A NOVEL INSPIRATION 1

“Every one of us are presented with numerous opportunities brilliantly disguised as impossible situations”.

 I’m not sure when I first heard this quote or who said it, but it stuck with me.

A few years back I was watching a documentary on the Shroud of Turin. For centuries it has been claimed as the burial cloth of the crucified Jesus Christ. Where am I going with this, you ask? Well, that documentary was the inspiration for my thriller, Threads of the Shroud, a modern-day mystery thriller surrounding that ancient piece of cloth, perhaps the most holy relic in Christianity. It so happens the House of Savoy, who had ties to the Knights Templar, had possession of the cloth when it was nearly destroyed in a fire on the night of December 3 and the morning of December 4, 1532.

Historical records show that the shroud was damaged when the silver reliquary, in which it was stored partially melted, dripping droplets of molten metal on portions of the cloth. Pope Clement VII selected a convent of Poor Clare Nuns to repair the damaged areas which was accomplished during a fifteen-day period in April and Early May 1534. Historical records mention the burned areas were trimmed and patched. Thus, when the cloth is viewed, the triangular shaped patches are clearly visible to this day. There is no historical record of what happened to the threads that were trimmed from the burned areas? My inquisitive mind posed the question, what happened to the threads of the shroud?

This question was the inspiration for the novel, Threads of the Shroud, that seeks to answer it.

Now that I had a title for a book, I needed a story. I wanted a modern-day mystery, not one that was set in ancient times, so I needed to bring the story into modern times. I also wanted the bulk of the story to take place in the United States. A little creative thinking and I was able to accomplish this through by linking a character in the story to the invasion of Normandy in WWII. I won’t lie, I had recently finished reading The DaVinci Code by Dan Brown, so that book could have given me the inspiration to take a mystery hundreds of years old and make a modern-day mystery from it.

One of the most often asked questions from my readers is, where do you get all those ideas?  For me it comes from an inquisitive mind. When I see something that poses a question, I ask myself, “what if”. From there the possibilities are endless. A documentary on TV, a newspaper article, a random thought. Ideas for a novel are everywhere. Now you know where I got the inspiration for Threads of the Shroud.

You can check out this novel and my many others on this link.    larrylavoieauthor.com