The Novels of Steve Berry

The Novels of Steve Berry

• The Third Secret, 2005, about the Fatima vision, takes us into the Vatican's Riserva, "the special archive open only to popes"
• The Templar Legacy, 2006, revolves around a search for the lost archives of the Knights Templar
• The Alexandria Link, 2007, is about a search for the key to the location of the remnants of the ancient Library at Alexandria, Egypt
• The Venetian Betrayal, 2007, involves European museums being destroyed by fire
• The 14th Colony, 2016, sees hero Cotton Malone in Russia where he encounters a former KGB archivist, Vadim Belchenko; the archives of the post-Revolutionary American Society of the Cincinnati also play a role.

Braindead (2016-) TV series

Title: Braindead (2016-)


In this witty political satire that features clips from the 2016 Presidential campaigns of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, extraterrestrial invaders in the form of ant-like creatures find their way into the brains of various Washington, D.C., politicians and their staff.

In the episode titled "Taking on Water: How Leaks in D.C. Are Discovered and Patched" broadcast on August 21, 2016, character Laurel Healy (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), who works for her brother Democrat Senator Luke Healy (Danny Pino), meets with her lover Gareth Ritter (Aaron Tveit), chief of staff to Republican and infected Senator Red Wheatus (Tony Shalhoub), in front of the National Archives. The establishing shot before we see them shows a plinth with the engraved words "Study the Past". Another shot from ground level looking up at them with the building in the background shows its name over the columned entrance, "Archives of the United States of America."

The Forgotten Room (2015) novel

Original Novel Title: The Forgotten Room
Author: Lincoln Child
Publisher: Doubleday, 2015.

Lincoln Child, who also has collaborated on a series of well-received novels with Douglas Preston, sets his sixth solo novel in the rareified world of a Rhode Island think tank known as Lux. The forgotten room of the title references a hidden room within the huge mansion that houses Lux, the former home of the eccentric and wealthy Edward Delaveaux whose wife's ghost was said to still haunt a hallway of Lux.

The forgotten room contains a secret which one Lux researcher has already paid for with his life in a grisly suicide. Jeremy Logan, a Yale University professor who moonlights as an enigmalogist by solving unexplainable mysteries such as the Loch Ness monster or ghosts, is hired by Lux's director to investigate this out-of-character suicide. In doing so, Logan places his own life in jeopardy.

Early on during his investigation on behalf of Lux's director, he visits the institute's archives, located as archives usually are, in the mansion's basement. The think tank does not provide him with maps or signage nor did it occur to him to ask, so he has to find the archives on his own, where he eventually

"arrived at an open door with a sign that read ARCHIVES. Beyond the door, the walls and ceiling fell away, revealing a most impressive space bathed in bright yet pleasingly mellow light. Row after row of filing cabinets ran from front to back in achingly regular lines, but they were spaced far enough apart to forestall any sense of oppressiveness. At the far end, Logan could just make out another, smaller door, with what looked like a security station beside it. He stepped inside. ...

"Just inside the door, an elderly woman was seated at an official-looking table. A nameplate on one side of the desk read J. RAMANUJAN. She ran her eyes up and down Logan, lips pursing with an expression he could not decide was appraising or disapproving." (p. 78-79)

He's initially denied access because he has only a temporary ID card. He quickly overturns the archivist's decision with a letter the director provided him entitling him to unrestricted access. Not knowing exactly what he's looking for other than files pertaining to the 1930s, the archivist provides him with "blank document requisition forms." (p. 79)

After some discussion over the nature of his archival research and request to look for documents himself in the stacks, the archivist reluctantly agrees with the caveat that he "take no more than five folders from the stacks at a time. And please be careful when you refile them." (p. 80)

He spends a total of three hours at this research, "scribbling his observations into a small notebook with a gold pen," and realizes in the end that the files do not contain any records more recent than 2000 even though he was only interested in files from the 1930s. (p. 81)

