time, and I knew the mortgage had been paid, I would work on the book, usually in my home office/library or at the dining room table, very often at 3:00 in the morning. During those 14 years I made a multitude of conscious, very deliberate decisions that may or may not be noticed by readers.

Initially, of course, I had an idea. That idea was simply to produce a sequel to my first short novel titled Sherlock Holmes on the Roof of the World, which was discussed in my previous

post, and which brought together Holmes with Horace Holly and Leo Vincey, two characters integral to the Ayesha series of H. Rider Haggard.  

In 1978, Judy-Lynn and Lester DelRey,

the editors/publishers of the DelRey

sf/fantasy imprint of Ballantine Books,

released all four Ayesha novels in a

matched set of mass-market paperbacks.

At the very beginning, I simply thought it would be fun to have Holmes meet Rider Haggard’s other fictional icon, Allan Quatermain, who was the hero of King Solomon’s Mines and 17 more novels and stories. I began right away trying to concoct a situation and story that brought together Holmes and Quatermain. But real life kept intruding and it was difficult to focus. For one thing, I am no good at concocting plots for plot’s sakes. In that regard, story telling, per se, is not my forte. In essence, my writing must have an underlying purpose. In today’s parlance, I needed it to “make a difference.” For ten years I struggled with the idea, and as it gestated I wrote innumerable embryonic false starts that filled up folders, and the folders filled up boxes. I simply couldn't get a handle on the story!

Finally, eventually synchronicity helped guide my purpose (see Post 4, “Elfin Coincidence”).

The February 1998 issue of Vanity Fair magazine. I’ve circled the cover lines that interested me.

Somehow or another my life crossed paths with the February 1998 issue of Vanity Fair magazine. On the cover was blazoned the cover line “The Holiest Place on Earth”, which attracted my attention. The article itself (actually a book excerpt) suggested that Mount Sinai was the holiest place on earth. Within a day of reading this magazine article, I was thumbing through a trade paperback titled When the World Screamed & Other Stories Volume II: Professor Challenger Adventures by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Chronicle Books, 1990) and my eye noticed a line that included the phrase “the holiest thing on this earth!”

This coincidence set me to wondering what the holiest place on earth might actually be (if it weren't Mount Sinai). In due course, I decided that my vote would be for the spot on earth where human beings came into being. At that time it was becoming increasingly clear through the discoveries of Raymond Dart, Robert Bloom, the Leakey family, Donald Johanson, and many others that humankind’s progenitor Australopithecus had come into being up and down the 3,500-mile length of the Great Rift Valley of East Africa perhaps, in round numbers, three million years ago. Thus I concluded that the vast Great Rift Valley of East Africa was the “holiest place on earth,” and I thought it would be worthwhile to use that notion as the basis of the story that brought Holmes and Quatermain together. Once I had a meaningful purpose (as opposed to some random plot device) I was able to organize my previous drafts and write new material.

Two views of the 3,500-mile-long Great Rift Valley of eastern Africa. The valley has been forming for millions of years. Its climate, fertility, and geology were consistently favorable for at least 14 million years to allow the development of Ramapithecus, Ardipithecus, Australopithecus, Homo hablis, Homo erectus/ergaster, Homo sapiens, and Homo sapiens sapiens. Especially important were a series of perpetual lakes, like a string of pearls, that formed up and down the rift, which were conducive to long-term evolution. The rift was and is coming into being due to, in terms of continental drift, the Nubian African continental plate shifting in relation to both the Arabian Plate and the Somali African Plate. These graphics are from (left) historyofgeology.fieldofscience.com and (right) geology.com
Special photo juxtapositions by Thomas Kent Miller; copyright © 2016-2017 by Thomas Kent Miller.

But the Great Rift Valley, as I said, is 3,500 miles north to south, so I needed to narrow down the location for my story. I chose the Danakil Desert of Ethiopia for two reasons. First, journalist Walter Sullivan in his opus about continental drift Continents in Motion had described that region as being earthquake- and volcano-ridden, and one of the hottest, most horrible places on earth.  And well … once, when I was a geology major, I’d done much research on the Atacama Desert in western Chile, which was sometimes used by NASA as an analog for the planet Mars because the Atacama was the driest spot on earth. Being just east of the towering Andes mountain range, the Atacama was also earthquake- and volcano-ridden, one of the hottest, most horrible places on earth, and I still had boxes of that Atacama Desert research 20 years later. I figured I could use the research about the Atacama to help fill in the blanks about the Danakil.

