Craig Janacek's Blog, page 2

Three Plays of The Oxford Deception

In addition to the innumerable mentions to the plays attributed to one ‘William Shakespeare,’ “The Oxford Deception” refers to three other plays during the course of the hunt across Stratford-Upon-Avon and London.

Locrine

In Chapter One, the playbill for the Shakespeare Birthday Weekend notes that Friday night’s play would be “Locrine,” by Elizabeth McAleth. This is a fairly obscure reference to an actual Elizabethan-era play, which depicts the legendary Trojan founders of the nation of England and of Troynovant (London). Like much of the work dating from that era (cough, cough, hint, hint) the actual author of the original play is unclear, but cases have been made for the dramatists George Peele and Robert Greene as potential candidates. On the basis of a tempting note on the title page of the 1595 quarto, which advertised the play as “Newly set foorth, overseene and corrected, / By W. S.” commentators have speculated that ‘Shakespeare’ had a hand in the revision. This led to its inclusion in Philip Chetwinde’s second impression of his Third Folio in 1664, and is now part of the Shakespeare Apocrypha.

While the version in the book is supposed to represent a new version of the play, crafted by McAleth to replace the stiff, formal un-Shakespearean verse of the original, its main utility is to highlight some of the incredible ambiguities of Elizabethan-era scholarship, and the desperate need to find (or create) new works written by the Bard.

In addition, the opening scene of the play proper shows the aged Brutus, the mythical leader of the Trojans in Britain, and father to Locrine. The inclusion of the Trojans into “The Oxford Deception” is of course, an intentional reference to my earlier work, “The Anger of Achilles Peterson.” It is also an allusion to the famous line “Et tu, Brute?” from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (Act Two, Scene Four, Line Seventy-Seven), thereby tying this play from Chapter One into the final play from Chapter Twenty-Five.

Aias, Prince of Salamis

In Chapter Eight, Rick Campbell attempts to convince John Charles Barron that he and Beth are headed to London’s Drury Lane Theatre to see a performance of “Aias, Prince of Salamis,” written by Elizabeth McAleth. No such play has ever been published, though the name has similarities to the “Ajax” of Sophocles. This is another inside-reference to “The Anger of Achilles Peterson,” in which Alex Telamon, a character based on the Greek hero Aias, plays a major role. “Aias, Prince of Salamis” was also the first work that I ever completed, and someday I may compile it into a readable format for release.

Our American Cousin

In Chapter Twenty-Five, Rick Campbell is trapped by a gun-wielding madman in the balcony of the Globe Theatre during a performance of Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar.” After his triumphant escape, he makes reference to an 1858 play entitled “Our American Cousin,” by English playwright Tom Taylor.

This was a lighthearted farce about the introduction of an awkward, boorish, but honest American, Asa Trenchard, to his aristocratic English relatives when he goes to England to claim the family estate. Nowadays, it is of course, famous for its tragic performance at Ford’s Theatre on April 14, 1865. Halfway through Act III, Scene 2, the character of Asa Trenchard, played that night by Harry Hawk, uttered a line, considered one of the play’s funniest, and during the laughter that followed this line, John Wilkes Booth, a famous actor and Confederate sympathizer who was not in the cast, fatally shot Abraham Lincoln. Familiar with the play, Booth chose this moment in the hope that the sound of the audience’s laughter would mask the sound of his gunshot. He then leapt from Lincoln’s box to the stage, fracturing his left ankle in the process. Despite the pain, Wilkes Booth stood and raised his bloody knife (used to stab Major Henry Rathbone) above his head and reportedly shouted “Sic semper tyrannis!” (amazingly, still the Virginia state motto to this day). This Latin phrase means “thus always to tyrants” and is a shortening of “Sic semper evello mortem Tyrannis,” or “Thus always I rip off tyrants’ life” which is said to have originated with Marcus Junius Brutus during the assassination of Julius Caesar (though is never spoken in Shakespeare’s play).

Although once much acclaimed and highly popular, “Our American Cousin” is no longer performed today. While this is perhaps due to changing tastes, I for one consider it to be a profoundly unlucky play (similar in this regard to the Scottish Play), forever linked to one of our greatest real-life national tragedies.

