Is it any wonder that we are so often drawn into the dark corners of history, where despite our best intentions, we simply don’t know?

The Lost Library probed one of the greatest mysteries of antiquity, the Royal Library of Alexandria and its mysterious disappearance from the face of the earth. Can it truly have happened? Can so great a wonder genuinely have simply . . . vanished?

And can there be other mysteries, just as grand, still to explore?

That latter question really grabs at a writer of historical conspiracy thrillers. We live in a world today where we’re keen to find conspiracies everywhere — whether it’s in questions over the American president’s ability to sabotage his own governmental infrastructure, or in the apparently ‘uncoordinated coincidence’ that all the sweet shops in Britain seem to think I want chilli in my chocolate. But does our predilection for conspiracy and intrigue extend into the past?

The good news is that the answer is a resounding ‘yes.’

In writing The Keystone, which will be on shelves in a few months, the vastness of ancient Egyptian mystical intrigue became an ever-extending world in which to roam. The world of ancient Gnosticism is as strange, eerie, mystifying and complex as any an author could hope to inherit, as is the strange irony to its mystical enterprise: that the things done in secret, in the name of peace, often burst into world view in much more violent, tormenting measure.

Just what we want, after all.

But it is the past that always causes us to ask questions of the present. The testimony of history is that our conspiracy-minded curiosities today are not so out of place, and whether we know it or not, there is more going on behind the scenes that we care to admit. So whether there truly is the multi-conglamorate, covert desire to change my sweet-tooth’s habits that I suspect, or whether a president can manipulate his government to control his opponents, or whether ancient cults speak powerfully to the modern, there’s one fact that is above suspicion.

There’s always more to the story.

This blog entry by: A.M. Dean
Photo credit: Oberazzi via photopin cc

I have received rather a lot of correspondence from readers of The Lost Library over the past ten months, asking the inevitable questions over that dancing, moving, confusing line that separates fact and fiction. ‘Which of the historical facts you related are actually true?’ ‘How much did you make up?’ ‘Did things really happen like that?’

My standard answer has always been the same: ‘If you can’t tell, then I’m not going to tell you.’ It is in creating a situation where fact and fiction are so intermingled that we cannot fully separate them or tell them apart, that historically-minded fiction becomes interesting. At the very least, to me.

But sometimes, it is not only the readers who ask these questions.

The process of writing such stories is often as gripping, and contorted, as reading them – a fact I’ve become ever more aware of in the finalisation of The Keystone, which will launch this August. This book has allowed me to dive back into a world I know well, and love: ancient Egypt – though not quite as ancient as most imaginations are prone automatically to travel. Millennia after the pyramids had already started to decay, yet still almost two millennia before our own day, the sands of the Egyptian deserts were home to activities that still confound the world. Sects with strange rituals hid libraries away in caves; mystical rituals challenged the norms and power of empires; and secrets began to be whispered from one ear to another – secrets that remain hidden even in our day, though we have never fully escaped the influence of the secret-keepers.

Where is the edge of ‘fact’ when we draw ourselves towards a world of dark-corners, traditions never committed to print, and written works so cryptic that generations of modern scholarship cannot agree on what they mean, or even just who wrote them?

And if the earliest decades of a new millennium were marked out by secretive groups that might have existed, that might (or might not) have been eradicated, but whose influence could still be traced out centuries later in parts of the world that had no connection to this haunting land of origin, is it beyond belief that their influence might extend even into the present day?

The world, as I explore it in The Keystone, is one where these ambiguities are transformed from mild and idle curiosities into the stuff of definitive, immediate relevance and panic. It is a world where a manuscript seen by a thousand scholars might say something none of them have ever seen; where alchemy and history are not as tidy in their distinctions as modern scholarship likes to keep them; where chants of peace and cries of war often speak in the same language. And where nothing is ever truly committed to the past.

Is this fiction? Is it fact?

Or is even that, like so much else that cries out for our attention in the face of a compelling mystery, a little too firm a distinction for a world that so rarely deals in black-and-white?

The Keystone, 2013′s highly-anticipated sequel to A.M. Dean’s debut thriller, The Lost Library, is published worldwide in August by Pan Macmillan.

This blog entry’s author: A.M. Dean
Photo credit: L.A. Filming Location Expert via photopin cc

As but a singular example, someone this morning asked me if I wanted chilli sauce in my coffee. Yes, you read that correctly. Now it is likely just me, but I cannot imagine a more foul flavour combination than chilli-coffee-latté, but apparently the horrified recoil I gave the barista took him by surprise. ‘But everybody loves it,’ he said, protesting. And he might have a point. A few weeks ago, I was offered chilli vodka. And Sainsbury’s sells chilli flavoured chocolate. Chocolate.

