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Summary of The Lost Tomb
A
Summary of Douglas Preston and David Grann’s book
And Other Real-Life Stories of Bones, Burials, and Murder
GP SUMMARY
Summary of The Lost Tomb by Douglas Preston and David Grann: And Other Real-Life Stories of Bones, Burials, and Murder
By GP SUMMARY© 2023, GP SUMMARY.
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This is an unofficial summary & analysis of Douglas Preston and David Grann’s “The Lost Tomb: And Other Real-Life Stories of Bones, Burials, and Murder” designed to enrich your reading experience.
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DAVID GRANN
THE FIRST THING you notice about these thirteen remarkable true tales by Douglas Preston is that they all contain elements of intrigue. There is a story about the unexplained deaths of a group of skiers in the Ural Mountains, and another about a hunt for treasure that has consumed seekers for nearly two centuries, costing millions of dollars and killing half a dozen people. Still another tale explores one of the most harrowing cases in the annals of crime—a string of inexplicable killings in the bucolic hills of Florence, which has generated a bewildering array of suspects. Some of the mysterious incidents Preston probes reach back thousands of years, involving the fate of ancient civilizations—where they came from and why they suddenly vanished. The evidence now consists of artifacts and bones.
Not only are the subjects in this book fascinating, but so are the investigators. They include daring archaeologists, vindictive police detectives, renegade scientists, and obsessive amateur sleuths. They can be brilliant, and fallible. And some of them seem to have their own secrets. Are they shining a light on the truth or purposely trying to cover it up?
The second thing you notice about these tales is the way they are told. An acclaimed novelist of murder mysteries, Preston has an unerring sense of suspense, of how to hold the reader in his grip. Yet in these reported pieces, he is also scrupulous and rigorous about the facts. Propelled by his own compulsive curiosity, he follows one murky trail after another, which lead him from police interrogation rooms to pits of dinosaur bones, from DNA laboratories to Egyptian tombs. He keeps on digging and digging even when he arouses the ire of authorities or faces peril. He hunts down suspected criminals, confronting them with the damning evidence he has gathered, though he always judiciously allows them to share their side. It is not a coincidence that at least three titles in this collection contain the word
“mystery.” Preston is a recoverer of what is unknown: answers, justice, fragments of history.
Occasionally, he must find his way through a fog of information and disinformation. When he began searching for evidence to identify a serial killer, he was convinced that he could “find the truth.” Yet eventually he confesses, “I am not so certain. Any crime novel, to be successful, must contain certain basic elements: there must be a motive; evidence; a trail of clues; and a process of discovery that leads, one way or another, to a conclusion. All novels, even Crime and Punishment, must come to an end. But life, I have learned, is not so tidy.”
It is this untidiness—this moral complexity—that makes these stories so powerful. They shed light on the greatest riddle of all: the human condition. Preston says he has drawn on the unfathomable elements in these stories to conjure the plots of his novels. As he proves in this collection, truth really can be stranger than fiction.
ORIGIN STORIES
The Lost Tomb is a novelist's answer to the question of where ideas come from. The author's mother shared stories about buried treasure, such as the inscription on a rock at their grandparents' cottage and the Oak Island Treasure. The story began when three boys from Mahone Bay in Nova Scotia discovered a mysterious treasure on an uninhabited island. The author was fascinated by the mystery and decided to investigate it for a nonfiction book.
The hunt for treasure on Oak Island was more active than ever, with wealthy man David Tobias planning a huge excavation to solve the mystery. He proposed the idea to Smithsonian magazine, which published a piece about the treasure hunt. The article was the most popular magazine article in a decade.
Around the same time, the author wrote a nonfiction book, Dinosaurs in the Attic, edited by Lincoln Child. The book told the story of the American Museum of Natural History in New York. One night, the author and his friend Linc visited the museum and found the Hall of Late Dinosaurs, surrounded by giant skeletons of T. rex and Triceratops. They decided to write a thriller set in the museum, leading to the novel Relic, which was made into a movie by Paramount Pictures. The couple later wrote a second novel, Mount Dragon, and a sequel called Reliquary.
After Reliquary was published, Linc and the author discussed the Oak Island mystery and an article they had read in Smithsonian. They decided to write a thriller based on the true story, moving the island to Maine and creating a treasure hunt. The author was initially skeptical about extracting fiction from nonfiction, but eventually realized that great writers often base their work on true history.
The novel Riptide was born from this conversation, which led to many ideas for novels originating from nonfiction stories, particularly pieces written for the New Yorker. After Riptide, they wrote a fifth novel, Thunderhead, which deals with prehistoric cannibalism in the American Southwest. The latest example is "The Skiers at Dead Mountain," which explores the Dyatlov Pass incident in 1959.
