My Literary Upbringing, or How I Came to Write Knights of the Cornerstone

In order to fulfill my promise to my editor, I have to go back to the dawn of time, or at least to the early Jurassic, because Knights of the Cornerstone is very much a product of who I am, and who I am goes back a ways. I'm tempted to insist that the story is True—a secret history and world-wide conspiracy that I've been entrusted to reveal—but other writers have already used that ploy successfully in regard to the Knights Templar, and it seems unlikely that it can be pulled off more than a half dozen times without raising the doubts of the reader. How I came to write the book is a fairly complex business, nearly 50 years of whirling, oddball flotsam finally attaining critical mass. I've written out elements of it here. If you've read the book, the whirling flotsam will seem to have some sort of shape; if you haven't read it, then good luck.

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I owe my career as a writer to two women—my mother, who turned me into a reader, and Viki, my wife, who made it possible for me to find the time to write once I got going. I started getting real books as Christmas and birthday presents when I was eight or nine years old: Mark Twain to begin with—the Complete Short Stories and Huckleberry Finn in particular. I developed a thing for rivers before I'd actually seen any. It was Huckleberry Finn and The Wind in the Willows that led me to write my first novel, The Elfin Ship; and water in one form or another has figured into much of my work ever since. I remember the several shelves of my mother's books in our living room. The bookcase made up a room divider with a turned post, the shelves topped by a copper trough containing philodendron and other tropical houseplants. I used to look through the books as a child, imagining that the mysterious, romantic covers indicated the quality of the contents. I favored black cloth with gold or red lettering, which led me to read Ivanhoe and Mrs. Astor's Horse and The Adventures of Sherlock Holms before I was competent to understand them. My world at the time was made up of empty orange groves and beaches and the streets and alleys of 1950s suburban southern California, with now and then a road trip through the desert to visit family in Colorado or Iowa. The New York, high-society doings of the people in Mrs. Astor's Hors seemed like science fiction to me. In those days I knew more about Opar than I knew about New York.

I can still remember discovering Edgar Allen Poe in the center of my mother's crossword puzzle book. I read "Descent into the Maelstrom" over and over again, and the same with "The Fall of the House of Usher" and "The Pit and the Pendulum." Around that same time I wrote my first short story. I recall the story's inspiration in detail. I was walking down the railroad tracks with my friend Johnny Hatley, an orange grove with a windbreak of eucalyptus on one side and five acres of strawberries on the other, the strawberry patch framed by tumbleweeds along a barbed wire fence. We were catching horned toads and searching for ant lion burrows. Johnny was going on about a terrifying film he'd seen. I had no idea at the time that the title of the film was actually spelled Macabre, but I was struck with the urgent need to write a scary story of my own. The idea of walking skeletons had always filled me with fear, so I stole the title—"McCob"—and wrote a story about a skeleton that smoked a corncob pipe and wore a slouch hat. The skeleton terrorized a family in a farmhouse, although I can't remember why. (Even today it seems to me that walking skeletons don't need much in the way of motivation.) I remember nothing else about the story except that I thought it was pretty good. I'm happy that the story disappeared long ago so that I can go on thinking so. I still dream from time to time about walking skeletons, by the way, although the dreams are rarely nightmares: my dreaming mind recognizes them as old friends from Central Casting. Last time the skeletons had truth-telling monkeys perched on their shoulders, and the skeletons appeared and disappeared in jungle clearings, which – at least in my dream – reminded me of how I felt when I first read Heart of Darkness. That was shortly after Viki and I and our sons John and Danny had gotten back from Singapore, where we had been surrounded by about a hundred very unhappy monkeys during a trek through the rain forest.

But back to the books…. On Tuesday afternoons my mother hauled me down to the Stanton Public Library, where I eventually read my way through all of the available Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Howard Pease, and Walter Farley books, along with a number of other authors whose books I remember but whose names I've forgotten. I discovered Steinbeck among my mother's books when I was about 11. I puzzled my way through In Dubious Battle, The Long Valley, Cannery Row, and The Wayward Bus, and I determined that I was living in the most wonderful, colorful, interesting state in the union. I still think so. When I read The Grapes of Wrath, I was enthralled by the chapter in which Noah wanders away through the willows along the Colorado River. I read it and reread it. Even at that age I felt that I knew absolutely why he wandered off alone. I'd seen the Colorado River by then. Our family trips east took us through Needles and Blythe (other family vacations had taken us through Salinas and Watsonville and Monterey) and so the very name of the Colorado River had taken on a certain magic. I reacted similarly to other desert rivers, especially the Mojave, during the years when I went on monthly camping trips as a Boy Scout. In those days my uncle, John Carl Blaylock, had a shack out in the desert, where he watched the night skies for UFOs. He had been a mover and shaker in the Los Angeles New Age scene for thirty years, and was instrumental in the search for Dr. Wallace C. Halsey (brother of Admiral Bull Halsey) when Halsey's small plane went down in the Virgin Mountains in Nevada. An account of the search for Dr. Halsey was published by Futura Press. According to Michael Barton, the author and my uncle's traveling companion, "We'd received word from upstairs that the saucer people were in on this search with us…." My uncle sent me a copy of the account, in which he wrote, "To James Paul Blaylock, my literary nephew; wishing you the best always!" Certainly it's one of the coolest books I own. It's full of people with names like Shave and Lotion McDonald and Whisky Red and Woodenshoe Dutch, men who spent their lives as hard rock miners, searching the hills for silver during the day and watching the saucers spin through the desert skies at night. Let me make it clear that I don't think any of this is silly. To the contrary, my uncle was (and still is, at 93) a true believer, and although we can argue from dawn till dark about "belief," I have my uncle to thank for opening a door onto a world that I would have missed otherwise. I'm not done with that world yet. When I'm out there in the desert, in Nevada or California or Arizona, I look out at the dry ranges and at the heat mirages rippling above the blacktop, and I imagine all sorts of things.

