Looking at the novels by James Rollins, Dan Brown, and Katherine Neville, one finds a common thread that includes ancient secrets, modern-day conspiracies, hypothetical explanations for gaps in recorded history, and experts with a lot of knowledge to explain to the reader and many of the characters the significance of what is being found and how dangerous it is for the world if the secrets turn out to be worse than we thought.

James Rollins The Last Odyssey focuses on Homer’s stories and suggests that the events really happened and, worse yet, that the powers of the gods were actual and, if found, would tip the balance of power today.

While I enjoy reading these novels and playing “what if” on a huge, global scale, the research involved just to nail down the known facts is more than I want to tackle.

Consider the research you woul have to do if your “what if” is “What if Leonardo Da Vinci drew a preliminary version of today’s F-150 pickup truck and that ‘the bad guys’ stole these plans and made a protetype that used Greek Fire as for fuel”?

Typically, the story might begin when a mechanical genius who is researching old records of the Ford Motor Company and uncovers “something odd about” the F-150’s predecessor truck, the 1950 model F-3. Let’s say that its revelopment moved along faster than it should, based on the scienceof the times. This leads the researcher to the personal libraries of the truck’s designers and one of them had a passion for Da Vinci.

As you’ll see after reading many of these novels, thbe minute somebody finds about about the designer’s passion for Da Vinci, massive forces and organizations will appear to steal the records, destroy the records, or use them as the basis for negative technology that might alter the universe. There are gun fights, people are captured, reseachers travel to Rome and gain entrance to the Vatican library, etc. Needless to say, finding the true nature of the Ford F-150 and its predecessor  Bonus Built trucks is a race against time.

Feel free to take this idea and run with it. If you end up writing a successful novel with a title like “Found On Road Dead,” good for you. Please mention me in the acknowledgements. It’s all yours because I just don’t have the patience to do the research. Goodness knows, my four hoodoo books set in the 1950s Florida Panhandle required more fact finding than anyone might guess.

I can see, though, why books in this genre (whatever it might be called) are popular. People love conspiracies, knowing secrets, and being the first to solvce old mysteries. Especially those that show us that old myths really weren’t myths.

—Malcolm