The author has also written other nonfiction-fiction connections in their work, such as Tyrannosaur Canyon, which involved the discovery of a dinosaur killed by an asteroid impact that caused the mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous Age. This inspired the author to create "The Mystery of Hell Creek," chronicling Robert DePalma's real-life discovery of one of the most important fossil sites ever found in North Dakota.
The author believes that storytelling is embedded in our genes and that good stories are not lectures on life and morals but tell of real people engaged in dramatic events, experiencing danger and crisis. The Lost Tomb is a collection of origin stories of some of the author's most important novels, but all stories are absolutely true and have been meticulously vetted and confirmed by the New Yorker magazine.
UNCOMMON MURDERS
A BURIED TREASURE
The Internet has become a powerful tool for writers to find inspiration and connect with old acquaintances. One such example is the author, who Googled the name "Peter Anderson" and "New Jersey" to find his childhood friend Petey. Growing up in Massachusetts, Petey and the author had a wild childhood filled with activities like playing stickball, making crank calls, and hunting for treasure.
One day, the author and Petey decided to fill an empty cookie tin with treasure and bury it in the ground for ten years. They spent hours debating what to put in the tin, choosing items with adult gravitas. The author chose a Morgan silver dollar, a trilobite fossil, and an arrowhead. Petey's treasures included a squirrel skull, a miniature brass cannon, and an intricate blob of lead.
The author and Petey decided to write their own stories, which they would share with the world when they were older. They gathered in Petey's living room and worked on their stories, naming their works "The Story of My Life So Far." The author wrote about riding horses in Wyoming, living with a Luo family in the African bush, eating ram guts and ugali, and listening to the lions roar at night.
The future was strange, scary, and thrilling to ponder, as the author wondered what America would look like when they dug up the tin. The internet has made it easier for writers to find inspiration and connect with their past.
The author and his friend Petey set out to find a tin in an abandoned field at the farthest edge of Wellesley College property. They set out with a compass, pick, and shovel, aiming to find a faroff place where anyone could find it. They buried the tin in a hole two feet deep, cutting through the upper layer of loam into a stratum of orange clay. The author made a treasure map showing the oak tree, the field, and the cedar tree, with dotted lines indicating the number of paces and directions.
When Petey moved away to New Jersey, they wrote long letters to each other, but their friendship passed away peacefully. The treasure was almost forgotten. When the author was sixteen, they found the treasure map and decided to dig up the box by themselves. However, when they arrived at the field, they discovered it no longer existed and had rejoined the forest. The author tried to identify the cedar tree but couldn't find one.
Over the years, the author reminisced about Petey over the years, but never found anything. One day, he remembered that Petey's middle name was Stark, which led him to search for information on Petey. He found an article in the Times of Trenton revealing that Peter Anderson, son of Virginia and Perry Anderson, was deceased, and that the date of his death was May 2, 2011.
The author recounts the tragic story of a man named Robert Horrocks Jr., who was charged with murder after he killed a young boy named Petey. Horrocks had been working as a handyman at the boarding house where Petey lived and had fled to Connecticut the night of the killing. He was brought back to New Jersey and charged with murder. Horrocks claimed to have killed Petey while defending himself in a fight, but the prosecutor questioned his account, claiming that nobody could corroborate his story of a sexual assault. Horrocks was sentenced to thirty years in prison without parole.
The author's memory of Petey as a boy was haunting, as he had been terrified of violence and had been targeted by bullying. The author questioned whether it was right to face reality or stay ignorant, as the internet carried brutal information. After a month or two, the author conducted some research using Google Earth and found the abandoned field where Petey and his treasure were buried. The tin containing Petey's life story, arrowhead, and lead remains there, continuing its dark journey into the future.
THE MONSTER OF FLORENCE
In 2000, the author and their two children moved to Italy, renting a fourteenth-century farmhouse in the hills south of Florence. They discovered one of the most horrific murders in Italian history, one of a string of double homicides committed by a serial killer known as "the Monster of Florence." The case was never solved, and it has become one of the longest and most expensive criminal investigations in Italian history. Between 1974 and 1985, seventeen couples were murdered while making love in parked cars in the hills of Florence.
Impressum
Verlag: BookRix GmbH & Co. KG
Tag der Veröffentlichung: 08.12.2023
ISBN: 978-3-7554-6312-2
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Widmung:
Douglas Preston, author of The Lost City of the Monkey God, uncovers an Egyptian tomb with sealed chambers, revealing pirate treasure, mysterious deaths, and archaeological mysteries, spanning Honduran jungles, American Southwest sites, and Italy.