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.]
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| From "Allan and the Holy Flower" —Hookway Cowles |
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From
"Hound of the Baskervilles"
—Sidney Paget
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The Title Page, Part Two
In October 2002, after working on The Great Detective at the Crucible of Life; Or, The Adventure of the Rose of Fire for 14 years, I finally turned in a manuscript that I was happy with to my then new publisher. This is the title page that I submitted:
After working on the book for so long I had a clear vision of how the title page should appear when printed. Not only would the final published page include three authors (two of which didn't exist) and hark back to the turn-of-the-century publishing convention of including some of the authors' previous works (all of which I detailed in Post No. 2), I wanted to include yet another element that was sometimes used on title pages of that era—namely the inclusion of an epigraph of such a crucial nature that only the title page would do—a vital block of text smack on the title page to underscore its importance. The epigraph that I planned to include on the cover was:
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” ”
Here is an example of such a title page from H. Rider Haggard's SHE sequel: Ayesha: The Return of She, published in 1905, which I was emulating:
CRUCIBLE's epigraph comprises a few lines from the short novel The Great Return by Arthur Machen (1863-1947), the great Welsh author, whose significant output included, as H.P. Lovecraft put it ". . . some dozen tales long and short, in which the elements of hidden horror and brooding fright attain an almost incomparable substance and realistic acuteness." Indeed, Lovecraft counted three of Machen's stories among his all-time favorite weird tales.
Machen wrote The Great Return (http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/35611) during the real-life horrors of The Great War (or World War I) when he was a working newspaper reporter, and the story in fact appeared as a serial of seven installments in the London Evening News during October and November 1915. Over the years, much has been made of the fact that this and some fourteen or fifteen other stories written in the same manner may have confused some of the newspaper's readers, perhaps believing them to be real reports. (See my paper on Machen's pseudo-journalism in Faunus 22, The Journal of The Friends of Arthur Machen, Autumn 2011. Visit the FoAM at (http://www.arthurmachen.org.uk/).
How " . . . the Rose of Fire" Became the Subtitle
I had picked up a Pinnacle paperback way back around 1974 entitled Tales of Horror and the Supernatural and knew instantly that its author, Machen, and I were simpatico. I especially admired The Great Return because of the casual first-person journalistic style with which it was written and also because of the way it discussed the Holy Grail glancingly and in a tone that seemed sincerely spiritual, as opposed to presenting it as a prosaic cup or platter used as a common questing plot device). I was struck by the phrase "rose of fire"—especially since I had then recently read H. Rider Haggard's first Quatermain sequel (titled Allan Quatermain, 1887) in which that exact expression had been prominently used. On his return to Africa in search of a lost kingdom, in a chapter titled "The Rose of Fire," Quatermain and his friends encounter in an underground river:
[A] huge pillar-like jet of almost white flame . . . sprang fifty feet into the air, when it struck the roof and spread out some forty feet in diameter, falling back in curved sheets of fire shaped like the petals of a full-blown rose. Indeed this awful gas jet resembled nothing so much as a great flaming flower . . . Below was the straight stalk, a foot or more thick, and above the dreadful bloom . . . , which gleamed fiercer than any furnace ever lit by man . . . For yards and yards round the great rose of fire the rock-roof was red-hot . . . My eyes seemed to be bursting from my head, and through my closed lids I could see the fierce light . . . [I]t roared like all the fires of hell . . . .
While I think that these roses could both be considered symbols of "transition," otherwise they couldn't be more different. Still, their juxtaposition in time caused me to pay attention, and the phrase became special to me for all the above reasons and more, but particularly as a symbol for the Holy Grail, thus my plan to use the epigraph right on the cover.
How I Crossed Paths with My Publisher
In the mid-1970s I'd collected all of H. Rider Haggard's Allan Quatermain books. For that matter I collected virtually all of Haggard's books. In those days it was a matter of corresponding with book dealers by sending REAL letters via the post office, first around the USA and then over to England. Of course many of the books I collected were printings from the late 19th century through the late 1920s. Because most of Haggard's 60+ books had dropped out of favor and had not been reprinted on either side of the Atlantic at that time for decades, I had to track down many of his books as early editions because they were all that existed. Thus by 2002 my entire Haggard collection was 30 years older, and many of the books (especially the Quatermain books) were getting more and more fragile. A book that was, say 60 or 70 years old when I collected it, had become 90 or 100 years old. I didn't collect first editions because I wanted to read them, not collect them per se . . . and I have read and reread some of them a lot. They were getting tattered and I was beginning to worry how I was going to replace them. Then I found a brochure from Wildside Press that was bound into a Weird Tales magazine—and I was overjoyed to see that the publisher had most of the Quatermain books available at ordinary prices. This was the first time I had ever encountered these books so easily attainable. I didn't know it then, but these were print-on-demand-books (a technology that I'd never heard of at that time). Anyway, I went online and ordered perhaps a dozen books from Wildside and listed my P.O. Box as my address. In short order, I received an e-mail from Wildside Press publisher John Betancourt asking if he could send my order via UPS to a street address, rather than to a P.O. Box. We exchanged a few e-mails, and I mentioned that the academic publisher Borgo Press had been distributing Sherlock Holmes on the Roof of the World since 1988 and that I had nearly completed Sherlock Holmes at the Crucible of Life; Or, The Adventure of the Rose of Fire. John—always a man of few words—replied on August 13, 2002. "I would LOVE to reprint 'Roof of the World' and to publish 'Crucible of Life'—they both sound like a lot of fun. I'll send contracts shortly.—John"
Naturally I was thrilled and was motivated to complete CRUCIBLE faster than I would have otherwise, and e-mailed him the 63,000-word manuscript on October 23, 2002. The next morning, which happened to be my birthday, I received back this note from John. "Just a note to say everything arrived safely, and I'm well into CRUCIBLE (and enjoying it immensely). Having just read about 40 Haggard books in the last 2 years has more than doubled my appreciation of it!—John"
It took another 2 1/2 years for the book to be prepared for publication. At the beginning of that process, John made some fundamental editorial decisions, which he as publisher had a perfect right to do, and it is one of those decisions that is the root reason for this particular Post. If I remember correctly, John took the epigraph off the title page and assigned it to its own page, and at a stroke disconnected the novel's subtitle from its epigraphic passage, which was its raison d'etra!
Oh well, no harm done! :-)
Next, I will make some remarks about the copyright page.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Great-Detective-Crucible-Life/dp/0809500507
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