Grantland Article Examines Michael Crichton's Literary History

His Jurassic World: Author Michael Crichton’s Entertainment Odyssey and Lasting Cultural Impact

This article by Michael Weinreb, (in which yours truly is quoted), examines Crichton’s earlier works.

From the article:

My favorite of the John Lange books is Drug of Choice, a trippy little book involving that inexplicable blue urine and models and an illusory island; it ends with a lecture about the power of corporations. “Do you want to live in a certain neighborhood?” a villain named Harvey Blood (seriously) declares. “Do you find certain food tasty? Do you prefer certain climates, clothes, cars, paintings, movies, books, films, toilet paper, soap, toothpaste, singers? Don’t you see your preferences are all conditioned? Don’t you see you are manipulated every minute of your life? You’re manipulated by Procter and Gamble, by Ford, by MGM, by Random House, by Brooks, by Bergdorf, by Revlon, by Upjohn—’’

John Lange Novels to be Published in Paperback

Ask and ye shall receive.

When the digital publication of Michael Crichton’s pseudonym novels was announced, many people said they wished they could get print editions. Most of the titles were out of print and the second hand copies were often quite expensive.

Especially Odds On, Drug of Choice, and The Venom Business.

Hard Case Crime, which republished Grave Descend in 2006 and Zero Cool in 2008, will be publishing the eight novels Crichton wrote under the name “John Lange” in October/November 2013.

Charles Ardai, the owner and publisher of Hard Case Crime, worked with Crichton in getting two of the books republished—Crichton even wrote two extra chapters for Zero Cool—but he was unable to persuade “John Lange” to reveal his true identity. In a recent interview, Ardai said:

Working with Michael (even if we had to keep it secret) was one of the great pleasures and privileges of my career, and ever since, I've wished we could have completed what we began. I've also wondered whether Michael might eventually have given in to temptation and written a whole new Lange novel for us -- no less persuasive a figure than Stephen King was encouraging him to do so! Alas, a new Lange novel will never be…but we’re very pleased to announce that five years later we finally will get to finish what we started. We’re going to be bringing all eight John Lange novels back to bookstores for the first time in more than four decades – and with the blessing of Michael’s family, the first time ever under the his real name.

I work in a bookstore and I remember telling several Michael Crichton fans about the John Lange novels we had for sale. Most were very surprised, having had no idea that Crichton had written under a pseudonym.

Odds On (1966)

Scratch One (1967)

Easy Go (1968)

Zero Cool (1969)

The Venom Business (1970)

Drug of Choice (1970)

Grave Descend (1970)

Binary (1972)

Unfortunately, Dealing or The Berkeley-to-Boston Forty-Brick Lost-Bag Blues (1970) by Michael Douglas is still available only in digital or out-of-print editions.

A Case of Need (1968) by Jeffery Hudson was out of print but was republished in 1993 with Crichton’s name on the cover. It’s available in paperback and has been for years. There’s an interesting story behind that. (Coming Soon: “A Special Case of Need”)

Origins of Pirate Latitudes - Part 2

In my post The Origin of Pirate Latitudes? I speculated that a novel Michael Crichton mentioned he was working on in his autobiography Travels was Pirate Latitudes. Crichton, while describing a 1982 trip to Jamaica, wrote:

For many years I had been working on a book about seventeenth-century Jamaica, and now I wanted to visit this museum.

As I’ve mentioned before, I thought it was likely that the book was a novel, and any novel about Jamaica in the 17th century would probably contain pirates, given their prominence in the locale at that time.

Recently I discovered a March 1979 American Film article “Ready When You Are, Dr. Crichton” by Patrick McGilligan. From the article:

His future calendar is just as wide-ranging: Crichton will write a contemporary story set in Africa, his first novel in roughly three years; he will direct a thriller for Twentieth Century-Fox about television commercials; he will try to complete a long-standing book project about Caribbean pirates in the seventeenth century. (p. 53) [Emphasis mine]

Crichton’s novel Grave Descend (published in 1970 under the name John Lange), was set in Jamaica and contained a historical reference to the privateer/pirate Henry Morgan. After reading Pirate Latitudes three times and several biographies of Morgan, I am convinced that Morgan was the real-life model for the character Captain Charles Hunter.

Given the familiarity with Jamaica that Crichton demonstrated in Grave Descend, he might have been thinking about (if not actually working on) the novel Pirate Latitudes as early as the late 1960s.

Another question to ponder--did Crichton, an avid scuba diver, ever dive at Port Royal, Jamaica? The city was struck by a horrific earthquake in 1692, and two-thirds of the city sank into the sea. It was excavated by marine archeologists in the early 1960s, and people are allowed to dive there with permission from the local authorities. Henry Morgan’s tomb disappeared into the sea because of the earthquake.

Links and more info on Michael Crichton at:
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