After struggling through an unpromising first chapter, I began reading the passage that opens:

  There, in the middle of the broad, bright high-road—there, as if it had that moment sprung out of the earth or dropped from the heaven—stood the figure of a solitary Woman, dressed from head to foot in white garments; her face bent in grave inquiry on mine, her hand pointing to the dark cloud over London, as I faced her.

  I was spellbound, and from that moment until I finished, I lived and breathed the novel, walking around in a daze. Dickens called the passage one of the two most dramatic descriptions in all of literature. It is a chapter that every thriller writer should study.

  The first installment of The Woman in White was published in Charles Dickens’s weekly magazine,All the Year Round, on November 26, 1859, starting on the same page as the final words of the last installment of Dickens’s novel,A Tale of Two Cities.

  It was an enormous success. Over the course of the serialization, the circulation of All the Year Round tripled, and lines formed at newsagents when the next part was due. Thackeray stayed up all night, devouring The Woman in White, and William Gladstone cancelled an important engagement to finish it. It was one of the biggest selling novels in English up to that time.

  The Woman in White created a new genre of fiction, the “sensation novel,” which was the direct precursor to the twentieth-century thriller. The sensation novel dealt with extreme subjects: murder, violence, bigamy, insanity, kidnapping, illegitimate children, nefarious legal machinations, adultery, forgery, fraud, and dark labyrinthine secrets—not in exotic, faraway locales, but seething beneath the placid surface of English domestic life. Because many sensation novels were published in parts, each section had to end with a flourish, a cliff-hanger, a dark note of violence or mystery to keep the reader eagerly awaiting the next installment. The sensation novel was the progenitor not only of the pithy chapter structure of the modern thriller, but also of the episodic nature of most television dramas , thus exerting a vast and subtle influence on modern storytelling.

  Collins got the idea for The Woman in White from a story recorded by Francois Gayot de Pitaval in his 1735 book, Famous and Interesting Cases. Pitaval recounted the ordeal of a woman who was bundled off to an insane asylum by her heirs bent on acquiring her estate. (The story of Martin Guerre was another of Pitaval’s cases.) In The Woman in White, a brutal baronet and a devious Italian count steal a young woman’s inheritance by forcing her marriage to the baronet, who then switches her with a woman in an insane asylum, where her protestations to be a lady of quality become further proof of her insanity.

  Structurally,The Woman in White is daring and avant garde. The story is mostly told by four narrators, presented through their letters, diary entries, and written statements. Some of the narrators in The Woman in White are unreliable, even suspect, which adds to the novel’s atmosphere of menace and deception. This shifting of narrative points of view anticipated the literary experimentation of the twentieth century, and in many ways it was more radical than, for example, Faulkner’s narrative shifts in As I Lay Dying and The Sound and the Fury.

  The plot of The Woman in White is fantastically complex, as ornate and dark as a Victorian wig dresser. After the book was published, one critic analyzed the various timelines and gleefully announced that it was impossible for the events to have taken place. A chagrined Collins ordered the presses stopped and rewrote the book to fix the problem, but modern critics have pointed out further inconsistencies. Despite that, the book moves swiftly and surely, the pacing is perfect, and each terrible scene is like the slow winding of a spring, building up an unbearable tension.

  What makes The Woman in White a great novel, however, is more than plot and structure: it lies in the extraordinary characters Collins created. Two in particular are unforgettable: Count Fosco and Marian Halcombe, the heroine’s best friend.

  Collins created deep and powerful portraits of real women in his novels, and Marian Halcombe was his crowning achievement. She is a completely original character, the anti-Victorian woman—independent, sarcastic, highly intelligent, loyal, strong, and courageous; she roundly disparages the idea that women are delicate and weak and in need of protection. Underlying the novel is a subcurrent of outrage at women’s lack of rights, particularly property rights, and these are clearly Collins’s views, too, a man more than a century ahead of his time. Marian Halcombe is—do I dare say it?—a more fully realized depiction of a woman than anything to be found in English literature before, and that would include the novels of Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters. She is magnificent.