When I was sixteen I met Viki, whose family vacationed on the Colorado up around Bullhead City and Laughlin and down on the Imperial Oasis near the Mexican border. Later her folks moved out to Bullhead, into a mobile home on the river in a place called Holiday Shores. We were wild-eyed water skiers in those days, and we would ski for hours and then hang around in the Colorado Belle or the Riverside Casino in Laughlin during the heat of the day. There was an island in the river, down toward Needles, which we used to circle around when turning back upstream again. Bob Martin, my father-in-law, had the idea of buying that island and building a small casino and bar on it, which seemed to me to be a top notch plan, although it never actually came to pass. In the morning or evening we walked up into town, browsing through the Cornet, which was essentially an old fashioned five and dime store. There was a bookstore across the street, in a dusty, windblown, cinderblock building with reflective foil on the windows. I discovered over a dozen hardcover novels by P.G. Wodehouse there once, including first American editions of The Code of the Woosters and The Return of Jeeves. I remember spending about twenty bucks and coming out elated with a box full of volumes, wondering how on earth the books had made their way out into the middle of the desert. It was hot out there in Bullhead City, 120 degrees in the height of the summer, and my favorite time of day was evening, when the sun went down and the bats came out and you could smell the river and the willows and the warm wind off the hills.

About three years ago, I was sitting around recalling some of the things I've been writing about here, and I envisioned a bar built of stone out on that island in the river – a bar out on the bar, let's say. In my imagination it was night, and a heavyset man with a beard was creeping along the edge of the building, obviously trying to remain out of sight. He stopped at a lighted window and peered in, where he saw a group of people dressed something like Shriners or Masons engaged in what might be a Communion ritual. (My father-in-law was a Mason, by the way.) They had a doughnut-shaped decanter like my old friend Roy Squires used to own, and it was full of blood-red wine...

It seemed to me that the bar wasn't merely a bar, but was something much more than that, and I started to think about what it might be – what might lie buried beneath it. I was reminded of "Crossing the Bar," the Tennyson poem, which has always ranked as one of my favorite poems (perhaps partly because it was my mother's favorite) and I thought of the bar sinister, of the Temple Bar in London, of the Knights Templar, of the hollow silver head allegedly taken out of the Paris Temple, of rumors that the Knights possessed the severed head of John the Baptist. I read as much as I could find about the secret loot taken out of Constantinople and what might have been hidden beneath Rosslyn Chapel in Scotland. I saw then that the people in that cinderblock room weren't Shriners or Masons, but were a far flung remnant of the Knights Templar. I wondered what they were doing out there in the desert, where they had come from and why they stayed there. One thing led to another, as things often do for a writer who has had all these odd notions swirling around in his head for fifty years. (I couldn't figure out how to fit the Tennyson poem into the novel, so I had to be satisfied with hijacking the spirit of the poem and giving it to Aunt Nettie and Uncle Lymon.)

The Knights Templar, of course, were big literary news at the time that I was writing the book, but I'd been onto them for a couple of decades by then, and so I resolutely ignored what anyone else had to say on the subject, and I refused to let their momentary popularity derail my novel. My Knights weren't the familiar crowd anyway; they were made up of my Iowa and Colorado and Wisconsin and Okalahoma relatives, re-imagined. From the get-go I knew that they possessed the Cornerstone of the Temple of Jerusalem, despite claims to the contrary by the Vatican. When I came across an article on the Veil of Veronica, I knew absolutely the nature of the object in the cardboard box. Until then, by the way, the thing in the box was in fact Aunt Iris's spirit veil, an idea I liked so much that I decided to give it a few chapters of play. (It could be that Aunt Iris's veil is still out there in the desert somewhere, in the bed of a pickup truck, maybe, or hidden beneath the floorboards of a shack in the hills...)

And there you have it. That's how I came to write Knights of the Cornerstone.

Cheers, Jim Blaylock