Robert Gregory Browne: May 2009 Archives

What was the inspiration for MEDUSA?

I have written fourteen books and every one of them started off with a pretty good concept only to bing and bong through each chapter like a ball lighting up the board of a pin-ball machine. Medusa, which was the eighth in the NUMA Files series with Clive Cussler, was no exception. There were times writing it when felt as if I were the one with snakes growing out of my head.

Medusa was more a case of desperation than inspiration. I had been reading about how the thinning arctic ice might open the Northwest Passage and create a conflict among countries over the riches in oil and minerals that might become accessible. I had even come across a study that outlined how the U.S. Navy should prepare for the eventual meltdown. Since Cussler books normally start with a historical prologue, I came up with the lost Henry Hudson expedition.

Clive was in Los Angeles involved in the lawsuit over the filming of his book Sahara, but I tracked down the name of his hotel and sent my proposal off to him. He wrote back and said he liked the concept, but called a few days later. "I've got bad news," he said. He had checked with his son Dirk, who is co-writing Clive's Dirk Pitt series, and he had already started a book with virtually the same idea as mine. It used the lost Franklin expedition instead Hudson's.

That really hurt. After sulking for a few days I dug into my idea bin and found some material on ocean biomedical research. The creation of pharmaceuticals to fight diseases such as cancer from chemicals found in ocean creatures is expected to be a big deal. Sometimes those chemicals are deadly toxins. I had the idea of one of those toxins being taken from a rare jellyfish called the Blue Medusa, and smuggled out of a lab by a Chinese agent. The toxin would be used to poison an Indian technological entrepreneur, thereby crippling that country's surging high tech industry.

I even came up with an Indian investigator named Shandra Patel who tries to figure out the plot and hooks up with Kurt Austin, leader of NUMA's special assignments team. I wrote several chapters with this engaging and intelligent young lady until I decided to dump the whole Indian connection after talking it over with Clive. It had become too unworkable and unwieldy for me to handle. Instead, I fleshed out a Chinese immunologist named Song Lee who had a bit part in the earlier version. Clive and I decided not to make the Chinese government the Bad Guys, but to put the blame on a particularly weird Chinese triad criminal organization.

The triad had produced a virus aimed at destabilizing the Chinese government, but didn't want to unleash the bug until it had the vaccine. So the Bad Guys hijack the undersea lab where the vaccine is being developed by the U.S. and Chinese governments. Every writer I know has a mind that resembles an attic crammed with trunks and boxes of stuff that might come in handy one day. I'm no exception. I had always been fascinated by the historic Beebe bathysphere dive. In it went. I live not far from New Bedford, which was once the whaling center of the world, so I used an ill-fated whaling expedition as the historical hook. I had read somewhere about a whaler being swallowed by a sperm whale. Throw that into the mix. The whaling trip tied in Micronesia and the ancient ruins of Nan Madol to the story. In they went. I tossed in a hijacked Russian Typhoon submarine, a hideaway in a defunct underwater volcano, and some repulsive mutant jellyfish. Somehow the thing hung together, and it was with a great sigh of relief that I typed those magic words that bring a smile to the face of every scribbler.