Donald Johanson and his colleagues unearthed  "Lucy" in 1974; it was the first Australopithecus

fossil to be identified. Special photo juxtapositions by Thomas Kent Miller; copyright © 2016-2017 by Thomas Kent Miller.

Second, it was in the Afar desert region of Ethiopia that Donald Johanson and his colleagues had unearthed "Lucy," the Australopithecus fossil, the first paleo-anthropological fossil that clearly showed that the predecessors of humankind walked straight and fully erect on their some two feet millions of years before Homo sapiens.

Now that I had a firm grasp on the theme or underlying purpose of the book, I needed a title. Since this new book was a sequel to Sherlock Holmes on the Roof of the World; Or, The Adventure of the Wayfaring God, the title would need to be structured in the same manner. Therefore, it was a "no-brainer" that the main title would have to be “Sherlock Holmes” plus “a preposition” plus “a geographical location.” Well, at some point I had thought of and grew fond of "The Crucible of Life" as a metaphor for the Great Rift Valley. But an important sub-theme of the book was a classical quest for the Holy Grail, and of course, the Grail is traditionally conceived of as a cup or dish or bowl that held Christ’s lifeblood and was therefore miraculous. It seemed to me that it wasn’t too big of a jump to think of the Grail as a sort of crucible. After all, in Parzival, Wolfram von Eschenbach described the Grail as a platter.

So, in my mind the Crucible of Life referred to the Great Rift Valley, which was equivalent to the Holy Grail.

Yet, there was more afoot. A writer as important as Haggard in my estimation is the Victorian/Edwardian Welsh mystic Arthur Machen, one of whose works is The Great Return, a novel depicting the Holy Grail returning to modern Wales, and the Grail is portrayed in that story as a “rose of fire.”:

“A red light, a burning spark seen far away in the darkness, taken at the first moment of seeing for a signal . . . and then, as if in an incredible point of time, it swelled into a vast rose of fire that filled all the sea and all the sky and possessed the land. “
—Arthur Machen in The Great Return

The Great Return was published by The Faith Press in 1815. Image from "A Guide to Supernatural Fiction." (supernaturalfiction.co.uk, edited by R.B. Russell)

Thus the subtitle of my new book became “or the Adventure of the Rose of Fire”, an homage to Arthur Machen and his novel.

The whole title therefore, when deconstructed, would mean Sherlock Holmes at the Crucible of Life, or the Great Rift Valley, or the Holy Grail; The Adventure of the Rose of Fire, aka, the Holy Grail.

Speaking of homages, as I wrote the book, over those 14 years, I continually added homages to things that I love, to the degree that it was possible that the book risked being perceived as spoofing the whole Sherlockian pastiche genre. But this decision was made neither quickly nor lightly, as Crucible gestated from 1988 to 2002. In the end, I decided that it wasn't bad if some readers thought of the book as a gentle parody—as long as they also understood the serious nature of the book.

All that said, I decided to underscore my efforts of homage by starting on the very first page—the title page. When I realized that I was not only tipping my hat to Doyle and Haggard and Machen, but also to that whole magical period of 19th Century romance publishing, I decided to make the title page extra special.

To be continued in Post 8. 

The Great Detective at the Crucible of Life is the second book of the "Holmes Behind the Veil" trilogy and will be available September 19 from online bookstores and marketplaces everywhere, including Amazon USA,  Barnes and Noble, and Amazon UK.

Formal Notice: All images, quotations, and video/audio clips used in this blog and in its individual posts are used either with permissions from the copyright holders or through exercise of the doctrine of Fair Use as described in U.S. copyright law, or are in the public domain. If any true copyright holder (whether person[s] or organization) wishes an image or quotation or clip to be removed from this blog and/or its individual posts, please send a note with a clear request and explanation to eely84232@mypacks.net and your request will be gladly complied with as quickly as practical.