221B Baker Street & Other Holmes Sundries

Since Watson only makes it to England in the last paragraph of The Isle of Devils, this post really isn’t terribly relevant to the book, but the following pages are too much fun to NOT link to…

One interpretation of the interior of 221B Baker Street.

And another!

And a fascinating take on the Great Hiatus, told completely via telegrams.

221B Baker Street

Since Watson only makes it to London in the last paragraph of The Isle of Devils, this post really isn’t terribly relevant, but the following pages are too much fun to NOT link to…

One interpretation of the interior of 221B Baker Street.

And another!

The Story of the Story: The Oxford Deception

No book springs forth fully formed like Athena from the brow of Zeus. It has to evolve out of a series of ideas until it finally takes the shape that you think is best. The process may rarely be as quick as lightning, but often is a long and winding road. Each of my books has its own origin tale…

The genesis for The Oxford Deception sprang from one fevered night of writing in the spring of 2003 where, in the course of a few very late hours, the entire outline was mapped out. It was clearly inspired by the mystery-thrillers of Dan Brown, as I had just recently read Angels & Demons (2000). Although the central mystery of The DaVinci Code (2003) is more compelling, I still find A&D to be the more purely entertaining book of the two (with The Lost Symbol (2009) being a distant third). Part of this stems from the fact that The Da Vinci Code spans two major cities (Paris and London), while A&D confines itself to the Eternal City of Rome, where the events play out across its Renaissance churches and monuments like a grand tapestry. I will freely admit to loving A&D so much that when our extended family and friends took a trip to Italy in the summer of 2005, I created an all-day Angels & Demons Walking Tour, in which we visited all of the sights (at the end, we soaked our tired feet in the Fountain of the Four Rivers while eating gelato). Clearly, it was this same feel, but involving the Tudor-era locales of London, that I was striving for when I had my vision for The Oxford Deception.

When it came time for picking the central mystery of the story, the immediately obvious choice was my long fascination with the Shakespeare Authorship Controversy. I was first introduced to this concept by Michael E. Hart’s book The 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Persons in History (1992), where Edward De Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford came in at Number 31. I was so enraptured by this idea that I began studying the arguments, and even presented this at our weekly meeting of The Society for the History of Everything (SHOE), an organization that met from 1996 until 1998 primarily at a dining establishment on 21st Avenue South, Nashville Tennessee, and sadly now defunct.

Having become a convert to the Oxfordian cause, I even once began an attempt at a Sherlock Holmes pastiche, in which Holmes and Watson would be called in to solve the mystery of the missing ‘Shakespeare’ manuscripts. For reasons that I no longer recall, that effort fell by the wayside, only to be reborn as the first inklings of the plot for The Oxford Deception.

I had been to London several times prior to sitting down to write this tale, but had missing visiting several of the key locales, most notably Southwark Cathedral. So although the story was more or less complete by the end of 2006, it wasn’t until we took a trip to London in spring 2007 and actually walked the locales (for either the first or repeat time) with the eye of a writer that I could add some of the necessary description that would complete it. And then it languished for a few years until the rise of digital publishing on Amazon’s Kindle emboldened me to go ahead with its publication. I gave it one last read-through at the zen-like tranquility of Big Sur’s Ventana Inn to correct some minor mistakes, and off it went.

The Story of the Story: The Anger of Achilles Peterson

No book springs forth fully formed like Athena from the brow of Zeus. It has to evolve out of a series of ideas until it finally takes the shape that you think is best. The process may rarely be as quick as lightning, but often is a long and winding road. Each of my books has its own origin tale…