The archivist informs him that more recent records are either with the scientists themselves or "'in archive two, beyond that door.' And she pointed toward the far end of the room." Archive two turns out to be off-limits to Logan even with his special letter of access. Seems he required "a level-A access or greater" according to the security guard who's armed with a nightstick and a can of Mace. "Then he [Logan] nodded, turned, and made his way back through the stacks and into the basement corridor beyond." (p. 81-82)

So the main archive stacks have no security other the guard who's at one end and who's purpose is guard against intruders to archive two. Filing cabinets for storage are so 1970s. Any archives worth its upkeep would more than likely not permit the use of pens to take notes. At least the part about the archives being relegated to a basement seems to accord with the location of many archival facilities with which I'm familiar.

The Thieves of Darkness (2010) novel

According to the dustjacket of Richard Doetsch's 2010 novel The Thieves of Darkness: A Thriller, "reformed master thief" Michael St. Pierre helps an imprisoned friend in a quest to find "a map containing the location of a holy place lost to the mists of time, a repository of knowledge and treasure predating Judaism, Christianity, and Islam."

Destroyer of Worlds

Original title: Destroyer of Worlds
Author: Niven, Larry and Lerner, Edward M.
Publisher: New York, NY: Tor, 2009 (hardcover)
The final volume in Niven and Lerner's trilogy prequel to Larry Niven's 1970 Ringworld, Destroyer of Worlds, like its two predecessors, Fleet of Worlds (2007) and Juggler of Worlds (2008) includes several references to archives. The human archivist Sven Hebert-Draskovics featured in the first two novels is no longer a character in the third volume.
We learn a little more about the importance of the Pak library, the alien species featured in Niven's 1973 novel Protector, which exists to protect the Pak culture after they repeatedly destroy their civilization due to their evolutionary nature:

"Thssthfok remembered visiting the Library before New Hope set out, poring over ancient records of Pakhome's climate. .... His work had gone slowly. Most information existed only as written text stamped into nearly indestructible metal pages, survivability taking precedence over ease of use. It was said that neither absence of electricity nor obsolescence of format could devalue the data--never that the archaic representations made work for Library staff, painstakingly transcribing from old languages to newer." (p. 25)

"At this distance [in space], the Library complex was no longer visible. The stamped metal pages of the Library would survive the catastrophe [the galactic core explosion] soon to kill everyone left on the planet." (p. 29)

References to the Gw'oth alien species and its archives, which were introduced in Juggler of Worlds, continue in Destroyer of Worlds, particularly on pages 71 to 74.
There are also some scattered mentions of shipboard archives aboard a human ship, the Don Quixote, on pages beginning with 119.

Codex 632

Original title: Codex 632: The Secret Identity of Christopher Columbus: A Novel
Author: Santos, José Rodrigues dos; translated from the Portuguese by Alison Entrekin.
Publisher: New York: William Morrow, 2008.
First published in Portugal in 2005 as O Codex 632, this novel references several archives and historical manuscripts, all of which the author assure us, exist, including Codex 632 of the title. The author attempts to solve the mystery of Christopher Columbus' true identity. Unfortunately, the book reads more like a journalistic expose than a novel. I only managed to finish it because I wanted to read all the references to archives.

Underworld: Rise of the Lycans

Original title: Underworld: Rise of the Lycans
Original movie release date: January 23, 2009; DVD release date: May 12, 2009
In this prequel movie starring Bill Nighy as the vampire king Viktor, there's a scene where Tannis (Steven Mackintosh), one of the vampire leaders while vacating their stronghold from an overwhelming werewolf attack, is attempting to retrieve scrolls from what appears to be an archives or office chamber. To Tannis Viktor angrily says word's to the effect, You don't have time to collect your precious scrolls.

The Book Of God And Physics: A Novel of the Voynich Mystery

Original Title: The Book Of God And Physics: A Novel of the Voynich Mystery
Author: Enrique Joven
Publisher: William Morrow, May 5, 2009 (hardcover)
Considered the world's most mysterious manuscript, the Voynich Manuscript, named after its discoverer, is the subject of at least three novels published early in the first decade of the 21st century. The manuscript is preserved in  Yale University's Beinecke Library.

