The Sixth Key

We have reached our destination and the final sixth key to writing The Sixth Key and I couldn’t end without speaking about Don Quixote, Sherlock Holmes and Edgar Allan Poe. When I was a young girl, my birthdays were celebrated in my house by going to the movies.

On my twelfth birthday I was taken to see the film, Man of La Mancha, with Peter O’toole and Sophia Loren and I enjoyed it so much that for weeks I couldn’t stop singing, ‘To Dream the impossible Dream’. My Spanish father was so excited that he bought me my first copy of Don Quixote by Miguel Cervantes, which I would have thoroughly enjoyed, had it not been printed in old Spanish making it a tad tedious to read!

Even so, I was very excited to come to Don Quixote again through Otto Rahn, the main character in The Sixth Key, because, as it turns out, he was quite a fan. Sherlock Holmes had been a favourite of mine for years; in particular I loved Basil Rathbone’s portrayal of him. So when I realised in researching The Sixth Key, that his creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, was not only a Freemason but had also visited the south of France and come into contact with one of my characters, I couldn’t believe my luck.

I was also amazed to find out that Edgar Allan Poe’s Monsieur Dupin was the inspiration for Sherlock Holmes, because his macabre stories were so delicious and fit so nicely with the overall theme! So there you have it. I have only scratched the surface of what is locked inside the pages of The Sixth Key  - adventure, romance, conspiracy, mystery, crime, murder, not to mention magic. Have I lived all these things? Of course! As Edgar Allan Poe says, ‘all that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream’.