It was the night of February 7, 1988 that I got the idea for the book. I know this because I kept the two pages of notes I jotted down. I was working on another novel at the time, an unpublishable heap of six hundred pages that still makes me cringe whenever I think about it. The idea was about an undersea volcano that is artificially accelerated. My plot was a straightforward KGB villain verses a straight-out-of-central-casting CIA agent in a cold war thriller with a newly discovered element called bikinium, after the Bikini Atoll tests, as the prize.
A couple of years went by during which time I finished college before I began to seriously think about turning those couple of pages into a book. By this time the Soviet Union had collapsed so before writing a single word the story was already dated. The concept was still sound but needed a new hero, hey, ex-KGB villains were still doable. Because so much of the book had to do with geology I turned my CIA agent into a mining consultant.
There were two things I knew about the name I wanted. Number one it had to be fairly short because I am to this day a four finger typist so Obadiah Theadoracropolis was out. The next thing is that it seemed most heroes, at least in Hollywood just use their last names so I wanted something that would work there as well. I was doing a lot of driving between Florida and Vermont around this time and from an interstate in New Jersey came the name. Emblazoned on the side of a water tower were the words Mercer County.
Mercer was born.
The plot evolved around him and came out much better than had he remained a spy. I wrote two rough drafts of what I had titled Vulcan’s Aide and was confident enough to send it to a publisher. The rest, as they say, is history.
I usually throw the names of friends into my novels, changing them a little just in case one of them wants to sue me. If you knew my friends you’d understand. For Vulcan’s Forge it was my brother who got that treatment. Ivan Kerikov’s henchmen Evad Lurbud is actually my brother’s name, Dave DuBrul spelled backwards.