The genesis for The Anger of Achilles Peterson can be traced back as far as the summer of 1996, during a ferry ride that I took with three friends from Brindisi, Italy to Patras, Greece. As was, and still is, my wont, I was reading something very topical to our trip: Aeschylus’ Agamemnon (having already finished re-reading the Iliad), I believe the Penguin Classics version translated by Robert Fagles. After finishing the story proper, I went back to read the introduction (having learned the hard way that the Penguin intros had a nasty habit of giving away too much of the story). There I found a wonderful quote from D.H. Lawrence, from a letter that he had written in 1915: “Do you know Cassandra in Aeschylus and Homer? She is one of the world’s great figures, and what the Greeks and Agamemnon did to her is symbolic of what mankind has done to her sense – raped and despoiled and mocked her, to their own ruin. It is not your brain you must trust to, nor you will – but to that fundamental pathetic faculty for receiving the hidden waves that that come from the depths of life, and for transferring them to the unreceptive world. It is something that happens below the consciousness and below the range of the will – it is something which is unrecognized and frustrated and destroyed.”

People don’t really write that way anymore. The death of formal correspondence began around the same time of that trip with email, and the lid of the coffin has 140 nails. But that’s beside the point. The point is: wow! As I sat there under the stars (we were poor students then and traveled ‘deck class,’ the experience of which is exactly how it sounds), meditating upon the meaning of those words, my friend Sylvia asked me a simple question. It went something like this: “You read so much, I am surprised that you don’t write.” I fumbled for an answer, but none was forthcoming. The reality is that she was totally and incontrovertibly correct. I needed to write!

But what? Well, from there it was but a simple step from reading about the great Greek myths to writing about them. But I did not start with this book. Instead, my very first completed work was a play entitled Aias, Prince of Salamis (if you read carefully, this is the play by Beth McAleth that she and Rick Campbell pretend that they are headed to see at Drury Lane in Chapter Eight of The Oxford Deception). This was a re-telling of the Iliad combined with some of the post-Iliad tales, such as Ajax by Sophocles, but focused entirely on the character of Aias, who has always been my favorite due to his great strength and courage. It was he who twice duels Hector to essential draws in the Iliad and single-handedly holds off the Trojan assault upon the ships in Book Fifteen. And, as noted by Richmond Lattimore in his introduction to the Iliad, unique among all of the other great heroes “…Aias carries on, from beginning to end, without benefit of supernatural aid.” Aias was finished in late 1997 in a humble house on Fairfax Avenue, Nashville, Tennessee, a stone’s throw from the famous Natchez Trace, and about 80 miles from where Meriwether Lewis met his mysterious end.

Is it a good play? I have no idea. It’s never been staged (as much as it would make my day, if not year, to see such a thing). The play went into my files, never to be seen again (except as the aforementioned throw-away line in The Oxford Deception). But the idea of writing about the Iliad has never left my brain, and when, after three completed plays, I decided to finally turn my attention to trying my hand at a novel, it was to the Iliad that I turned again. But it was still not the story that can be found in the Anger of the Achilles Peterson. Instead, in 2000, perhaps overly inspired by Baz Luhrmann’s movie Romeo + Juliet (1996), I began an ill-fated attempt of writing the story of the Iliad re-imagined as taking place in the streets of modern Los Angeles, with the Greeks and Trojans as gangsters! I still have the pages trapped in the bowels of my computer. They start in a half-lit, almost-deserted Jazz Club, where Hector implores his adored wife Andi to “Sing to me, goddess.” And she responds by singing Duke Ellington’s “I’m Beginning to See the Light” to him. I didn’t get too much further, mainly because I don’t really know anything about gangsters!

And then it hit me. I would combine not just one, but two of my great passions, by writing about both the Iliad and about basketball. I cannot recall for certain, but this was likely inspired by Steven Pressfield’s The Legend of Bagger Vance (1995), the intertextual re-telling and re-setting of the Bhagavad Gita’s ancient war to the golf greens of 1931 Savannah, Georgia. It’s a great story (to which the 2000 movie does fairly poor justice), and it was a simple leap from there to re-setting the Iliad’s battles on a basketball court. But which one? Well, obviously it has to be in a town named after the legendary Troy. Perhaps not surprisingly, given how the fall of Troy is one of the most famous tales of all time, there twenty-three towns in the United States so named. But one glance at a map of upstate New York made it clear that it was the only possible setting, given the preponderance of towns named after classical locations (as shown in Appendix II).

Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller gave me the opening quote, “The world’s history is constant, like the laws of nature, and simple, like the souls of men. The same conditions continually produce the same results.” This seems like the most straight-forward description of intertextuality that I can think of, a technique used in such great works as James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), John Steinbeck’s East of Eden (1952), and many others. (As an aside, Schiller is of course most famous for one thing, his poem Ode an die Freude (1785), which was later set for chorus by Ludwig van Beethoven, and became the greatest piece of music ever written).

Although not published until 2011, The Anger of Achilles Peterson was essentially completed in 2002, in a small Walden-like cottage upon the remnants of the old Schilling Estate in Woodside, California. I am now burdened by greater cares that I could have possibly imagined at the time, and have moved on from that simple home. But at the time I was deeply influenced by Henry David Thoreau, whose words still inspire me: “I learned this, at least, by my experiments; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, and will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him… and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings.”

The “Official” Soundtrack to The Oxford Deception

William Byrd: The Earl of Oxford’s March (c.1588): Prologue
Ralph Vaughan Williams: The England of Elizabeth Suite, Stratford (1957): One: Stratford Town Hall
Sir William Walton: The Death of Falstaff (1944): Two: Holy Trinity Church
Benjamin Britten: Variations on an Elizabethan Theme of Byrd (1953): Three & Four: The Shakespeare Centre
Ralph Vaughan Williams: The England of Elizabeth Suite, King’s College (1957): Five & Six: Holy Trinity Church
Franz Joseph Haydn: Symphony no. 92 in G major, “Oxford,” Adagio (1789): Seven: On the Train
Franz Joseph Haydn: Symphony no. 104 in D major, “London,” Andante (1795): Eight: On the Train
Ralph Vaughan Williams: 3 Shakespeare Songs, The Cloud Cap’t Towers (1951): Nine: Westminster Abbey
Vaughan Williams: The England of Elizabeth Suite, Books (1957): Ten & Eleven: British Library
Franz Joseph Haydn: Symphony no. 94 in G major, “Surprise,” Andante (1791): Twelve: Richmond Park
Gustav Holst: St. Paul’s Suite, Op.29, no.2, Finale (1913): Thirteen: St. Pauls’ Cathedral
Ralph Vaughan Williams: Fantasia on Greensleeves (1934): Fourteen: The Tower of London
Sir Edward Elgar: Sospiri, Op. 70 (1914): Fifteen:  The British Museum
William Byrd: Wolsey’s Wilde (c.1590): Sixteen & Seventeen: Hampton Court
Ralph Vaughan Williams: The England of Elizabeth Suite: Treasures (1957): Eighteen & Nineteen: The Temple
Franz Joseph Haydn: Symphony no. 94 in G major, “Surprise,” Finale (1791): Twenty & Twenty-One: The Golden Hinde & Globe
Ralph Vaughan Williams: Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis (1910): Twenty-Two: Southwark Cathedral
Sir Edward Elgar: Enigma Variations, Nimrod (version for Organ) (1899): Twenty-Three: Southwark Cathedral
Franz Joseph Haydn: Symphony no. 96 in D major, “Miracle,” Finale (1791): Twenty-Four: Southwark Cathedral
Franz Joseph Haydn: Symphony no. 92 in G major, “Oxford,” Presto (1789): Twenty-Five: The Globe
Franz Joseph Haydn: Symphony no. 104 in D major, “London,” Finale (1795): Twenty-Six: The London Eye
Ralph Vaughan Williams: Serenade to Music, “Shakespeare” (1938): Epilogue

