THE STARSEED: A Professor Korrigan Mystery

 

One night in February of 1975, a group of young men and women broke into a random house on the west-coast of Norway and abducted an infant child. A note with a pagan symbol used in ancient magic rituals was left in the crib. It was the first of several clues to the terrible secret of THE STARSEED.

Genre: Paranormal Mystery.
Setting: Norway, 1975.
Date of publication: December 17, 2023

Purchase link (Amazon.com)

The Starseed is the first book in a planned series following the paranormal adventures of the English archaeologist, Professor Mortimer Korrigan.

Professor Mortimer Korrigan is an accomplished, if not slightly infamous, archaeologist. Though a prolific researcher and excavator, his successes are often overshadowed by his failures—failures that often garner much publicity due to the eccentric claims that often preceded them. Little does the general public know just how right he really is. (Photo model: Arne Vagle.)

 

HOW THIS NOVEL CAME TO BE

As a fan of both Mysteries and Horror it was only a matter of time before I dipped my toes into both genres. And while I enjoy a good straight forward murder mystery, it is not a genre I was interested in writing myself, that is, without adding some “fantasy gimmick” to make it more me (note that I use fantasy in the broader sense of the word here, as in fantastical, not in the orcs and dragons sense). My solution then was to make a paranormal mystery in the tradition of the old “occult detective” genre, albeit with my own modern-ish spin to it.

While I am by no means a believer in the paranormal (though I do try to keep an open mind), I have always been fascinated by TV shows like Kolchak: The Night Stalker and The X-Files, the latter of which always managed to bring a strong sense of realism to stories that dealt with extraordinary threats like aliens and ghosts and other things that go bump in the night. What could have easily turned into a simple monster-hunter series managed to tell very human stories that more often than not dealt with very real issues. I’ve always liked that approach to fiction, where the extraordinary represents some facet of humanity, or if not, it does at the very least provide a narrative opportunity for the characters to respond to it in ways that say a lot about who they are, or even who we all are as a species.

It is no wonder then that I immediately become a huge admirer of Nigel Kneale, the writer of such classic BBC series as Quatermass and the Pit, whom I first discovered while putting the finishing touches on my first novel; Dawn of the Karabu. Stripped of any gimmicks, Kneale’s paranormal stories were really about the world around him, often tackling serious issues like class differences, authoritarianism, and racial tensions. And while I personally don’t hold any disdain for escapist fiction the way that Kneale often did, I do feel that so-called ‘genre fiction’ like Science-fiction and Horror are at their best when dealing with real issues in this manner and it is a philosophy that I very much aspire to emulate in my own work.

André Morell as rocket scientist Bernard Quatermass in the 1958 miniseries 'Quatermass and the Pit.'
Copyright © BBC. 

The resulting idea that came from all of this, however, was not The Starseed. I initially started working on a novel called The Highland Incident, a kind of ‘old dark house’ style story set primarily in a Scottish abbey, though now that I had begun developing what I intended to be a recurring character, it was hard not to start looking ahead and start planning what his other adventures would be. This wasn’t just me getting caught up in the world-building, but also a bit of a necessity as the middle-aged Professor Korrigan would from the beginning be established as someone who had already gone through several adventures. It was during this process that I started toying with the idea of a story set in my own home region in the south-west coast of Norway, and keeping in mind that I wanted my stories to have some form of historical and cultural relevance it only made sense to focus on the oil rush that started in the late 1960s and was still very much alive when I was growing up in the city of Stavanger (one of several real locations visited in the book). Of course, this immediately meant that the story would have to take place after the events of The Highland Incident, which takes place in 1967, as the “Norwegian Oil Adventure” didn’t truly begin before 1969. It seemed like the beginning of a good idea, and I quickly decided it would make for a good short story that I could hopefully get published somewhere as a little teaser for my upcoming Korrigan novel. Needless to say, it didn’t quite turn out that way.

What started as a simple short story quickly escalated into a novella, which in turn evolved into a full novel (albeit a fairly short one). Clearly, I had taken my intent to make a human story out of something extraordinary to heart, as it was the story of the misguided eco-terrorists that eventually tipped a simple narrative about a strange meteorite and a kidnapping into a larger and much more morally complex story told from two different points-of-view. Suffice it to say, without going into spoiler territory, that the kidnappers played a much simpler and more traditionally villainous role in my first draft, something that simply didn’t sit right with me.

The end result is, I hope you’ll agree, a much more complex story that accurately reflects a lot of the philosophical and political tensions of the time—and perhaps even today.