Things are getting curiouser and curiouser.

Twitter is no better. Having followed various literary types and as many of my readers as I can keep up with, Twitter attempts here and there to suggest new ‘tweeps’ I might wish to follow. Amongst the recent have been, surprisingly, ‘Erotic Desires Massage’ and the fairly ominously monickered ‘Thrustworthy.’ I suppose it is only in a generation where 50 Shades of Grey could outsell Proust that a social media engine could presume ‘Thrustworthy’ is a natural follow-on to ‘Dante’ and ‘Neil Gaimon.’

But it’s not just the social media that’s gone odd: real social interactions have got stranger, too. Firstly, to set the scene here, I should point out that I succumb to a certain stereotype: I do enjoy taking my computer with me to a little pub garden or tea room patio and writing there, watching the people go by, enjoying the background noises, all whilst plotting the downfall of the Library of Alexandria or tormenting the modern world with ancient Gnostics. And this habit occasionally sparks up the odd conversation, such as this one, which I had only a week ago:

Me: (Mumbles to self whilst typing.)

Strange Person: What are you doing, there?

Me: Just a bit of writing.

Strange Person: Writing? You write books?

Me: Yes, by chance. I do.

Strange Person: What sort of ‘books’? (Placing a strangely conspiratorial emphasis on the last word, as if to suggest we might be recorded.)

Me: Historical conspiracy thrillers, mostly.

Strange Person: (Pauses) Are you Dan Brown?

Me: No. I am not. I am not Dan Brown. (Drinks heavily from pint.)

Strange Person: Are you sure? Cause he writes that sort of thing.

Me: Does he?

Strange Person: Yeah. I think his books have even sold like a thousand copies. You sure you’re not Dan Brown?

The thing that makes this conversation so absolutely absurd is that it actually took place, almost word-for-word as I have recollected it.

Perhaps the world is just getting odder and odder. And now that I’ve had my custom-made ‘I’m not Dan Brown and I don’t want chilli with that’ t-shirts done up, it’s time I contribute to the phenomenon.

This blog entry by: A.M. Dean
Photo Credit: maize// via photopin cc

Amazon bestseller rankings for The Lost Library on 13 March 2013.

The climb in rankings follows a suite of strong reviews and a special promotion by Amazon of The Lost Library as the Kindle Daily Deal.

“From the very first page . . . I was hooked . . . No holy grail here but something much more explosive and far reaching” (read more reviews).

Many thanks to the readers all across the world who have taken up The Lost Library in such numbers. A reminder that A.M. Dean’s next books, The Keystone, will be released in August 2013 and carry forward the adventures of The Lost Library in new and exciting ways.

Amazon bestseller rankings for The Lost Library on 13 March 2013.

All bestseller statistics reported in this post are taken from the indicated Bestseller rankings lists on Amazon.co.uk on 13 March 2013. Suspense Thrillers ranking is for Kindle edition only; other rankings are for combined printed book & electronic/Kindle editions.

Click here to get Kindle Daily Deal The Lost Library for just 99p!

The Lost Library has been sold in 16 territories across the globe and translated into multiple languages. The debut thriller by A.M. Dean, it will be joined later this year by The Keystone (Pan Macmillan, August 2013) – so now is the right time to be drawn into the world of historical secrets, conspiracies, puzzles and action that mark out the books that have seen readers demanding more.

Get your copy of The Lost Library as Kindle’s Daily Deal either directly through the promotion on your Kindle device, through the Amazon.co.uk. e-mail shot, or by clicking here – today only!

Click here to get Kindle Daily Deal The Lost Library for just 99p!

Ancient manuscripts, encoded messages, FBI plots, Egyptian caves and modern day religious sects: The Keystone promises the reader an adventure with pace, action, and the intermingling of history and modernity that marked out Dean’s The Lost Library.

Read a teaser for The Keystone at this link, and stay tuned to www.amdean-books.com for the latest news as publication day draws closer.

This blog entry written by: Tamara

As someone who’s spent his whole life writing, across many different genres and styles, I’m keen to support creative writing wherever and whenever possible. Hence the wee, tiny act of support I’d like to show for the NaNoWriMo writers out there who are also fans of this site:

Submit the opening chapter / prologue of your 2012 NaNoWriMo novel for publication here on amdean-books.com, as a small sign of congratulations for your hard literary work.

