In a previous blog, I reflected on the strange line between fact and fiction that my preferred genre of writing enjoys bending, blurring and twisting. Though most people insist on ‘wanting the facts’ and perceiving history in as straightforward a set of terms as possible, secretly the majority love to rest in that mysterious place where we’re simply never quite sure what is real and what is surreal.

Is it any wonder that we are so often drawn into the dark corners of history, where despite our best intentions, we simply don’t know?

The Lost Library probed one of the greatest mysteries of antiquity, the Royal Library of Alexandria and its mysterious disappearance from the face of the earth. Can it truly have happened? Can so great a wonder genuinely have simply . . . vanished?

And can there be other mysteries, just as grand, still to explore?

That latter question really grabs at a writer of historical conspiracy thrillers. We live in a world today where we’re keen to find conspiracies everywhere — whether it’s in questions over the American president’s ability to sabotage his own governmental infrastructure, or in the apparently ‘uncoordinated coincidence’ that all the sweet shops in Britain seem to think I want chilli in my chocolate. But does our predilection for conspiracy and intrigue extend into the past?

The good news is that the answer is a resounding ‘yes.’

In writing The Keystone, which will be on shelves in a few months, the vastness of ancient Egyptian mystical intrigue became an ever-extending world in which to roam. The world of ancient Gnosticism is as strange, eerie, mystifying and complex as any an author could hope to inherit, as is the strange irony to its mystical enterprise: that the things done in secret, in the name of peace, often burst into world view in much more violent, tormenting measure.

Just what we want, after all.

But it is the past that always causes us to ask questions of the present. The testimony of history is that our conspiracy-minded curiosities today are not so out of place, and whether we know it or not, there is more going on behind the scenes that we care to admit. So whether there truly is the multi-conglamorate, covert desire to change my sweet-tooth’s habits that I suspect, or whether a president can manipulate his government to control his opponents, or whether ancient cults speak powerfully to the modern, there’s one fact that is above suspicion.

There’s always more to the story.