Post No. 1—Genesis & Cover

The Writing of One Novel
 

The Great Detective at the Crucible of Life;
Or, The Adventure of the Rose of Fire

Copyright © 2012 by Thos. Kent Miller

All rights reserved

  [Note: These posts are sequential, each building on the previous.]

From "The Man With a Twisted Lip"

—Sidney Paget (1891)

From Maiwa's Revenge

—Thure de Thulstrup (1888)

I wrote a 240-page book called The Great Detective at the Crucible of Life; Or, The Adventure of the Rose of Fire. It was my second novel and was published in 2005 by Wildside Press. It has sold about 500 copies in paperback and hardcover, and a Kindle ebook version was downloaded for free well over 1,000 times in 2013. At this point (Feb. 2014) it is no longer available as a Kindle ebook, but it IS available as a PDF ebook on Google Plays [ https://play.google.com/store/books/details/Thos_Kent_Miller_The_Great_Detective_at_the_Crucib?id=d_eiC5PAH6cC&hl=en }  .)

During a period of 17 years, I wrote the book slowly and carefully and made a multitude of conscious, very deliberate decisions that may or may not have been noticed by readers. The purpose of this blog is to go through my decision-making processes item by item in the hope that such a detailed account of the making of one book may be of interest to someone. I will begin literally at the beginning and work through the novel page by page.

Here, then, is my blow-by-blow account of the thinking that went into the writing and creation of The Great Detective at the Crucible of Life; Or, The Adventure of the Rose of Fire. http://www.amazon.com/The-Great-Detective-Crucible-Life/dp/0809500507

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; Or, The Adventure of the Wayfaring God. ROOF, as I will call it for short when I need to mention it, came to mind in September 1983. That was nine years after the publication of Nicholas Meyer’s The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, the book that immediately sparked that vast and unending torrent of Sherlock Holmes pastiches that continues unabated to this day.

A Bit of Background

The creation and history of ROOF is a long one and is a totally separate story, and someday I should devote a blog post to it, as well. For now, its principal relationship to the following discussion is merely that it preceded CRUCIBLE, and, for now, I need only relate a bit of back story and mention that Nicholas Meyer did three things in The Seven-Per-Cent Solution that proved hugely influential, as evidenced by the many hundreds of Holmes pastiches since:

First, his conceit, way back in 1974, was to offer up a book that was presumably a real memoir written by the real John H. Watson, M.D., and that he, Meyers, was only its editor. To "perpetrate" this extraordinary "deception", Meyer and his publisher "colluded" to the degree that the cover and title page of the novel went so far as to include these words: "Being a Reprint from the Reminiscences of John H. Watson, M.D. as edited by Nicholas Meyer".

Second, to underscore that pseudo-reality, Meyers wrote a detailed Preface (or framing device) that explained how the memoir happened to be found and how Meyers happened to publish it.

Third, and probably most importantly, in that book, he had Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson cross paths with a true-life historical person—Sigmund Freud. Thereafter, in pastiche after pastiche, the Great Detective has adventures with countless other contemporaneous real people of renown, such as Theodore Roosevelt, Lenin, and Jack the Ripper . . . and very quickly he began to mix it up with famous fictional characters, as well, also proximal to his era, such as Dracula, Fu Manchu, and H.G. Wells' Martians.

Being enamored of this new genre, I decided to write one myself, and it occurred to me that it would be interesting to have Holmes meet Jesus. The where of the encounter was no problem at all as Doyle himself had Holmes explain that he’d visited Lhasa during his Great Hiatus, and I was aware of an ancient tradition that suggested Jesus had traveled to Tibet. Since Watson could not tell the story as he ordinarily would have, I needed to find a substitute narrator, and then I remembered that H. Rider Haggard had sent his heroes of SHE, Horace Holly and Leo Vincey, off to central Asia around the same time. Thus, I had Leo Vincey do Watson’s job, and the rest fell into place. ROOF was published at Christmastime 1987, exactly 100 years after Holmes’ first adventure, A Study in Scarlet, was published.

The Genesis of The Great Detective at the Crucible of Life

That was the situation when the germ of what became The Great Detective at the Crucible of Lifeoccurred to me. At the very beginning, I simply thought it would be fun to have Holmes meet Rider Haggard’s otherfictional icon, Allan Quatermain, who was the hero of King Solomon’s Mines and 17 more novels and stories. I began right away to concoct a situation and story that brought together Holmes and Quatermain. But real life kept intruding and it was difficult to focus. For ten years I struggled with the idea, but 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!

Eventually synchronicity helped guide my purpose.

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 (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 worth while 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.

