Brad Ricca's "True Raiders"

Brad Ricca was born in Cleveland and still lives there with his family in a 100-year-old house. He teaches sometimes at Case Western Reserve University, where he earned a Ph.D. in English.

Ricca's books include written Olive the Lionheart, Mrs. Sherlock Holmes, Super Boys, and American Mastodon. He made a movie, Last Son, that won a 2010 Silver Ace Award at the Las Vegas Film Festival. He loves books and comics ... and hates mummies.

Ricca applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, True Raiders: The Untold Story of the 1909 Expedition to Find the Legendary Ark, and reported the following:

From page 99:

The hour was late when Monty finally got up to his room at the tall ramshackle house that they were renting from the mukhtar, the chieftain of Silwan. Monty walked up the creaky stairs. Its high ceiling were guarded by uncompromising spiders. The men had turned the first floor into what appeared to be a Jerusalem version of a jumble sale. There were bits and pieces of digging equipment scattered over handsome Persian rugs, pickaxes propped up against heavy cracked bowls spread out on the Turkish divans. Wall shelves and cupboards had been repurposed to temporary storage spaces . . . Monty clicked his door shut and walked over to the closet. As he passed a mirror, he caught a glimpse of himself, or at least a version of it: different, but generally recognizable in the moment. He walked into the closet -- it was still dark -- and switched on the special bulb. He looked into the shallow tray on the small table before him. A shadow had begun to form, like smoke, on the surface of the paper. As the image began to fade in, the strange black cloud solidified into a sharper rectangle. Monty shook the tray a little, before grabbing it with the tongs.

Ok, so this page may not be all that thrilling or full of adventure, but it really does portray one of the major themes of the book, at least as I saw it. I usually don’t like talking about process because I like things to be more open-ended for a reader but writing about something like the Ark has that built-in anyway, so this is just my interpretation. Monty going up the stairs is him moving past the down-and-dirty part of their dig near Jerusalem to think about the quest for the Ark in a higher, more imaginative way. One of my main inspirations for the structure of the book was William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, not only in the multiple (and sometimes unreliable) narrators it has, but in the way Faulkner continually moves them through all kinds of boxes and spaces, some filled, some not. For me, that is the quest for the Ark, trying to find some ancient box with an unknowable interior that is so tantalizing in its mystery and lack of truth that it is overwhelming. In the closet, Monty is confronted with that lack of knowledge as darkness before he begins to see the image take shape – but what is it? He may see the Ark in the tunnel (for a moment) but it is ethereal and changing. There is nothing concrete about any of this, but there is some hope – some faith – in even the briefest of signs that pushes him to continue. When Monty looks in the mirror, that’s also my admission that I can't portray him exactly as he really was (I don't have a working time machine). Much as we all sometimes look in the mirror and say “who is that?” there is a disconnect between the book's Monty and the real Monty – and how he views the Ark – that exists in the space between what we see and what is true. For me, that conflict -- and power -- is at the hidden core of this book. It’s a busy page. Full admission: I changed that adjective before "spiders" at least forty times.

Visit Brad Ricca's website.

The Page 99 Test: Mrs. Sherlock Holmes.

--Marshal Zeringue