Simon Toyne's "The Searcher"

Simon Toyne is the bestselling author of the Sanctus trilogy: Sanctus, The Key, and The Tower. A writer, director, and producer in British television for twenty years, he worked on several award-winning shows, one of which won a BAFTA. His books have been translated into twenty-seven languages and published in more than fifty countries. He lives with his wife and family in England and the south of France, where he is at work on his second Solomon Creed novel.

Here Toyne dreamcasts an adaptation of The Searcher, the first novel in the Solomon Creed series:

The Searcher has just been optioned by Leonardo DiCaprio’s production company, so who knows, maybe the boss will play my hero, Solomon Creed. I always tend to cast my books as I’m writing them and have a character document with visual steers and notes about what they look like and how they act. It’s a useful way of keeping track of who’s who in the long process of first draft and then revisions. It also means I can jot down notes that occur to me and refer back when I’m writing different characters. Sometimes I’ll have an idea about one character, for instance, while I’m writing another so it’s a useful and easy way to capture these thoughts before they vanish into the ether.

Solomon Creed is very thin and elegant and pale, almost albino-like with white skin and hair and pale grey eyes. One character describes him as looking like a beautiful marble statue that has come to life. When I was writing the character I started off seeing him as Peter O’Toole in Lawrence of Arabia, then he morphed into David Bowie in The Man Who Fell to Earth. For a while he looked like Michael Fassbender and then ended up as Cillian Murphy, only with white blonde hair. Now the book is finished, however, he kind of looks like all of these people, which I suppose means he probably now looks exactly like Solomon Creed.

Learn more about the book and author at Simon Toyne's website, Facebook page, and Twitter perch.

My Book, The Movie: Sanctus.

My Book, The Movie: The Tower.

--Marshal Zeringue