Allan Quatermain Meets Sherlock Holmes in East Africa 1872

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 .

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.

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 .

Saturday, August 4, 2012

Post No. 5—One Epigraph

The Writing of One Novel

The Great Detective at the Crucible of Life;

Or, The Adventure of the Rose of Fire

From "The Greek Interpreter"

—Sidney Paget

From Marie

—Hookway Cowles (??)

Some Thoughts on One Epigraph

Following the disclaimer page of The Great Detective at the Crucible of Life; Or, The Adveture of the Rose of Fire, there are four epigraphs. One of them is the passage from Arthur Machan's The Great Return already discussed in Post No. 3. There is one by A. Merritt that I added impulsively at the last minute and since regret. Another is a prayer, "The Memorare," that will be discussed in a future Post. That leaves:

"Travelers afoot in hot deserts should set their course toward shade!"

—Junior Woodchucks' Guidebook

This is a quote from the Dell comic book Uncle Scrooge # 7 (1954). That comic book has in many ways informed the direction of my imagination for the whole of my life. [I said the same thing, I know, about Arthur C. Clarke and Richard Powers in the previous post. Nonetheless, both statements are true and are not contradictory.]

It is a magnificently written and drawn tale of Uncle Scrooge (by Carl Barks) and his nephews discovering the Seven Cities of Cibola in the American Southwest. (Curiously, I am not alone in being inspired by that particular issue. Clearly the opening sequence of Raiders of the Lost Ark owes much to it, and I'm gratified that that connection has been documented in detail at various web sites, particularly http://www.dialbforblog.com/archives/429 .)

In every possible way, The Great Detective at the Crucible of Life; Or, The Adventure of the Rose of Fireis an homage to Uncle Scrooge # 7. Both stories follow a group of people (or ducks) across a Hellish desert in the midst of which they discover a lost city. In both cases, the key to the gorge-like passage that leads to the city is a cleft in a cliff marked by shade in an otherwise featureless wasteland.

Putting These Last Comments into Perspective

I am not an eclectic guy. There are things that I like and things that have influenced me, and there are things I take exception to. The fact is that my life seldom deviates from these tracks. Of course, some people may be fooled to think that because I adore Uncle Scrooge on one hand and Heavy Metal on the other I must have far-ranging interests, but that is far from the truth. Age 8 was a formative year for me, as was 12, 21, 25, 28 and 32. Various things touched me at those times that seemed to have "programmed" or "hard wired" me. (Of course, every person on earth has had his or her equivalent "formative" moments.) I mention mine here because this blog is about the writing of CRUCIBLE, and CRUCIBLE is, whatever else it is, an ode or "love letter" to these formative incidents. I imagine that as I continue writing about how and why I wrote successive pages of this novel, there will be more emphatic statements about life experiences that ""hard-wired" my feelings, tastes, and views. Just imagine that they are all true and running simutaneously like programs in the background of my consciousness [just as equivalent programs run in the background of your mind, dear reader.]

For example, at eight I discovered science fiction movies. Within a few weeks I saw both The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms and The War of the Worlds, and the tenor of my life was set. From that point on, all things mundane and prosaic were anathema to me.

To say that another way: I may be able to explain how fundamental this synaptic track switching was to me at the age of eight by this little story. In the 1970s, Roots, the first American TV mini-series, attracted a titanic audience. The show fanned a cultural interest in genealogy and people everywhere delved into their backgrounds and learned that they were related to thus and so, or sprung from this, that, or another stock, and so forth. Due to all this being "in the air" around me, I began to ponder what my roots were, but there didn't seem to by anything about my heritage or ancestors that was worth noting. Then one day it hit me that my fundamental roots were science-fiction movies. Clear and simple. It was science-fiction movies that cultivated in me a craving for anything but the here and now.

At age eight is when my life crossed paths with Carl Bark's Uncle Scrooge comic books and the whole notion of "lost-race" adventures became intrinsic to my being. At twelve I discovered books (that's right, books, whereupon I began haunting all our local licraries and bookshops), science fiction, and, particularly, Arthur C. Clarke, all during the summer of 1957. By 21, I began to notice everyday phenomena that didn't add up, coincidences that seemed highly improbable, that even seemed to have purpose. At 25, I learned of Carl Jung, the collective unconscious, and synchronicity, all of which put names to the phenomena I had begun to notice at 21.

Also around that same time, science fiction literature was going through one of its periodic inferiority complexes, which this time spawned the "new wave". . . and the genre that I loved turned to ashes in my mouth.

For three or four years I existed in a sort of literary limbo; nothing I read was satisfying. But then in 1973, at 28, I discovered H. Rider Haggard via his The People of the Mist published through the Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series (Betty Ballantine and Lin Carter, eds). I found in Haggard a sort of soul mate with regard to attitudes about life and its meaning and the eyebrow-lifting ironies that seem to frame much of it all. I never looked back and my fiction tastes have remained ever since happily entrenched in the period of roughly 1850 to 1930.

