Allan Quatermain Meets Sherlock Holmes in East Africa 1872: August 2012

Friday, August 31, 2012

Post No. 10—Fourth Chapter, Part 1

The Writing of One Novel

The Great Detective at the Crucible of Life;

Or, The Adventure of the Rose of Fire

All rights reserved

[Note: These posts are sequential, each building on the previous.
I suggest beginning at the beginning by scrolling down and clicking on "older posts" or by using the Blog Archive to the right to locate
Post No. 1 in July.]

From "The Naval Treaty"

—Sidney Paget

The Fourth Chapter, Part One

The fourth chapter is entitled "Foreword by John H. Watson, M.D," and it is the first chapter wherein the reader encounters Allan Quatermain. The chapter is presented as an introduction to a thick manuscript that Watson sent to 19th-century landscape painter Frederick Church. In this introduction Watson explains why he is sending Church the manuscript and details the circumstances that led he (Watson) and Quatermain to show up impulsively on Church's doorstep the month before.

Regarding Frederick Church—From 1825 to 1875, there developed a style of uniquely American landscape painting known as the Hudson River Valley School. These works were astonishingly photographic in detail while at the same time rendering nature in such romanticized and noble hues, with such immaculate emphasis on light and atmosphere, that the paintings were like windows into paradise. As the sobriquet would indicate, many of the original paintings depicted the Hudson River Valley in upper New York State. Among the foremost practitioners of this school—such as Thomas Cole, Albert Bierstadt, Asher Durand, John Kensett, and Thomas Moran—was Frederick Church, whose vast canvases portraying Niagara Falls, towering South American mountain ranges, and erupting volcanoes inspired awe in those who viewed them. Toward the end of his career, Church built his home high on a hill overlooking the Hudson River. Designed to resemble a Persian palace, he called it Olana.

From Maiwa's Revenge

—Hookway Cowles

Watson reminds Church how Quatermain had noticed two paintings in Church's sitting room, and how the juxtaposition of those images reminded Quatermain of an adventure he and his man-servant Hans experienced in Ethiopia in January 1872. One of the two paintings was El Kasné, the treasury house of Petra in Jordon. Though I've never been to Petra, I've known many people who have, and the ancient city has haunted me since I first read about it Richard Halliburton's Complete Book of Marvels when I was around ten.


El Kasné , the treasury house is displayed above the fireplace in the sitting room in Church's home Olana. (Olana State Historic Park, 60 in x 50 in.)

The other painting is less well-known, El Ayn (The Fountain, also known as Constantinople). The fountain is in the bottom right corner.

El Ayn (The Fountain, also known as Constantinople) is currently part of the collection of

the Mead Art Museum, Amherst College, Amherst, Massachusetts (24 in. x 36 in.).

Have you ever, out of the blue, seen something that you bonded with fundamentally in an instant? In 1989, in Time magazine or Newsweek, there was a very small reproduction (I forget the point of the article; it was probably a discussion of trends in art at the time) of Albert Bierstadt's In the Mountains (Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut). The actual painting is 36 inches x 50 inches, but the photo in the magazine was hardly larger than a couple of postage stamps, rather like this:

But that was enough to turn my head, and in short order I was impassioned by all things Hudson River School—in particular Frederic Church. I then learned that the Frederick Edwin Church exhibit at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., was being held over from it's original run of October 8, 1989–January 28, 1990. Very quickly, my wife and son and I flew from California to D.C. and I took in the exhibit, which was one of the high points of my life (I often wish I could time travel back to that day in the museum and relive it.) To this day Church and the Hudson River School are uppermost in my mind.

In any case, three intertwining plot threads of CRUCIBLE dealt with fountains, and so it was natural that I would gravitate to El Ayn (The Fountain) (above). Thus, it became an essential element of the fourth chapter.

Please note that the cover of The Great Detective at the Crucible of Life; Or, The Adventure of the Rose of Fire incorporates both a jagged pathway through a mountain crevice (the Siq that is portrayed in El Kasné) and a fountain, making the cover a bit of an homage to the two Church paintings here discussed:

Post No. 11 will discuss further this fourth chapter, focusing on Olana, Frederic Church's home—where he and Dr. Watson listened in wonder as Allan Quatermain related his Ethiopian adventure.

When possible, comments are appreciated.