6: On Sherlock Holmes on the Roof of the World

New readers of this blog should begin with the first post—"Introducing Miller's Five Prin-ciples of Pastiche"—and work their way up to read an overview of the writing of the "Holmes Behind the Veil" trilogy series.

Sherlock Holmes on the Roof of the World is the first book of the "Holmes Behind the Veil" trilogy and is now available from online bookstores and marketplaces everywhere, including Amazon USA, Barnes and Noble, and Amazon UK. An excellent Audible Audio Book version (from a different publisher with a different cover and modified title) is also available at Amazon sites worldwide and all other normal outlets.

While, of course, it is a Sherlock Holmes pastiche novel (or novella), it is also a sequel to H. Rider Haggard's She: An Adventure. In fact, the adventure it records precedes the action covered in the only heretofore known sequel, Ayesha: The Return of She. Thus, it tells of events that occurred between the originally published adventures.

Its narrator is not Dr. Watson and the principal characters never have any inkling that they are having dealings with the famous great detective.

The manner by which this book came into being is as follows:

First off, the date was September 10, 1983. I had graduated from university the year before and I was working as an editor/proofreader for a nearby textbook publisher. I’d already had a great fondness for Sherlock Holmes for at least a decade, so much so that I named my first gray-tabby kitten Doyle. When Jayne and I first met, it was Doyle's name that proved to be the perfect ice-breaker—“Oh, is your cat named after Arthur Conan or Doyle Drive?”

Sherlock was never far from my mind, and this night in 1983 I was remembering that a few years before an acquaintance and I had been talking while working at the college newspaper, and our discussion turned toward the notion that Jesus is said, in some quarters, to have traveled to India with his brother Thomas after his seeming death on the cross. This thought automatically led me to think of Nicholas Meyers’ ground-breaking novel The Seven-Percent Solution and I realized that the Canon recognizes that Holmes traveled to Tibet in the guise a Norwegian named Sigerson during his Great Hiatus. So I asked myself the natural question under those circumstances: “Wouldn’t it be interesting if Holmes discovered in Tibet that Jesus had in fact visited there?” 

But then I realized that such a tale could not be set down by Watson, as Watson was under the impression his friend was dead. Who then? Well, by that point in my life I was also long under the strong influence of adventure novelist H. Rider Haggard, and I remembered that at the end of his epic novel She: An Adventure, he sent his two heroes, Horace Holly and Leo Vincey, off to Central Asia to search for the reborn Ayesha. 

“I traveled for two years in Tibet . . . and amused myself by visiting Lhasa, and spending some days with the head Lama.”—Sherlock Holmes in “The Adventure of the Empty House”

  

“We are . . . going away again, this time to Central Asia, where, if anywhere upon this Earth, wisdom is to be found.”—L. Horace Holly in She

It was merely a matter of figuring out a way for them to meet. That was about as far as this idea went. Bringing together all these threads took only a moment in time, and I probably wrote myself a note so as to not forget the idea. Later that night my wife and I retired and went to sleep.

I had a vivid dream, it was as follows: I am

standing on a sidewalk. A big white limousine pulls up in front of me, and James Michener, the best-selling author of Tales of the South Pacific and Hawaii, gets out of the car and shakes my hand, saying “Tom, let me give you this advice: Whatever else you do with it, finish your novel.” Upon awakening, this impressed me so much that I found a small photo of Michener, typed his dream advice as a small caption, glued it together, and framed it as a reminder that I had no choice but to write the novel that I had conceived the night before. Here is a scan of that very framed picture; it’s yellowed over these 33 years, but it's still prominent on my bookshelf within sight as I type this.