  And then there is the exquisite Count Fosco, the corpulent Italian nobleman of refinement and taste, an aesthete and wit who pets and kisses the tame mice that scamper about his enormous person while remaining monstrously indifferent to the suffering of his fellow human beings. He combines prodigious charisma and charm with a cool, pleasant, and utterly amoral world view; he is one of the most perfectly realized Machiavellian figures in English literature. And yet the reader finds, to his own shock, something deeply attractive about the man. One of the best pieces of advice I ever received as a novelist came from an editor who insisted that a great thriller must have a great villain; Fosco is a villain for the ages, and any writer who aspires to the genre should study him.

  When Lincoln Child and I were in the early stages of plotting our novel Brimstone, we needed a villain who was an Italian nobleman. Linc brought up Count Fosco, saying we needed a character like him. As we debated who our villain would be, enumerating his traits, arguing about his habits, his looks, and his manners of speech, we kept coming back to Fosco. Finally I said, “Damn it, Linc, why don’t we just steal him?” And so, with trepidation (and due credit given), we purloined the adipose count— pet mice and all—for our novel. There he appears, exactly as conceived by Collins, updated only slightly into the twenty-first century. It is our little homage to one of our favorite authors, Wilkie Collins, and his greatest novel,The Woman in White.

  Douglas Preston was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and grew up in the deadly boring suburb of Wellesley. He worked as an editor and writer for the American Museum of Natural History in New York. He also taught writing at Princeton University. His numerous books, both fiction and nonfiction, include Tyrannosaur Canyon (2005) and Blasphemy (2008) as well as Cities of Gold: A Journey across the American Southwest (1992). Some of his novels were coauthored with Lincoln Child, featuring FBI Special Agent Aloysius X. L. Pendergast, among them The Cabinet of Curiosities (2002). His nonfiction book,The Monster of Florence (2008, coauthored with Mario Spezi), chronicles the story of Italy’s most notorious serial killer, who ritually murdered lovers in the hills of Tuscany. Preston writes occasional pieces for the New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly, Smithsonian, and other magazines. He served on the board of directors of the Authors Guild and International Thriller Writers.

  11

  Jules Verne’s

  THE MYSTERIOUS ISLAND (1874)

  D. P. Lyle

  French author Jules Verne (1828–1905) is the father of the science-fiction genre and, with The Mysterious Island, penned one of the great thrillers. Verne’s unique gift lies in his ability to meld science fact, fantasy, and speculation with incredible adventure stories. He has taken millions of readers to the center of the Earth, 20,000 leagues beneath the ocean’s waves, around the world aboard a balloon in eighty days, the surface of the moon, and all points in between. He imagined navigable aircraft, an electric submarine, and a space rocket long before these existed. He presaged such things as the FAX machine, aerial warfare, astronauts walking on the moon (his were also launched from Florida), and even the now ubiquitous camera phone and text messaging.

  The desire to perform a work which will endure, which will survive him, is the origin of man’s superiority over all other creatures . . .

  —Jules Verne,The Mysterious Island

  It’s 1864. The Civil War rages across the rolling hills and fertile farmland of Virginia. Richmond is besieged. Five prisoners commandeer a balloon and escape from a Confederate prison.

  “Are we rising again?”

  “No. On the contrary.”

  “Are we descending?”

  “Worse than that, Captain! We are falling!”

  With those lines one of the great adventures in all of literature begins. The Mysterious Island follows the fate of the five Civil War prison escapees. They are an eclectic group—an engineer, a sailor, a journalist, a young boy, and a black man, who might have been a slave (Verne chooses to refer to him as a loyal butler). The storm carries them from Virginia, across an angry ocean, and deposits them on an uncharted volcanic island in the South Pacific.

