“Rider Haggard and Ernest Hemingway. Two vastly different men who, if they were looking down, would be astonished to find themselves in the same sentence.”

(Excerpt from new "FATHER AFRICA, MOTHER NILE")

“Rider Haggard and Ernest Hemingway. Two vastly different men who, if they were looking down, would be astonished to find themselves in the same sentence. Yet here they are. Why? Both of these giants of their time wrote extensively of Africa and its peculiar allure. Both wrote about white hunters in a colonial Africa, Haggard in King Solomon’s Mines and Alan Quartermain, Hemingway in The Snows of Kilimanjaro and The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber - a few examples among many. Both writers idealized womanhood and conjured up females with life and death power over men. Haggard gave me the immortal and terrible She, or Ayesha, a veiled white goddess ruling over a lost race in Africa. Hemingway gave me Catherine Barkley, the idealized nurse in A Farewell to Arms who cares for Lieutenant Henry, a wounded ambulance driver in the Spanish civil war, and who is referred to by a comrade as Henry’s ‘cool English goddess’. Two goddesses in white. Both authors killed off their goddesses at the end of the story. One, after a horrifying transformation when She bathes her body one more time in the immortalizing pillar of fire – ‘and then she seemed to realize what kind of change was passing over her, and she shrieked- ah, she shrieked!- she rolled upon the floor and shrieked!’ The other dies after childbirth – and when he went in to see her ‘it was like saying goodbye to a statue.’ Both authors were romantics. Haggard wrapped his imaginings in a florid Victorian style and Hemingway stripped his prose down to hard-boiled simplicity. Haggard’s romanticism lay behind a gauzy veil of mystery like a mosquito net - those dream castles of the tropical night - while Hemingway’s lay behind stark wire mesh. Both writers fired my search for She... and mystery.”

"Father Africa, Mother Nile". Introductory launch period: $1.99 on Amazon Kindle “A personal exploration of mystery writing born of old Africa and ancient Egypt”.