Golden Relic (36 page)

"What for?" Pavel asked.

"An Aztec dagger, some little statues and a gold mask."

"The other artefacts from the Paris hijacking," Maggie exclaimed.

"Which also explains why Marcus organised for the second lot of exhibits to get here a day
early," Sam said. "He had to get out of Paris straight after the hijacking."

"Will Andrew and Marcus be brought to justice for Noel, Barbara and the others?" Pavel asked.

"There's a lot they'll never be charged with Pavel, because it would be too hard to prove," Sam
said. "But no doubt a couple of unsolved hit and run cases can be re-opened once the relevant
authorities have been informed," Sam said.

"But Barstoc
will
be charged with Professor Marsden's murder," she added. "And if Marcus
ever regains consciousness he'll be charged as an accessory, and for the theft of the various pieces
of the Hand of God, including the hijacking of the Tahuantinsuyu Bracelet."

"Which is finally back where it belongs," Vasquez stated, patting the box.

"Yes, Enrico," Pavel said, "and tomorrow I will be formally handing back it to Peru. If you are
agreeable and feel you are capable of such a responsibility, I will suggest you are appointed as the
official Guardian of the Hand of the Sun God."

"I would be honoured," Vasquez asserted.

"Well, I don't know about you lot, but I am exhausted," Sam exclaimed.

"I need a holiday," Pavel agreed.

"I think I'm going to retire to Queensland," Maggie laughed. "I don't care if I never see another
museum, or archaeological site, or jungle, or precious artefact of any kind. And, Pavel, if you find
any more cursed relics, do not tell me. I don't want to know."

"Maggie, my love," Pavel laughed. "You will never retire. It's not in you to be idle."

"I agree with Pavel," Sam said. "You've got more energy than I've ever had, Maggie. I doubt
you'll stop until someone forces your dead body to lie down and be quiet."

"That's charming," Maggie chuckled.

"And even then," Sam continued, "I'm sure you'll arrange to be buried somewhere significant so
archaeologists of the 24th century can dig you up and announce a remarkable find."

"Ah, now there's a thought," Maggie said. "Perhaps I'll have my thigh bone inscribed with an
enigmatic message, for just such an occasion."

"What for?" Sam laughed.

"To confound them, my dear. To confound them."

THE END

Late last century - before every household had the Internet, DVD recorders and
plasma screens,
long
before Facebook and YouTube, and before every teenager was iPodded and
iPhoned to the wider world - I wrote a murder mystery.

While that makes me sound older than Agatha, I'm talking
last
century; as in the late
1990s - you know when there were still phone boxes on some street corners, mobiles were the size
of bricks and the only Internet was dial-up with a lot of drop-out.

That mystery was
Golden Relic
, the book you've just read. But what I wrote it for, back in
1997, made me a pioneer of the World Wide Web.

Yes I - Lindy Cameron, Australian crime writer - was an Internet Pioneer. I believe I was
the first person
in the world
to be commissioned to write fiction specifically for
publication on the World Wide Web. I boldly went where none had gone before.

Three years before the turn of the Millennium, I was paid actual money to write a novel
for
this new-fangled thing that, in terms of home-use, was more
un
than usual.

I was commissioned by the Museum of Victoria to write a novel to help promote Melbourne and its
museums in the lead-up to ICOM '98 -
the
most important
international gathering of
museologists, museum professionals and other learned types that Australia had ever seen.

The Triennial Conference of the International Council of Museums (whose HQ is in Paris) is a
really big deal. In the museum world, scoring the hosting of this prestigious conference is akin to
a city hosting the Olympics.

In 1998 the honour went to Melbourne, Victoria. It was the first time the conference had been
held in Australia and only the second time it had travelled south of the equator.

Despite the seriously high-profile nature of the thing, some wacky person on the Melbourne ICOM
committee decided that a 'novel' way to let all the potential delegates - museum folk from all
over the world - know about 'our part' of the world was to commission a murder mystery.

The ICOM '98 committee approached Sisters in Crime Australia looking for some likely writers to
submit ideas for a murder mystery set in the Melbourne Museum but focusing on the conference's 1998
theme of the repatriation of cultural artefacts.

That's where I came into it - although there were four of us to start with.

Four excited, but bemused, crime writers turned up for a briefing session to face a boardroom
full of semi-informed museum staff. That was the funniest part. Some of these folk - these
professionals from various departments of the Museum - learnt of the 'murder mystery PR concept'
at that same meeting. And many of them looked horrified at the thought of using a murder mystery to
promote their professions, their institution and their city - to the international museum
community.

By the end of the session however, they had not only warmed to the idea, but were suggesting
likely candidates and telling us just how, and why he, she or they should be bumped-off.

We writers left with our brief. We came up with our individual story ideas and submitted them to
the ICOM committee for selection.

It still amazes me that it was I who got this incredibly cool opportunity.

Why? Partly because of who I was back then. But also because - as we cross into the second
decade the 21
^st
century - both the Internet and I have come so far in that short time
that I realise just how totally awesome what I did was. For then.

So, who was
I
back then?I was an unpublished crime writer whose knowledge of, and love
for, museums was limited to visiting them. While
Blood Guilt
, my first-written crime novel,
had been accepted by HarperCollins Australia it was not due out until early1999.

But, in 1997 a public institution commissioned
me
to make up a story, titled
Stolen
Property,
to help promote their conference.

Their International Conference. On their website. On the Internet.

What I did predated Stephen King's pay-as-you-get-it serial foray of the year 2000. The bonus
with
Stolen Property
was that, because I was commissioned to write it, readers got the whole
book - all of it - over a 10 month period, for free.

This happens all the time now, but as recently as the late 90s this was
not
usual.

