Raymond Buckland’s Adventures in Fiction

Readers, please enjoy this guest blog post by Raymond Buckland, author of numerous books, including the new Solitary Séance.

After many years of writing non-fiction (approximately sixty books) I am at last able to turn to my true love, which is fiction. I thought that the ideal genre on which to focus would be fantasy . . . Tolkienesque, with magic, wizards, fairies, and the like. So I wrote The Torque of Kernow, which dealt with all of those things, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I thought “How wonderful! I have finally found my niche!” I planned follow-on novels about Kernow (which, incidentally, is the old name for Cornwall, my favorite part of England). I plotted the second one and had ideas for the third. But then a strange thing happened. I read a couple of mystery novels—which I have always loved—set in Victorian times, and found that I was hooked! Victorian mysteries! Yes!

This is not to say that I won’t continue with the fantasy series. I will . . . but just not yet. I wrote a stand-alone Victorian thriller-mystery called Golden Illuminati. A “stand-alone” is one book that is all by itself and not part of a series. I found that I could incorporate a lot of metaphysics into this book. In fact, it centers around the original Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and such luminaries as MacGregor Mathers and Aleister Crowley. It deals with a search for the original writings of the alchemist Nicolas Flamel and the secret of transmutation. Not exactly paganism, but most certainly related. I felt that a series of Victorian mysteries was in order, and came up with the concept for a “cozy.” I have now written the first three of those books, with a view to continuing with that series for as long as possible.

The joy of writing fiction is that you can let your imagination run wild. That being said, I can then see future Victorian mysteries that bring into play various aspects of paganism and magic. The Victorians were great ones for communing with nature and digging into magic and its related subjects. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (author of the Sherlock Holmes series) was fascinated with fairies, and wrote on that subject. Arthur Edward Waite was a scholarly mystic. Francis Barrett was an eighteenth century mystic whose book The Magus dealt with the natural magic of herbs and stones, magnetism, talismanic magic, alchemy, numerology, and the elements. All of these could find a place in a Victorian mystery series. I’ve always had a fertile imagination and I seem to have become a prolific writer. I can hardly wait to see what the future holds!