  Like Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Johann Rudolf Wyss’s The Swiss Family Robinson, The Mysterious Island echoes the true story of Alexander Selkirk, a sailor stranded on an island off the Chilean coast for five years. As did Selkirk, Crusoe, and the Robinson family, Verne’s castaways, who prefer to call themselves colonists, survive by their own ingenuity. They use watch crystals to create fire; manufacture matches from materials found on the island; mold bricks, build a kiln, and fabricate pottery; smelt iron from ore, using a sealskin bellows to stoke the fire, and ultimately make steel; produce various acids to tan hides and make soap; mix up gunpowder and then nitroglycerin, which they use to blow an opening in a rock wall, which releases a waterfall and a steady supply of fresh water; farm; raise animals; build an elevator; and set up a telegraph system.

  Each process used by the colonists, and every device they create, are meticulously explained by Verne, revealing the breadth and depth of his scientific knowledge as well as his ability to explain complex subjects to even the most naïve reader. He explores everything from chemistry and physics to zoology and botany, from geology and climatology to celestial navigation, from metallurgy to mathematics and trigonometry, from architecture to hydrodynamics, and even then-current medical knowledge when one of the colonists develops a “pernicious fever.”

  If The Mysterious Island were merely an educational adventure story, it would still rank among the greatest thrillers. But Verne seasons his plot with intrigue, and it is this mysterious element that adds depth and texture to the tale.

  The island holds a secret. They are not alone.

  Someone or something is out there.

  The initial clues are passed off as serendipity or good luck. A large amphibious creature is found slain, a slash across its neck. By what weapon? By whose hand? Maybe the sharp coral sealed its fate. A pig is found dead in one of their traps, yet when it is cooked, a bullet is discovered in the fiesh. Where could it have come from? A harpooned whale appears on the beach. A rich source of oil for them, but who launched the harpoon? A chest washes ashore, presumably from a passing or perhaps foundering ship. It contains weapons, tools, scientific instruments, books, maps, and clothing. Exactly what they need. As if someone had packed it specifically for them.

  A ship with fifty pirates arrives. They launch a furious attack on the colonists. Death seems imminent, until the vessel suddenly explodes. Surely, it was the powder magazine. But when they inspect the partially sunken ship, the magazine is intact, and it appears as if a mine destroyed the enemy. This fortuitous event convinces them that they are being watched. Six pirates, who were on shore at the time of the explosion, survive, and a cat-and-mouse chase ensues with the colonists being both hunter and hunted. Until the pirates are found dead. Who could have slain them?

  Thinking they are now safe, they discover that the island has yet another trick for the colonists. It awakens, spewing smoke and fire, threatening to explode with volcanic fury. On the verge of destruction, the island’s true secret is revealed in the person of Captain Nemo, one of the most enigmatic characters in literature. In The Mysterious Island, the amazing story of Nemo and his remarkable submarine the Nautilus, both initially introduced in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, comes full circle. To discover the fate of the colonists, the Nautilus, Nemo, and The Mysterious Island, you’ll need to read the book.

  Mr. Verne truly achieved his “desire to perform a work which will endure,” not only in The Mysterious Island, but also in each of the other fantastic novels he wrote. His influence on fiction writers is both long lived and profound.

  I first met him on a cool, cloudy October afternoon in 1960 in my hometown of Huntsville. I had just finished football practice—a sport played by most fourteen-year-old Alabama boys—and walked downtown to wait at the library for my dad, who would swing by to pick me up after leaving his job at the post office. The library, built in 1915 by Andrew Carnegie, held row after row of book-stuffed shelves. This day I had no homework, so I wandered through the musty stacks. I had never read a real novel. Just those high-school-sports-hero-wins-the-game-on-a-last-second-miracle-play-and-gets-the-girl books. What we would today call young adult. But never a real novel. A thick, heavy one.