Author’s Notes: I wanted the sound of this book to reflect the English setting, so I chose to go with either English composers, such as Byrd, Vaughan Williams, Walton, Britten, and Elgar, or composers who spent a considerable amount of time there, such as Haydn and Holst. Bryd’s Earl of Oxford’s March seemed like the perfect way to open the book. Vaughan Williams’ incidental music from the England of Elizabeth Suite worked well throughout the book, and his Cloud Cap’t Towers couldn’t be more perfect for the Shakespeare Monument scene in Westminster Abbey. Walton’s Death of Falstaff seemed appropriate for the discovery of Wright’s body, while Britten’s Variation on an Elizabethan Theme is just a gorgeous piece that seems to fit into Rick and Beth’s discussion regarding why Will Shakspeare is not a logical choice as the author of the greatest words in the English language. Haydn composed some of his greatest symphonies while in London, all of which fit beautifully into the theme of the book. Holst’s St. Paul’s Suite was the logical fit for Rick and Beth’s time in St. Paul’s Cathedral, as was Bryd’s Wolsey’s Wilde for their time at Wolsey’s old haunt, Hampton Court Palace. I almost used Elgar’s Salut d’Amour for Rick and Beth’s British Museum-prompted interlude, but chose his less-well-known but equally moving Sospiri instead. Vaughan William’s “Tallis Fantasy” seems like something to that needs to be heard in the great spaces of a cathedral, so it starts their final hunt. And although probably unlikely to actually be played in the Southwark Cathedral, I imagined that Rick and Beth heard the organ version of Elgar’s “Nimrod” while waiting for Charles’ return. Finally, Vaughan William’s Serenade to Music, inspired by Shakespeare’s discussion of the music of the spheres in A Merchant of Venice, wraps up the final scene in the National Portrait Gallery. To me, this piece seems to sum up all that is mystical and soul moving about music, a concept that I think would be totally foreign to the unlearned merchant of Stratford, but certainly not to the 17th Earl of Oxford.

How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank!

Here will we sit and let the sounds of music

Creep in our ears: soft stillness and the night

Become the touches of sweet harmony.

Look how the floor of heaven

Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold:

There’s not the smallest orb that thou behold’st

But in his motion like an angel sings,

Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins;

Such harmony is in immortal souls;

But whilst this muddy vesture of decay

Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.

Come, ho! and wake Diana with a hymn!

With sweetest touches pierce your mistress’ ear,

And draw her home with music.

I am never merry when I hear sweet music.

The reason is, your spirits are attentive –

The man that hath no music in himself,

Nor is not mov’d with concord of sweet sounds,

Is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils;

The motions of his spirit are dull as night

And his affections dark as Erebus:

Let no such man be trusted. Music! hark!

It is your music of the house.

Methinks it sounds much sweeter than by day.

Silence bestows that virtue on it

How many things by season season’d are

To their right praise and true perfection!

Peace, ho! the moon sleeps with Endymion

And would not be awak’d. Soft stillness and the night

Become the touches of sweet harmony.

The “Official” Soundtrack to The Anger of Achilles Peterson

Edgar Meyer: The Nick of Time (1999): Prologue
Samuel Barber: Essay for Orchestra, op. 12 (1937): Chapters I – III: Prelude to Game 1
Samuel Barber: Violin Concerto, Allegro (1939): Chapters IV – V: Game 1, First Half
Samuel Barber: Violin Concerto, Andante (1939): Chapter VI: Game 1, Half-Time
Samuel Barber: Second Essay for Orchestra, op. 17 (1942): Chapters VII – VIII: Game 1, Second Half
Antonio Vivaldi: Nulla In Mundo Pax Sincera (c.1703-1741): Chapter IX: The Depth of His Heart
Sir Edgar Elgar: Lux Aeterna (choral version of Enigma Variation 9, ‘Nimrod’) (1899): Chapter IX: The Depths of His Heart
Ferde Grofé: The River, from the Hudson River Suite (1955): Chapter X: Through the Darkness of Night
Aaron Copland: Symphony no. 3, Movement 1 (1946): Chapters XI – XII: Game 2, First Half
Aaron Copland: Symphony no. 3, Movement 2 (1946): Chapters XIII – XV: Game 2, First Half
Edgar Meyer: Short Trip Home (1999): Chapter XVI: Powerful Destiny
Aaron Copland: Symphony no. 3, Movement 4 (1946): Chapters XVII – XXI: Game 2, Second Half
Samuel Barber: Agnus Dei (choral version of Adagio for Strings) (1938): Chapter XXII: Balanced His Golden Scales
Aaron Copland: Clarinet Concerto (1948): Chapter XXIII: The Gloom and the Darkness
James Scott Skinner: Hector the Hero (1903): Chapter XXIV: A Passion of Grieving
Joseph Brackett: Simple Gifts (1848): Epilogue

Author’s Notes: I wanted the sound of this book to primarily reflect the American setting in order to highlight the universality of the tale that was being re-lived in the towns of Albany and Troy, New York. Therefore, I started listening heavily to the great American composers and found myself drawn to the sounds of Samuel Barber and Aaron Copland. Unfortunately, this choice creates a significant anachronism, since the majority of these songs were written after the events played out in 1927, but so be it.

