Inside the McCracken Adventures: History Meets Legend

"It's like Indiana Jones . . . with a rosary!"

This was one of the first comments I ever received about the McCracken books, which I started writing in 2013. It's very apt. I can't deny that Indiana Jones was a major influence on the series. I've always loved Raiders of the Lost Ark, not just for the music, but also for the exotic locations, the thrilling action sequences, and the mystery.

Watching it as a teenager, I couldn't help noticing a few things. The Nazis, for example, had no significant presence in Egypt in 1936. As I grew up, went to college, then graduate school, and then started teaching, I grew to love history. And I thought, History is exciting enough. Why do we have to place standard villains into historical situations where they never were? Couldn't fictional adventures be just as exciting if they were set in an accurately reconstructed past?

But I never actually sat down and tried to write an historical adventure. That didn't start until much later in my life. Almost thirty years passed. I was a teacher, a husband and a father of four boys. The older two were away at college and the younger two were still at home. There was no local Catholic school, so we homeschooled them.

In 2012, when we were living in Wyoming, we were crazy about a wonderful boardgame called Forbidden Island. This is a cooperative game in which the players work together to recover four treasures before the island sinks beneath the sea. As the game progresses, parts of the playing area flood and disappear, so the board literally shrinks under the players' feet, creating a wonderful sense of urgency.

My wife had an idea about how to entertain ourselves during the winter months: we would write down precisely the moves each player made at Forbidden Island, then use them to write stories. The best story would win a prize, I forget what.

Everybody wrote the beginnings of their stories, but they actually enjoyed mine the best. Nobody else wrote theirs down any more. If an evening came and I hadn't written a chapter of McCracken and the Forbidden Island, there were protests. The boys stomped around the house chanting in unison: "What is McCracken's first name?"

As we moved through the events of the novel, my wife became very encouraging, suggesting that we offer the manuscript to the Forbidden Island developers--I thought they could use it for marketing.

But then the idea began to grow.

One of my sons, Will, third in birth order, had just entered sixth grade as a very reluctant reader. This, by the way, is a very strange thing in our family. Reading is one of the things we do for fun, for relaxation. To try and encourage him to read more, we looked at the standard books on offer at the local bookstore, but the content of the popular books and award-winners was not the sort of thing Catholic parents wanted their children to read. We looked at the traditional titles chosen by other homeschooling families. But their style was often too stodgy for Will, who wanted books that were just right (like Goldilocks).

But he loved McCracken.

It was my wife who saw that there might be a potential series there, not just a one-off book, filling a much-neglected niche in Catholic publishing: middle-grade Catholic boys. The central character would be a heroic Catholic, and the adventures would be challenges to his Catholic faith. Fast-paced adventure would be combined with a way of teaching young boys how they could confront challenges to their faith as they grew up.

That was when we also realized that we couldn't really offer the manuscript to the game developers. So on a rewrite, I took out a lot of the specific references to Forbidden Island, changed the title to McCracken and the Lost Island and gently increased McCracken's Catholicism.

And whaddaya know, my wife was right. It did turn into a series.