You can find used copies of this book at https://www.amazon.com/Great-Detective-Crucible-Life/dp/0809500507

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Wednesday, August 15, 2012

Post No. 9—Third Chapter

The Writing of One Novel

The Great Detective at the Crucible of Life;

Or, The Adventure of the Rose of Fire

All rights reserved

[Note: These posts are sequential, each building on the previous. I suggest beginning at the beginning by scrolling down and clicking on "older posts" or by using the Blog Archive to the right to Locate Post No. 1 in July.]

From "Silver Blaze"

—Sidney Paget


From Allan Quatermain —Artist not identified

The Third Chapter

The third chapter of The Great Detective at the Crucible of Life; Or, The Adventure of the Rose of Fire is entitled "Preface 'The Prodigious Phone Call' By Thos. Kent Miller, Editor".

This entire book, including the previous two chapters that are presented as "Editor's Notes," is an exercise in a literary device called "narrative distancing." However, it is this chapter—the third chapter— that underscores how narrative distancing is this novel's principal feature or conceit. I explain:

If you say, "I'm telling a story," that is the first person narrative mode.

However, if you say, "I'm telling a story that my brother told me. He told me this tale: "I had an adventure," he said . . . . ", that is the simplest form of narrative distancing. The first narrator is telling a story that someone else told him. This technique is used less frequently these days than in the past. In the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries, the technique was used in innumerable gothic novels and ghost stories to enhance both verisimilitude and the suspension of disbelief.

Taking it to the next level, then, if you say, "I'm telling a story that my brother told me. He told me this tale: 'I had an adventure,' he said, 'in a native land where the village shaman gave me the secrets of life. He told me, "My son, in this land there were once giants . . ."'

Of course, that is a more complex narrative mode—narrative distancing twice removed.

In the early 20th century, H.P. Lovecraft used narrative distancing to great effect in his landmark story "The Call of Cthulhu". Lovecraft scholar S.T. Joshi had some interesting things to say about the structure of this story in his book A Subtler Magick: The Writings and Philosophy of H.P. Lovecraft (Third Edition, Wildside Press, 1996). His comments are entirely included on page 256 (Chapter XI, "1. Style and Structure"):

"'The Call of Cthulhu' presents the greatest structural complexity of any of Lovecraft's tales . . . . Here we have a main narrator ( . . . Thurston) paraphrasing the notes of a subsidiary narrator ( . . . Angell) who himself paraphrases two accounts, that of the artist Wilcox and that of Inspector Legrasse, who paraphrases yet another subsidiary account, the tale of Old Castro; Thurston then comes upon a newspaper article and the Johansen narrative . . . . This entire sequence can be depicted by the following chart of narrative voices:

Thurston

Angell

Wilcox

Legrasse

Castro

newspaper item

Johansen"

Joshi then concludes by saying " . . . Castro's wild tale . . . is three times removed form the principal narrative . . . This is narrative 'distance' with a vengeance!" [Italics and explanation mark both Joshi's.]

Now, while not hinting for a millisecond that my writing is comparable to Lovecraft's, nonetheless, by applying Joshi's logic to CRUCIBLE, a graphic presentation of my novel's narrative distancing looks like this:

I don't intend for readers to read CRUCIBLE in a linear fashion as they would most novels. I've structured CRUCIBLE like a child’s nesting toy—like a set of Chinese nesting boxes or Russian nesting dolls—insofar as the reader is asked to explore multiple layers within layers, of framing devices within framing devices, books within books, narratives within narratives, manuscripts within manuscripts, and tales within tales, thus to be swallowed by a maelstrom of ideas and adventures—relentlessly descending into a scholarly labyrinth.

[Actually, this is not unlike H. Rider Haggard's second world-class best seller after King Solomon's Mines—She: A History of Adventure. Scholar Norman Etherington has explained in his The Annotated She that in She "The Chinese nest of boxes appears in many guises throughout the book."]

Another way of saying it is that my story doesn't pull the reader along in a linear narrative; instead it asks the reader to read down into the various and numerous layers and elements of the book. Yes, while, a case could be made that I took the whole notion of narrative distancing to an extreme, however, I will say that all this happened organically. In other words, I did not set out to structure the book in this manner; it just happened in the process of my crafting a story that I myself would have loved to read.

Anyway, the chapter begins with me speaking to the reader and within 100 words, I offer up a [fictitious] letter from Judy-Lynn Del Rey, the science-fiction editor of the Del Rey imprint of Ballantine Books during much of the 1970s and 1980s (see note 1 below).

