Ghosts, time travel, espionage, spirit guides, astral projection, telepathy, karma – A War in Too Many Worlds has it all! The third book in Elizabeth Crowens’ acclaimed Time Traveler Professor series is a breathless romp through time and space with Arthur Conan Doyle, Harry Houdini, H.G. Wells, Bertram Fletcher Robinson, and the eponymous professor, who doubles as a spy in Berlin during the Great War. Fasten your seat belt!
I asked the pseudonymous Ms. Crowens, once a fellow Cincinnatian, a few questions about the series, this latest entrant, and what's ahead:
What was the genesis of the Time Traveler Professor series?
Like the average person on the
street, when someone mentioned Arthur Conan Doyle, I equated that solely with
his creation of Sherlock Holmes. Before writing the first novel, my familiarity
of Sherlock Holmes was primarily with the old Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce
films with a few others here and there such as The Seven-Per-Cent Solution,
Young Sherlock Holmes, Peter Cushing’s version of The Hound of the
Baskervilles, and the recent Robert Downey, Jr. versions. I had no idea
Doyle wrote over 125 works including novels, short stories, magazine articles,
and non-fiction reference books. Least of all, I had no clue that he wrote tons
of ghost stories, belonged to the Society of Psychical Research (SPR), or that
he was into Spiritualism and friends with Harry Houdini.
On the other hand, I always
loved Victorian ghost stories and for years had been fascinated by some of the
metaphysical writings of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century,
especially when British explorers and archeologists went to Egypt and opened
the tombs of the Pharaohs. To this day, Raiders of the Lost Ark, is one
of my top five favorite films. In addition, I used to have an antiques business
and worked with estate liquidations. Personally, I love to collect old, unusual
books. At one point I came across some diaries by an obscure 19th
century Scottish guy who claimed he tried some metaphysical experiments and mentioned
something about consulting with Doyle about them. That got me wondering, what
if he did?
Assuming the role of Sherlock
Holmes, I couldn’t find any conclusive evidence but that’s when I discovered
that Doyle was interested in that type of stuff. So, that was essentially the
springboard that got me going about coming up with a highly fictionalized, alternate
history series, but it also made me curious to dive headfirst into actual biographies
of Doyle.
In creating this gaslight paranormal
fantasy series, I had the ability to play around with blending fact and
fiction. Apparently, that’s my writing style. I do the same, but in a very
different way, with two other historical mystery series that I’ve written and
am shopping around to get published.
Who is your favorite
character in the books and why?
It would have to be the
protagonist, John Patrick Scott. He’s a bit of an anti-hero, but these books
are based on his “secret diaries.” For the first two books, I told his story in
First Person POV (point of view). In A War in Too Many Worlds, after
much debate, I switched the POV to Close Multiple Third, because that book focuses
a lot more on what’s going on with Arthur Conan Doyle and the challenges he
faces. He’s clearly in a supporting role as Scott’s mentor in the first two
books.
There is a lot of fact
as well as fiction in A War in Too Many Worlds and its predecessors. How did
you research?
Research was the most time-consuming part of writing the
series, but it also was the most exciting. I had to make about six, month-long trips
overseas. While over there, I’d spend an enormous amount of time in museums,
libraries, and used bookstores, and I also took thousands of photographs for
visual references. While researching A War in Too Many Worlds, I had to test
my memory of the trip I made to Germany five years ago, and because of Covid-19
travel restrictions, I couldn’t go back. When I needed a pre-WWI street map of
Berlin and realized I already owned one, I was ecstatic.
One of the biggest challenges was finding information
about what civilian life was like in Germany, France, and Britain during the
First World War. Most material was about trench warfare, which was important
for Book Two, A Pocketful of Lodestones. Also, MI6 for British intelligence
was in its infancy during the Great War, but I have a knack of finding obscure
books and found a few gems on espionage. That’s one of the reasons why my
invested name in the Adventuresses of Sherlock Holmes (ASH) is “A Collector of
Obscure Volumes,” which came from The Adventure of the Empty House, when
Holmes surprises Watson and reemerges from the dead in the disguise of an old
bookseller. As I mentioned earlier, I’m an antiquarian book collector and have
an eclectic library.
This is the third book
in the series, and it ends with an open door to the next book. How many more
volumes do you foresee?
There will be one more book
called The Story Beyond Time, which will bring us from the summer of
1922 when Doyle started to have his falling out with Harry Houdini to the end
of both Arthur Conan Doyle’s and John Patrick Scott’s lives.
What do you most want
people to know about this book and the series as a whole?
The Time Traveler Professor series
is a “serialized” series as opposed to a stand-alone series, similar to both Outlander
and the Harry Potter books in that it follows a timeline, and it really helps
to read the books in order to understand the characters, their backstory, their
motivations, and how they grow or regress over the course of time. Since I encourage
everyone to read Silent Meridian (Book One) first, the eBook is
discounted on Amazon. Unfortunately, discounting the trade paperback or the
audiobook is out of my control. Since there were a few years in between the
release of each book, I definitely urge everyone, regardless of whether they’ve
read the previous books or not, to read the Authors Note at the beginning of
the book which summarizes the previous books in the series. It’s easy to forget.
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