The Lost Symbol

Original Novel Title: The Lost Symbol
Author: Dan Brown
Publisher: New York: Doubleday, September 15, 2009

---

Given that Brown returns to familiar ground with his heroic professor Robert Langdon from Angels and Demons and The Da Vinci Code, I think it's safe to assume that this novel will contain references to museums and archives.

---

The Frankenstein Diaries

Original Novel Title: The Frankenstein Diaries

Author: Rev. Hubert Venables, trans. and ed.

Publisher: New York: Viking Press, 1980

---

A brilliant and faux presentation of a "tattered bundle of ancient, decaying papers" the translator and editor received from a Swiss colleague in 1970. In his foreword, the English Rev. Venables states "My subsequent researches in the archives in Germany and Switzerland have obliged me to revise my opinion, in that I have established beyond all personal doubt the authenticity of the diaries as a true historical record of fact." Of course the fact that Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein is a complete fiction means that these alleged authentic diaries of Viktor Frankenstein must therefore also be fictitious. Conveniently, the editor, who translated the diaries from German, died in 1980.

Other similar works to this one include The Secret Laboratory Journals of Dr. Victor Frankenstein by Jeremy Kay (1996) and the Diary of Victor Frankenstein by illustrator Timothy Basil Ering (1997).

The Atlantis Prophecy

Original Novel Title: The Atlantis Prophecy

Author: Thomas Greanias

Publisher: New York: Pocket Star Books, 2008

Contains references to an archives.

The Darwin Conspiracy

Original Novel Title: The Darwin Conspiracy
Author: John Darnton

Publisher: New York: Alfred A. Knopf, September 2005 (hardcover)

---

A murder mystery that flips between the present and the past and involves the 19th century English naturalist Charles Darwin, there are some excellent scenes in the Manuscripts Room of Cambridge University. Part of the plot revolves around the discovery of a diary kept by Darwin's youngest daughter Lizzie.

The Archivist: A Novel

Original Novel Title: The Archivist
Author: Martha Cooley
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company, 1998.
Could this be a trend, two first novels, nearly a decade apart, with the same title? The similarities end there, as this novel, unlike its 1989 predecessor, is a contemporary romance featuring a librarian whose institution preserves letters of poet T.S. Eliot. The poet's life intersects not only with the librarian/archivist of the title, but also that of a woman poet who fervently hopes to see the sealed letters.
Terry Abraham, special Collections, University of Idaho, commented to the ARCHIVES mailing list: "I do not think this will be the book that will expand and improve the public's image of archivists."

---

The Archivist: A Black Romance

Original Novel Title: The Archivist: A Black Romance
Author: Gill Alderman
Publisher: London, England: Unwin Hyman, 1989.
A first novel, this science fiction work is set some four thousand years in the future on the planet Guna, a matriarchal society whose Archivist is a male named Magon Nonpareil. At some point in this vast book (380 close-spaced pages.), the Archivist comes to power and sweeps away old social structures, replacing them with new ideologies and systems. Among the most significant change we learn on page 273, "The Archive was opened to all."

Archangel

Original Novel Title: Archangel
Author: Robert Harris
Publisher: London, UK: Hutchison, 1998 ; New York, NY: Random House, February 1999.
Harris, author of the novels Fatherland and Enigma, sets this novel in modern Russia where a one-hit wonder historian, Dr. Christopher Richard Andrew "Fluke" Kelso, is in search of a secret notebook kept by Josef Stalin. Russian archives and archivists play a starring role in the novel, so much so that this work could represent the Great Archival Novel of the 1990s.
Quotations are from the British hardcover edition:
Kelso, addressing a conference, "Confronting the Past": An International Symposium on the Archives of the Russian Federation", paints a grim picture of Stalin's personal life unaccounted for in any archives (p. 69-70):

Colleagues, whenever I sit in an archive, or, more rarely these days, attend a symposium like this one, I always try to remember that scene, because it reminds me to be wary of imposing a rational structure on the past. There is nothing in the archives here to show us that the Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers, or the Commissar for Foreign Affairs, when they made their decisions, were shattered by exhaustion, and very probably terrified -- that they had been up until three a.m. dancing for their lives, and knew they might well be dancing again that evening. ...

