Tomorrow is Another Day
That is one of the working titles that Margaret Mitchell considered when she began in 1926 her ten-year journey writing her only novel—a history romance epic. She was a writer for an Atlanta newspaper, had been injured in an automobile accident, and was healing slowly. She was encouraged to pass the time healing by writing a book. She immediately thought of the many stories her grandmother, an Irish-American who lived in Clayton County, Georgia, told her as a little girl about the era before, during and after the Civil War. Clayton County was just south of Atlanta and her grandmother’s stories were replete with characters and dramatic events she had experienced.
Margaret Mitchell had heard stories and first-hand accounts from her grandmother of the family romances, privations, sacrifices and endurance during that time. Especially vivid were the tales of the burning of Atlanta, General Sherman’s march of destruction, burning and killing from Atlanta to Savannah, and the privations and banditry of the carpetbaggers during the strict Reconstruction imposed upon the South.
The elements for her book were based on these stories. And she wove them into the fabric of her history-romance novel, Gone With the Wind, using real events and real people to make her novel compelling as if the reader was experiencing the events in the book just like the real people in her grandmother’s accounts had actually experienced them.
Such were the examples that Dr. Joe Rudé and I wanted to put into our trilogy. We had accumulated over the fifteen years of research similar stories about the actual people in the Hospitaller Order of Saint John, Knights Templar and their families and decided, like Margaret Mitchell, to sprinkle these characters and their stories into our trilogy. We both have a long genealogy reaching into the times of the Crusades and decided to use some of those characters as well as the personae of friends, classmates and well-known people to create the fictional characters in our stories following the example of Margaret Mitchell and making them come alive. We strung these historical events and real people into three history-mystery novels starting with Mystery at the Thirteen Sycamores, following with The Seton Secret, and ending with Washington’s Doubloon.
Since the time frame of all of the events in this story spans 1,000 years, we have used historical fact and fictional romances, as well as a postulated theory about the search for the lost treasure of the Knights Templar based on historical facts. The places are real and some of the characters are real. The trilogy stories could actually happen, and unfortunately, some of the terrorist activity we predicted in the three novels has actually occurred.
We hope everyone will enjoy our books in the trilogy and look forward to my next books, A Death in Elwood and The Knights of the Golden Circle.