The Collector of Strange Stories: A Guest Post by Douglas Preston
The kind of history you don’t need to be a buff to love. Our Monthly Pick author Douglas Preston has a knack for fascination, and here he’s compiled a whole lot of it, including tombs, treasures and tons of insights into curiosities dating back to the dinosaurs. Read on for an exclusive essay from Douglas on writing The Lost Tomb.
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The Lost Tomb: And Other Real-Life Stories of Bones, Burials, and Murder
The Lost Tomb: And Other Real-Life Stories of Bones, Burials, and Murder
By
Douglas Preston
Foreword by
David Grann
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Paperback
$16.99
$19.99
From the #1 bestselling author of The Lost City of the Monkey God, a jaw-dropping discovery of an Egyptian tomb opens up a slew of archaeological mysteries and deadly tales. Now in paperback with an EXCITING BONUS ADVENTURE!
From the #1 bestselling author of The Lost City of the Monkey God, a jaw-dropping discovery of an Egyptian tomb opens up a slew of archaeological mysteries and deadly tales. Now in paperback with an EXCITING BONUS ADVENTURE!
My first job out of college was working as an editor for the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. One morning I opened the door to my office and was nearly knocked down by the stench of mothballs and old, rotten meat. I complained to my co-workers at the coffee machine, and one of them suggested that I contact the anthropology department. “I think they’ve got some kind of storage room next to your office,” he said.
Indeed they did. I learned that a wall of cheap plasterboard was all that separated me from the museum’s collection of mummies. It seemed that this particular morning they had received a fresh change of paradichlorobenzene crystals to keep them free of insects. Curious, I decided to pay my neighbors a visit.
Most of the mummies were stacked along a long wall in a solid tier of black tin crates. Several in the center of the room were sealed in beautiful old museum glass cases—ones which had been on display. What riveted my attention was a bizarre mummy in a case in the center of the room. A faded label identified it as “The Copper Man” and noted it had been discovered in Chile in 1899—the naturally mummified body of an prehistoric Indian miner who’d been collecting copper ore from a crawl space around fifteen centuries ago. The ceiling had shifted slightly, pinning him, and over the centuries copper salts turned the body a bright green color and perfectly preserved it, down to its very fingerprints.
I’ll never forget staring at that mummy with its braided hair, arms still extended in a working position, hand clutching a coiled basket he’d been filling with ore. As a collector of strange stories I immediately thought: There’s a story here. And indeed there was—a story that began with the prolonged and horrifying death of the miner, which then continued with the mummy’s discovery in 1899 and the deception, lies, lawsuits, riots, money, and controversy that followed—up to the present day.
My piecing together the history of the Copper Man explains, in microcosm, the motivation behind writing The Lost Tomb. I am a collector of stories. I have scoured the world for true stories that appeal to my love of mystery. The Lost Tomb is a catalog of my favorites—tales of disturbing deaths, mysterious burials, uncommon murders, bizarre crimes, lost treasure, and unsolved mysteries. Many of you who are fans of my novels with Lincoln Child will read these stories with a shock of recognition. Our novel Thunderhead, for example, was inspired by “Cannibals of the Canyon”; Dead Mountain sprang out of “The Skiers at Dead Mountain”; and Riptide grew out of “The Mystery of Oak Island”—to name just a few.
Even though many of the stories in my collection will strike you as being as crazy and improbable as any of my thrillers, there is not one word of fiction in The Lost Tomb. Every account is absolutely true, sourced, fact-checked, and verified. Truth is always stranger than fiction—or as Dean Koontz once observed, “We craft fiction to match our sense of how things ought to be, but truth cannot be crafted. Truth is, and truth has a way of astonishing us to our knees, reminding us that the universe does not exist to fulfill our expectations.”