I’ve started work on a new novel, The Legend in the Stone, a story set in Arizona that begins with a graduate student from the University of Arizona in 1990 looking into an old legend about a mysterious hermit living somewhere in the Superstition Mountains. What he finds is considerably stranger than he expected.

The story follows Charles Johansson, a man who has been in Arizona since the nineteenth century and has accumulated more than a few stories along the way. Some are documented, some are questionable, and some are probably just Charles having a little fun with his audience. But one story may be entirely true.

I’m currently working my way through the first half of the novel, which follows Charles from his early years in Arizona through Tombstone, the mining camps, the Geronimo era, Globe, and eventually the legend that sends him into the Superstitions looking for the Lost Dutchman mine.

It’s turning into something rather different from my usual novels, and I’m enjoying the process. As an Arizona native, specifically the east Valley where these mountains were always in view, I was always fascinated by the legend of the Superstitions. I heard stories of hermit miners and all the ghost stories involving the Lost Dutchman, along with reading a book my parents owned when I was a teen called “The Killer Mountains” by Curt Gentry. Plus seeing various documentaries over the years on the search for the mine itself.

Having moved back to Phoenix last year, after spending 33 long years in Texas, has brought back my interest in these stories. So I plan on maybe making a series of novels based on the various stories around the state, so more to come as the story develops.