7: The Theme of The Great Detective at the Crucible of Life

This seventh post addresses the writing of Book 2 of the “Holmes Behind the Veil” series from MX—The Great Detective at The Dawn of Time—which will be available September 19. Book 1, Sherlock Holmes on the Roof of the World, is already available, and Book 3, The Sussex Beekeeper at the Dawn of Time, will be available on November 20 from online bookstores and marketplaces everywhere, including Amazon USA, Barnes and Noble, and Amazon UK. 

As far back as I can remember, I’ve always been enchanted by lost cities, giant secret projects and the like.   

Though it may seem preposterous to lose a city, if you were to measure time in millennia or centuries rather than in mere years, the loss of whole cities, you would notice, becomes almost commonplace. The list of those eventually found is long and illustrious—Troy, Ubar, Palenque, Angkor, Ur, Pompeii, on every continent except Antarctica, and even that last holdout began making headlines in 2016.

My interest in the idea of lost cities originates in a comic book, Dell’s Walt Disney’s Uncle Scrooge # 7 (1954), which is a tale by Walt Disney storyteller and illustrator Carl Barks describing Uncle Scrooge McDuck and his nephews, Donald Duck and Huey, Dewey, and Louie, discovering the Seven Cities of Cibola in the American Southwest. Many more lost cities and civilizations, both real and legendary, were serendipitously unearthed by Mr. Barks  through the 1950s and 60s. Two decades later, I encountered H. Rider Haggard (see Post No. 1), whose oeuvre boasts a dozen or so important examples of this genre (with three of four considered its progenitors). From these fonts eventually emerged my own "lost race" pastiche novel, Book 2 of “Holmes Behind the Veil,” The Great Detective at the Crucible of Life, at the center of which Allan Quatermain stumbles upon a lost city in the middle of one of the three or four most God forsaken spots on Earth—Ethiopia’s hellish Afar Desert.

It was in 1988 when I started writing the novel. I sent the completed manuscript to the original publisher in 2002. Doing the math; 14 years. It was actually published in 2005. I never took a hiatus from it. The book was written slowly because I have a one-track mind and my career and my family came first. But whenever I had both the time and the energy at the same time, and I knew the mortgage had been paid, I would work on the book, usually in my home office/library or at the dining room table, very often at 3:00 in the morning. During those 14 years I made a multitude of conscious, very deliberate decisions that may or may not be noticed by readers.

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, which was discussed in my previous

post, and which brought together Holmes with Horace Holly and Leo Vincey, two characters integral to the Ayesha series of H. Rider Haggard.  

In 1978, Judy-Lynn and Lester DelRey,

the editors/publishers of the DelRey

sf/fantasy imprint of Ballantine Books,

released all four Ayesha novels in a

matched set of mass-market paperbacks.

At the very beginning, I simply thought it would be fun to have Holmes meet Rider Haggard’s other fictional icon, Allan Quatermain, who was the hero of King Solomon’s Mines and 17 more novels and stories. I began right away trying to concoct a situation and story that brought together Holmes and Quatermain. But real life kept intruding and it was difficult to focus. For one thing, I am no good at concocting plots for plot’s sakes. In that regard, story telling, per se, is not my forte. In essence, my writing must have an underlying purpose. In today’s parlance, I needed it to “make a difference.” For ten years I struggled with the idea, and 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!

Finally, eventually synchronicity helped guide my purpose (see Post 4, “Elfin Coincidence”).

The February 1998 issue of Vanity Fair magazine. I’ve circled the cover lines that interested me.

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 (actually 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 worthwhile 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.

Two views of the 3,500-mile-long Great Rift Valley of eastern Africa. The valley has been forming for millions of years. Its climate, fertility, and geology were consistently favorable for at least 14 million years to allow the development of Ramapithecus, Ardipithecus, Australopithecus, Homo hablis, Homo erectus/ergaster, Homo sapiens, and Homo sapiens sapiens. Especially important were a series of perpetual lakes, like a string of pearls, that formed up and down the rift, which were conducive to long-term evolution. The rift was and is coming into being due to, in terms of continental drift, the Nubian African continental plate shifting in relation to both the Arabian Plate and the Somali African Plate. These graphics are from (left) historyofgeology.fieldofscience.com and (right) geology.com
Special photo juxtapositions by Thomas Kent Miller; copyright © 2016-2017 by Thomas Kent Miller.

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. I chose the Danakil Desert of Ethiopia for two reasons. First, journalist Walter Sullivan in his opus about continental drift Continents in Motion had described that region as being earthquake- and volcano-ridden, and one of the hottest, most horrible places on earth.  And well … once, when I was a geology major, I’d done much research on the Atacama Desert in western Chile, which was sometimes used by NASA as an analog for the planet Mars because the Atacama was the driest spot on earth. Being just east of the towering Andes mountain range, the Atacama was also earthquake- and volcano-ridden, one of the hottest, most horrible places on earth, and I still had boxes of that Atacama Desert research 20 years later. I figured I could use the research about the Atacama to help fill in the blanks about the Danakil.

Donald Johanson and his colleagues unearthed  "Lucy" in 1974; it was the first Australopithecus

fossil to be identified. Special photo juxtapositions by Thomas Kent Miller; copyright © 2016-2017 by Thomas Kent Miller.

Second, it was in the Afar desert region of Ethiopia that Donald Johanson and his colleagues had unearthed "Lucy," the Australopithecus fossil, the first paleo-anthropological fossil that clearly showed that the predecessors of humankind walked straight and fully erect on their some two feet millions of years before Homo sapiens.

Now that I had a firm grasp on the theme or underlying purpose of the book, I needed a title. 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, at some point I had thought of and grew fond of "The Crucible of Life" as a metaphor for the Great Rift Valley. But an important sub-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. After all, in Parzival, Wolfram von Eschenbach described the Grail as a platter.

So, in my mind the Crucible of Life referred to the Great Rift Valley, which was equivalent to the Holy Grail.

Yet, there was more afoot. A writer as important as Haggard in my estimation is the Victorian/Edwardian Welsh mystic Arthur Machen, one of whose works is The Great Return, a novel depicting the Holy Grail returning to modern Wales, and the Grail is portrayed in that story as a “rose of fire.”:

“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

The Great Return was published by The Faith Press in 1815. Image from "A Guide to Supernatural Fiction." (supernaturalfiction.co.uk, edited by R.B. Russell)

Thus the subtitle of my new book became “or the Adventure of the Rose of Fire”, an homage to Arthur Machen and his novel.

The whole title therefore, when deconstructed, would mean Sherlock Holmes at the Crucible of Life, or the Great Rift Valley, or the Holy Grail; The Adventure of the Rose of Fire, aka, the Holy Grail.

Speaking of homages, as I wrote the book, over those 14 years, I continually added homages to things that I love, to the degree that it was possible that the book risked being perceived as spoofing the whole Sherlockian pastiche genre. But this decision was made neither quickly nor lightly, as Crucible gestated from 1988 to 2002. In the end, I decided that it wasn't bad if some readers thought of the book as a gentle parody—as long as they also understood the serious nature of the book.

All that said, I decided to underscore my efforts of homage by starting on the very first page—the title page. When I realized that I was not only tipping my hat to Doyle and Haggard and Machen, but also to that whole magical period of 19th Century romance publishing, I decided to make the title page extra special.

To be continued in Post 8. 

The Great Detective at the Crucible of Life is the second book of the "Holmes Behind the Veil" trilogy and will be available September 19 from online bookstores and marketplaces everywhere, including Amazon USA,  Barnes and Noble, and Amazon UK.

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