Thriller Guy’s alter ego Allen Appel’s first
published novel was the time travel book Time
After Time. (Buy it HERE for Kindle!) He has written on this blog about how
the book was conceived, written and followed by four more in the series. TG,
and Appel, have remained interested in the story of the murder of the Tsar and
his family as details have come to light over the years. When TG’s pal Syd
Jones blogged about a new book on the topic, TG snagged a chunk of the Q&A
with author Sam Eastland about his book, Archive
17, to use here. To see the entire interview, go to Syd’s excellent book blog, Scene of the Crime. What was particularly interesting to TG was
Eastland’s explanation of how the idea for his book came to him.
“During the mid 1990’s, a friend of mine was present
at a construction site in Russia when a backhoe unearthed the body of a
soldier. The dead man was laying spread-eagled on the carcass of a horse which
had been buried at the same time. The man was wearing a long greatcoat, tall
boots and had a thick leather belt across his middle. The clothing and the body
had been preserved by the soil so that the man appeared to be partially
mummified. Upon examination of the corpse, it became clear that the rider had
been buried around the time of the First World War. It also seemed clear, from
the fact that he had been laid to rest along with his horse, that the man had
probably been buried on the same spot where he had been killed. The man’s belt
buckle, which clearly showed the double-headed eagle of the Romanovs,
identified him as a soldier of the Tsar’s Army. However, because of the
location, which was not on what would have been the front lines during the
Great War, the man must have been buried after, not during, the war. This would
have placed the soldier’s death at some time in the early days of the
Revolution, when soldiers still loyal to the Tsar, known as the Whites, fought
pitched battles with the Bolsheviks, who became known as the Reds. During the
course of the construction, several other bodies were discovered, all of whom
were similarly dressed and, presumably, had been killed during the same battle.
After the bodies had been re-interred, my friend was given one of the belt
buckles as a souvenir. He then passed it on to me, and I still have it.
For every book, there is always some unexpected
catalyst that sets everything in motion. Waiting for these catalysts to take
hold is like standing in the path of a gently falling meteor shower. Ideas will
come hurtling past, but they don’t hit you, so eventually you forget them. But
then some image or some anecdote, will strike you right between the eyes. From
that point on, the formation of the book becomes like the making of a pearl
inside an oyster. The grain of sand embeds itself inside the oyster. The oyster
is not trying to produce a thing of beauty. It is trying to survive. The pearl
is the product of pain. It is the same with these stories. Once they have
snagged like a fishhook in your brain, you have to find a way to work them
loose.
Holding that buckle in my hand made me think of the
tens of thousands of people who were swallowed up in that revolution whose
stories have never been told. For months after I began writing the Eye of
the Red Tsar, that rider galloped through my dreams. It became an act of
self-preservation to conjure back to life the story of that buckle, and of the
man who wore it to his death.”
TG, and Appel, understand the power of an object to
evoke a story. Usually Appel sees a period photograph that somehow calls to him
across time and sets up an echo in his mind that rattles around until a story
begins to fall into place around it. With Appel’s last book, it was a
photograph of Abraham Lincoln looking at a book with his son Tad, a photograph
that had sat on a bookshelf above his computer for 20 years.
What’s the point here, TG?
When searching for a story idea, look around and see
if anything calls to you, Seeing a picture, holding a belt buckle, going to a
museum, or even a walk in the woods can jog loose a single thought, that,
amazingly, will sometimes spin itself into a story, a novel.
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