Here we are, gathered in Moscow, forty-five years after Stalin's death, to discuss the newly-opened archives of the Soviet era. Above our heads, in fire-proofed strong-rooms, maintained at a constant temperature of eighteen degrees celsius and sixty per cent humidity, are one and a half million files -- the entire archives of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

Yet how much does this archive really tell us about Stalin?

A former hardline Communist Party and KGB member, Vladimir Mamantov, acidly comments to Fluke on how some Russians view the opening of the Russian Archives and its exploitation by historians (p. 73):

"So you're part of the gathering of thieves,' he said to Kelso.

"What?'

"The symposium. Pravda published a list of the foreign historians they invited to speak.Your name was on it."

"Historians are hardly thieves, Comrade Mamantov. Even foreign historians."

"No? Nothing is more important to a nation than its history. It is the earth upon which any society stands. Ours has been stolen from us -- gouged and blackened by the libels of our enemies until the people have become lost."

Kelso smiled. Mamantov hadn't changed at all. "You can't seriously believe that."

"You're not Russian. Imagine if your country offered to sell its national archive to a foreign power for a miserable few million dollars."

"You're not selling your archive. The plan is to microfilm the records and make them available to scholars."

"To scholars in California," said Mamantov, as if this settled the argument. ...

The Tenth Directorate (pp. 107) is the shorthand form for the Special Federal Archive Resource Bureau, "or whatever the Squirrels had decided to call themselves that particular week" wryly notes one Russian investigator of Fluke's discovery. (p. 133).
The Tenth Directorate records room is maintained by one (p. 134, 136)

Blok -- an ageless creature, stooped and dusty, with a bunch of keys on his belt -- [who] led him [Feliks Suvorin] into the depths of the building, then out into a dark, wet courtyard and across it and into what looked like a small fortress. Up the stairs to the second floor: a small room, a desk, a chair, a wood-block floor, barred windows. ...

He had been expecting one file, maybe two. Instead, Blok threw open the door and wheeled in a steel trolley stacked with folders -- twenty or thirty of them -- some so old that when he lost control of the heavy contraption and collided with the wall, they sent up protesting clouds of dust. ...

He couldn't read them all. It would have taken him a month. He confined himself to untying the ribbon from each bundle, riffling through the torn and brittle pages to see if they contained anything of interest, then tying them up again. It was filthy work. His hands turned black. The spores invaded the membrane of his nose and made his head ache.

In another extract from Kelso's speech before conference delegates he pessimistically assesses the worth of the Russian archives (p. 156-157):

And the opening of the archive? "Confronting the past"? Come, ladies and gentlemen, let us say frankly what we all know to be the case. That the Russian government today is scared, and that it is actually harder to gain access to the archives now than it was six or seven years ago. You all know the facts as well as I do. Beria's files: closed. The Politsburo's files: closed. Stalin's files -- the real files, I mean, not the window dressing on offer here: closed.

In the town of Archangel, to which the notebook about, not by Stalin, led Kelso and a reporter who intruded into the hunt, the men bribe a Communist Party official to let them see the Party archives. The scene is once again rather dismal and almost pathetic from Kelso's perspective (p. 276):

The Russian conducted them back along the passage and into reception. The woman with the dyed blonde hair was watering her tinned plants. Aurora still proclaimed that violence was inevitable. Zyuganov's fat smile remained in place. Tsarev collected a key from a metal cupboard and they followed him down two flights of stairs into the basement. A big, blast-proof iron door, studded with bolts, thickly painted a battleship grey, swung open to show a cellar, lined with wooden shelving, piled with files.