To give each of the two games their distinct tones, I used Barber almost exclusively for Game 1 and Copland for Game 2, with the exception of Barber’s magnificent Agnus Dei for Hector’s death in Chapter XXII, tying the two games together as Game 2 comes to its tragic end. The Prologue and pivotal scene away from the basketball action in Chapter XVI were set to the bluegrass-infused soft classical chamber music of Edgar Meyer, which I think provides a beautiful contrast from the powerful notes of Barber and Copland.

Two songs that actually feature in the story, though not by name, are not anachronistic. In Chapter IX, the protagonist finds Achilles gloomily listening to Vivaldi’s Nulla In Mundo Pax Sincera, a glorious work made famous in the movie Shine. And when he departs Achilles’ house at the end of the chapter, the mysterious song that he hears is Lux Aeterna, the choral version of Elgar’s magnificent Enigma Variation 9, ‘Nimrod’.

Grofé’s The River is from his Hudson River Suite, which seemed highly appropriate for the tragic killing of Dolan during the misadventure across the Hudson in Chapter X. Skinner’s moving Hector the Hero couldn’t be more appropriate for Hector Price’s funeral scene in Chapter XXIV. And finally, we conclude with Bracket’s perfect Shaker melody, Simple Gifts, later integrated into Copland’s Appalachian Spring. The words speak for themselves: 

‘Tis the gift to be simple, ’tis the gift to be free

‘Tis the gift to come down where we ought to be,

And when we find ourselves in the place just right,

‘Twill be in the valley of love and delight.

When true simplicity is gain’d,

To bow and to bend we shan’t be asham’d,

To turn, turn will be our delight,

Till by turning, turning we come ’round right

The Story of the Story: The Isle of Devils

No book springs forth fully formed like Athena from the brow of Zeus. It has to evolve out of a series of ideas until it finally takes the shape that you think is best. The process may rarely be as quick as lightning, but often is a long and winding road. Each of my books has its own origin tale…

The genesis for the Isle of Devils comes from something I read once and which has stuck with me ever since. In 2002, having already re-read Agatha Christie’s monumental Death on the Nile (1937), I was reading Elizabeth Peters’ Amelia Peabody series of historical mysteries in preparation for a trip where I planned to take my eighty-year old grandmother Emily on a cruise down the Nile (unfortunately we didn’t stay at the Winter Palace Hotel in Luxor, where Christie wrote the story). When I got to the sixth book in the series, The Last Camel Died at Noon (1991), I found in the introductory acknowledgements the statement: “I am an admirer of the romances of Sir Henry Rider Haggard. He was a master of a form of fiction that is, alas, seldom produced in these degenerate days; having run out of books to read, I decided to write one myself. It is meant as an affectionate, admiring, and nostalgic tribute.”

For some reason, I have never been able to get that simple sentiment out of my head, and I finally decided to do something about it. While a rare peevish individual may occasionally make limpid claims otherwise, it is not much of a stretch to definitively say that Sherlock Holmes is the greatest detective to ever be set down in print. Meanwhile, Dame Christie’s Belgian Hercule Poirot is but a pale, farcical imitation of the Master. And yet, it is equally easy to postulate that the single greatest detective story does not belong to Holmes. I think that title safely lies with Murder on the Orient Express (1934). Everything about it is perfect, from its origins at the Pera Palace Hotel in Istanbul, Turkey, the southern terminus of that now-famous railway line, to its exotic setting and cast, to its brilliant distortion of the traditional trial by jury, to its magnanimous conclusion. I’ve been reading mysteries ever since I finished the Orient Express, and while I’ve found some brilliant ones in their own rights, I’ve never unearthed one that has tried to capture its same spirit. Hence the Peters’ quote. And that’s how I decided to try my hand at a good old-fashioned mystery….

