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LETHAL JOURNEY
Noir 1892 Thriller
Lethal Journey is a novel (fiction) based on John T. Cullen's scholarly analysis (nonfiction) Dead Move: Kate Morgan and the Haunting Mystery of Coronado. The Beautiful Stranger checked into the Hotel del Coronado on Thanksgiving Day 1892. Gorgeous and dressed like an actress, she was found dead five days later of a gunshot to the head. She had checked in under an alias, and nobody knew who she was or what her business at the great resort had been. Why did she die, alone and suffering, at the tender age of 24? The tragic enigma of the Beautiful Stranger instantly became a national crime-mystery sensation in the Yellow Press. It also became the subject of a famous ghost legend at the fabulous Hotel del Coronado, persisting to this very day. Solved at last, the enigma proves that truth is far stranger than fiction. Lethal Journey is a story of passion and violence, conspiracy and betrayal. She became the epitome of that greatest of Victorian heroines, the Fallen Angel, found in paintings, novels, and music of the age. The Fallen Angel is epitomized in fiction by Thomas Hardy's Tess of D'Urberville. The dead girl in San Diego was the real Fallen Angel, and tens of thousands gathered every day to mourn over her beautiful open coffin in the front window of a funeral parlor downtown.
The author reveals the gripping details of a wild blackmail plot gone wrong. The target of the plot, the mega-wealthy John D. Spreckels, who owned the Hotel del Coronado, was at that very moment negotiating with President Benjamin Harrison and the Congress over the fate of the Hawaiian monarchy and the future of his family's fabulous sugar cane fortune. The story thus has global implications, and the Hawaiian monarchy fell just five weeks after the plot at the Hotel del Coronado. The tragedy of Lottie A. Bernard--the name under which the mystery woman signed in at the hotel--gives us a snapshot of life in late Victorian times--all because of a beautiful young factory girl named Lizzie Wyllie who had an affair with her foreman, a married man with children. They eloped together and became involved with the ruthless and scheming Kate Morgan and her violent husband Tom, and what follows is truly a dark and lethal journey. From the author of Umnitsa and The Generals of October. |
Copyright Notice: (Special to Publishing Industry News.) Copyright @ 2011 by John T. Cullen. All Rights Reserved.
All material on this website, including all text, is Copyright © 2011 John T. Cullen. All Rights Reserved.—top You may not copy, download, steal, or otherwise appropriate text or images from this website for any reason, whether for profit or other gain, or just for your personal website, or any other purpose.—top Don't steal someone else's work—that's what it boils down to: The 7th/8th Commandment: Thou Shalt Not Steal.—top Dating to the early Web—before e-commerce, and the misguided idealism of some technical zealots who hated the advent of e-commerce—there has been this ethos (or lack of one) that whatever you can steal online is yours. Those of us who devote our lives to creating content deserve to be paid. If the content is desirable enough to steal, it's desirable enough to pay the owner and creator for it. Another way to look at it: if it's free online, why bother stealing it? top If you have any questions, read the law as laid out functionally by the U.S. Library of Congress Copyright Office. Statutory penalties are very severe—over $100,000 per infringement.—top As experience has proven with a few who refused to see the light, stealing things online soon leads to getting caught, and the consequences typically crater their life. So don't steal. Read what's free, like much of the material here, but leave everything as you found it. Take nothing away when you leave. Book mark the site so you can always come back to enjoy more. But don't steal—top One Case Study. In fifteen years as an online publisher, I have been involved in, and know of, a number of actual intellectual property theft cases. All of them ended badly for the thief. This is just one true story from long ago, before the statutory penalties for online intellectual property theft became as severe, world-wide, as they are now: Piracy…top |
Sator Enigma: Ancient Roman Mystery Solved
The so-called Sator Square (also Sator Rebus, Puzzle) refers to a mysterious ancient text found on walls throughout ruins of the Roman Empire. Archeologists have found exemplars in such diverse ancient Roman locations as a government hall (aula) in Cirencester, Britannia; twice in Pompeii, pre-dating the city's volcanic destruction by Mt. Vesuvius in 79 CE; and in the distant frontier fortress of Dura Europos on Rome's Mesopotamian border with Parthia. Something about this strange, cryptic writing must have been so important that the Romans would post it in their government halls, public squares, and top military headquarters.
It is one of the most perfect palindromes ever created. A simple palindrome is a text that reads the same, backwards or forwards; e.g., "Madam I'm Adam" and ".madA m'I madaM". The Sator Square is a perfect four-way palindrome that reads the same left-right, right-left, up-down, and down-up. Nobody had a clue how to translate it, despite thousands of hours of research, hundreds of learned books and articles, and at least one Ph.D. thesis in Classics at Yale University.
John T. Cullen solved the puzzle in the summer of 2007, almost coincidentally, while continuing eight years of scholarly research for his nonfiction/Ancient History virtual tour guide A Walk in Ancient Rome, Revised 2nd Edition (Clocktower Books, Summer 2011). He had been aware of this baffling cryptogram from long ago, which has since become an object of superstitious reverence in certain Christian and Neo-Pagan settings. Suddenly, while taking a break from his Rome research, he looked at the Sator Square in a new way—and was able, within a few weeks, to both translate it and plausibly explain it.
Ironically, at the annual convention of International Thriller Writers, of which he is an Active Member, in New York City in July 2009, he was the only author present who had actually deciphered and explained a cryptic, ancient epigram of world importance—and lived to tell about it.
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