Tsarev put on a pair of heavy-framed spectacles and began pulling down dusty folders of documents while Kelso looked around with wonder. This was not a storeroom, he thought. This was a catacomb, a necropolis. Busts of Lenin, and of Marx and Engels, crowded the shelves like perfect clones. There were boxes of photographs of forgotten Party apparatchiks and stacked canvases of socialist realism, depicting bosomy peasant girls and worker-heroes with granite muscles. There were sacks of decorations, diplomas, membership cards, leaflets, pamphlets, books. ...

The tension that exists between the historian and the archivist is well portrayed in this novel. This conflict, driven by the desire of both parties to possess history, is molded and manipulated to an evil end by Mamantov.

The Da Vinci Code

Original Novel Title: The Da Vinci Code
Author: Dan Brown
Publisher: New York: Doubleday, 2003
Despite being hammered by critics for its writing, this novel has attained a cult status with electronic and print pro-, anti- and guides to the Da Vinci Code. Lewis Perdue published a similarly titled novel in 1983, then a second one about Mary Magdalene in 2000. Brown's novel, as Perdue points out on his Ideaworx site, bears some similarities in character and plot development to these two novels. Having read Perdue's highly forgettable The Da Vinci Legacy, I can't say I'm convinced Perdue's plagarism case would stand up in court. See also The Novels of Lewis Perdue and Angels and Demons.

All the Names

Original Novel Title: All the Names
Author: José Saramago; translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa
Publisher: New York: Harcourt Brace, 15 September 2000.
Originally published under the title Todos os nomes.

---

Based on glowing reviews in Amazon.com and other sources, this novel is highly recommended. The principal setting is the Central Registry of Births, Marriages and Deaths. So vast are its depths that

one poor researcher became lost in the labyrinthine catacombs of the archive of the dead, having come to the Central Registry in order to carry out some genealogical research he had been commissioned to undertake. He was discovered, almost miraculously, after a week, starving, thirsty, exhausted, delirious, having survived thanks to the desperate measure of ingesting enormous quantities of old documents that neither lingered in the stomach nor nourished, since they melted in the mouth without requiring any chewing. (quote from novel copied from Amazon.com)

The protagonist is a clerk working in the registry, also described as an archives, who commits the archival sin of removing records nightly from his office for his personal research. And thereupon hangs the tale by this Nobel-Prize winning Portuguese author.

Amnesia: A Novel

Original Novel Title: Amnesia: A Novel
Author: Douglas Cooper
Publisher: Toronto: Random House, 1992 (paperback)
Public librarian Rhonda K. Kitchens describes this novel as the "best example of modern gothic today by a Canadian writer." She notes that "the archivist functions as a sort of confessor...or is he the perpetrator???"
Divided into four sections or chapters, the very first is titled "Archive". The narrator describes himself as "an archival librarian" who works with plans upon first meeting one Izzy Darlow. The narrator is getting married later in the day, but Izzy quickly convinces him to hear his confession. The novel contains only one or two references to the functioning of the archives such as this one:

   The entire city is mapped in the Archive. We can trace the horizontal evolution of every building and street in Toronto. In a sense, the Archive is very much like Rome in Freud's analogy to the mind: an impossible city in which everything exists simultaneously. A building that was torn down a hundred years ago coexists with the present building, occupying the same site. Nothing is ever destroyed. Everything is remembered. (p. 9)
   

Many more references abound to libraries and the profound impact certain books had on Izzy.
The narrator listens to Izzy's story, misses his own wedding, dismissess Izzy, then wanders about until he assumes Izzy's name and perhaps even his identity.