You can see here how I presented that fictitious letter on the first page of the chapter:

But an interesting point is that the fictitious letter from the novel was based on a very real rejection letter that I'd received from Judy-Lynn in 1981:

As I said, in this chapter the narrative distancing begins. In short order, in my story I'm taking a phone call from James Turner, editor/publisher of Arkham House at the time of my [fictitious] Preface [see note 2 below]

Shortly thereafter, I received a package from Turner at my door that contains:

• A note from Turner

• A photocopy of a [fictitious] 1,600-word typescript of an [fictitious, i.e. written by me in careful emulation of HPL] letter written by Lovecraft to fellow Weird Tales contributor par excellence Clark Ashton Smith. Turner explains in his note that this letter was left out of the Arkham House five volume set of H.P. Lovecraft's Selected Letters, and that, "If it had been printed, it would have started on page 19 of volume II where letter #188 to Frank Beknap Long currently is."

Arrow points to where Lovecraft's letter to Clark Ashton Smith should have appeared.

• Another note from Turner.

•          A letter from Dr. Watson to the great 19th century landscape painter Frederick Church [see Post No. 10 for more information in Church].
•          A long Foreword also from Dr. Watson to Church explaining just why he has sent a fat manuscript to Church.
•         The manuscript itself (a virtual tome) that is in essence the story Quatermain told to Watson and Church before a roaring fire in Church's home in upstate New York.

—All of which sets up the fourth chapter of the book entitled "Forward by John H. Watson, M.D." It is in this chapter that we first encounter Allan Quatermain as a character.

Comments are appreciated; thank you!

http://www.amazon.com/The-Great-Detective-Crucible-Life/dp/0809500507

[Note 1: Judy-Lynn Del Rey, with her husband Lester, took over the editorship of Ballantine Books’ science-fiction and fantasy lines in the mid-1970s—shortly after Ian and Betty Ballantine sold to Random House the publishing house that bore their name and which they started in 1952. the late Judy-Lynn Del Rey, who was up until her death in 1986—and still is, to be sure—considered one of science fiction’s most admired and important editors.]

[Note 2: Following H.P. Lovecraft's death in 1937 at the age of 47, two of his young protégés, August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, started a publishing company in Sauk City, Wisconsin, called Arkham House (named after a recurring town in many Lovecraft stories) for the sole purpose of reprinting Lovecraft’s work within the dignity of hardcovers. Though sales were slow to start, the paperback reprints took off during W.W.II and, of course, now H.P. Lovecraft is considered by many to be one of America’s foremost writers of horror. (Indeed, over the last decades, devotees have spawned a hugely successful Lovecraft cottage industry.) In time, Arkham House began publishing collections of other Weird Tales authors and is still a viable publishing house to this day. After Derleth’s death in 1971 (following the brief management tenures of Wandrei and Roderic Meng), James Turner became editor in 1974.]

Post No. 8—Second Chapter

The Writing of One Novel

The Great Detective at the Crucible of Life;

Or, The Adventure of the Rose of Fire

From "The Hound of the Baskervilles"

—Sidney Paget

From Allan's Wife

—McDonald Edition

The Second Chapter

The second chapter of The Great Detective at the Crucible of Life; Or, The Adventure of the Rose of Fire is entitled "Editor's Note to the Movie Tie-In (Second) Edition" and is not even two full pages long. It is the second bit of pseudo-front-matter. The conceit of this chapter is that the [fictitious] original severely abridged printing of the book had unexpectedly been enjoyed and commented upon by a [fictitious] top radio talk show host, whereupon the book became a best seller and was quickly made into a [totally fictitious] movie staring Gene Hackman and Sigourney Weaver with the title The Rose of Fire.

Apparently I wrote this chapter with a great degree of verisimilitude—because perhaps ten individuals over the last seven years have, in all seriousness, asked me why they can't find the movie in Leonard Maltin's Movie Guide or IMDB or if I knew when it would be released on DVD and other variations on this theme.

For those who haven’t read the novel yet, I should mention the novel's core [fictitious] chain of events in chronological order, in order to put this second chapter into perspective

• I [fictitiously] unexpectedly came into possession of a copy of Quatermain's memoir, and it was arranged that I should coordinate its publication. [Note that it is a copy of the original; which means that the original might still exist somewhere . . . .]