When
Stolen Property
went up on the ICOM '98 website, personal computers were still
newish, and the proverbial 'they' were still talking about a time when 'one in four homes'
might
eventually have PCs; when one in 20 might get, not have, 'get' dial-up internet.

This was the olden days.

So much so, that even though the whole reason for me writing the story was to promote a
conference through the conference's own website, I had to do most of my book's research at
libraries. As in physically leave home and walk into a library building, search for actual books and
borrow them.

Why? Because in 1997 BG - Before Google - there still weren't that many 'websites' you
could just go visit to get your facts.

Even
in
this novel designed for serialisation
on
the Internet, you will note I made
few references to the Internet itself. This was because it was technology so 'new' to me, and most
people I knew, that I could not even 'guess' where it would be in six months - let alone the
following year when
Stolen Property
went 'online'.

There were a few other odd things I had to tackle in the writing of
Stolen Property
that
were a twist on the skills we writers use everyday.

First, I had to create an intriguing mystery, accessible to all/any readers, while avoiding
telling granny how to suck eggs - or in this case without bashing the museologists about their
own stuff, in order to 'explain' it to readers who were less in-the-know. Readers who were, in fact,
more like me.

One of the reasons for this was that when HarperCollins, my soon-to-be first-time publishers,
learnt of what I was doing for ICOM '98, they came up with an incredibly awesome plan. They would
publish the end result of my serialised mystery as an actual paperback. In time for the opening of
the actual ICOM Conference in 1998. This book would actually come out before the one I had already
contracted with them.

Hence my desire to make
Stolen Property
a novel for a much wider readership than the
online international museum community.

Another aspect of having to make things up, based on fact, was a couple of minor real-world
details.

When I started writing
Stolen Property
in 1997 the (old) Museum of Victoria was still in
Swanston Street with the State Library of Victoria, in the heart of Melbourne.

Stolen Property
, however, was set a year later, between September and October 1998 when
- if things went according to plan - the Museum as we had known it for 150 years would be
closed to the public. Its curators and staff would be working to finish the packing, for storage, of
the entire humongous collection - in preparation for the opening of the new museum sometime in
2000.

When I started writing in '97, the space beside the famous Royal Exhibition Building in the
Carlton Gardens was just that, space - lawn and trees and space.

When my hero Sam Diamond stands there, in what was
my
future but the book's present, I had
to imagine what she might be seeing - a year later in real time and in the midst of three or so
years' work on a huge construction site.

Would Sam see half-dug foundations for a mighty new museum? Would part of the building itself be
up? Or would 'the site' still be lovely lawn and trees, because something had gone awfully wrong and
not a single sod had yet been turned?

It was part of my brief to talk up Melbourne; introduce our city as great place, in its own
right, for the conference delegates to visit, to enjoy, to look at. But what if I couldn't get that
little detail about the new museum right? No pressure at all.

Not to mention having to rabbit on about museums, and museum practice, and how it was all
changing, and the whole repatriation of cultural artefacts concept, and… all for the 'entertainment'
of people who chatted about such things over coffee. Did I mention, no pressure.

Righto. Blah-blah, Lindy. I had
the
best time. Of course I did.

The serialisation of
Stolen Property
on the ICOM '98 website between February and October
of 1998 did exactly what it was supposed to do. HarperCollins Australia published my story as a
paperback in October 1998. Retitled
Golden Relic
my book was launched on the opening night of
the ICOM '98 Conference.

And now my little murder mystery has come full circle back to a wider audience on the World Wide
Web.
Stolen Property,
the serialised internet novel, which became
Golden Relic
the
paperback, is now
Golden Relic
the ebook.

It not only stands proudly as a quirky bit of Internet History, but
Golden Relic
is also a
rollicking good yarn - if I do say so myself - and the first in the Sam Diamond / Maggie
Tremaine archaeological mystery series. There will be more.

One last thing about the original paperback. The
day
that I received my
advance copies of
Golden Relic
in the mail had it's own spooky coincidence. Apart from the
sheer thrill of opening the parcel, taking out my first published book, smelling it, fondling it,
going all wackadoo about holding a real novel with my name on the cover and filled with pages of
words that I had put into the right order… Um, as I said, apart from all that, that 'day' was also
significant.

Remember, I wrote the thing the year before, in 1997. Allowing for the fact that I was actually
using the real conference as a backdrop to the mystery, and that I wanted to have the denouement of
that mystery happening at the official opening of ICOM '98 (well, my fictional version of that
opening, obviously) I had a timeline that my characters had to meet. I was also writing a serial
- so I needed a lot of 'racing around' and end-of-chapter cliffhangers.

So I set up my plot, then worked the timeline backwards from the real official opening date of
the real conference, and then picked a day/date at random to start the mystery.

A murder in the Melbourne Museum launches Special Detective Sam Diamond and archaeologist Dr
Maggie Tremaine off on an adventure around the world and back to Melbourne - in time for the
October 10 opening of the ICOM '98 conference.

That random start date - which I chose back in about July of '97 - was Wednesday
September 16, 1998.

On that day, in fiction, Professor Lloyd Marsden of the Museum of Victoria was found murdered in
the old museum.

On that date in the real world - 18 months after it was plucked from the air - I, Lindy
Cameron received my advance copy of
Golden Relic
.

Yes -
do-do-de-do -
on Wednesday 16 September 1998, I opened my first-published
novel, for the first time, and read:

Chapter One

Melbourne, Wednesday September 16, 1998

The hands tore at Professor Lloyd Marden's flesh with a surprising savagery. It was
hardly fair, he thought, that in his last moments of life he was also being tormented by a gathering
of avenging gods…