  My rummaging ended at a shelf lined with books by Jules Verne. I had seen the Disney production of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, so Verne was not an unfamiliar name. I picked up Journey to the Center of the Earth, took it to a table, and began to read. The first page set the hook. When Dad arrived, I got a library card—my first—and took the book home. A week later, I exchanged that one for The Mysterious Island. More Verne as well as H. G. Wells, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Hemingway, Steinbeck, and a lifelong love of reading followed. Thank you, Mr. Verne.

  D. P. Lyle, M.D. is the Macavity Award-winning and Edgar Award-nominated author of the nonfiction books,Murder and Mayhem, Forensics for Dummies, and Forensics and Fiction as well as the thrillers,Devil’s Playground and Double Blind. His other works include Howdunnit: Forensics: A Guide For Writers, from Writers Digest Books. He is a practicing cardiologist in Orange County, California, and has worked with many novelists and with the writers of popular television shows such as Law & Order, CSI: Miami, Diagnosis Murder, Monk, Judging Amy, Peacemakers, Cold Case, House, Medium, Women’s Murder Club, and 1-800-Missing. Visit his Web site, The Writers’ Medical and Forensics Lab, at www.dplylemd.com

  12

  H. Rider Haggard’s

  KING SOLOMON’S MINES (1885)

  Norman L. Rubenstein

  Sir Henry Rider Haggard (1856–1925) was the eighth of ten children born to a barrister father and a poetess mother. After a lackluster elementary and high school education, Haggard’s father arranged a position for Rider with the lieutenant governor of Natal in Africa, where Rider later became the registrar of the High Court of the Transvaal, itself later to become a part of South Africa. Rider married and had four children, the family eventually returning to England, where Rider studied law and became a barrister. However, he soon determined that his heart wasn’t in it, and he turned to writing.King Solomon’s Mines (1885) was Haggard’s fourth book and became a hugely popular best seller. The prolific Haggard published over seventy books, including eighteen that featured the hero of King Solomon’s Mines, Allan Quatermain, along with four novels featuring his other enduring literary creation, Ayesha, “She Who Must Be Obeyed,” starting with the also famous novel,She (1887).

  According to H. Rider Haggard, he came to write King Solomon’s Mines because of a small wager with one of his older brothers, who bet Rider that he could not write a book “half as good” as the recently published (1883) Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson. Rider took the bet and promptly wrote King Solomon’s Mines in short order (accounts vary from as few as six weeks to at most sixteen weeks). The book originally had trouble finding a publisher, as it was so different and original compared to anything that had come before it, but when after six months of attempts it eventually was published in 1885, it became an immediate best seller and ultimately that year’s best-selling book. The novel was one of the first to be the subject of a modern-style advertising and marketing campaign, with billboards and posters inundating London with the announcement that King Solomon’s Mines was “The Most Amazing Book Ever Written.”

  The novel is generally and correctly credited with being the first “Lost World” genre adventure novel and the forerunner and inspiration of such famous novels as Kipling’s The Man Who Would Be King, Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, Howard’s Conan and Kull tales, and Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness, among many others.King Solomon’s Mines has been filmed at least six times, and the story’s hero, Allan Quatermain, is an obvious antecedent and influence upon contemporary heroes such as Indiana Jones. Quatermain himself has appeared as a main character in the graphic novel and subsequent film of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, where no less an action hero than Sean Connery portrayed him.

  King Solomon’s Mines is an enduring classic that is still widely read and enjoyed today and owes its continued popularity in part to its engaging, informal first-person narration by Quatermain. It is also notable as the first adventure novel published in English that was based in the African continent. At the time of King Solomon’s Mines, the African continent was largely unknown to the Western world, and the author’s personal knowledge of the geography, flora, fauna, peoples, and fables of South Africa gave the novel a great deal of veracity and flavor that rang true with readers.

  The plot involves a small, intrepid band of adventurers who follow an old sixteenth-century treasure map written in blood, that supposedly reveals the location of the lost gold and gemstone mines of the biblical King Solomon. It has epic battles, lost civilizations, and plenty of action, elements that are usually crowd pleasers, yet the novel has been the subject of two major contemporary criticisms.