Simon Toyne is the bestselling author of the Sanctus trilogy. Toyne was a TV executive who quit his job to focus on writing and recently released his first Solomon Creed novel, The Searcher. The Solomon Creed novels are about a man trying to find redemption.
“As a writer,” Toyne said, “I always try as hard as possible to get out of the way of the story, so maybe that’s the most important thing my readers should know—I’m all about the story, not about the ego.”
“Solomon Creed is a man who knows everything about everything but nothing about himself and is on a journey of redemption to try and reclaim his identity. Like all my best ideas I had the initial thought when I was right in the middle of writing something else. It started life as a single line—a man has to save the souls of others in order to ultimately save his own.
“I have lots of half-baked, ill-formed ideas like this all the time and most of them stay that way, but this one took hold. I kept thinking about who this man might be and I liked the idea of writing a quest. Quest stories are about the oldest form of narrative there is and they’re also the perfect metaphor for life because we’re all on a journey, trying to figure out where we’re going and who we are, Solomon Creed is just doing it with more danger and guns involved.”
Toyne said he never set out to address a particular issue when he wrote the book. “My primary objective is always to tell a good story first and foremost, but it dawned on me during the writing of the first draft that a lot of the storylines deal with father-son relationships, so maybe I was subconsciously channeling something.”
None was quite right for the story, so in the end I had to make up a whole town again and build it from the ground up…
The Searcher takes place mostly in the small, fictional Arizona town of Redemption. Toyne said, “Before writing the book I went to Arizona on a research trip to try and find a real town to set the story. My previous three books had all taken place in a fictional town in Turkey called Ruin. I knew how much work it took to create a totally made up place and was determined to try and avoid that with ‘The Searcher.’”
In his quest to find the perfect location, Toyne drew up a list of places, including old mining towns, old wild west towns, border towns, ghost towns. He drove through the desert armed with a camera and lots of questions. He said, “Some places came close, but none was quite right for the story, so in the end I had to make up a whole town again and build it from the ground up—buildings, history, people, the whole lot.”
Toyne is writing the sequel to The Searcher now and is conducting another search for the perfect town. “I’m hoping with the second book in the series, I might finally get lucky and find a real place that fits the story I have in mind, but I’m not holding my breath.”
For more information about Simon Toyne, visit his website at simontoyne.net
