Lost Worlds (35 page)

He wondered how he was going to break the news to the team. He had a feeling that another expedition was on the cards.

P
reviously, when writing the Young Sherlock Holmes books which have kept me busy over the last couple of years, I’ve finished off by talking
about historical influences, research sources and which of the characters in the book were real and which I had invented.

This book is different. It’s set in the present day, of course, which means that I didn’t have to do any historical research. What I did have to do was
geographical
research,
mainly on Georgia, its capital city Tbilisi and the area around the Caucasus Mountains. I was fortunate enough to visit Georgia at the invitation of the Georgian publishers of the Young Sherlock
Holmes books, and I spent a wonderful few days in Tbilisi and out in the countryside (including an incredible day trip to a real prehistoric cave village which I used as the basis for the Almasti
village in the book). For that reason I would like to thank Bakur Sulakauri Books, and specifically Elene and Tata, for looking after me so well. Never have I eaten so much good food in such a
short space of time. Who would have thought that walnut sauce could go with so many different dishes? Who would have thought that you could make a refreshing fizzy drink with tarragon leaves? And
while on the subject of Bakur Sulakauri Books, I would like to express my thanks to Nino Demuria for helping out with character and place names.

There are influences on this book, of course, but they are more literary and descriptive than factually historical. When I was growing up, I read a lot of books by a writer named Willard Price.
He wrote fourteen novels about two teenage zoologists named Hal and Roger Hunt, who travelled the world seeking out wild animals for zoos, circuses and wildlife parks. The first of the books,
Amazon Adventure
, was published in 1949, and the last,
Arctic Adventure
, in 1980. I loved those books, and the strong memories I have of them have provided at least some of the
impetus for writing about the adventures of Calum Challenger. Of course, writing about a boy whose pastime is catching animals for zoos, circuses and wildlife parks would be pretty unacceptable to
most people these days, so Calum had to have a different, and more ecological, aim in mind.

Calum’s interest in undiscovered animals is inherited, of course, from his great-grandfather Professor George Challenger. Like Sherlock Holmes, Professor Challenger was a character
invented by the Victorian writer Arthur Conan Doyle. He appears in the novels
The Lost World
(1912),
The Poison Belt
(1913) and
The Land of Mists
(1926), plus the short stories
‘When the World Screamed’ (1928) and ‘The Disintegration Machine’ (1929). Although he obviously takes no part in this book, and in fact it doesn’t really matter to the
plot whether Calum is related to him or not, I am grateful (again!) to the family of Arthur Conan Doyle for allowing me to make reference to him.

Going back to Willard Price – when he wasn’t writing adventure books he travelled on many expeditions to remote areas of the world for the National Geographic Society and the
American Museum of Natural History. My father used to have a subscription to the society’s
National Geographic Magazine
, which arrived in our letter box every month filled with glossy
colour photographs of various animals, landscapes and geographic features. Every couple of months there used to be a folded map included in the package. I still have some of those maps, including
one brilliant one that showed all the underwater mountain ranges buried deep beneath the surface of the world’s various oceans. That really sparked my imagination. I learned an awful lot
about the world from the
National Geographic Magazine.
In fact, I have my own subscription now, but it arrives wirelessly on my iPad, rather than in a thick envelope in the post.
That’s progress for you.

Another magazine I have a wireless subscription to is the
Fortean Times.
That magazine focuses not on the real world, but the unreal one. It lists and discusses various phenomena from
poltergeists to alien abductions to bizarre deaths, but it takes a relatively sceptical approach to what it reports, and it always tries to seek out genuine evidence rather than hearsay, anecdotes
and stories. What I like most about the
Fortean Times
is its regular articles on strange creatures glimpsed in remote forests or appearing from the shadows outside small, isolated villages
– creatures either unknown to science or, perhaps, thought to have died off many years ago. A lot of things that I have read in the
Fortean Times
have influenced the way that Calum
Challenger thinks in this, and future, novels.

Off at a tangent, I spent a long time when I was younger collecting a set of books called the Dumarest series, written by E. C. Tubb. The books form a continuing science-fiction series about a
man searching for the lost planet of Earth, travelling from world to world collecting evidence that will help him find it (and picking up a lot of scars on the way). The Dumarest universe is pretty
much alien-free and technology-light, and the books are more about the things one man has to do to survive in a series of hostile environments, and about the importance of integrity and honesty in
a person’s life. E. C. Tubb died in 2010, but not before actually writing the last book in the series (which runs to thirty-two novels). I loved E. C. Tubb’s writing style. As a kind of
tribute to him I recently decided to read all of the Dumarest books again, one after the other. I’m still going, but one thing I have learned (with some surprise) is that my writing style (if
I have one) borrows quite a lot from E. C. Tubb’s. If you’re going to borrow, I suppose you should borrow from the best.

So, here we are. It’s November 2012, and I’ve just finished writing this book. In the next few days I’ll start writing the sixth Young Sherlock Holmes book, which I think is
going to be called
Stone Cold.
Or possibly
Knife Edge.
When I’ve finished that, I’ll start work on the second Calum Challenger book. I have no idea what that’s going
to be called, or what kind of strange creature it will involve, but I am looking forward to finding out.

I’ll see you then.

Andrew Lane

A
ndrew Lane is the author of the bestselling Young Sherlock Holmes books. These have been published around the world and are available in
thirty-seven different languages. Not only is he a lifelong fan of Arthur Conan Doyle’s great detective, he is also an expert on the books and is the only children’s writer endorsed by
the Sherlock Holmes Conan Doyle estate.
Lost Worlds
is inspired by another famous Conan Doyle novel,
The Lost World.
Andrew’s main character, Calum Challenger, is the grandson
of Conan Doyle’s protagonist, Professor George Edward Challenger.

Andrew writes other things too, including adult thrillers (under a pseudonym), TV adaptations (including
Doctor Who
) and non-fiction books (about things as wide-ranging
as James Bond and Wallace & Gromit). He lives in Dorset with his wife and son and a vast collection of Sherlock Holmes books, the first of which he found in a jumble sale over forty years
ago.

Young Sherlock Holmes: Death Cloud

Young Sherlock Holmes: Red Leech

Young Sherlock Holmes: Black Ice

Young Sherlock Holmes: Fire Storm

Young Sherlock Holmes: Snake Bite

First published 2013 by Macmillan Children’s Books

This electronic edition published 2013 by Macmillan Children’s Books

a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited

20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR

Basingstoke and Oxford

Associated companies throughout the world

www.panmacmillan.com

ISBN 978-1-4472-2803-5

Copyright © Andrew Lane 2013

The right of Andrew Lane to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (electronic, digital,
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liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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