There’s more to the tale, of course. I also couldn’t get the story of Chushingura, the Japanese legend of the Forty-Seven Ronin. The true tale of a group of leaderless samurai who avenge their fallen lord’s honor by patiently waiting and planning for two years to kill the man responsible. It’s a fantastic tale that I feel transcends culture and could be transplantable to any time and place. My earliest attempt at writing this tale did involve the French Foreign Legion, but it was set in one of the great mansions of pre-1906 San Francisco. And the critical battle where the betrayal occurred was that of Balaclava, when the Light Brigade was sent into the Valley of Death. The tone of the outline (it never progressed much beyond that) was obviously heavily influenced by Tennyson’s famous poem, so much so that I had tentatively titled it “The Charge of Murder.”

Half a league half a league

Half a league onward 

All in the valley of Death

Rode the six hundred: 

‘Forward, the Light Brigade

Charge for the guns’ he said

Into the valley of Death

Rode the six hundred. 

‘Forward, the Light Brigade!’

Was there a man dismay’d?

Not tho’ the soldiers knew

Some one had blunder’d: 

Theirs not to make reply,

Theirs not to reason why,

Theirs but to do & die,

Into the valley of Death

Rode the six hundred. 

Cannon to right of them,

Cannon to left of them,

Cannon in front of them

Volley’d and thunder’d; 

Storm’d at with shot & shell,

Boldly they rode & well,

Into the jaws of Death,

Into the mouth of Hell

Rode the six hundred. 

Great stuff! But this idea eventually stalled out, both for lack of a distinctive detective, as well as stumbling too much against the weight of history, for the Crimean War is too well documented for the facts to be easily altered to fit the confines of a murder mystery novel. It was tucked away into a file entitled simply: “Ideas,” and left to incubate for many years until the right protagonist and setting could be found.

And then it hit me. The greatest series of detective stories are those belonging to Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. But Holmes alone was not great. His two tales of individual investigations (The Adventures of the Blanched Soldier & the Lion’s Mane) rank towards the bottom of his scintillating escapades. He only achieved true greatness in the presence of his friend and biographer, Dr. John H. Watson. And yet, Holmes’ brilliance often shone so bright that Watson appeared dim in its shadow. It is my belief, however, that nothing could be further from the truth. Holmes would not have been content with a bumbling fool by his side! Dr. Watson was brave, intelligent, honest, and a genuine hero in his own right. I felt that he deserved an adventure all to himself, and so I wrote the story of his first adventure, before he had ever heard the name Sherlock Holmes. But of course, I borrowed heavily from the themes, words, and objects found in the Holmes and Watson stories to lend as much authenticity to the tale as possible.

As for the setting, it could only be Bermuda, that magnificent, lush, sub-tropical outpost of the great British Empire. Within Bermuda, the obvious choice was St. George’s, the oldest continuously inhibited (non-native) town in the New World. And in St. George’s, the old Globe Hotel (now possible to visit in its current iteration as the National Trust Museum) seemed to have the ambiance most similar to the fabled Orient Express. Throw in a hurricane (in place of the Yugoslavian snowstorm) to strand the travelers, and voilà! I cannot claim to have finished The Isle of Devils in a locale as exotic as the Pera Palace Hotel, but I am happy to say that the book was outlined in its entirety, and the first words set down, in the cedar-paneled library at the Aicardi Estate at Bridge House, Southampton Parish, with its beautiful setting overlooking Ely’s Harbor and the famous Somerset Bridge (reputedly the smallest working drawbridge in the world). Close enough.

The Story of the Story

No book springs forth fully formed like Athena from the brow of Zeus. It has to evolve out of a series of ideas until it finally takes the shape that you think is best. The process may rarely be as quick as lightning, but often is a long and winding road. Each of my books has their own origin tale, which can be found on their own pages (above).