Temple or Temple?

I'm doing the pivot. I'm going to finish The Early Fox as quickly as I can, and leave that series behind while I do something different.

That does involve getting a cheap cover (as long as most of my productive hours are still being used up by my day job, getting it done for me costs less of the more important resource).

And for that, I need a blurb. So I did some re-reading on constructing a decent blurb. Which lead me to look for what similar books had been doing, and what is my genre anyhow? And that led me to GoodReads and a list of all the books they dropped into the pile of combining archaeology and mystery/adventure.

Fascinating the different ways archaeology, or in most cases, an archaeologist as protagonist, gets turned into the premise of a story. But studying these ways also underlines the underlying paradox. To wit; it is almost never archaeology that matters.

When it is there, it is a bit aside from using the archaeology of classical Greece. The stories that come closest to using archaeology as a discipline are doing forensic anthropology. But, really, I think you'd get the same mechanical effect if you had a forensic engineer as hero. (I say "mechanical," because even if said engineer is at a crash site, it isn't quite the same frisson as discovering a person's life and the manner of their death through the marks on their bones.)

And even if the career path of the protagonist is a little more archaeological, it still comes down to being an excuse for a body drop. And after that, all the identification of pre-Columbian pot-throwing techniques has damn-all to do with tracking the killer. So the books tend to play out a lot more like; "Here we were investigating an 8th-century monastery --" And everything changed when the Fire Nation attacked.

The ones that do keep something that is only a few steps removed from archaeology in the actual plot at hand is when what is going on falls under the shroud of biblical archaeology. As in, basically, the Judeo-Christian god is real, religious artifacts have scientific meaning and religious writings (from the right religion, of course) can be dissected for plot-important information.

It should be no surprise that these often cross paths with horror. But then, horror, almost always supernatural horror, is also a typical thriller premise to spring from the depths of a shovel test pit.

And then there are those stories where what matters is the thing being dug up. If there is engagement with the living patterns or material culture or beliefs of the peoples being explored, it is of utility to the plot only in the getting to the magic sword or pot of gold. There is rarely the process of learning how this particular past culture worked. It is more of looking up how this past culture worked (say, how they wrote "use secret button to open door" in their glyphs) in order to get to the artifact de jour.

As a sideline, notice Indiana Jones is never wrong? Sure, he gets details wrong, but what is presented in that sort of adventure is a very classroom idea of history. There is one true history, and our heroes already know it. Indiana Jones never discovers anything new about the cultures he engages with. Even if he has to hit the books, it is to find the truth that is already known and already written down. There's never a disagreement about the name of the god they worshipped -- only if that god was actually an alien from the planet Zarkon.

Again the overtly religious ones come ahead; in few other stories does the history itself matter, not as a path to grab the death ray or stop the zombie plague, but as a thing that matters to contemporary people. Perhaps more than it should; Dan Brown has basically built an industry on the idea that people will panic and governments will fall if it became known that Jesus had sex. 

I live for finding a story in which other para-histories are what people are getting knifed by albino monks for. I saw one book in the GoodReads list where Macedonian Nationalists were running around in the parade of people chasing our heroes, but it would be too much to hope for the Skopje brigade there. 

So that's the primary trio; mysteries about a body dug up with all sorts of luscious small-town secrets buried with it, action-packed-action in which archaeology dug up a McGuffin and the story is about people shooting other people to get their hands on it, and stories in which various people with shaky faiths get to ponder on how their particular god is actually real and important to their lives. While possibly getting shot at a lot.

Somewhere out there is a book where the body of Mary is dug up and with it all sorts of tawdry small-town secrets of ancient Judea but anyhow...

There is a minority which are more like travel adventures to one of the big archaeological tourism locations; Egypt, the Yucatán, Crete. Which usually end up being towards the cozy mystery side and the body drop might not even be at the dig site. And some stories are romances, with or without reincarnation or time travel.

I did get one useful lesson out of this. If a blurb says, "For those who love Dan Brown..." you can be sure the thing is terrible. And this is even properly additive. A book that name-drops six better-known authors...

The other thing I found is some definitions of cozy. And the Athena Fox series ain't it. As with many things, there's some flexibility. A cozy shouldn't have sex or violence (but some books cross that border). More importantly, they are set within a restricted social circle (often a small town) and the amateur detective is someone in position to interact with most of this people on a social level (such as, they own a tea shop). Now, Penny may indeed do the thing of solving the mystery through understanding the social psychology at play -- it is very much a thing I've been doing -- but she is also distinctly outsider. It's the anthropologist version of the cozy, where the outsider has learned enough of the culture they are visiting in order to write papers about it (and hope they aren't being spoofed as badly as Margaret Mead).

And several of my sources argue that the cozy is dependent on the body in the vicar's garden. That there is a social norm that is violated by this death, and the book ends with the neighborhood returned to sociability.

Rather the opposite of either the thriller (especially the gothic style), where that genteel society is shown to be a sham and is torn apart by the discovery of the body, or the noir detective, where greater society is sick and the actions of the detective bring some of the ever-present corruption to light.

Not a theme I was consciously working. Penny is playing within the power structures for the resolutions of all of her adventures, even if during all of them she showed great sympathy for those outside. The New Mexico book comes closer to breaking her trust in law enforcement, as she isn't sure how high the conspiracy runs.

(Her making a deal with the devil is a practical matter. For me. If you are going to be doing all the crazy stunts a hero gets up to, it really helps to know people in high places who can make the consequences go away during the victory celebration.)

For all these reasons, "Cozy Mystery" is a bad fit. Once again I wish I hadn't taken the titles I did. I am growing in my liking for something a bit like; The Gift of Athena, The Zero Room, The Mirror of Amaterasu, The Treasure of Montmartre. And as usual one book misses, but I'm sure given enough time I could come up with a conceptual title for the New Mexico adventure.

So far, the only thing I have to hand to the cover designer is a list of things that won't work, or that I'm tired of and don't want.

I haven't completely let go of the map idea. But there's problems. Too busy. Makes it look too much like travel fiction or sailing stories (and for older maps, historical fiction). And out of step with the current design trends (or so say the sources I looked at).

So more of a bold graphical treatment, possibly downplaying the map and using the idea of "there's a map" inside a composition. The retro look of the logo and Adventure fonts are also out of step, plus take things too much in the direction of pulp adventure, when these are too philosophical, cerebral (cough) boring for that to be an honest branding.

Still tempted by the idea of a single image of map or globe or something, a cluttered table with photograph or chart or folded map and some basic tools of the trade on it. And then mostly color-grade it to fit the different books.

Once again, there's an odd man out. The London book could do very nicely with a graphical treatment of my modified Northern Line Express done in something just similar enough to TfL's tube map not to get sued. The others don't suggest something quite as obvious and graphically interesting. 

Really, for what I am hoping for The Early Fox (not a hell of a lot), I could throw an ersatz Remington or Russell under whatever cheap font is free, crap it out in Canva and call it good enough. I mean, I'm not even intending to do a print run on this one.