---

Suggested by Rhonda K. Kitchens, 1997.07.28

All the King's Men

Original Novel Title: All the King's Men
Author: Robert Penn Warren
Publisher: 1946 (hardcover)
This Pulitzer Prize winning novel was recounted (edited here) by Robert Shuster, Director of Archives, Billy Graham Center, Wheaton College, Illinois:
The book is mainly about the rise and fall of Willie Stark, but the narrator, Jack Burden, takes about forty pages to talk about his historical research into the life of his ancestor Cass Mastern, reluctant slaveowner and Confederate soldier. This research is based on, "A large packet of letters, eight tattered, black bound account books, tied together with faded red tape, a photograph, about five by eight inches, mounted on cardboard and stained in its lower half by water and a plain gold ring, man-sized, with some engraving on it, on a loop of string." Burden is sent the material by a relative who wants to know if they could be sold to a historical library. Burden says he does not think so, because Mastern was not a "historical significant" figure, so the relative tells him to keep them for sentimental reasons and Burden tries to use them to write his doctor's dissertation.
The rest of the chapter is the story of Mastern, as told by the documents and supplemented by other records Burden turns up. The purpose, I think, is to provide some counterpoint in the conflict between Cass and brother to the realtionship between Stark and Burden in the main part of the novel. The documents are brought in to represent the burden, specially the Southern burden, of history. They apparently never make it to an archives or repsoitory, but perhaps they deserve an honorable mention.
The film of the novel won the 1949 Academy Award for best picture.

---

Submitted by Robert Shuster, 1997.01.07.

Airframe

Original Novel Title: Airframe
Author: Michael Crichton
Publisher: New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996 (hardcover); New York, NY: Ballantine Books, November 1997 (paperback).
The tragic deaths of three people and numerous injuries on a trans-Pacific jet flight from Hong Kong to Los Angeles set in motion an internal investigation. Norton Aircraft, builders of the plane, conduct their own investigation to determine cause. Much of the novel centers on records-keeping practices required by the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and electronic data recovery processes.
Quotations are from the hardcover edition:
During the initial inspection of the aircraft, a counterfeit part is the prime suspect for the pilot losing control. In order to foil counterfeiting (in this case after the fact) and to guarantee accountability

The FAA required commercial carriers to keep extraordinarily detailed maintenance records. Every time a part was changed out, it was noted in a maintenance log. In addition, the manufacturers, though not required to, maintained an exhaustive ship's record of every part originally on the plane, and who had manufactured it. All this paperwork meant that every one of the aircraft's one million parts could be traced back to its origin. If a part was swapped out and repaired, that was known. Each part on a plane had a history of its own. Given enough time, they [the investigators] could find out where this part had come from, who had installed it, and when. (p. 100)

Norton Aircraft maintained operational records for each "ship":

The ship's record consisted of a mass of documentation--a million pieces of paper, one for every part on the aircraft--used to assemble the aircraft. This paper, and the even more extensive documentation required for FAA type certification, contained Norton proprietary information. So the FAA didn't store these records, because if they did, competitors could obtain it under the Freedom of Information Act. So Norton warehoused five thousand pounds of paper, running eighty feet of shelf space for each aircraft, in a vast building in Compton. All this was copied onto microfiche, for access at these readers on the floor. But finding the paper for a single part was time-consuming, she [Casey Singleton, Quality Assurance/Incident Review Team, Norton Aircraft] thought, and--- (p. 118)

Having determined that a failed part was a counterfeit, when she viewed electronic repair records

Paper for the part appeared to be proper; a photocopy came up on Casey's screen. The part had come from Hoffman Metal Works in Montclair, California--Norton's original supplier. But Casey knew the paper was fake, because the part itself was fake. She would run it down later, and find out where the part had actually come from. (p. 123)

A counterpoint plot in this very suspenseful novel has Jennifer Malone, a TV investigative journalist, also tracing the historical record of the same problem with the Norton Aircraft model whose current accident Casey Singleton is probing. A videotape taken by one of the passengers becomes a crucial piece of evidence for both women. The company probe eventually becomes a race against time and a test of the evidentiary multimedia record to discredit the reporter whose story could prevent certification and production of a new Norton airframe.