• That memoir was [fictitiously] originally published in severely abridged form as a one-shot cheap paperback titled The Rose of Fire. Beyond that, the publisher wouldn't have given it a second's thought.

• Because the book [fictitiously] unexpectedly gained a famous media friend, it became a huge bestseller and was made into a movie.

• As part of the marketing and hype for the movie, the publisher planned to release a new pressing of the book, and I exercised my [fictitious] contractual rights and insisted that the book be published as I originally intended, which made it a Second Edition. This edition included my original [fictitious] Preface about how I came across the manuscript in the first place and all sorts of other ancillary material about the location of the origin of humankind. Titling this Preface "Editor's Note to the Movie Tie-In Edition" was clearly required to explain the significant differences between the [fictitious] First and [fictitious] Second editions.

• Though the [ficticious] movie failed at the box office, the [fictitious] Second Edition developed an underground following and eventually came to the attention of some powerful and/or influential people.

• The wheelings and dealings of these people resulted in the formal UN-based creation of a [fictitious] vast preserve in Africa marking the location of the beginning of the human race, which, of course, necessitated a [fictitious] Third Edition, the preface to which constitutes the first chapter of the novel, which was discussed in the previous post, Post No. 7.

Post No. 9 will be relatively extensive because there is much to say about CRUCIBLE's third chapter entitled "Preface: 'The Prodigious Phone Call'".

Comments are appreciated; thank you!

Find used copies of CRUCIBLE at https://www.amazon.com/Great-Detective-Crucible-Life/dp/0809500507 .

Monday, August 6, 2012

Post No. 7—First Chapter

The Writing of One Novel

The Great Detective at the Crucible of Life;

Or, The Adventure of the Rose of Fire

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

From "The Resident Patient"

—Sidney Paget

From She and Allan

—Maurice Greiffenhagen

The First Chapter

The first chapter of The Great Detective at the Crucible of Life; Or, The Adventure of the Rose of Fire begins on page 15 and is entitled "Editor's Note to the Third Edition."

If that seems like an odd title for the first chapter, let me explain that several things are going on here:

(1) Sherlock Holmes pastiches usually begin with some sort of preface that explains how that particular manuscript by Dr. Watson had come to light. Nicholas Meyer to a greater or lesser degree began this convention back in 1974 in The Seven-Percent-Solution. Frankly I entirely enjoy these pseudo-front-matter remarks and I am disappointed when a pastiche dispenses entirely with them or reduces the preface to a mere few sentences. Thus I decided to begin CRUCIBLE with pseudo-front-matter that would make my own heart sing. Remember in my first post that I mentioned that I had decided to pile homage on top of homage to the degree that it was possible that I risked being perceived as spoofing the whole Sherlockian pastiche genre.

To this end, rather than a typical "Preface," I decided to pretend that the book in its current state had gone through multiple editions with separate introductions prefacing each one. In this light, "Editor's Note to the Third Edition" is self explanatory, especially since it is clearly noted on the copyright page that this book is a FIRST EDITION.

(2) In addition, I felt that the conceit of multiple editions would enhance the novel's verisimilitude in the same manner that Meyer had intended for his "Preface". . . but taken to the next level! In other words, the book would pretend to be a serious—almost scholarly—compilation of "found" texts with appropriate detailed explanations of their provenances. Of course, from the start all this material would focus on fictional characters for the most part, so it was unlikely that anybody would take any of it seriously. It should by now be obvious that I was immersing myself in the "Grand Game."

(3) When I was in school, I was greatly influenced by the works of William Faulkner and James Joyce who sometimes wrote their fiction as a circle with the ending at the beginning, and it came natural for me to follow suit (not implying that I think of myself in the same league!). Thus the whole point of CRUCIBLE is right there on page 15. All the action and the plot and the many quests are resolved on the first page of the first chapter. Virtually everything that I explained in Post No. 1 is made manifest right there.   Of course, this is often missed, especially since the chapter seems dry to many readers. Well, that can't be helped; dryness was the whole point; but presumably the readers who paid attention to the first 14 pages would have figured out that the dryness was simply a conceit.

(4) Now, at this point in this memoir of the writing of CRUCIBLE, I have to admit something. All along as I was writing the novel (for 14 years, remember!) and

•    manipulating ideas and tossing around in-jokes, and
•    carefully balancing parody with inspirational messages (I hoped), and
•    attempting to evoke both nostalgia and a sense of wonder, all at the same time . . .