Shortly afterward, I needed to decide if the narrator would be Horace or Leo. Thus I began to write the book with Horace relating the events, mainly because he was by far the more literate of the two and besides he matched Watson’s age more closely than Leo. Sometime after I had finished the first couple of chapters, I had a dental appointment. My dentist was in downtown San Francisco, and his office was high in an office building that presented a great view of the San Francisco Bay. The next day, my supervisor came to work after lunch and arbitrarily mentioned that she’d been to the dentist and, also arbitrarily, described the view from the dentist chair. Well, she was describing the exact view seen from my dentist’s chair. Her dentist was in fact my dentist…and his first name was Leo. This coincidence struck me hard. Here I was trying to choose between Horace and Leo when fate stepped in and pressed hard on me the name “Leo”. I took this very seriously and rewrote the first couple of chapters, and it turned out that doing so opened up new possibilities. 
.

Our lives were very busy back then, full of major life events, and it took me four years to write what turned out to be a fairly slim book, a novella rather than a novel. Sometime during that period—probably later than earlier—another married couple and my wife and I took a train up the coast of California for the specific purposes of enjoying a train ride and viewing the rugged coastline. It had been years since any of us had ridden a train. Naturally I brought writing materials, and there came a time when I was hard at work composing on a yellow legal pad the numbered sentences that would comprise “The Gospel of Issa”. I was concentrating and not aware of my surroundings, when someone jostled my elbow and said “Excuse me.” I looked up…right into the face of Sherlock Holmes!  It turned out that that particular train on which we were riding was a “Murder Mystery Train” upon which the local literary mystery club or clubs staged a mystery, and it was the job of its members to find planted “clues” and eventually the “murderer.” At these events, many club members often dressed as their favorite literary detectives to amp up the fun. Well, you can easily imagine how a coincidence of this kind affected me (see "The Fourth Principle—Elfin Coincidence" in this blog).

Here are two examples of Murder Mystery Dinner Train ads

(found via a Google search).

Because I was anxious to finish the book once and for all and also to maintain control over it, I published the book myself as Rosemill House publishers. I’d been involved in the publishing field for a decade by then and knew my way around typesetting, design, layout, wax, printers and their antics, and so forth, and felt I could do the job well myself, and in fact I did, successfully bringing it out at Christmas time 1987, exactly 100 years after Sherlock Holmes came into existence in A Study in Scarlet in Beeton's Christmas Annual magazine 1887. The First Edition of Sherlock Holmes on the Roof of the World sold for $4.95 and is a nice little trade paperback that I’m very proud of. 

The first 1987 edition.

However, I found that distribution wasn't (and still isn’t) my forté. When in due course, the respected academic/library press, Borgo Press of San Bernardino, California, contacted me and asked if they could distribute the book to libraries with library casing, i.e., hardcover, I was delighted. In fact, it sold well enough that Borgo deemed it a “best-seller.” In subsequent years, the owners of Borgo closed shop, and I did not have the energy to sell the book except by onesies and twosies, and eventually Roof became a valuable collectors’ item. 

Twenty years later, in 2007, Wildside Press, which had absorbed Borgo Press circa 2002, brought out its own printing of Roof, but both versions have long been out of print, while a beautifully recorded Audible book from Wildside is still available.

NEXT:  Post # 7 begins a discussion of Book 2 of the "Holmes Behind the Veil" series, The Great Detective at the Crucible of Life. This is the first of my books that push expectations for Holmes pastiches far far beyond most readers' anticipations. The discussions of my Five Principles of Pastiche below lead up to this point in this blog, and each principle will be explained further with illustrations from Book 2,
The Great Detective at the Crucible of Life.


Sherlock Holmes on the Roof of the World (Book 1 of the "Holmes Behind the Veil" series from MX publishers is available now from Amazon USA,  Barnes and Noble, and Amazon UK and
online bookstores and marketplaces everywhere. An excellent Audible Audio Book version (from a different publisher with a different cover and modified title) is also available at Amazon sites worldwide and all other normal outlets.
.

Formal Notice: All images, quotations, and video/audio clips used in this blog and in its individual posts are used either with permissions from the copyright holders or through exercise of the doctrine of Fair Use as described in U.S. copyright law, or are in the public domain. If any true copyright holder (whether person[s] or organization) wishes an image or quotation or clip to be removed from this blog and/or its individual posts, please send a note with a clear request and explanation to eely84232@mypacks.net and your request will be gladly complied with as quickly as practical.