Me (a King) and the African Queen.

 Annamaria on Monday

I am revealing a private joke today.

Long, long before I ever dreamed of writing novels about Africa, I was in love with The African Queen, both C. S. Forester's brilliant 1935 novel and John Houston's 1951 film. So great was my infatuation with that story that for one of my birthdays, my dear departed David gave me a gift of an original Hirshfield cartoon with Katharine Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart in their African Queen roles.

This is the best photo I could take of it.

I have watched the movie umpteen times, read the book a few times, and have taken to listening to and re-listening to the audiobook, beautifully narrated by Michael Kitchen.

In researching for the second in my Africa series, Idol of Mombasa, I did my usual deep dive in the real story, including reading heavy but also extraordinarily helpful tomes such as J. Spencer Trimingham's Islam in East Africa. How, then, could I resist, while in the research phase, also indulging in a frequent diet of those wonderful versions of the story I love so much--in all of its tellings.

Forester's story takes place just a few years after Vera&Toliver#2.  In C.S. Forester's tale, an English missionary and his sister are in German Central Africa, and WWI is in full swing. My tale is set just over the border from German EAST  Africa in late January 1912.

As usual, my research set my imagination boiling with ideas.  I knew that the main theme of V&T#2 was going to focus on the second Commandment, which forbids worshiping any but the one true God.  And that the sin that ought to have a Commandment was going to be slavery.  The missionaries in Africa in those days were as much anti-slavery activists as they were workers in the vineyard to bring converts to Christ.

It was just then that I sat down to a Bouchercon dinner with my MIE cohorts.  I brought with me to that gathering my friend and later our fellow MIE blogger, Susan Spann.  Susan was sitting to my right and on my left was my blog brother Jeff, both lawyers.  Susan, in fact, is an intellectual property lawyer.

As the shop talk progressed, at one point, I talked over a possibility for my next book that had legal implications.  I told Jeff and Susan that I was thinking about inventing two characters inspired by C.S. Forester's African Queen: the missionary Samuel Sayer and his sister Rose.  Jeff, rightly, warned me that I could not just adopt them.  I did not want to plagiarize them, just make my own version of that duo, a very similar brother and sister. Certainly it was not unheard of that a missionary would have a sister (ahem) asSISting him.

Susan confirmed that although I could not use the names that C.S. Forester gave his folks, it was permissible to create similar characters.   And so, as a private joke, I gave my invented people, who were inspired by The African Queen, the names of the actors who played Samual and Rose in John Huston's film.  My missionary's name is Robert Morley and his sister's name is Katharine and this is what they look like:

To my knowledge, only one reader has seen through my little ruse.

Of course the characters in the photo above are in German Central Africa, Forester's   fictional colony.  My characters live in the real British East Africa.

My Robert and Katharine disappear into German East Africa at end of Idol of Mombasa, more than two years before the outbreak of WWI. And out of sight, my characters and Forester's will be leading somewhat parallel lives through the war.  I am hoping that Katharine will return to BEA in 1919, for book nine of the series. She will be without her brother, I fear.  But with her husband, Humphrey.