Your Basic Blast From the Past

Like most writers with an on-line presence, I get emails from readers. Most of it is generated by two different series, both of which came to rather abrupt ends when I thought they were going to continue but the publisher ultimately thought otherwise. So several times a week -- occasionally several times a day -- I get an email wondering when the next book in one of those series is going to come out, and I have to write a sheepish reply informing the reader that, uh, there isn't going to be a next book.

Today, however, I got emails from two different readers concerning a couple of books that I wrote well over a decade ago, neither of which was a great success, but both of which I enjoyed writing.

TRIUMPH OF THE LION was the final book in the Children of the Lion series. These were Biblical historical novels set during Old Testament times and packaged by Book Creations Inc., the Lyle Kenyon Engel-founded outfit responsible for many different historical novel series during the Seventies, Eighties, and Nineties. I worked for BCI for a number of years and wrote at least 50 books for them, maybe more. I had read some of the Children of the Lion series, but that was my only connection with the series until one of my editors at BCI called and asked me to write #19, which was the final book on the contract with Bantam. There was a possibility that the series might continue past that, however.

I had never written any Biblical fiction, but I was raised in the Baptist church and grew up going to Sunday School, so I knew all about King David and the Philistines and such-like. Or I thought I did, anyway. I wound up doing considerable research for the book, which was the fourth and final part of a story arc within the series started by another author. I'd been writing mostly Westerns for BCI, and in fact was working on a series Western at the same time as I was writing the Children of the Lion book. I told my editor that I'd be careful not to have King David say, "Well, I reckon I'll go slay me some o' them Philistines." I quickly discovered that sword fights were just as much fun to write as gunfights, and battles with a bunch of guys in chariots weren't that different from Old West cavalry battles. I had a great time with the book. I finished off the other author's storylines (to this day, I don't know why he didn't write the book and why BCI called on me instead), and I set up some stuff of my own in case the series continued. Sadly, it didn't. I had some pretty good ideas for it, I thought.

The other book a reader emailed me about today was THE HEALER'S ROAD, a Civil War historical novel co-authored with Livia and published under the name J.L. Reasoner. We'd done another historical novel for Berkley under that name, a Gold Rush novel called RIVERS OF GOLD. The editor wanted a novel about a family of doctors during the Civil War. This was the first time I had written anything set during that era, and researching it was good practice for all the research I had to do a few years later when I started writing the Civil War Battles series for Cumberland House. THE HEALER'S ROAD was a lot of fun, too. We threw in more than just the war, of course. We also had lust, obsession, greed, doomed love, and all sorts of soap-operatic complications for your characters. But there were also some serious scenes, and some darned good ones, too, in my biased opinion.

The book did well enough that there was a sequel, HEALER'S CALLING, following the same characters after the war, during Reconstruction and also moving westward. There was talk of a third book, but it never came about. At the end of the first book we left it rather vague as to whether or not a certain character who appeared to be dead was really still alive. When people asked me about him, I would say, "Well, if there's a third book, he lived, because he's going to reappear. If there's not . . . I guess he's really dead."

These books are fairly rare now, although the two HEALER'S books can be found very cheaply -- I mean, inexpensively -- through on-line booksellers. Copies of TRIUMPH OF THE LION can be found on-line, too, but they're more pricey, I guess because by that time the print runs were pretty low. I think they're good books, and I'm glad that they haven't been completely forgotten. And I thank you for allowing me to wax nostalgic this evening.