Cover by Dean Ellis

Therefore, I've written two pastiches, one set in 1891 and the other in 1872, and I've nearly completed a third titled Allan Quatermain at the Dawn of Time; Or, The Adventure of the Star of Wonder, set in 1873, another Sherlock Holmes and Allan Quatermian adventure.

Post No. 6 will explain the purpose behind my 600-word "Dedication: To Sir Henry Rider Haggard".

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

Comments are appreciated! Thsmk you.

Sunday, July 29, 2012

Post No. 4—Some Front Matter

The Writing of One Novel

The Great Detective at the Crucible of Life;

Or, The Adventure of the Rose of Fire

From "Silver Blaze"
—Sidney Paget

From She and Allan
—Maurice Greiffenhagen

Some Thoughts on the Front Matter

Amongst the original real Front Matter (as opposed to faux Front Matter . . . of which there is a great deal indeed) of the manuscript of The Great Detective at the Crucible of Life; Or, The Adventure of the Rose of Fire, there was a secondary separate Disclaimer Page as follows:

This statement, while true, was meant to serve a similar function as a similar device used by Arthur C. Clarke in the Front Matter of Childhood's End:

"The opinions expressed in this

book are not those of the author."

Both the novel itself and the 1953 paperback cover art (above) by Richard Powers turned my life on end at the impressionable age of twelve, and, frankly, for good or ill, I am who I am largely as a result.

However, due to the vicissitudes of publishing, my Childhood's End tribute disclaimer got tacked to the end of the more formal disclaimer (which by the way was, in its own right, unlike any standard disclaimer), which I had every reason to expect nobody would ever read.

In a similar fashion, my formal dedication moved from its own separate page to the top of the Copyright page thus:

It is my experience that most people pay little, if any, attention to the Copyright Page. (Of course, the page is chock full of information of a bibliographic sort, and there are in fact some readers who study—even enjoy—that information with relish. But I won't bore you with a discussion of copyright pages generally.) That meant that few people would ever see the book's formal dedication:

"Also, for Jayne and Douglas, this new service, this new hymn."

The words "also" and "new" are operative, naturally. In order to understand this dedication, it would be useful to know that the prior book, Sherlock Holmes on the Roof of the World; Or, The Adventure of the Wayfaring God, bore the following dedication on page v:

"For the Joy

and the Miracle

of N.L.M.

this service

this hymn"

Without exception, readers who note these words of ROOF's dedication assume that the book is dedicated to N.L.M., whoever that might be. But that wouldn't be right. In fact, I intentionally left out a few words, words that could properly and easily be understood if readers took a moment to think about it. However, I knew full well that nobody would bother. Thus the dedication was a sort of secret between me and the recipient of the dedication, perhaps as many dedications are, I suppose. After all, it does not say "For N.L.M." or "To N.L.M.", it says "For the Joy and the Miracle of N.L.M." Therefore the book is being dedicated to someone who is not specified, someone who is implied or understood, someone who provided the "Joy and Miracle of N.L.M." and to whom I am offering the reciprocal "this service, this hymn."

Think about it. Who doles out miracles and receives hymns?

The book was dedicated . . . to God . . . for the Joy and Miracle of N.L.M. . . . and to whom I reciprocated with a service and a hymn . . . that happened to be the book Sherlock Holmes on the Roof of the World; Or, The Adventure of the Wayfaring God. (Those who know Arthur C. Clarke know that these kinds of sentiments would have been anathema to him on every conceivable level. But that really isn't at issue here.)

ROOF was four years in the making, even though it is a slim novel, and the story of N.L.M. began and mainly ended during its composition. However, as you may gather as you read further, such a story can never really end....

Who then is N.L.M.? He was Nicholas Lawrence Miller, my first son. He would have been 27 years old last April. His claim to fame was that he was the third small child, the first toddler in all the world, who had a heart transplant. For those who are interested, his story can be summed up by the following 1986 Los Angeles Times and New York Times news items. I apologize in advance for the newspapers' tacky advertisements!

[ALERT: Please be advised that these news items may be too "heavy" for some readers, of which I've encountered a couple. Though it wasn't my intent when I started this blog about writing one novel just a few days ago, it is clear to me now that it may also include some reflection on my spiritual journey . . . and therefore I'm choosing to share the story of Nicholas, who is central to that journey.]

http://articles.latimes.com/1986-09-02/local/me-13534_1_heart-transplant

http://www.nytimes.com/1986/09/02/us/baby-who-got-heart-implant-dies-as-his-body-rejects-it.html

Thus, CRUCIBLE's dedication is likewise a dedication to God to whom I offered this new service and hymn The Great Detective at the Crucible of Life; Or, The Adventure of the Rose of Fire.

A full-length version of Nicholas' story is available at various online used book dealers, starting at about $1.00, including Amazon Marketplace http://www.amazon.com/Baby-James-Legacy-Family-Courage/dp/006250584X.

Blog No. 5 will offer background on some of the epigraphs.

Comments are appreciated; thank you!

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