. . . it never once dawned on me that some readers might find my style daunting. I suppose I was naive, but I imagined readers would quickly realize that CRUCIBLE needed to be approached with other-than-ordinary expectations, almost as though they would automatically realize that they needed to get into a "Where's Waldo?" mode. Let's face it, after all, isn't that exactly what happens when you pick up a Nero Wolfe as opposed to, say, a Leon Uris? You don't read EXODUS in the same way that you read Nero Wolfe. Your brain knows how to change its settings. It never occurred to me that readers wouldn't get that when they picked up CRUCIBLE.

Once it was published, however, I learned quickly that many readers could not relate to the book. It was much too far outside their comfort zone. One lady in my church said to me, "It's rather like a study book isn't it?" I still cringe when I remember that! I assume she thought it was a text book. To my overwhelming astonishment, the reviewer for Publishers Weekly seemed to know nothing about the "Grand Game," nothing about the long tradition of the Holy Grail in literature, nothing about accepted alternative ways to present the character of Sherlock Holmes, and mainly dismissed the book in one small paragraph.

All that notwithstanding, I nonetheless honestly believe I wrote in a manner that careful readers will understand simply by ignoring preconceptions, by recognizing the multitudinous clues I've dropped before page 15, and by applying a little common sense. By doing so, readers should be alerted to the idea that they ought not expect the same ol' thing, and that perhaps it would be profitable to look below the surface text only a little. I am grateful that enough readers appreciate much of what I'm doing (see some of the readers' reviews on the product page for this book on both Amazon.com and Amazon.uk).

In this vein, one of my all-time favorite authors, as already noted, is Arthur Machen. Horror-writer Peter Atkins' has said of him, ". . . [Machen] has little patience with the undereducated." I don't put myself in Machen's league any more than I do Faulkner's and Joyce's, but I can appreciate Atkins' thought. For instance, many readers simply ignore the first 55 pages of CRUCIBLE out of hand and skip over it, and then they complain about various aspects of the book. Where's the sense in that?

In Post No. 8, I'll discuss the second chapter, which is entitled "Editor's Note to the Movie Tie-In (Second) Edition."

Extra Credit
The next 550 words merely repeats some of what I've already said in a slightly expanded form. Here I voice more passionately the frustrations I have with modern readers—in the spirit of getting this out of the way before I discuss the remainder of the novel's other pseudo-front-matter.

When I went to high school, reading books, any books, was looked upon by my classmates as a kind of torture. Whether it was David Copperfield or Algebra or World History, many would do their best to pass their classes without paying attention to the required books. The habit of reading somehow never took root in, say, 90 out or a hundred kids. And when it was positively necessary to crack a book or books, inevitably these reluctant readers encountered Prefaces by scholars, Introductions by the author, and perhaps even, worst of all, Footnotes. And if reading any book, generally speaking, was anathema to these students, then dealing with all this extra BORING junk was the last straw! Unfortunately, lemming-like, this attitude was even often taken up by those kids who basically enjoyed reading and they too inevitably skipped right over the "front matter," as its called, and started reading on the first page of Chapter One.

In fact, I have several books that include introductions by the authors themselves who claimed at the very start that they were being required by their publishers to provide the intro, and then when it seemed that they had satisfied those publishers, they would disparage what they had just written by saying things like "...Well that's done. Now go to Chapter One, which is what this book is REALLY about..." Clearly, these authors didn't like introductions and front matter any more than their classmates did!

I've always bucked the tide, though, and I've never conformed to anything more than was required by law and that was necessary to maintain the semblance of civilized behavior. I have been perfectly clear since childhood that my views are in the minority. I bring that up now because I adore Front Matter and all that other scholarly paraphernalia. It is by no means uncommon for me to be so satisfied by the introduction(s) that I put a book down and then not pick it up again for days or weeks!

And when I discovered the FICTIONAL INTRODUCTIONS that graced many of the adventures of H. Rider Haggard, most pastiches of Sherlock Holmes, and often the novels of cutting-edge science by the dearly departed Michael Crichton, I thought I had died and gone to Heaven!

Many critics make a hasty distinction between the 60 percent of my novel they view as the "real action" and everything else, which they feel is inconsequential. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, the "story' is told obliquely through layers of framing devices—a lengthy dedication, multiple introductions, footnotes, notes, digressions, and appendixes. In other words, the book masquerades as a 75,000-word scholarly report describing the finding of several lost manuscripts involving Sherlock Holmes—and the "story" of the book is embedded in ALL of it.