Here are the details: Submit the first chapter / prologue of your 2012 NaNoWriMo creation (up to 2,000 words; please do not send your whole novel) as an MS Word file attached to an e-mail, sent to contests[at]amdean-books.com, no later than 11.59 p.m. (GMT) on Friday, December 7th. I’ll read through the submissions and pick the five I’m the most fond of (no pretensions of clinical objectivity here!). The selected entries will be published on amdean-books.com, together with a brief note by me and a link to the author’s website. All genres welcome except erotica (sorry, erotica authors!).

The fine print: This is a contest purely for the love of writing and to share the good work of NaNoWriMo participants. No monetary value is attached to any dimension of this contest, nor is any agenting, representation, or other publication.

Enjoy!

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As can nostalgia. I have never lived in a reality where the snowfall of winter was accompanied by a great uncle, puffed out with a heavy woollen jumper and clouding up the air of his antiquated study with a pipe, who determined that stories should be read around the library fireplace, with hot wine and hot chocolate to ensure the stories were sweet. Yet this time of year, I find myself always transported back to that strange, inexplicable memory. I can taste the chocolate that I’m quite sure I never drank, and though this never happened and I’m certain this pastoral storytime is all imagined, I’m equally as certain that his stories involved dragons and wardrobes, and perhaps a talking bison.

I’m sitting now with a Scotch, the hot chocolate of the former child. I’ve my own library, that’s emerged around me over the years. It doesn’t look like the one in my vivid, well-imagined memory, but it suits just fine. And it’s a space heater, today, that’s taken the place of the fire, as I’ve yet to clean out the flue and my fireplace is currently an artfully decorative home for my potted plants. Yet as the loud snow falls, the grey world becomes all white, the fire is burning, the stories are sweet and the chocolate sweeter, and I’m back at that place I never was. Happy, and comfortable to be there.

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And the night before, more people will get drunk than at any other time of the year. Many might not know that Thanksgiving eve is the day of the largest annual bar sales in the USA (presumably because they are too hungover to remember).

Perhaps this is what gives rise those classic, legendary American appetites. Courage and pride, Thanksgiving eaters! In 2007 (presumably the last year such absurdly unnecessary statistics were compiled) Americans ate 690 million pounds of turkey. There are many things against which that weight could be compared, but perhaps the most amusingly pointless is the observation that that is equal to the entire weight of the population of Singapore. One has to admit, that’s impressive.

Perhaps that is why famed American statesman Thomas Jefferson once noted that the idea of Thanksgiving as a national holiday was ‘the most ridiculous idea I’ve ever heard.’ A sound bite for the ages.

But whatever country we find ourselves in, I hope there’s something of a positive boost to be gained from a whole country (in fact, two: Canada also celebrates Thanksgiving, albeit on a different day) dedicating a day to giving thanks. For family, friends, nation, peace, food, hope. Not bad ideals. Not bad reasons to pause for a moment in gratitude.

Of course, some of us are caught out by the day. I like to think of myself as a generally grateful, thankful person, but I have to admit that the energy I was expelling just before writing this post was spent lamenting haw gut-cringingly horrid the Amazon Kindle Paperwhite has turned out to be (‘a pox upon their houses,’ and whatnot). For shame. Maybe instead of growing frustrated at the blurry, horrid haze my e-books are now being read off of, I should be grateful that Amazon have provided me a rich harvest of things to moan about for countless posts and tweets into the future.

THANK YOU!

And there we have it: gratitude restored, even without the turkey.

To all who will celebrate over the coming days: have a wonderful Thanksgiving, filled with good reading, perhaps a bit of writing, and good spirits all around.

Author of this blog post: A.M. Dean
Photo credit: Sugar Daze via photopin cc

But you all had bought them
In droves and in masses,
Leaving me nothing –
You selfish great asses.

So I went for a Kindle,
Thought this would be fun;
But you’d bought them up also,
Leaving not one

Except for the model
That predates the wheel,
Made of equal parts wood,
Iron rivets and steel.

So I’m left with nothing
While you have your toys,
Reading my books of fricken’ paper
Whilst trying desperately to think of a personal pejorative profanity that fits the mood and otherwise carefully-crafted metre of this poetic artifice.

Fin.

This blog entry written by: A.M. Dean
Photo credit: libraryman via photopin cc