The Writing of One Novel
The Great Detective at the Crucible of Life;
Or, The Adventure of the Rose of Fire
Copyright © 2017 by Thomas (Thos.) Kent Miller
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 .]
 |
|
Leo Vincey (left)
and Horace Holly at the
beginning of
their search for Ayesha.
|
 |
|
Leo (right) and Horace twenty years later near
the end of their
quest. Drawings by Maurice
Greiffenhagen.
|
Sherlock Holmes on the Roof
of the World
It's been four years since I
added to this blog. And now that I am, I realize that I've given short shrift
to the book to which The Great Detective at the Crucible of Life is a sequel—Sherlock
Holmes on the Roof of the World. Therefore, before I continue with the main
task at hand of discussing Crucible, I will finally give Roof its due. I
mentioned Roof briefly in Posts numbers 1 and 2, but I really didn't say much.
However, there really are some interesting things about the birth and
development of the book.
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. Recall now that 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 married, Doyle was part of the package (especially
since his name proved to be the ice-beaker by which Jayne I first connected [“Oh,
is your cat named after Arthur Conan or Doyle Drive”]). Sherlock was never far
from my mind, and this night I was remembering that a few years before a fellow
and I were 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. So on
this night, I was also remembering 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 then
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 set his two heroes, Horace Holly and Leo Vincey, off to Asia to search for
the reborn Ayesha. 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.
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. Recall now that 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 married, Doyle was part of the package (especially
since his name proved to be the ice-beaker by which Jayne I first connected [“Oh,
is your cat named after Arthur Conan or Doyle Drive”]). Sherlock was never far
from my mind, and this night I was remembering that a few years before a fellow
and I were 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. So on
this night, I was also remembering 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 then
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 set his two heroes, Horace Holly and Leo Vincey, off to Asia to search for
the reborn Ayesha. 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.
That
night, 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, 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.
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; my father’s
second wife had recommended him to me years before. His office was high in an
office building that presented a great view of the 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, so
I asked who her dentist was…and he was the same as mine…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.
My
life was very busy back then 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 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 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…and looked right
into the face of Sherlock Holmes!
It turned out that the particular train on which we were riding was a “Mystery
Train” whereon the local 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.
An example of a Mystery
Train ad
(found via a Google search
on the Internet).
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 first
appeared 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. However, I found that
distribution wasn't (and still isn’t) my forté. When in due course, the respected
academic/library press, Borgo Press based in 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”. Not long after this, both Rosemill House and
Borgo Press published and distributed a second "corrected printing,"
which Rosemill sold for $5.95. In subsequent years, the owners of Borgo closed
shop, and I did not have the energy to sell the book voluminously, only by
onesies and twosies, and eventually Roof became a valuable collectors’ item
(despite my having hundreds of copies in my garage!). In 2002, Wildside Press
asked to publish both Crucible (as then unpublished) and Roof. Right around that same time Wildside
Press bought Borgo Press, and in 2007 Roof was reissued by Wildside as a Second
Edition with a new cover (nothing I would have chosen) and professional
distribution (far better than my own meager attempts). It sold well again for a
while, until it’s small market became saturated.
Since
then, I’ve reissued it as a Kindle book and also in combination with various
releases of Crucible.
The 2007 Second Edition
trade paperback.
The next post will again feature a discussion of the writing of The Great Detective at the Crucible of Life.
Find used copies of CRUCIBLE at https://www.amazon.com/Great-Detective-Crucible-Life/dp/0809500507 .