To simply disregard the Front Matter and Digressions in this book is like ripping out the first hundred pages out of, say, THE DA VINCI CODE or THE LORD OF THE RINGS or THE GODFATHER or THE EXORCIST or any other novel. Now where is the logic in that? But, of course, this attitude harks back to the beginning of this "extra credit" note: Many readers simply see introductions and so forth, and their knee-jerk reaction is to ignore it all. Indeed, this is so ingrained in some people that no amount of logic can dissuade them from ignoring this book's literary apparatus: They just don't comprehend that they are SUPPOSED to read (and enjoy) it all.

Comments are appreciated! Thank you.

Find used copies of CRUCIBLE at https://www.amazon.com/Great-Detective-Crucible-Life/dp/0809500507 .

Sunday, August 5, 2012

Post No. 6—Dedication

The Writing of One Novel

The Great Detective at the Crucible of Life;

Or, The Adventure of the Rose of Fire

From "Hound of the Baskerviles"

—Sidney Paget

From Child of Storm

—A.C. Michael

The Dedication

On page 11 of The Great Detective at the Crucible of Life; Or, The Adventure of the Rose of Firebegins the second and more obvious of the book’s two dedications (see Post No. 4 for a discussion of the first dedication). It is a block of text 600 words long. Certainly this is not at all what modern readers expect to see, if they happen to notice any dedication at all. Dedications as a rule are short and exceedingly specific. I’m picking out a couple of books at random off my shelves…and here is the sort of thing that is expected these days:

For Sally

Here’s another:

The wife of my youth

Who

Still abides with me

My 600-word block is in unabashed emulation of H. Rider Haggard’s dedications. Many of his books were dedicated in just the fashion that you see below. Of course, I would never expect any typical modern reader to know that. I’m grateful, however, that John Betancourt noticed instantly, but, of course, he had the advantage of, in his words, "Having just read about 40 Haggard books in the last 2 years has more than doubled my appreciation of it!”

Haggard was a very sincere man, and he tended to lavish his feelings on those individuals to whom he dedicated his books. His dedications were closer in spirit to personal heartfelt letters, listing the accomplishments of the person.

Here is Haggard’s dedication from Child of Storm, a Quatermain novel, which was his favorite from among all his works of fiction.

Thus, there was no question that CRUCIBLE would include something of the sort—dedicated to Haggard, and also to others as a natural consequence. Much of the purpose of this dedication has already been discussed in the first five posts. It only remains to be said that, in essence, this dedication was in fact written as a letter to the great author. The location, Redwood City, California, at the end of my dedication represents where I first had the idea of what would become CRUCIBLE. The year, 1988, is when I actually began to write it.

[As an aside, in the early 1980s, my wife and I bought our first house in the Emerald Lake district of Redwood City, California. Emerald Lake is a forested, rustic pocket of turn-of-the-century log houses in an otherwise normal suburb of San Francisco. As it happened, by pure chance, down the road apiece, around a few bends, lived E. Hoffmann Price—making him my neighbor. Price was a popular and successful contributor to pulp magazines from the 1920s to the 1950s. His first sales were to Weird Tales magazine, whereupon he became a friend of many writers of the day through correspondence. Before long, he sold stories to a long string of magazines with titles like Spicy Detective, Adventure, and Magic Carpet. In time, he developed a wanderlust that he sated by automobile "touring," then a new past time, and he drove around the country meeting his colleagues and friends, writers and editors, such as Henry Kuttner, Seabury Quinn, Clark Ashton Smith, Otis Adelbert Kline, Robert E. Howard, and H.P, Lovecraft. Here is a photo of Ed and me.]

Thos. Kent Miller and E. Hoffmann Price c. 1985

Post No. 7 will begin to focus on the novel itself (as opposed to its front matter), which, ironically, pretends to be front matter! It is really the first chapter of the novel and is titled "Editor's Note to the Third Edition," and it is a vital chapter because it is here that the reader finds the conclusion or denouement of the whole story.

Comments are appreciated! Thank you.

The Great Detective at the Crucible of Life; Or, The Adventure of the Rose of Fire is available at
http://www.amazon.com/The-Great-Detective-Crucible-Life/dp/0809500507 .