The Tarantula Stone
After the seriousness of Tiger, Tiger, I wanted to do something a tad lighter.
I thought of doing an 'Indiana Jonesish' thing, only with a more realistic setting, something that would be a homage to all those great B movies I used to watch at the Saturday morning flicks when I was a kid. (They usually starred Gilbert Roland.) I decided fairly early on that it would be set in the Mato Grosso, a place that had haunted my imagination since childhood. If I'm honest, I think there was a good dollop of The Treasure Of The Sierra Madre in there too. (The film, not the book. I'd seen it as a very young child and I vividly remember being scared by Gold Hat, the grinning Mexican bandit who utters the immortal line, I don't need no steenking badge!) I set the story in 1947, just after the war. Naturally there would be man eating cannibals, shoals of piranhas, vicious ex-Nazis and as a central point, I fixed on the struggle for possession of a fabulous (but very unlucky) diamond.
From the start the portents were not good. Midway through writing my editor left to join another publisher and the lady that replaced him was clearly not mad about my subject matter. Furthermore, I committed the unforgivable sin of killing off my heroine in the final furlong. To be fair, a lot of people tried to persuade me to change the ending, but I was adamant. After all, this was my vision, I didn't intend to compromise it for anything.
I don't think anyone who ever read the book forgave me for it and the result was that I lost my contract with Granada and didn't get published again for several years. A sobering experience to be sure, but it did however, teach me a valuable lesson. Disappoint your readers (and your publishers) at your peril.
FACT: I lost out on translation rights to Denmark, because of that ending. They said they'd only publish it there if I allowed the heroine to live. I declined to make the change. Ah, such principles!
FACT: For this book, as for Tiger, Tiger, the jacket art was provided by the artist who did the covers for Wilbur Smith, and his name even cropped up in the cover blurb. I've never read a Wilbur Smith book, but I'm pretty sure there are few similarities.