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, Actually, that was fairly easy because in the early 70s I had gotten a bee in my bonnet to write some stories about the Atacama Desert in West Chile. This was because I'd read a one-inch article buried in the newspaper that reported that a town in Chile had melted in the first rainstorm for four centuries. This fascinated me, and I wound up doing a lot of research on the Atacama. This resulted in at least three stories, one of which I submitted (unsuccessfully) to a magazine contest. I still had boxes of that Atacama research 20 years later when I realized that the Danakil Desert in the Afar region of Ethiopia (at the northern end of the Great Rift Valley) was in many ways an analog to the Atacama Desert and that, even better, it was there that Donald Johanson and his colleagues had unearthed "Lucy," the Australopithecus fossil that clearly showed that the predecessors of humankind walked straight and fully erect on their two feet millions of years before Homo sapiens—a finding that dispelled the long assumed image of early hominids moving like chimps using their arms and knuckles most of the time for support (as Stanley Kubrick chose to portray the ape-like creatures in the "Dawn of Man" sequence of 2001: A Space Odyssey).

Around this time, I knew I needed to settle on a title.

The Title

It was clear that 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, somewhere along all this thinking and research, I had thought of and grew fond of "The Crucible of Life" as a metaphor for the Great Rift Valley. But the other equally important 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, thus “Crucible of Life” alsomeant the Holy Grail. In other words, the title in my mind had two meanings.

The Subtitle

The subtitle of the book is Or, The Adventure of the Rose of Fire. Of course, first off, this is intended, just as Or, The Adventure of the Wayfaring God had been, to honor Conan Doyle’s device of naming most of his Holmes stories “The Adventure of the [ . . . ]”. Furthermore, one of my favorite stories by another of my favorite authors—Arthur Machen—is The Great Return, which is a depiction of the Holy Grail returning to modern Wales, and the Grail is portrayed in that story as a “rose of fire.” Thus the subtitle is also a reference to the Holy Grail. [Please note that Post No. 3 will be a continuation of this subtitle discussion and will examine Arthur Machen's story and "rose of fire" in some detail.]

In other words, the full title of my book was to have been Sherlock Holmes at the Crucible of Life; Or, The Adventure of the Rose of Fire—and was intended to invoke:

Sherlock Holmes + The Great Rift Valley of East Africa and/or the Holy Grail + The Holy Grail

However, because I was unclear about the legalities of using the name “Sherlock Holmes” at that moment in time, my Wildside Press publisher and I compromised with “The Great Detective” and the book became The Great Detective at the Crucible of Life; Or, The Adventure of the Rose of Fire.

My Byline

Now comes my byline, which is “Thos. Kent Miller”.

My given name is Thomas Kent Miller, but in the real world that boils down to “Tom Miller, ” which is much too common for my tastes! In fact, there already is at least one successful writer named Tom Miller ( a travel writer). So, as far back as 1985, I chose to author my first Sherlock Holmes/H. Rider Haggard novel using the abbreviation "Thos." because it felt distinctive and seemed more in keeping with the Victorian era, which was the era I was writing about. Abbreviating names was apparently pretty common in centuries past—Robt. for Robert and Jos. for Joseph, Jn. for John, Geo. for George, and so forth. This was due to the relative rarity of paper in those days and the consequent necessity of cramming as many names as possible onto documents such as shipping manifests and parish registers. Admittedly, in this day and age, abbreviating names is rare, which from my point of view is just fine as it makes Thos. all the more distinctive!

The Cover
Back in 1987, I asked a graphic designer named Linda Villareal to create a cover for ROOF. I suggested she use a photograph of the great Potala Palace in Lhasa, Tibet (where the story unfolded) for inspiration and I also indicated that I was looking for an older feel, as though it was an old lost book with yellowed pages. Linda was a genius in my estimation and provided this cover, using her own etching on black board, and this is how it was published.

Naturally, when I was thinking of a cover for CRUCIBLE, I imagined something similar. Thus I approached another gifted graphic designer Sheila Marie Comerford around 2004 and explained what I was looking for. This was after the book had been completed and after Wildside Press offered to publish it, and the story, characters, and plot were all finalized. This time, I had another spiritual image in mind—an image with two parts. The illustration would show a cleft in a mountainside, a dim narrow gorge that formed the entrance to a hidden valley (rather as Al Siq is the entry to the ancient city of Petra in southern Jordan). But rather than glimpsing the famous El Khasne, the ancient treasury house carved into the red sandstone cliff opposite the Siq, I wanted CRUCIBLE's cover drawing to unveil an elaborate fountain portraying The Blessed Virgin Mary, the Mother of Jesus, holding a vase in her hands from which poured Holy Water into a pool.

The reasons for this particular image are twofold. (1) I have a particular fondness for clefts in cliffs that open into vast caverns or valleys filled with wonder beyond imagining. And (2) candidly, I feel very close to Mary and have for decades. Her undeniable existence inspires my life (which, again, deserves a separate blog post down the line) and I wanted to not only feature her in the story, but also show my profound respect by making her central to the cover. Sheila did the marvelous drawing and design and produced the final cover art that graces the book. You can probably see the family resemblance between the two covers.

With this cover it sold 184 copies from February to June 2005 and 156 during the next earnings period.  In the six years since, the book has sold only in "onesies and twosies", and, of course, those first copies have lately been turning up in droves in digital used bookstores and other aftermarkets.

Thus I begin my examination of the writing and development of my second novel. Blogs No. 2 and 3 will discuss in detail the Title Page.

Comments are appreciated; thank you!